Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 121

Episode Date: March 9, 2024

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since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone 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. Boy howdy, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. And the it is different most episodes. But today, the thing that is happening here is discussion about the growth of self-immolation as a form of protest from the 20th to the 21st century. Obviously, we are recording this less than a week after Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old serviceman in the United States. Air Force lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. And, you know, repeatedly stated free Palestine as he was doing it. He said more than that obviously he wrote, you know, I think very clearly about why he did what he was doing.

This is something that you'll have heard a lot of debate about. There's a certain kind of person, particularly in the media, who feels obligated to say, this is mental illness and we shouldn't discuss it as anything else. I think that's wrong for the same reasons, by the way, that it's wrong to dismiss, you know, any sort of mass shooter or whatever as mentally ill. Not that either of those are similar in terms of the actions. They're not. Yeah.

But that attempt to dismiss it because it's something, it makes you uncomfortable to consider that somebody could do something so incomprehensible to you for a logical reason. Now, when I say a logical reason, that doesn't mean I'm arguing this is something more people should do. It doesn't mean that I'm arguing that this was the best thing that Bushnell could do. What I am saying is that from everything that is available, this was a rational act. He understood what he hoped to accomplish with this. And he took concerted steps to ensure that he succeeded and that attention was drawn to it. His reason for doing it was clear.

He took actions like to set up a will and whatnot. This seems to have been a rational and principled action. And we are not really primarily going to be discussing what Bushnell did. because I don't really know that there's much to say. You know, it's everyone here's stance that what's being done to Gaza is a genocide. I don't know that this will help. I certainly hope that somehow it does. But we're simply not at a point where we can say what the impact of this on the overall, you know, situation in Gaza is going to be.

Yeah. And I mean, I guess like the thing we can say off the bat is like whether or not this matters is to a larger extent up to you. because like someone someone like I mean this is the thing right like matters in the sense that it has an impact on the obviously I think it matters because he was a person right well that too right yeah but like yeah in the in the in the in the in the in the in the sense of whether it accomplishes political objectives that's up to us figuring out how we're going to run a political movement in such a way that the genocide gets stopped yeah and that is yeah that is not something I have a clear answer for you on right now but I do think so I think the thing we're going to try to do that I think

can be helpful in this is attempt to provide some context on what is the history of self-immolation as a protest tactic? How does it tend to work in the past and in the present? And in what sort of situations has it been more or less effective as an instrument of protest? That's what we're going to try to cover today. Obviously, this should not be seen as a totally comprehensive look at the entire history of this. As I'm about to come, this is what we can get for you in about a week. And I think it will help and provide a broader sense of context as to how this sort of thing has worked in other situations around the world and throughout time. Self-immolation goes back very far as a protest tactic. There were Christians who were being persecuted by the Roman government in Nicodemia in 300 AD who lit a fire in front of the Emperor's palace and threw themselves into a bonfire as an act of protest.

in Russia, I think in like the 1600s, Orthodox. I don't, there was an Orthodox sect. I don't really know much about them, but they locked themselves in churches as a protest for some of the Tsar's reforms and then lit those churches on fire. So like died inside the churches that they were in. So this is a kind of thing that goes back quite a while. I'm sure there are other cases in, you know, ancient history that go well before that. but it's not a new thing. However, when we talk about kind of 20th and 21st century self-immolation, the first sort of

really famous case of this. And the one that, like, gets brought up every single time people talk about self-immolation as a protest tactic was one that occurred during the Vietnam War. And it was the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk named Tish Kwong Duk. I believe that's T-H-I-C-H. I think that's how that's pronounced. I listen to do it before we started recording this, but that kind of stuff slips out of my head. So I apologize if that is the case.

He's an interesting guy. I think pretty, pretty, his early life is probably pretty common for people who became Buddhist monks in kind of central Vietnam in this period of time. He left home when he was like seven. He became a novice at 15. By 20, he was a full monk. And one of the things that's happening during this period of time is the South Vietnamese government is this guy. he's called the president. He is a dictator, I think, in everything but name. No, Dyn Diem. And he's a terrible guy. He's a French-educated Catholic. And if you know anything about the French history

and into China, right? That does not suggest somebody whose role before Vietnam got its independence from France was particularly great. His brother, No, Din, knew, is the head of the secret police. and they are, despite the fact that Vietnam, South Vietnam is a Buddhist majority country, they're passing a lot of policies that are like actively cracking down on and reducing the right of Buddhist people to worship, right? And, you know, this is, there's a lot of reasons for this, but they kind of boil down to the fact that Diem was horrible, was just a fucking dog shit leader. Absolutely sucks.

Yeah. Really, really trash. Now, I've heard it said online when people bring up this self-immolation, you know, within kind of the context of what's happened recently. Like, this wasn't a, you know, people are wrong when they say this was an act of protest to the Vietnam War. It wasn't. And that is technically true. Because like, the thing that, that Duke was, was protesting was not U.S. involvement in

Vietnam, but he was protesting the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam. And that government is very relevant to why there was a Vietnam War. So I do kind of think it's not entirely accurate to be like, well, this wasn't a Vietnam War protest. No, no. It was, it was just about the fact that, like, it was. Like the Catholic, theocratic drug dealing fascist government was like murdering I don't know.

Seems like you're splitting a hair there, bro. I feel like the murdering Buddhist thing might have been part of why there was so many people willing to fight the South Vietnamese government. Not a zero percent part of that equation, maybe. But yeah, so these guys, these Buddhist, I mean, Buddhist religious leaders in the country get increasingly angry about what's happening. there are debates, I think, for several years, kind of within sort of the more highly ranking kind of leaders in the faith as to like, what do we do about this crackdown on our rights? And like, should we?

They were talking for quite some time about having a self-immolation protest, right? Like, it was the kind of thing where there was a decent amount of like discussion earlier. And Duck is actually the one who, I think, suggested it initially to, like, other leaders in the church. And, yeah, while there was, like, for a while they tried to push back against this, eventually the level of prosecution just became so clear that, you know, they basically said, okay, let's, like, you can do this. And Duke is going to be the guy who is going to, like, physically, you know, destroy his body in order to carry out this act of protest. as is always going to be the case when we talk about these famous self-immolation cases. Half of the story is the guy who does or is the individual who lights themselves on fire. And half of the story is the reporter who happens to be there.

And in this case, it was a guy named Malcolm Brown. He is, I believe, is an American reporter. He's stationed in, you know, Saigon. And he's, he's, you know, doing what a lot of journalists were doing at the time. And in the springtime of 1963, there start being, like, these kind of messages put out by the Buddhist church that are sort of, he describes it as hinting as some kind of spectacular protest. His guess was that it would, quote, most likely be a disembalment of one of the monks or an emulation. And either way, it was something we had to pay attention to.

And like a lot of journalists, he's got some sources within the church. He gets a call one day, and they're like, you should show up at this pagoda at this specific time. And here is how Malcolm describes what he saw. By the time I got to him. to the pagoda where all this was being organized, it was already underway. The monks and nuns were chanting a type of chant that's very common at funerals and so forth. At a signal from the leader, they all started out into the street and headed toward the central part of Saigon on foot. When we reached there, the monks quickly formed a circle around a precise intersection of two main streets in Saigon. A car drove up, two young monks got out of it. An older monk, leaning a bit on one of the

younger ones also got out. He headed right for the center of the intersection. The two young monks brought up a plastic jerry can, which proved to be gasoline. As soon as he seated himself, they poured the liquid all over him. He got out a matchbook, lighted it, and dropped it in his lap, and was immediately engulfed in flames. And yeah, that's, you know, what happened that day. Malcolm takes a picture of, he takes a bunch of pictures. You can see all of them. There's a good time article. Malcolm Brown, the story behind the burning monk, that has all of the pictures that he took, or at least like a long list of them. And they are worth seeing. They are, I shouldn't have to put a trigger warning in here, right? These are photos of a man burning to death.

That shit sucks. Can say from researching this? Like, good God. It doesn't look good. It looks really bad. Now, obviously, one of specifically one of the photos, you've probably seen it, where like half of the monk's face looks okay and the other half is just like wreathed in fire. This goes like the 60s equivalent of viral, right? President Kennedy said of the photograph, no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world is that one. And at the time, it may have been true. And it is, it is number one, it does have a role in the anti-war movement because, you know, this is related to a protest against government we were backing.

But this is also one of the more successful, maybe the most, like, directly successful cases of self-immolation I've seen, because this does play a significant role in the end of Deem's presidency and his life, right? So, Duck leaves a note, like a lot of these people do. And his note, again, is very clear-minded. He ends it by saying, before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President No, Dindyem, to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally.

Yeah, when this kind of happens, as I quoted earlier, Kennedy is, like, shocked and furious. He yells to his national security advisor. Who the fuck are these people? like how did we not know this was going to happen? He's very angry about all this. Does he know what Buddhist is? Like I feel like that's the kind of people who have to charge of the U.S. I actually have trouble imagining like JFK having a significant amount of context as to like what Buddhism is.

Oh, God. But maybe I'm wrong. So I want to quote from this really good medium article, the suicide that changed American policy in Vietnam by Apurva. Tadepali. And this is for a series they write called NIRPOD, which is an interactive classroom tool for students. And I found this a very readable and concise description of kind of what happened after Duk's self-immolation. Quote, the publicity of the incident increased pressure on Diem's government to deal with the crisis. But he did not take the incident seriously enough. His response to the death was an announcement on the radio later that day that wildly missed the point.

The state of affairs was moving forward so smoothly, he said bizarrely, when this more. morning acting under extremist and truth-concealing propaganda that so doubt about the goodwill of the government, a number of people got intoxicated and caused an undeserved death that made me very sorry. What? Okay, I see a lot of terrible statements about self-in-lawations doing it. That might be the worst one. It is, we need to do the bastards episode on him, because DM is, like, he's horrible. He causes a lot of damage to a lot of people, but he's such a fucking scrub, right?

Yeah. Like, fucking Stalin would never, you know? Like the O-Gs? Very sad. You think Saddam Hussein would have gotten caught up in that shit? No. Not my man. This is like, this is bushling shit even by like fucking like East Asian dictators.

Like, can you even? Cheinkajek. Like, no way. Oh, no. Kish wouldn't have gotten caught up in this shit. Absolutely not. If someone had tried to do this specifically in Chen Kajek. Chankajek would have shot the guy himself.

Absolutely. Yeah. Oh my God. So anyway, this scrub, he makes like a promise that they're going to do reforms and stuff. And like while he's doing this, his family, including his brother, New, who's like the head of the Saigon secret police is basically, is saying like, like literally says, if the Buddhists want to have another barbecue, I'll be glad to supply the gasoline. Jesus Christ. And his wife, who's like a very Mary Antoinette figure, Madam New, who is, it's his brother's wife, but she's basically the first lady, right, of, of. of South Vietnam. She's like, let them burn. We'll clap our hands. Oh, God. So it's pretty cool.

DM is actually kind of the smart one in the family because he's trying to like tell his sister-in-law and his brother-in-law like, no, bro, or his brother and his sister-in-law, like, you guys don't understand. We have to be a little bit careful here. This could really go badly. Yeah, it really seems like, like, they haven't figured out the playbook for dealing with this yet. No.

Because, like, the successive governments, like, everyone has, like, the same line that say when it happens. And these people, it looks like, they're really kind of scrambling here. They didn't have any, they'd never even considered that something like this could happen. There would be reactions to their policies like this. There are a bunch of protests by monks and nuns. The police arrest a bunch of people. This continues to draw outrage and make the system situation worse. New, the secret police guy has his, his goons like ransack and destroy a bunch of like Buddhist temples, basically. A lot of people, like 1,400 people are, like, like rounded up and arrested. Diem accuses the monks of being part of the Viet Cong, which is again,

like, sure. Yeah. Okay. So one of the things that is important to understand here is that this is at a very different stage of the Vietnam War. The U.S. has troops in the country, but not a lot, like very few compared to how many are going to be there. And at this stage, DM actually isn't happy that we have, even though it's going to become

very clear that like the U.S. troops, the only thing allowing this regime to stay propped up. Yeah. He is like, I don't want them here. They don't even have passports, right? Like, he's, he's, he's, he's like weirdly anti. The, the, like, and part of it is because the U.S. is about to act here, finally, to take support away from his regime. So three days after his buddy, his brother-in-law, or his brother knew has a bunch of raids on these Buddhist temples, there's a cable sent from DC to the U.S. ambassador in southern Vietnam that's like, we're not backing this guy anymore. And this ends with a bunch of South Vietnamese generals who had already been planning a coup being

given to go ahead from the U.S. basically, saying like, we're not, our guys are not going to take any actions to stop you from overthrowing this guy. And on November 2nd, Diem and his brother are kidnapped while trying to escape, and they are killed, not long after. So this is, you know, Pretty successful self-immolation, you have to say, right? Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it works about as well as you could have hoped for that, right? Like the, at least I'm sure is as well as that monk hoped because, you know, DM is not just out of power, but is fucking killed as a result of this.

Although the problem is the subsequent people he has put in charge also suck. But that's, that's also part of a pattern, unfortunately. and there's like a weirdly, there's like a history of self-immolation leading to regime change. We're going to talk about Tunisia at the end of the episode. And that does tend to be the story of like, yeah, we got rid of the dictator. And then a guy who sucked as much came into power. Okay, well, the Taiwan one we're going to talk about in a second actually goes pretty well. Yeah.

Yeah. And before we go into that, because we're going to let you take over from hearing me out, or at least for the next couple of parts of this. But first, let's let our advertisers take over. And we're back. All right, Mia, you are on deck. Yeah, so I think people are kind of broadly aware, kind of, if you know anything about the self-immolations about the self-immolations in Vietnam and then also the sort of the ones in the U.S., like as anti-Vietnam War protests. The ones that I don't think most people here know, and that I only know about like, because like my mom was born in Taiwan, right?

is the Taiwanese self-immolations. Yeah, so this guy's name is Zhang Yong. He is, he's also noticed, the thing most people call him is Nylon Jung for reasons that I guess will become clear when he lights himself on fire. So,

Nylon Jung is a very, very influential, well, okay, I don't know, very, very influential is quite there, but he's like, he's a pretty famous, some very influential pro-independence activists in Taiwan during the KMT's occupation there. And this is something I don't, like Americans tend to not understand this very well. So, okay, so the KMT, the Chinese Nationalist Party, they take power in Taiwan after just invading it effectively.

They, when they, when they lose a civil war, the KMTs are grating forces and a bunch of their supporters like flee to Taiwan. and there are like three groups of people who the KMT like spend most of their time killing and that is communist feminists and Taiwanese independence activists they also hate Presbyterians for reasons that are Hey hey we all hate Presbyterians am I right Okay too look look I am not normally at Presbyterian like are the Taiwanese Presbyterians like legitimately do good work

in the sense that they're like one of the groups that's like pretty important in bringing down the KMT one party to catership But, okay, so Taiwan has this like really appalling like one party dictatorship. Nailon Jung's actually born, I think. If I'm remembering this right, he's born like during the February 28th incident, which is this thing in 1947. Actually, we are two days, I think when this goes out, we'll be two days after the 77th anniversary of it, where there's a giant uprising in Taiwan because the people in Taiwan fucking hate the KMT because they suck and they murder people.

And there's this giant uprising, and the KMT eventually, like, their military forces get reorganized. And they, so the initial uprising takes most of the islands. And then the KMT just come back and kill everyone. They kill about 20,000 people in a week. It's one of the sort of, like, I don't know, one of the kind of, like, defining incidents and what becomes sort of Taiwanese national culture is just this, like, massacre. And then, you know, it's basically, it's legal talk, but afterwards, this is the beginning of the sort of white terror in China. and they're going to, you know,

this is the start of the KMT kidnapping and torturing, like tens of thousands of people. One of the things that happens in this, this is actually, so this was my family's experience of it, is that, okay, so there's this up,

there's the uprising, right? But one of the things that starts happening pretty quickly is these, like, retaliatory killings against, like, against Chinese nationals. And that was stuff,

my family was like, yeah, we like couldn't go outside because if you leave your house, like, you're going to get killed by mobs. And that stuff, that stuff, like sucked.

Yeah, that, that does sound like it sucked. No, it's not good. It's a thing because it's weird because it's like that uprising like broadly good, but it turns, like parts of it turn into race riots or like it was weird. Like, I don't know. It turns into these like like anti-Chinese national like riots. And that stuff, you know, so Zhang is from a Chinese like, like, just from like a, a sort of like Chinese national family that like fled to Taiwan after the war.

and his family is protected by other Taiwanese like uprising people who are like, no, like we're not going to fucking just kill these random Chinese people. Like, what are you guys talking about? And that's this really formative thing for him. Where this is one of things that causes him to grow up to become like the kind of Chinese, like Taiwanese independence activist that he is, where he's one of these people who is really big on Taiwan as like,

like liberating Taiwan as a nation, but having it be like a nation of ideals. not a nation of blood because his, you know, because he, he sees how badly this kind of like ultra-nationalist bloodline like shit can go. And so he becomes like a pretty prominent independence activist. He runs one of the anti-party newspapers, like anti-Campi newspapers. And he's, he's mostly doing a lot of this stuff in the 80s where, so basically like, you have two consecutive, like, like, there's Shankai Shack and then you have like more guys from that family. By the 80s,

you're like, democratization is kind of like slowly moving forward because the Taiwanese ruling class is losing American backing. They're losing backing overseas. But, you know, even by sort of 1989, which is in the period in which people are talking about like, well, democratization's happening. Like, it's going to go forward. The country still has, like, they haven't had like

real national elections and they still have these. really, really intense, what I call anti-sedition laws. And so one of the things of the pro-independence activists and this is the period in which Taiwan's like modern ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party,

like comes into existence. They're coming to existence as the anti-KMT party. And this is the sort of milieu kind of in which Dalai Lung Jung is sort of mobilizing, right? But he's also, I don't know, he's a kind of guy that doesn't exist anymore, which is like he's kind of like a like liberal progressive national liberation supporter.

So I found a really interesting thing translated by Yan Han Chen on this guy I kind of am aware of from Twitter, who translated this thing that he wrote about Palestine, where he is a pro-Palestine guy. But it's interesting because he sees Palestine as like another nation that's been like subjugated in like a similar way to Taiwan have. and he's like an anti-arm struggle guy, but he's also very sort of, he's very committed to Taiwanese independence as a national liberation movement.

And specifically, like, the thing that you're liberating it from is the KMT. And so, you know, he, he gets into trouble constantly with like the KMT government. They arrest him a bunch of times. And eventually, in 1989, he gets charged by these anti-sidition laws.

He gets charged with insurrection for like spreading drafts of a potential due to Taiwanese constitution. And so he barricades himself in his office, refuses to show up to court, he gives this giant speech about how like you'll never take me alive. And the police kind of take him seriously. He's barricaded himself in like his newspaper offices and he's there for like two months. And at the end of month too, a cop who is the current. mayor of New Taipei City

tries to burst down his door. That doesn't seem like a job that you should be able to have. No! No! This is one of these things where it's like, okay, so like the KMT, this is one of these things about sort of Tetonese politics, that's weird, is that the KMT is the modern sort of

pro-China pro-unification faction, right? Those guys suck. Like, they're not at, they're not the same sort of like just death squad party they were in the sort of late, like the 20th century. But they're also like, yeah, no, it's literally their mayor of New Pi Pei, which is... Okay, but I'm not going to go into what the difference between New Japan and Taipei is here.

That's a whole thing. I'm guessing it's like the difference between, you know, New York and old York, right? It's closer to the difference between New York City and New York. Okay. Okay. But, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that works. Like, this guy, this guy who, again, like, was elected like two years ago, tries to kick down his door.

And Nylon Jung likes himself on fire. And this has a enormous impact on the sort of subsequent course of Taiwanese politics. Because this is a, this is a, like, this is a PR disaster for the, like, for the ruling, like, for, for the current government, which had been trying to sort of like do its, like, ah, we're doing moderate reforms, blah, blah, blah. We're doing, you have local elections now. We're doing democratization. Suddenly, like, their cops break down this guy's door.

and he lies himself on fire. And, you know, the cop later says, like, oh, yeah, we broke down the door because we were trying to save his life. It's like, no, you did it. What the fuck are you talking about? I love things that have never happened. That's my favorite kind of thing. Yeah. And, you know, so, this is one of these things that, and this is actually a thing that's become, that's a very, very common thing in protest, like, now.

So, Nailon Jung has, he has this massive funeral. I mean, this is an absolutely enormous funeral march. And the police attack it. And when the police attack it, another pro-independence activists also lights himself on fire, like, in front of the cops when they refuse to do it. And this, that second guy is like a lot less remembered than Alan Jung. But this becomes a massive sort of rallying cry around like, you know, for the pro-dependence people, but also for the sort of broader fight for like an actual, like actual free Democratic election. elections, like, the big thing these people were protesting, like, specifically was free speech because the thing about the sedition laws is if you, you know, again, if you start passing

around copies of the Constitution, they try to arrest you and throw you in prison. Yeah, I mean, nothing says sedition like the Constitution of the country you're in. Yeah, and like, you're changing it, I guess, is sedition. It's like the KMT really suck. Like, cannot emphasize that enough. But the sort of the results of this is that, you know, okay, like, so. This is one of these actions that's kind of complicated because the arc of Taiwanese politics was bending towards democratization in some kind of like actual electoral system. And it probably would have happened even without this, but this supercharges the whole process.

Within about two years, two or three years, all this edition laws are repealed. And within, well, it takes a while before you get, I think, I think it's like 2000, I think it's like really what you can call like the first. first really free, like, Taiwanese national election when there's actually like a transition of power between the KMT and the, the, the, the, the, the Democratic Party. Sure. But yeah, it was to a large extent, very successful. Like, I don't know. Okay. So it accomplished the goal of knocking off the KMT sort of one party state. It knocked off sedition laws. The kind of Taiwanese independence, like, that's very, very sort of national liberation driven is kind of not the same one that exists in Taiwan now. It's a bit different. But on the other hand, like, yeah, they

did it. It was, it was really, it was pretty effective. And, yeah, I don't know, like, this is, this is, of the ones that I've seen, I think this was the most clear he won. Nowan Jung's, like, is sort of to this day, a pro-independence hero. There's a there's a statue of him. So they, I think I think I'm pretty sure they turned the office real and himself on fire like into a

into a museum. And there's there's a very famous sort of like pictures of the statue of his burned corpse. That's just harrowing. It's one of the symbols of the sort of Taiwanese Democratic movements. And it's also a sort of

it matters a lot this is also happening in the same year as Tiananmen like yeah so there's that kind of like it's in the air right yeah yeah and his his widow goes on to be a dp politician um and it's one it's it's one of the things that it's it like his memories invoked dream like so in 2014 Taiwan had their own version of occupy that's like shittier called the sunflower movement i'm sorry this is this is where we're getting into the the Mia has a bunch of political beefs with people in Taiwan where I think they're all libs but it's yeah

like they have their own sort of they have they have like this this largest series of street protest and this like he's one of the figures that's you know one of like brought up in yeah that's gonna be the same thing with the guy in Tunisia we're about to talk about too where where they become

even to people that they would not you know certainly we're not like expressing similar views they still become this like icon that gets cited yeah yeah and I think I think the last thing too is he's the fact that the cop who kicked his door down

is now the fucking mayor of New Taipei city is just like oh appalling stuff yeah the KMT absolutely suck and those are the people who want Taiwan to be reunified

with China so if that understand who you're making your bed with if that's the kind of politics that you want to be engaged in yeah so that's that's the Taiwan self-emulations

I guess kind of, I don't know. Not enough bad things happen to the cops who trigger this kind of stuff, which sucks. Although I guess the cops in South Vietnam didn't do great. No, no, no. I mean,

ultimately, right? It doesn't immediately really cause them any problem. It takes a while. Secret police a bit. Speaking of Secret Police, this podcast is sponsored entirely by the Secret Police. So, you know, check that out. And we're

back. Yeah, we just got beaten by phone books because they don't leave any bruises by our sponsors at the secret police. So, you know, the secret police, like the police, but secret. Mia, did you have another one you wanted to get into before we talk about Tunisia? Do we want to do Tibet first or do we do Tunisia first? Why don't we do Tibet? Yeah, so I think, other than Tunisia, I think the most famous wave of self-immolations was the ones in Tibet that started in about 2009. There is actually a guy in Tibet who lights and stuff on fire in the late 90s, but that doesn't have the same kind of sort of, it doesn't have the same effect as the 2009 ones. So one of the things that's been periodically happening, I guess, over the sort of course of,

the the history of sort of occupied Tibet is the Dalai Lama so the Dalai Lama like flees there's this whole giant drama in 1959 so so okay I guess I should go back to the beginning so Tibet is just like straight up invaded by China when when the after the communist win the civil war this causes an enormous amount of shit to happen one of the things that the Communist Party is trying to do is they are trying to gain control of the Tibetan religious system so that they can eliminate the religious system, like they can, they can eliminate like the Buddhist clergy is effectively like they can eliminate Buddhist monks, they can eliminate like the religious institutions as a source of resistance to them. They are kind

of foiled in this when the Dalai Lama makes this break and escapes to India. And this is one of the things that triggers eventually in in the in the 60s, China's war with India. But one of one of the things that I've been happening for a while was these kind of negotiations between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government that try to like find a kind of resolution to like how bad things were in Tibet

and in 2009 the Dalai Lama goes yeah none of this is fucking working like it's not nothing like we're not getting anything the Chinese government's not offering us any like any actual deal that we can live with and

pretty quickly this. So, okay, you get this giant way of self-imilations. The first guy, this guy named Tape, he is a monk. He lights himself on fire in 2009. There's conflicting reports. Okay, so one of the problems with talking about this is that in this period, the internet is not as widespread as it is today. And there is a giant, like, there is a Chinese like media cordon, effectively on, on Tibet. In a very similar way to like West Popper. where they won't let journalists in. It is very hard to get information out.

So the thing that I'm about to say is something that is reported a lot on the time by people who are trying to smoke a message is out. And the thing they report is that as this guy is self-immolating, the Chinese police shoot him, like multiple times. Well, I mean, as we've seen recently, that is how cops tend to look at somebody. Like, yeah, someone has let themselves on fire clearly what this situation needs is a gun. And, and, you know, okay, so like the Chinese, Chinese police, they, they, I don't have any evidence of them shooting people after that.

They absolutely, one of the things that, so what happens after this is this wave of self-immolations is protest across Tibet. The thing that they absolutely do a lot is start beating the person who's on fire with a stick, like using like riot sticks. Sometimes they have these, they have riot sticks with like spikes on them. And they are absolutely beating people to death while they are burning to death. The Chinese police are like as psychotic, well, maybe not quite. as like absolutely murderous as the American police, but they are,

like, they are beating a burning man to death, right? That is, oh, God. I will say, that is, that is definitely,

I haven't, that certainly, I can't think of anything I've ever seen U.S. police do that is more violent than beat a man to death while he's on fire. Yeah, that's up there. That makes the cut.

It's really bad. And this is the kind of thing that, you know, I mean, this is the kind of thing that sets off, self-immolations in the first place, which is that Tibet has, you know, like is, has, has a colonial occupation, right? It has, you know, the Chinese government has been attempting to suppress Tibetan Buddhism. There's been a massive way, like systemic, massive ecological

destruction of the Tibetan plateau so that the Chinese government can like mine gold in shit. And in a way that's very similar to sort of like the ecological demonstration you get in places like the Amazon. There are, you know, they're, there's intense police crackdowns all the time. there's another very famous incident that's like kind of one of the things that leads to this where in 1989 there's there's a bunch of protests in Tibet and the cops just start shooting them they kill a bunch of people and so you know and people had been like up until 2009 people had kind of had this promise that things were going to get better because you know you have these negotiations between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama and then the Dalai Lama

turns around and goes, yeah, no, they're not giving us anything. Like, they're giving us nothing. The Chinese state's policy on Tibet is that effectively, we're going to, like, we're going, we're going to, like, we're going to try to make these people Han effectively. One of the things they spend, and they do this in Xinjiang too, is they spend a lot of, there's a lot of resources invested in getting, like, Han settlers from other parts of China to booths to bet, you know, and, you know, as, as it's true also in Changsianjong, like the, like the cadre jobs are basically all, like, government cadre jobs are basically all hawn people

and so you know you start getting you start getting attempted civil disobedience there are these giant protests in 2008 like attempting to make a sort of like a giant have a giant thing happened right before the Olympics in order to get international support and those turn into riots

and those are brutally suppressed and once that happens people are really kind of they're running out of options for civil disobedience because you know this is one of one of these things about this kind of Buddhism is that it's it's very much a like their resistance

tradition is nonviolence right like these people sometimes like very very rarely you get riots but they're not like they're not going to try your arm struggle and so what they have is nonviolence of a disobedience but the problem is that if you try to do nonviolence with disobedience in China what happens to you is just the cops show up and arrest you all and then they arrest your families and this is something that happens to the people who self-emolate is that that there are like 160 of them from 2009 until now. And

when someone lights himself on fire, what the Chinese government does is, well, A, they beat the person to death while they're on fire. B, they start arresting the people's family. They start arresting their friends. They start arresting people in the monasteries that they're at. They start doing these purges

to stop, like, to remove the sort of Buddhist monks who they think are going to be problems. And this fuels this kind of cyclical wave of this because on the one hand, you know, there's this incredible repression going on. On the other hand, it's not possible to like wage,

really like wage other kinds of mass civil disobedience campaigns. And the thing about lighting yourself on fire is that the government can't stop it, right? Like, in theory, you could maybe train police to stop people from lighting people on fire. But the thing is, the actual thing that happens when you lights, when someone lights himself on fire,

is the cop goes and beats them. And so it becomes this sort of, it becomes this sort of like this cycle of, of self-immolations. And also, I mean, the other thing that's worth mentioning to is people, there are a few other cases of Tibetan Buddhists like outside of, outside of Tibet. You do it. There's a few people in India, who let themselves on fire. And I don't know. I think the Tibetan example is really bleak because it doesn't work. like they lose um and this is one of these situations where i don't know like i legitimately

don't know how they could have won because they were dealing with a enormous a very very powerful state apparatus that was very invested in using all of its state capacity to repress them and it it it fails and it it like the thing that it mostly accomplishes is a bunch of is like just a generation of, well, I mean, some, like the youngest kid who self-filmedes is 15, right? And it mostly accomplishes a bunch of these kids let themselves on fire and die. And everything is worse now than it wasn't 2009. Yep. I think, you know, so very recently, they're been big, they've been protesting Tibet again because the CCP is trying to build a dam that's going to flood and destroy a bunch of monasteries.

And I don't think anyone's lit themselves on fire over it, but the police just arrested everyone. And so, I don't know, it's really bleak. And I think the free Tibet movement has become much weaker as the sort of like 2010s went on to the point where now I think like most America, like most of the sort of like broad American far left basically just takes the Chinese line on it, which. is that like the Dalai Lama was a slave owner and the Chinese occupation was a gift. Yeah. Yeah. Like I want to take like a couple, like a minute to talk about this because like... I hear that a lot.

Yeah. And it's this thing where like, you know, it's really interesting looking at a lot of these people who are anti-Tibet but pro-Palestine because, you know, if you look at the originators of Cedar colonial studies, like Patrick Wolfe, right, who was like the godfather of Cedar colonialism studies, Tibet is one of the states that he holds up, like, as the paradigmatic example of what setter colonialism is. It's Palestine and Tibet, right? And, you know, like, the thing about, oh, it was because they were trying to, like, free the Tibetan search really pisses me off because if that was the actual thing the CCP wanted to do, they could have done a thing

that happened all over the fucking world in communist countries, which is they could have moved in, they could have knocked off the government, and they could have set up a communist Tibetan state, right? This happens all over the fucking Eastern bloc. There's precedent. for it in East Asia, which, you know, there's a president of Mongolia, which was also, I mean, a very different Buddhist society, but also a largely Buddhist society where the Soviet Union went in, knocked off the government and set up an independent Mongolian state, right? And I'm not going to say things like went great from Mongolia. But the thing is, if your actual objective is just knock off a theocratic government that you don't like, you could have done that. And they don't.

They don't do it. They're already into fucking China. It's also worth like stating like, yeah, things maybe not like didn't work out great in the immediate term for Mongolia. But Mongolia is a state right now is not like the worst. It's not doing as badly as like Tibet is doing, you know? Yeah. Like it's, it's an independent country that functions more or less. Yeah. And who does better than functioning more or less, really?

Yeah. Like, and this, I don't know. And this is, this is the sort of, that's, and that's one of the things that, like, Chinese nationalists tend not to really use that line. I mean, they use it a bit when they're personally, like, when they have to, like, specifically make arguments about the Dalai Lama, that's something they do. But most of the arguments that the actual, like, supporters of the Chinese government

in China, the arguments they make is like, oh, well, these people are, like, these people are shitty barbarians and we have to like, we have to civilize them. And, like, our invasion was a gift to them because we're going to civilize these people. And, like, it's literally, it's like identical to the shit that, like, that the Israelis say, like, Palestinians, we should also very briefly mention that a lot of the surveillance technology that's used in Tibet, like, are cameras that the Chinese government sells to Palestine. So keep that shit in mind.

Yeah. And I don't know. But it's, it's, this is one of the really bleak examples because the thing about self-immolation as a politics is that like, it functions by mobilizing someone else, right? And in some cases, that's, that's, that's, you know, that's another government. In some cases, that's your own government. in some cases that's the people around you. But if you're in a state

where the government does not give a shit about you and they have the ability to ruthlessly repress anyone who's inspired by your actions, it just leads to a lot of people dying. And I don't know what the sort of lesson from that is other than it's really hard for

and this is the thing with Hong Kong too. is it's really hard for any one, any one part of China to try to go into revolt against the government because there's so much more of the rest of fucking China. And if you, if you, if you alone are pitted against the entire might of the Chinese state that has broad popular backing, you're fucked. Yeah. And it's, it's really bleak. But.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have anything positive to say there. Hey, everybody, Robert here. Our discussion ran very long, so this is going to be a two-parter. You'll be hearing about Tunisia and more in the next episode. But for now, please continue listening to our podcasts and not other podcasts, because why would you do that? Who would do that?

Nobody I like. Hey, everyone. Robert Evans here. Back to introduce It Could Happen Here, Part 2 of my discussion with Mia Wong, of the history of self-immolation protests. We'll be starting with Tunisia in this one and then moving on from there. So please buckle up and listen in. But I will move us on to talking about Tunisia, which is the last place we will talk about, self-immolation protests. I want to end, I guess, a bit. I want to end after you talk about Tunisia with one in China that kind of worked. Oh, okay. Well, that'll be nice.

So there was a, you know, Tunisia existed for most of the, like, 21st century under a dictator. This state of affairs changed for, unfortunately, a fairly limited period of time on December 17, 2010, when a young man, and he was 26, Mohamed Bozizi went out to sell fruit. And, you know, Muhammad lived in a very poor region of. a very poor part of Tunisia, the city of Citi, Bowsid. It's about a hundred miles south of Tunis, which is the capital. And like a lot of people, you know, in that part of the world, it is not uncommon particularly really for young men because unemployment is so high for young men to kind of make their living, doing a mix of odd jobs and like odd vending, right?

Where you're just kind of like selling whatever you can get your hands on and think that you can make a profit on because there's not jobs in the traditional sense. Yeah. And because political corruption was so horrific in the state at that point in time, it's one of those things where most everybody who's out there selling shit on the street is breaking the law by doing it, right? Because you can't get the permit, because the permit is basically a bribe and you can't afford the bribe, right? That's how a lot of this stuff works. So, you know, Muhammad kind of prior to this, he had been, his friends when you read interviews with people who knew him, he was always like one of these guys who was like really upbeat and funny. His nickname basically meant like funny man. in town. And this had started to change. Like Friends noticed like a couple of years before, you know, 2010 when he's in, hits his mid-20s and starts getting into his late 20s that he's like, it is impossible to get by as a young man. There are no jobs for us. There's no future. I don't feel at all. Like I have no, nothing to be hopeful for, right? I think a lot of people. Yeah.

can understand, empathize with where he was coming from. So he goes out to sell fruit, and this municipal inspector, Fyda Hamdi, sees him, realizes he doesn't have a permit and takes his shit, right? And there are accounts that he, like, hits him, too. Basically, he's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? You're not paying your goddamn bribe and, like, smacks him around. So this is kind of the breaking point for was easy. He goes to the police station because he's got, like, this scale that he's using the, like,

way out fruit and stuff that he wants to get back. it had been confiscated. He, like, can't work without it. And they tell him, like, fuck you, you're not getting shit back. So he says, like, I want to meet with the governor and, like, plead my case to the guy in charge. And they're like, fuck you, the governor doesn't want to see you. So at about 11.30 a.m., he takes his cart outside of the governor's office.

He pours, I think lighter fluid, something flammable over his head. And he lights himself on fire. His cousin gets a call. Ali Bozzi, gets a call. I guess from someone who was nearby and knew them both and was like, Muhammad just lit himself on fire in front of the governor's office. And Ali runs there, sprints over to the governor's office with his smartphone. And he gets there in time to record his cousin's body being taken into an ambulance.

Protests start up after this. Almost immediately people take to the street. I think it's just everyone is living under the same regime. They're living under all of these like fucking corrupt-ass officials. everyone pieces together this. Yeah, and it's worth mentioning this is also a period of massive increases at food prices. Yes. Which are one of the big.

Like, if you want your protest to work, like, Spark plus pricing food prices, great way to get it to happen. Yes. So, you know, the spark catches fire. Protests start up and they do not calm down. Part of why they don't calm down is Ali, Boisee stays out in the street. He uploads footage of his cousin's body. to Facebook, and he takes footage of the protests, too, and he just starts sending shit to Al Jazeera, right? So all of this footage he's taking, like, winds up on television that evening, and by the next day,

other cities in Tunisia are holding protests. And this is the kind of thing where it's like, you know, we all saw this, you know, obviously with a different cause in 2020. Sometimes something happens that's so horrible that the whole country takes to the streets. And that's what happens in Tunisia. So the president at the time, basically a dictator, Abedin al-Abidin bin Ali does the normal dictator thing. He sends out, and non-dictators, right? We do it here too. Yeah, yeah.

He sends the cops out to beat the shit out of everybody, right? But he's also, he's, you talked in when we were talking about Vietnam about like the playbook and they didn't quite have it down. Part of the playbook is down because in addition to sending the cops out to beat the shit out of people, he visits Bozizi in the hospital because he lingers for a while, right? And he also has the officer, the guy who slapped Bozizi arrested. You know, he's kind of desperately trying like, maybe this will calm everybody down. It does not.

Bozizi dies in the hospital a couple of days later. And the protests, which are known now as the Jasmine Revolution, it takes about a month, but they force bin Ali to flee the country for Saudi Arabia and, you know, successfully bring an end to his regime and the return of a democratic system. There are functional elections for a while in Tunisia. They gain a significant amount of, like, political, freedom. Like there are some really significant inroads made in terms of like civil rights during this period immediately after the Jasmine Revolution. But things also don't get better, at least not

enough, right? This is generally seen Tunisia as the start of the Arab Spring. And if you know anything about the rest of the Arab Spring, this was also seen as like kind of the successful case, right? Like shit didn't work out very well in Syria or or in Egypt. But, like, Bahrain. Yeah, Bahrain. But here they got rid of the dictator and they gained a lot of civil rights and that's great. The problem is that the other issues, the high food prices, the fact that unemployment is at a nightmarish level, the fact that corruption was a hideous problem in Tunisia, this doesn't just go away, right? Because it's deeper than the dictator.

The culture, whenever you have a culture of corruption like this, which is, by the way, it's not just the Middle East that has to deal with this. But if you've spent time in the Middle East, one of the things that is really depressing, is how massive and absolutely different, by the way, from the kind of corruption that we have in the West, it is over there. The degree to which, and you start to care about this, not because you're getting fucked over as a tourist, because you really don't notice it much as a tourist,

it's when you make friends in that country and you talk to them about, like, how many different people are constantly taking a little bit from them, right? And often not a little bit. Like the degree to which regular people suffer because every single person who is quote unquote a government official is just soliciting for bribes is that's so much deeper than any one guy in charge, right? That's something you can't just revolt your way out of it. Yeah. Like one of my professors in college, I don't know if he ever actually wrote about it, but he's, okay, long story, but he lived in Egypt for a long time.

And one of the things he would talk about is like the concept of like the oddly powerful bureaucrat. So like his thing was like the like the. The guy who sells you tickets at, like, the train station in Cairo. Like, that guy, if you don't fucking pay him, he can just say no and you can't get on a train. And there's just like so many layers of like this guy who controls this specific thing and thus can fuck you over unless you like do what he tells you, which is usually give money. Unfortunately, we need to go to ads. We'll be back in a second. And we're back.

Yeah. And it's part of why it's more durable is it's not like, You know, I think in South Vietnam, you know, when DM was around, you had a lot of, you have all this corruption, but a lot of it is top down. It is people who are loyal to the president, right? A lot of the corruption in places like this is bottom up in that it's not a situation where all of these men who are so loyal to the dictator have this corrupt position. I mean, that's part of it. I'm not saying that it's not. But a lot of it is that like, well, maybe it's technically my job to stop the guy who works at the the train station from denying people entry if they don't bribe him. But if I do that, then maybe he's going to make a fuss about how I'm doing the same thing for like permits to fix your roof or whatever, right? Like, it's so much more bottom up in a lot of ways. And so the reason this matters is that like shit doesn't really get better in Tunisia, right?

And now that the, so while all these problems continue, corruption continues to be an issue, high food prices continue to be an issue, unemployment continues to be an issue, particularly for young men. Another thing that's changed is that now everyone has seen what Wazizi does, has done. And, like, obviously he dies horribly, but one thing that happens is, like, his family moves to Canada, right? Like, they, and this is, I don't think, fair to his family.

I haven't seen the evidence they were, like, corrupt or whatever. But, like, I think because of how, like, because they're able to, like, get out of this situation, it's seen as like, well, maybe if I do this, not only will it hurt whoever, whatever corrupt motherfucker, you know, I'm angry at, but maybe. shit will work out for my family, right? This is often not what actually happens, but there have been hundreds of self-immolation cases in the last 10 years in Tunisia. It has become, you might compare it to kind of mass shootings in the United States, not obviously on a moral level. You're not doing nearly the same thing. You're not hurting anyone else. But in terms of the fact that it is this,

this really, really shocking event that then becomes kind of routine because people pick up on it is like, well, this is what you do in this situation, you know? One of the articles that I read for this was an AP news piece that interviews a guy named Hosni Kalea, who's one of the dudes, one of the many Tunisians who have attempted or succeeded in killing themselves through self-immolation as an act of protest. Hosni survived, right? And he did not survive without serious injury, right? Now he has to, he covers his face at all times, his left hand, he's lost a bunch of fingers,

his right hand has no fingers at all anymore. Like, he is just grievously injured as a result of this. And he said when interviewed by the AP, quote, I would never describe the act of self-immolation as an act of courage because even the bravest person in the world couldn't do it. When I poured the petrol over my head, I wasn't really conscious about what I was doing. Then I saw a flash.

I felt my skin start to burn and I fell down. I woke up eight months later in the hospital. And I found that really interesting because there's a lot of talk right now. with what Aaron Bushnell did about like principle and courage or mental illness or whatever and like to what do we credit something that is so incomprehensible to most people. And I found what Hosni says here really interesting because what he's saying is that like you can't even call it courage, you know, it's almost like someone else is doing it. You were animated by such rage and hopelessness that it's almost like someone else is

is in control of your body. And I don't, that doesn't sound like mental illness to me for certain. That sounds like someone, that sounds like desperation of such an extent that it's mind altering. I don't know any other way to describe it than that. And I'm not saying this is what goes through everybody's head when they self-immolate, but you don't get a lot of interviews with those people after the fact, right?

Yeah, well, like, there's some people who survive in Tibet, and it's like, well, those guys, the Chinese government will not let anyone near them, right? like no you know and like i i guess i should i should mention this about the chinese government line on this is that it's very similar to what you see in the american press is like the well no you're you're you're seeing the terrorist stuff too here but like the the chinese government line and this line works pretty well is like these people were mentally ill these people are terrorists um or they were like misled by like the dali lama who's like leading his people to the flames yeah and that's been kind of the that's been kind of the playbook every

everywhere for this that like the one the one that kind of works is that one it's it's you have to attack the moral character of the person because it's such an it's such an act of it's an inherently selfless selfless yeah so the only way to do it is you can't describe it anywhere else they're lighting themselves on fire yeah yeah so they like you know the it's it's it's the the rogers stone rat fucking thing of attack them where they're strong and you know so it's it's the attack on the moral character that like happens i i think the thing with teneas too is it's like like the alternative to this is this like rapid anti-immigrant politics in a way that's like we'll talk about that in a second but yeah it's it doesn't end well one thing I do want to hit on is the degree to which again

this kind of does function in Tunisia as like a memetic virus Hosni the guy we heard from survives but his brother shortly thereafter lights himself on fire in an act of protest and kills himself and his mother attempts to do the same right like three members of the family all carrying out self-immolation. And it is one of those things. This is listed as like an example of the tactic succeeding. And it does in terms of it gets the regime out of power. But things are not better in Tunisia, especially since.

So, you know, there is a period of time where there is at least a functioning democracy and significant gains for civil rights. But because food still doesn't get affordable, there aren't jobs. You'll find a lot of articles from around 2020, especially where people are like, Yeah, I guess freedom's nice, but it's not really worth much if you're starving, you know? Yeah. Which, you know, anyway, all of this leads in part to the coming to power of the guy who is currently leading Tunisia, Kais Saeed. And as you noted, Mia, you know, this guy is a populist.

He is elected with 72% of the vote. He frames himself like populist him to do is like, I am, you know, I'm outside the system. I'm going to help you take on the elite that have corrupt. ruled our country, and he also is very anti-migrant, right? Tunisia, a lot of people who migrate into Europe do so through Tunisia, just for geographical reasons. And he is blaming a lot of their problems on, he does like great replacement shit that all these black migrants are causing our country's problems. He inspires a wave of violence against black people in Tunisia. That's pretty hideous and horrific. And he has gained a significant amount of backing from particularly

the Italian government, I think also the French government, because he's cracking down on migrants, right? And those migrants come to Italy and France, and that's a problem for those governments. So they're supporting this guy, who, by the way, has turned himself into a dictator. All those gains Tunisia had in the wake of the Arab Spring, he has rolled back. He has centralized power. He has more or less destroyed the judiciary as something that's independent. You know, he is, if he's not a dictator, he's not all that far from it, you know. and he's being supported by these these quote unquote democratic nations because

well I mean because racism right yeah the same reason they support a Gaddafi like yeah when it comes to the politicians it's a mix of racism and just like well racism wins votes and when it comes to like why racism win votes it's back to racism right anyway so those are

that's Tunisia more or less unfortunately we need to go to ads we'll be back in a second and we're back yeah so let's end on a slightly more positive note where, well, so the line I was going to give was one about how like, you know, let me, this is the thing with Tunisia, right? It's like you have this, like, Tunisia has effectively structural unemployment rates of like 30,

40% right. Yeah, it's, it's, and that's a thing that's a thing that can't be solved without changing the economic system. Yep. If you, you know, if you, you can have your political revolution without your social revolution. You'll be right back to where you were in like 10 years. The problem, though, the other thing is you can have your social revolution. and also end up in the same place,

which is where we're going with with China, where, so one of the, there's a very famous, okay, I guess the place we should start with this is that one of the, I've talked about this a bit on this show. One of the ways that labor works in China,

like structurally is that, so you're a contractor, you work for a contracting company. The contracting company is this like series of shell companies. And there's like a, there's like, there's a payday on like new years. Because that's when the like the financial,

like the year sort of rolls over and that's when you get paid. And so these companies are designed to specifically go out of business like the day before New Year so they don't have to pay any of the workers for the work that they've done. And this leads to a rash of protests in China, like every single year on New Year's Day. There's like this massive, there's protests like fucking everywhere because people have been screwed. It happens a lot with construction companies. And so there's a very, like one of the very common tactics you see is people like standing on top of. with buildings holding banner saying, like, we're going to jump unless you guys, like, pay us. And so that's kind of the background of this, which is that, that's a fairly common kind of like workers protest. In 2021, there's a delivery driver in Zhang Su who he, so something I didn't really talk about on the 10 episodes is that Chinese economy is increasingly becoming a gig economy. And this has been, this has been happening for a while now. And so this guy is a delivery driver for Alibaba. And he's like, he's like trying to change.

apps and the app garnishes his wages and steal $700 from him and that's an enormous amount of money. Yeah, I mean, the app garnished his wages as a sentence that just makes me want to light something on fire. So I get why this would spark protests. Yeah, and he like tries to get it back and they don't give it to him and he lights himself on fire. And this turns into, so he lets himself on fire and then like this is this is in 2021. this is the same year where the Tammu employee falls over dead like or falls like dies in her bed from overwork and also the same year when a Tammu employee jumps off of the building because of overwork. And this sets off like a giant kind of shift in in the way that the Chinese public is thinking about labor.

Because up until this one, people have been, you know, like China, it's not, it's nowhere near as bad as Tunisia, but it also has this problem of like everyone works harder and harder. You're working 9-96, right? You're working 9 a.m. 9 p.m. 6 days a week. And you're working more and more hours and you're not getting ahead, right? You're still stuck in your shitty apartment and your app isn't paying you for the work you did. And this leads to a whole, like a whole thing that sort of culminates in, in something I talked about a bit in the 10 episodes, which is the Chinese Supreme Court

like the Chinese Constitution says you're not supposed to be able to work people for longer from like 35 hours unless like special circumstances and the Chinese Supreme Court goes like well obviously you're not allowed to work people like 12 hours a day six days a week

and that isn't like in large part and partially it's because of the the Tammu suicide and the Tammu thing but the other huge contributing factor to this And the other huge thing contributing to Chinese society attempting to reckon kind of with their unbelievable overwork culture is the self-immolation. And it's it goes viral so fast that there's no way to sort of like cover it up. There's, it's, it's you can't, the Chinese government can't really just press the racism button like they normally would because this isn't someone in Tibet or this isn't someone in Xinjiang. They can't really do that.

and so they kind of are they're forced to make at least like some kind of change because it pisses off so many people in ways that like can't really be contained so you know I guess a lesson from that if there is one is sometimes very rarely

you can back a government into a corner where the normal things that they would say about it or like the normal like mental illness terrorists, deluded things don't work because the raw simplicity of what they did and why just breaks through the media sphere thing. And it's, again, very hard to predict. Obviously, like, this isn't the first, within the last 12 months, this isn't the first

self-immolation of the United States, right? And the last self-immolation attacked, or not attack, sorry, I should, jeez, do I have media brain or what? The last self-immolation that we had, which I believe was over climate change. Oh, there was a Palestine one too. Oh, then there was a pass. So I guess we've had a couple, like two in the last, or three now, I guess, in the last like 12 months or so. But they didn't, the other ones did not really move the needle, right?

Why Aaron, I mean, I think part of it might have to do with how deliberate it was and how, you know, it got, was very quickly picked up by local media and the national media. I don't know, that's really outside the scope of these episodes, but I hope you at least now have more of a grounding in like how this has gone other times people have used this as a method of protest. And hopefully that's of use to you. Anyway, have a good day. Bye. Welcome to Dick and App and here, a podcast, sometimes occasion, not even that occasionally. That's about a bunch of not very functional mass surveillance technology. that's being deployed against all of us. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Also with me is Garrison Davis. Yeah, and so today we're going to be talking more about something we've talked about on the show, I think a couple of times, but that is the shot spotter program.

And there was recently a leak of the locations of all of shot spotters like gunfire sensors. And with us to talk about it are the people who got the leak and wrote the article about about where the shot spotter censors are. And that is Drew Mayrotro, who's a staff writer at Wired, and Joey Scott, who's a freelance investigative journalist and photographer.

And both of you, too, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I'm glad to be talking to you about this. So, I guess for the people who don't remember or, like, have not listened to other episodes we've done about this or have read this article,

which you should go read at Wired. It's great. can you describe what ShotSpotter is and what it's supposed to do versus what it actually does? Sure, Joey, you want me to take this or do you want to do it? Yeah, go ahead. Sure. Well, ShotSpotter is a sort of controversial gunshot detection system built by the company sound thinking. On the face of it, the tech is sort of straightforward.

The company will basically install little sensors on streetlights and traffic signs in a jurisdiction and these sensors are sort of like algorithmically tuned to detect gunshots. So when one of these sensors hears something, it basically will send an alert to an incident review center, which will then like vet the sound, make sure it was actually a gunshot before then forwarding it to dispatchers who send a cop to investigate the sound. You know, activists and academics have been basically saying for years that this tech is inaccurate and primes police basically to go to low-income communities of color expecting gunshots when likely they won't find any.

Yeah, and I think the specifically low-income communities of color thing is a big part of this because so you all created a map of where the shot spotter sensors are from the data you got. And I looked at Chicago one and immediately I was like, I recognized that map. That is the map of where the non-white people are in the city. So it's Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's it's it's it's stark I think a lot A lot of the responses that I've seen on Twitter and you know

In my email inbox or essentially that like look This is just a map of where all the not white people are in Whatever city that it's deployed in Yeah and you all did some analysis of what you found sort of statistically about Where these centers ended up and like the sort of the, I guess like class and racial composition of those places. Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure, I'll take this one just because I worked on the analysis. So yeah, I mean, what we found is that more than 12 million Americans live in a neighborhood with at least one

shot spotter sensor. We basically joined census data onto the locations of every single shot spotter microphone and looked at the demographic composition of those neighborhoods. And, you know, what we found is that an aggregate, nearly 70% of the people who live in a neighborhood with one set with at least one sensor identify as either black or Latinae. Nearly three quarters of those neighborhoods are a majority not white and the average household income in a neighborhood with at least one sensor is $50,000 a year. So these are low income communities of color. It's kind of hard to describe it in any other way. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things, and this has been a thing for, so I'm in Chicago.

there's been a huge series of fights over getting rid of Schatzbutter here. One of the things you hear all the time that shot is the shots hard people will go no, well, we don't use race as a factor for yeah, but Schott spotter insists that they don't use race at all in determining where

they put these sensors, but Kaba, they've still managed to somehow create this map. And I don't know. I I'm wondering what you think about their response and whether you, and I guess this is more of a subjective thing. Like, how much do you actually believe them when they say this?

Well, I think when, you know, we were investigating this, we found that the police don't even know where these locations are. And so they're just giving shot spotter data of where to put this stuff. So the police can kind of wipe their hands of like, oh, we insisted that they put it in this place or, anything like that. And I think, you know, Drove can probably speak to this, but, you know, the argument is this is where all the shootings are. And so that's where they are. But, you know, when you investigate that, it doesn't call into effect. Like in other parts of the country

outside of like Chicago or something, you look at gun violence and where these alerts are, you know, they aren't just where the alerts are. And, you know, Pasadena's an example. You know, shootings happen outside of where the. alerts are, but they're specifically in a very specific part of Pasadena that is poor and non-white. So yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, when we spoke to sound thinking, you know, I think it's important to point out here that they did not dispute our findings or the sort of authenticity of the doc. But, you know, they said what you would expect that the sensor deployment is not really informed by race. And, you know, the way it works, as Joey says, is that the company,

basically asked police department who purchased the systems for data about gun violence, which sound thinking says is objective, but we have no idea what that data actually looks like, right? We don't know if it's all crime data, which might be, you know, subject to enforcement bias, right, if they include things like drug crimes on there, drug arrests. So we just don't really know why sound thinking, you know, makes a recommended plan for their sensor deployment. The other thing that, at sound thinking it told me is that, you know, sometimes they'll ask for data and they'll do this sort of data-informed way. But other times, cops will just say, like, look, we want the,

we want the deployment in this area. And that might include, like, a stadium or a school or places where people gather. So, you know, it's kind of, we don't really know why exactly sound thinking is deploying its sensors in any given location. Yeah, and having them be deployed by cops is like is a spectacular way to have caught brain in terms of locations which not not not not I don't know

not an especially good way to get a statistically unbiased sampling of where you would potentially want these things so I guess I guess the thing we should talk about in terms of what the issues with the system is are okay so shot spotter claims that it and this is something I've seen over and over and over again it claims it is a 97% accuracy rate of detecting gunshots.

There's just, I don't believe it. None of the research I've ever seen backs that up. You talk a bit about what it's actually detecting versus what they sort of claim it is. Yeah, I think, well, I guess the overreaching kind of theme here is we just don't know. shot spotter is very not transparent about their data. There have been really no peer reviewed independent studies of the technology. So when we make, when we talk about, you know, how effective it is, that that is a claim that shot spotter makes based off of, you know, very little information given to the public about

it, you know, and that's kind of the big issue is when you start getting down into the nitty gritty of like what's actually going on, you notice that a lot of the times what they consider a gunshot, police will investigate and find out it was a firework, which if you live in, you know, I use Pasadena because it's next to me out here in L.A., you know, fireworks are kind of how we celebrate and it's a different kind of language out here, you know, fireworks happen all the time. So once you start getting into looking at some of the data that I have been able to get, you start seeing that, you know, maybe they claim it was a gunshot, but when police show up, they don't find any evidence of a gun crime. And sometimes they find out it was a car backfiring

or construction equipment and all of that. And that just kind of shows, you know, their claim that it's effective at identifying gunshots is, you know, very questionable to make that claim. Yeah. And, you know, their 97, of it, like, the 97% figure that they cite in their marketing material is based on police reporting back to ShotSpotter that there was a mistake, right? Like, for, for ShotSpotter to count a, to count, like, a gunshot, or to count a sound as an error, the police have to report it back to Shot Spotter, right? So it's almost like by default, if they hear nothing, they have a 100% accuracy rate.

But the second that, you know, they're informed of this, they, you know, will adjust that rate. Well, and also, I mean, that that's a metric that relies on the cops telling them, like, it relies on the cops taking an extra step in an investigation. And these are, like, you are dealing with one of the most notoriously lazy group of people, like, in the entire country. Like, I have, I have watched these people on duty in Chicago. They spend like 80% of their time standing around on their phones playing Candy Crush, right? Like, this entire statistics thing requires them to do another. step. It's like, what percentage

of the time is a cop going to admit that they ran out to this thing and, like, drew their guns and we're doing their, like, whole, oh, there's been gunshots thing, and then there's just nothing there. It's like, I don't know. It seems like

cast a pall over even this, even the sort of potential that their data can be right. Right. I mean, we all know that cops lie. Yeah. And we've seen, them kind of use shot spotter alerts, you know, Chicago was one of the examples where they were using it as cover to make illegal stops and, you know, that sort of thing. So, you know, if there's room for that, it's hard to then take what data police are giving

them in this way as accurate. And then again, it goes back to, well, we don't, the public doesn't get to see any of that information. So we don't get to make that, I guess, distinction between the two and know what's best for people's communities because of that. That's one of the things about this program that is really alarming is that you have this mass surveillance technology and the people in charge of it, or like the people who'd be in charge of sort of like deciding whether or not you want it. It's like, like both both the general public and like city mayors, etc., etc.,

seem to have so little information about whether, about what it's even doing that it's incredibly difficult to make any kind of, like any kind of sort of database choice. All you have is sort of this combination of like the company going, oh yeah, well, obviously our stuff works. And then this sort of, let me, this is the thing that's been happening in Chicago is this sort of like crime panic stuff

that people just fall back on. they combine this sort of crime panic with just the assumption that it works because that's what it says in the box. And that's a, I think, a really alarming combination to me. Yeah. I mean, I think the fact that city council members are kept in the dark about the locations of these things, as are the police departments you pay for it, or the cities pay for it. I think it's, you know, something that's really been quite interesting as after we published is

that, you know, I've gotten a bunch of emails from city council members asking, you know, asking me if I can provide them data about the locations because they can't even get them from the company, right? So, yeah, there's a lot of transparency issues here. Yeah. And, you know, this is a public, this is a tool being paid with public money. Um, you know, another thing we found in the data was that there are a list of sensors that are broken or out of service or anything like that. Um, in talking to, to various police departments, ShotSpotter doesn't let them know when that happens and, you know, referred us to talk as to ShotSpotter about that. So, you know, not even the functionality of like how many sensors are down are really communicated.

And that's a huge problem. But like, again, this data, as a journalist to investigate it to request documents, I can count at least three separate cities where ShotSpotter intervened and said the release of the data would be. a trade secret. And so therefore, yeah. So like, even any data that shows transparency of like anything more detailed

than just an alert that many cities have, Shotspotter won't release because it is quote unquote a trade secret. Mind you, I have gotten documents from other cities that are more detailed. And then when I request those from other cities,

ShotSpotter intervenes and goes, no, that's a trade secret. So it's this kind of trying to hide the transparency that then adds more skepticism to the effectiveness and usefulness of the product, which the public, I believe everyone would agree, deserves a right to know, especially if it's taxpayer money. Yeah, and it's a lot of money, too. So speaking of a lot of money, unfortunately, we have to take an ad break. so we will be back in a second.

Okay, we are back. Something I wanted to talk about with the way that these sensors are used. So about, actually, I, okay, sorry, I should have actually figured out the exact date after which the story originally came out,

but maybe like four or five days after your story came out. There was a story that came out of Chicago about a sort of, effectively the cover-up of a case where a CPD was, was responding to a shot spotter ping.

And it was just like a 13 year old kid shooting off fireworks. And the cop showed up and immediately started shooting. And like, thankfully, cops can't set up a barn. So the kid didn't get shot. But like this child had a cop shoot at him while the kid was running towards the cop going, no, it was fireworks. Yeah. So I was wondering what kind, like, you know, how many of those kinds of stories did you run

into when you were sort of like doing this? running into the story and yeah what is the impact of that stuff sort of been you know I think that that example you bring up is particularly egregious

but what happens more often I think are these there's sort of like less dramatic events where you know sound thinking or shot spotter will detect two shots and deploy cops to a corner and you know

they'll detain someone on the scene, run their name through their, you know, their databases and find that this guy's got a bench warrant or, you know, pick someone up on a misdemeanor, right? So like, I think, you know, while there are some really egregious examples, the thing that that I think about a lot here is that is just how much unnecessary, how many unnecessary arrests are happening because of shotswater, right? How many people are being picked up on bullshit, essentially? Yeah, and, you know, that recent case in Chicago with the kid with the firework, and, you know, it wasn't too long ago that, you know, Adam Toledo was shot. Yeah. A 13-year-old kid, for the same reason, cops were responding to a shot spot earlier. And the Chicago OIG and their report about it kind of highlighted one of the things, which is cops are just primed to be, you know, expecting, you know, gunfire, somebody shooting at them and everything. and, you know, I think that's, that is a danger, you know, but again, to what Drove's saying is, like, it also leads to a lot of unnecessary stops. It opens up people to be profiled and pat it down. And, you know, so both options are not great, you know, when you consider the harm that this causes.

It's just, we all know that, like, cops are very jumpy to begin with. So, you know, they hear a firework or, you know, an acorn hits their cop car or something. we all know that like that's probably not what we need police to be expecting on a call. And so you're just telling people, oh, gunshots, and then they're going to run in expecting to be fired upon. And I don't think that's great for society. Garrison, do you want to talk a bit about that? Oh, I don't know if there's much more to say. I think.

That's true. Yeah, we did do a lot of acorn cop. I think the acorn incident stands on itself. I don't think it needs to even be talked about. I think one sentence speaks a whole book's worth of possible analysis of police behavior. And no, the notion of police rushing into every situation thinking that there was a gunshot obviously has its inherent problems. Now, mind you, a lot of the times, you know, and at least in other cities, it's, 60 to 80% of the time, they don't find anything, you know, which I think is good in the sense

that nobody's being harmed or stomped, but it's also bad when you consider the effectiveness and utility of the device, you know, which shotswater has kind of distanced themselves from, you know, this idea of preventing gun crime or lowering crime and more in terms of like safety and arriving to a scene quicker to render aid and help police find shell casings. You've seen over the years the kind of switch of focus on what the technology does. And that most certainly happened around the time they changed their name to sound thinking. Yeah. I think the other thing I wanted to mention here is that, you know, from a different leaked internal report from the state's attorney's office in Illinois, in Cook County, Illinois, it found that like a third of arrests stemming

from a shot spotter alert actually had nothing to do with a gun in the first place. So it's not even like, you know, there are 89% of alerts don't, you know, result in finding a shell casing. It's that even when there are arrests that occur from a shot spotter alert, 30% of them have nothing to do with a gun, right? And that just shows you sort of the criminalization of what of people in areas that have these microphones. Yeah, and I think the combination of those two things gets you to this point about shot spotter's effectiveness, which is that like, okay, so we've had shot spotter for a while in Chicago, right?

Chicago police do not solve murders. Like, it's sub, it's, they're murder, their murder clearance rate, and you have to keep in mind that murder clearance doesn't actually mean they solved a murder. But, like, even that jacked up murder clearance rate, I don't think has, like, I think they may have had one year in my entire life over 50%, and that was because murder clearance counts. If two people both shoot each other and they both die, that counts as a clearance, or they find their suspect dies in like another way. So it's pretty clear that it's not actually substantively contributing to Chicago Police Department solving murders. Like you have a better than coin flip odds if you kill someone in Chicago that like the police aren't even going to like. The police aren't even going to like. like really try to figure out what happened. And so, yeah, I think, I think it makes a lot of sense that they've been pivoting away from

even like, even claiming that this can do anything to solve gun violence, because it just clearly hasn't at all. And it's, and instead it seems to be doing a bunch of other stuff, which is like either throwing cops around doing, is throwing cops around chasing like shadows, which either results in them arresting just random people or. or like having these really sort of terrifying incidents. Or it just results in straight up nothing? Yeah, we're going to go to ads.

We'll be back in however long capitalism dictates. So see you then. And we're back. I think like looking at the effectiveness, like two cities that have continued to deny ShotSpotter contracts are Atlanta and Portland. two cities that spend a lot of time thinking

about how they equip their police spend a lot of time making sure that their police are able to serve the largest amount of the community possible and the fact that specifically Atlanta with their massive

flock program of an integrated camera network across the whole city it is one of the most surveilled cities in the country if not the most. The fact that they are turning down this equipment for not being effective enough and it being too costly is a sign for like,

beyond it just being a sign, it's also like a look at why other police departments are interested in this and like what it allows them to do and being deployed to these various communities that have the, what, like 25,000 sensors. But no, I mean, like, they've constantly tried to send this stuff to Atlanta and it's like and it's just it's simply not happening and even after 2020 that Portland's like no

it's it's it's it's too super super useful examples to measure how much this technology actually is going to get used for what they say it's being used for versus just having an excuse to to act like there's gunfire all across the city yeah and and you know I think when we start more police departments are going to start relying more on technology. Sure. Largely because many departments cannot hire more cops. Now, this isn't advocating me, you know, I don't want police departments to hire more cops. You know, they've slowly defunded themselves in that way.

But like, you know, cities like Los Angeles are trying to grow their surveillance capabilities for that reason. They just do not have enough, they say, they do not have enough cops. And so this is where kind of this surveillance capitalism is going to really thrive is police departments are going to get desperate and they're going to start reaching out and getting more invasive surveillance technology. And, you know, I think in some city, shot spotter is kind of their way of quieting the narratives about, you know, the growing gun violence and everything in their communities. You know, they're like, oh, look, we've deployed this new toy to kind of help us. without really solving anything because we all know cops aren't really good at solving crime. Yeah. So it kind of gives them cover of like, we're bad at our jobs.

So how do we make it look like we're better? Well, let's invest in some new technology. So it looks like we're trying something. But at the end of the day, it's a waste of money. And then the impacts of that is harm, you know, greater than the good. Yeah. It's like we're spending an enormous amount of money to hurt people for no, reason.

And, you know, I think Shotspotter is only one of sound thinking's offerings, right? Like they, you know, when they change their name to sound thinking, it's sort of like reflected this pivot in the company where now they were going to start thinking more about like resource management, right? How do we convince departments that our technology is going to better help them allocate their resources? And, you know, surveillance is the way to do that. We can measure where crime is.

we can measure where gunshots is and where gunshots are and we can deploy police there. And one of shots bought, or recently sound thinking had acquired like a notorious predictive policing company called PredPol that happens, I think, earlier this year. So, you know, they're trying to expand their offerings here to be this kind of resource management solution for departments. See, Mia, did you have anything else you wanted to bring up here? Yeah. I guess there's one more thing I wanted to talk about, which is that.

So one of the things that I've heard from places that have gotten rid of their contracts is that shot spotters not like taking their sensors down, even when cities stopped doing contracts. I was wondering what you two, you sort of know about that. Yeah, I reached out to Dayton, Ohio, who recently got rid of their contract. And I reached out, you know, because I was like asking departments who had it. like, are you aware of the status of the censors? Do you know the locations? You know, both knows. And then I asked Dayton, you know, now that the contract's over, what happens to the sensors?

And they basically said, we don't know. That's shot spotter's responsibility. And their responsibility is maintenance and care and removal and installation. So who knows? Obviously, somebody knows because it's not. like some person can just start climbing telephone poles and installing surveillance equipment. So obviously, you know, somebody's issuing permits to install stuff and put stuff up there. But like, you know, as we're finding out, city council members don't know, police departments don't know.

And so who knows what happens to these devices afterwards? And then say a city like Chicago, you know, say they cancel their contracts, well, a new mayor can come in and then just instantly turn them back on. you know, and that way. And so that's kind of the other thing we're slowly starting to learn here. It's more cities start canceling their contracts or not renewing them. You know, it is what happens to the technology afterwards. And we don't know. Which is not a great sign.

Like, I mean, you know, it's not good that there's just a bunch of state surveillance technology around all the time. But it somehow feels even worse that we don't have any. idea what happens to it, even if the state decides it doesn't want to use it. So, yeah, I guess on that somewhat disquieting note, do you have anything I'll see? You wanted to make sure you get to? No, nothing from me. No, I mean, this is, you know, thanks to, you know, somebody brave enough to send us the info, and it's the only way this information has been able to get out. And I think if I implore the public to really research and dig into this technology, if their cities are thinking about extending their contracts or bringing a contract in and really questioning it

and trying to get shotswater on the record to answer for some of these things. And we know what works and what doesn't work. And I think most cities are starting to find out that there is a better use of that amount of money to stop these sort of gun crimes, interventions and other more community-based solutions rather than just dumping money into surveillance technology. And you can get a lot done with an $8 million. Yeah. You know, it's just like there's always money in the banana stand sort of thing. There's like, there's always money for police. So it's just like, why don't we just re-transform that money into things that actually work in these communities and, you know, go behind that.

So. Yeah. And I think, I don't know, hopefully, hopefully this will encourage more cities to stop paying for this shit. Yeah. So where can people find you choose work? I mean, I know, like, obviously this one's unwired, but are online places, etc., etc., etc. social media places. Plug yourself. Go. Yay. Yay. Well, you can find my stuff on wire.com and I'm on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it, at DeMero and on Blue Sky at D. Mero, D. Mero, D. M-E-H-R-O. And you can find me on Instagram and Twitter with the username Joey Never Joe. and then my writings have been in local press out here in L.A., L.A., public press, and NAC L.A. Yeah, and thank you to both so much for coming on. Thanks for having us.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah, and I'm going to encourage everyone else to go get your city to not use this stuff, because it sucks. All right. This has been a good app here. You can find us in the usual places. Goodbye. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here. This is Shereen, and today we are talking about, you guessed it, Palestine. I'm also going to keep talking about Palestine because there has been a genocide happening for the past five months and also 76 years. And I refused to let it be forgotten about.

I refused to let it be something that we used to talk about because it's happening right now and we need to talk about it. So here I am talking about it. And while being a public supporter of Palestine has never been popular in the United States, since October we've seen a significant increase in the silencing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, and this is happening both online and offline. But let's first start with the digital sphere, where the censorship of Palestinian voices and pro-Palestinian content can have really dangerous consequences, especially since the vast majority of us consume our news via social media these days.

Meta, for example, has a long history of systematically censoring Palestine-related content. While the company has stated that it's, quote, never their intention to suppress a particular community or point of view, AccessNow conducted a report where their documentation points to the opposite conclusion. The information in this episode when it comes to Meta in particular will be from the findings of Access Now in their report, because I don't think the report got the attention it deserved when it was published on February 19th. Denying the public from both expressing and seeing content supporting Palestine

is a very dangerous game that only further bolsters Israeli propaganda as well as silences any criticism against the settler colony of Israel. This is not okay. And it should concern you because you have the right to know the truth. This pattern of censorship is no glitch. Soon after Israel began bombarding Gaza and blatantly committing genocide, last October, Palestinians and people sharing pro-Palestinian messages began to report that their content was being censored and suppressed on social media platforms, including on Facebook

and Instagram. The platforms restricted and sometimes even suspended the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists both inside and outside of Gaza, and arbitrarily deleted a considerable amount of content, including documentation of atrocities and human rights abuses committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. Examples of this online censorship show that it is rampant, systematic, and global. For instance, human rights watch

has documented 1,050 cases of peaceful content expressing support for Palestine, originating for more than 60 countries around the world, being removed between October and November 2023. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Observatory for Digital Rights Violations has documented around 1,043 instances, of censorship between October 7th of 2020 and February 9th of this year, including on Facebook

and Instagram. From content removals to very blatant restrictions, the following examples illustrate the main patterns of censorship on meta's platforms documented since October 7th, 23. Our first example is Facebook's removal of content that was documenting the explosion at El Eid Arab Hospital. It removed content shared by people who were on the ground during the massacre and during the bombing. The automatic deletion of bystander content with evidentiary value, especially during times of war, not only violates people's ability to express themselves and freely access information, it also hinders current and future investigations into alleged war crimes at atrocities perpetrated in Gaza by Israel, funded by the United States.

There have also been suspensions of prominent Palestinian and Palestine-related accounts. Mehta has banned and suspended scores of accounts that posted content about Palestine. For instance, on October 10, 2023, Manda Weiss reported that Instagram had twice suspended the account of Leila Warah, its West Bank video correspondent. It was only after Manda Weiss publicized the suspension that the platform quickly reinstated her account. Meta also suspended the account of Gaza journalist and photographer Motaz Azza, who gained more than 18.6 million followers for reporting on the genocide in Gaza. This forced him to create a new backup account under At Mota Gaza,

which acquired more than 1 million followers within 24 hours. Meta later did reinstate Motaz's original account, but several of Aziz's posts showing dead or injured Palestinians were flagged by Instagram for possibly violating its policy on adult nudity and sexual activity. Under its DOI policy, which stands for dangerous organizations and individuals, META also permanently banned the Arabic and English language Facebook pages of Kutz News Network, the largest and entirely volunteer-run Palestinian news outlet, which has over 10 million followers on Facebook. Other news outlets that META has temporarily suspended or banned include

Aijal Radio Network, Breakthrough News, 24 FM, and Palestinian Refugees Portal. In addition, Palestinian journalists Fatan Al-Wan, Salah Al-Jafarawi, and Ahmed Shihab al-Din, have all experienced and continue to experience content takedowns and account restrictions on Instagram and Facebook. There have also been numerous examples of restrictions on pro-Palestinian users and content. Here are some examples. Meta blocked Jerusalem-based activist Saudnan Berk from live streaming on Instagram. It restricted Jewish-American artists. and author Molly Crabapple's Instagram account.

There have also been documented cases of meta hiding Instagram comments that contain the Palestinian flag emoji for being, quote, potentially offensive. Many people have reported being barred from commenting on Instagram posts containing Palestine-related content. One user said that a comment was blocked for over 24 hours, without explanation. People have also reported being unable to repost or reshare content

related to Palestine in their Instagram stories. In addition to the usual screening that meta imposes on graphic or violent content, meta imposed a, quote, sensitive content warning before users could reshare Palestine-related posts via their Instagram stories. In some instances, attempts to reshare such content generated a blank page and a message stating that, quote, something went wrong. Following the Al-Ahei Arab Hospital massacre, people were reported. being unable to reshare a video report that was criticizing Western media coverage of the bombing, either via their direct messages or Instagram stories.

This video report was conducted by a Lebanese media outlet called Megaphone. Meta has also repeatedly discouraged users from following or sharing content from popular Palestinian accounts that were sharing updates on Gaza, in the form of prompts saying, quote, are you sure you want to follow or mention this account? and warnings that certain accounts have, quote, repeatedly posted false information or violated Mena's community guidelines. In perhaps the most disturbing incident and one that I will never forget, and I hope you don't either. And if you haven't heard about this, buckle up. Instagram repeatedly auto-translated the word Palestinian or instances of the Palestinian flag used alongside the Arabic phrase al-hambul-llah, which means praise be to God, on people's bios.

alhamdulillah, by the way, is an extremely innocent phrase that is used by all people that speak Arabic, essentially, and it's said all the time. It's a very peaceful, calming thing to say. Alhamdulillah, thank you God. But guess what they translated this into? Instagram translated the word Palestinian, the use of the Palestinian flag, along with al-Hamdul-Lah in people's bios, into Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom. Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom. Are you fucking kidding me? When a TikTok user uncovered this disturbing pattern,

Meta apologized and fixed the issue. And we all moved on. One of the most insidious ways that Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices are being censored and suppressed on meta's platforms is via the restriction of certain accounts reach and visibility, without any explanation or notification, aka shadow banning. For example, following the Lebanese media outlet megaphone's coverage of the Al-Ehdi-Arab hospital attack, its Instagram account at Megaphone News, was hidden from search results.

Evidence also suggests that on October 8, 2023, Mehta hid Instagram content that included the hashtag Al-Aqsa Flood from View. Meta's censorship of Palestinian voices and Palestinian-related content is far as far as, from new. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly pronounced, with a well-documented pattern of systematic censorship, algorithmic bias, and discriminatory content moderation emerging. During the 2021 Sheikh Jadrach protests, social media content expressing support for Palestinian rights was deleted, removed, and shadow banned, while users who were sharing such content were suspended or prevented from commenting or live streaming, and pro-Palestrism. And pro-Palestrian,

Palestinian hashtags were suppressed. These were all serious problems that Mena brushed off as, quote, a technical issue. Let's take a little breather, and when we come back, we'll talk about silencing that is outside of the digital world. So, BRB. Okay, we're back. In addition to digital silencing, we have seen cases of silencing occurring offline, as Americans are being fired or facing threats for speaking out in support of Palestine. An open letter published an art forum on October 19th declared,

We support Palestinian liberation and call for an end to the killing and harming of all civilians. It was signed by thousands of artists, scholars, and cultural workers, including the Art World Magazine's editor, David Velasco. A week later, Velasco was fired from the publication that he had worked at for 18 years, reportedly after pushback from Martin Eisenberg, a major art patron and bedbath and beyond air. Wow. At least four art forum editors have resigned in protest against Velasco's firing. And many, many more people have lost their jobs.

Just a few quick examples. A Philadelphia sports writer was fired after tweeting, quote, solidarity with Palestine in criticism of a 76ers post that offered support to Israel. after Hamas' attack. In another high-profile incident, a University of California Berkeley professor was sacked as editor-in-chief of the scientific journal E-Life

after he retweeted an onion article that he said, quote, calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians. A spokesperson for Palestine legal, a civil rights group, says it has responded to more than 260 incidents of suppression

against Palestinian rights activists over two weeks of October, more than it did in all of 2022. The Council on American Islamic Relations, also CARE or C-A-I-R, which is a civil rights non-profit, says it received 7th74 complaints between October 7th and October 24th, which was the largest wave of complaints that it's handled since Donald Trump announced his Muslim ban in 2015. This wave has targeted professional activists as well as ordinary people who have spoken in defense of Palestinians. It has reportedly also escalated into death threats, as well as assaults and visits from the FBI to Muslim individuals and mosques. In surprise to absolutely no one, in the United States, the highest levels of power have long-supported voices backing Israel and its military.

In the words of Justin Sadowski, an attorney at care, the swift world. blowback against pro-Palestinian voices builds on decades of organized efforts to quote tar-Palestinian rights speech as pro-terrorist or anti-Semitic. The late civil rights attorney Michael Ratner called this the quote, Palestine exception to free speech. In 2015, CCR and Palestine legal published a report on the tactics used by pro-Israel lobbying groups, school administrators, and public officials to shut down Palestinian rights activists. They included false accusations of anti-Semitism or support for terrorism, as well as legal threats and criminal investigations, and they often succeeded in intimidating or deterring

Palestinian solidarity activists from speaking out. And again, this pattern of silencing is not new. The prominent Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi recalls feeling overwhelmingly outnumbered at Columbia University in 2003, when pro-Israel advocate, protested against him and other faculty as well as students who spoke out against Israel amid intense fighting in Gaza and the West Bank. News crews hounded him on campus and pro-Israel students even made a documentary about the controversy. Khalidi says, I think the narrative was pretty firmly in the hands of people who supported Israel. But he continued, there is a generational change taking place, with young people having an entirely different set of views.

They consume different media, and I think they're more educated, more worldly, and better informed than their elders. The recent laws against the boycotting of Israel in particular, which 36 states have enacted, directly stifle political advocacy by making people choose between their livelihoods and their First Amendment rights. Last year, the Jewish-American scholar Nathan Thrawl announced that he had been disinvited from speaking at the University of Arkansas for a refusal. using to sign an anti-boycott pledge that was required of public contractors by state law. Maybe after all this, you're asking yourself, so what do we do now? We do exactly what they don't want us to do,

exactly what they're afraid of us doing, exactly what they're trying to deter us from doing, continue talking about Palestine and sharing news and images and information that exposes Israel's crime of genocide against the Palestinian people. The same way people say to vote with your dollar when it comes to boyconing certain brands and choosing where your money goes, you can decide how you want to use your social media platforms. What do you want to do with your digital presence? What do you stand for? Personally, I think the days of casually and incessantly posting about your life are behind us, or at least we're headed in that direction.

We're utilizing social media in a different way now. Seeing how Gen Z has utilized TikTok to share information is a great example of that. I don't think celebrity culture, unfortunately, will ever completely go away on social media, but I do think we are demanding more of our celebrities now. And I think especially as we're seeing quote-unquote trusted news sources peddle disinformation and propaganda in an irresponsible and appalling way, to put it very lightly, we are relying on each other to share real information, and in this case our resources are coming from the people who are directly experiencing

the horrors of genocide for the past five months and 76 years. And those voices must be amplified. There are a lot of solid arguments to be made against social media as a whole when it comes to whether or not it benefits humanity. But I am seeing something shift now, where we are able to utilize this tool for our betterment. If it wasn't for social media, the movement for Palestinian liberation would not be be where it is today. People who were previously uninformed would never have seen the reality of a

situation, were it not for our ability to learn from each other outside of the limitations of mainstream news. We are learning to trust the establishment less and trust each other more. And I think we're able to use social media in this way, it's actually a net positive for us. It doesn't have to be empty and mind-numbing in a way to control us or get us to spend our money to keep the capitalism machine in good working order. We can decide how we utilize our digital presence and the good that can come from it. And to be united in this way is extremely powerful, and it can ignite real change, and at the very least it can be our way of spiting the powers that be and refusing to be sheep. Existing in an age of mass surveillance is frankly, very terrifying,

but seeing the lengths that companies like Meadow will not only go to to surveil us, but to monitor what we consume, it's extremely revealing of how weak their power actually is. It's up to us to take back that power. Especially now, as we are witnessing a genocide happen in real time on our silly little devices for the past five months and having people become aware of the slower genocide and ethnic cleansing that has taken place for 76 years. So keep talking about Palestine, both in person with your peers, and family and online. I can't guarantee that you won't face pushback or repercussions because as we know, that is a real possibility. But the community of people that you gain from learning of and speaking the truth far outweighs any individual fear.

And I would rather stand for something than cower by myself or be controlled by fear. We do have the ability to change things. I have to believe that something else is possible. But it starts with taking the blinders off and making a choice about how you want to utilize the tools at your disposal rather than be utilized yourself. And that, my friends, is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening and Free Palestine. Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen here. I am once again your guest host, Molly Conger. Joining me today is our friend Garrison. Hello, excited to get the Robert Rundo rundown.

So you already know what we are talking about today. It is a guy that you probably already know more about than you ever wanted to. It is Rob Rundo, the founder of the Nazi Fight Club, The Rise Above Movement. You and Robert did a great two-part behind the bastards on RAM back in 2021. Which is shockingly three years ago, which does not sound right, but I guess is the case. It's been a long three years for you, but an even stranger one for Rob. He's been. Yeah. He's been really country hopping a lot the past few years, huh? He's been busy. So when you recorded that episode back in January of 2021, Rundo's federal charges had been dismissed by Judge Cormac Carney in 2019. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision in March 2021, right around the time the episode came out. I think at the end of the second episode, you had a post script, like an addendum you recorded afterwards because before it came out, the Ninth Circuit ruling had been issued.

Okay, okay. But in an almost comical turn of events, Judge Carney has once again dismissed those charges two weeks ago now. Three years later, a few countries later, hopping from Serbia to the United States to probably other places around Europe. Yeah. And we're sort of back in the same position you were in when you talked about him three years ago. Time is a flat circle. But before we get into one of the sort of strangest legal slap fights I've ever read, let's back up for a second. Who is Rob Rundo and what was he charged with?

Yeah. So if you want a more robust look at the early days of the Rise Above movement, I do recommend going back and listening to that behind the bastards two-parter on the Rise Above movement. It originally aired in March 2021. So like really scroll back in your podcast app. But we'll do a quick recap here because it's not, I can't assign the listener homework. so. So the Rise Above movement first emerged in early 2017 after a brief period of being called the DIY division. Both stupid dames, I don't know which one's better, but Ram. We're just going to call them Ram. In 2017 was a big year for political violence. It was really hot that year.

The group was on its surface a mixed martial arts club for white men. They trained together and bonded over their shared and abhorrent political views. In their own words, they are fighting against the world corrupted by the destructive cultural influences of liberals, Jews, Muslims, and immigrants. You know. And gay people. And gay people. Yeah. Just pretty much everybody except, um,

you know, themselves. Except Rob Rundo. Yeah. Essentially. If you were not a member of the Nazi fight club, you are a victim of the Nazi fight club. That's the first rule of Nazi fight. Sure, whatever. Okay. The first rule of Nazi fight club was not, don't talk about Nazi fight club. And I think that's a big part of the

about it. They cannot stop talking. Like, if they had just followed the first rule of fight club, they might not be in this position. But Ram quickly became a staple at rallies in Southern California that year. In the spring and summer of 2017, they kept showing up and kept throwing punches. In March, members assaulted journalists and counter protesters at a MAGA rally in Huntington Beach. In April, they assaulted numerous counter protesters at a rally in Berkeley. In August, Ram members attended Unite the Right in Charlottesville and assaulted counter protesters in the streets, And, you know, they're not just going to these events and getting in fights, right? They're not just, like, showing up and just like it just happens. They're going to these events planning on committing these assaults and then bragging about the assaults publicly and privately. They're using these acts of violence as propaganda and recruitment tools, right? Like they're making little videos. They're posting about it. It's not just about committing the assault. So the violence is not just about physically hurting people. It's part of a larger strategy to incite others to join them in this project. And that's, I mean, You already know this. You covered that in your episode three years ago. This is for everybody else.

And they're still going. Unfortunately, these, they're now often called active clubs are more popular than what they were three years ago. They've become a very, a very big staple of white supremacist organizing across the United States and Canada, mirroring a lot of organizational styles in Eastern Europe. There's probably one in your area that you might not know about. They are active on telegram. They're actively recruiting. They recruit from high school. it is a big increasing problem as Patriot Front becomes more and more like Fedjacketed between their own Nazi ranks. We see more people plugging into these active clubs. Right. Ram did not go away. It just sort of morphed.

And so like back in 2017, you know, they said they had a lot of members. They probably had like 20. But now these active clubs just, they do genuinely have chapters all over the country. Yeah. But back in the past, right? So after Unite the Right, Ram members decided to lay off the rallies a little bit. You know, being seen on camera, beating a woman into the pavement at a rally that ended in a hate crime murder, invited some bad press. And they weren't looking to get doorks at that particular moment.

So they backed off a little bit at the end of 2017. But they'd spent most of that year attending rallies and getting into physical altercations. It wasn't until over a year after Unite the Right in October of 2018 that there was any attempt to do anything about this, very obvious. problem. You know, the criminal complaint itself even says that some of these assaults were committed in plain view of cops who just stood there and did nothing while these guys beat the shit out of people in the streets. You know, they're in each other's DMs, bragging about kicking a woman in the head while she's lying on the ground, but nobody lifted a finger to stop them. But in October of 2018, two cases were filed. One in the Western District of Virginia. Charges were filed against Ben Daly, Cole White,

Thomas Gillen, and Michael Macellis. And a few weeks later, in the Central District of California, charges were filed against Rob Rundo, Robert Bowman, Tyler Laub, and Aaron Eason. So all eight of them, four in each district, all eight of them were charged under the Federal Riot Act and conspiracy to riot. I think it was Robert, who said in the original Ram episode,

you know, like, if at any point early on, like, if at any point in those first few months of this happening, there had been any kind of intervention, if anyone had been arrested in the act, maybe this could have been nipped in the butt, and a lot of what happens later wouldn't have happened. Or even if they were, like, beaten up. Like, if, like, if a group of, like, anti-fascarists, like, beat them up, that would disincentivize them from going to future events to try to beat up other people, right?

Like, violence is actually very good at doing this specific thing. If you feel like you're going to go somewhere to get beaten up, you probably don't want to go there. And even, like, divorce from the actions at the state, like, that is, that is a demotivating factor, which has been a, effective against proud boys in Portland. Now obviously some of these guys, especially the ram crew, go there with the express interest of getting into fights. So that's something you should definitely like consider. But yeah, like if as long as they have a bad time, it makes them not want to come to these things. But when they're able to just beat up anyone they want to without any pushback, it's like yeah, it becomes like a fun thing. It becomes like a, a large amount of

incentive is gained for going to a rally, whether that's in Huntington Beach or halfway across the country. Yeah, I mean, they were having a. great time and there was no movement to stop this. And it's hard to know why it took over a year for any charges to get brought. I think you speculated in that RAM episode a few years ago that it was public pressure after that in-depth reporting came out in mainstream press. But I was going back over the timeline and that pro-publica piece came out in October 2017. That was just two months after United Right and a whole year before those charges were filed. It's not really possible to know why they waited so long unless some, you know, young U.S. attorney wants to level with us about

but I don't foresee that. Probably not. Just, you know, what's going on behind the scenes, buddy? But I do have one sort of interesting little anecdote. A couple months ago, I was at an event here in Charlottesville. It was a panel discussion. And one of the speakers was the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, Chris Kavanaugh. He was speaking to a group of people about the work that he does. And he was talking about the work that he did on some of these sort of extremism cases after United Right. Back in 2018, he was the assistant U.S. attorney here. He's been promoted since then. but he worked on the James Fields case and he worked on the RAM case that was filed here in Virginia. And he said something really interesting that I hadn't thought about before. So right after Unite the Right, in August 2017, a bunch of FBI agents were assigned to, you know, check out what happened here at this mass casualty event, right?

They had the resources to investigate and try to develop cases. I, you know, I love my documents. I spent a lot of time in the documents. So I've actually seen, you know, they got some federal search warrants. It was actually an FBI agent who dug the round that. Richard Preston fired at Corey Long out of the mulch in Market Street Park. You know, they got search warrants for social media for a couple of guys who ended up prosecuted locally. Alex Ramos, Richard Preston, Daniel Borden. So it looks like they were trying to develop hate crime cases, right? Like that federal warrant they got for Richard Preston's Twitter account said that they were developing a hate crime case.

And they never did. So like right after United Right, they're getting these warrants. They're developing these cases. But back to that event that I was at with Chris Kavanaugh, the U.S. attorney. He said when the Las Vegas shooting happened in October of 2017, they lost their task force. They had this huge volume of agents working, trying to develop unite the right cases. When that shooting happened, two months later, they all got reassigned. He was left with like a skeleton crew and they just didn't have the resources to develop these cases. Like, I don't know how the FBI is

managing their resources internally so badly that they can only handle one mass casualty event at a time or why the Washington Field Office was so heavily impacted by a shooting in Nevada. But that is what he said. So take that as you will. And I think that theory is at least in part supported by the fact that the federal charges against James Fields didn't get brought until June of 2018. Right? He'd been charged locally for the car attack that killed Heather Hire. But the federal charges didn't pop up until June of 2018.

So I don't know if maybe something shifted in terms of resources in their office that summer. I don't know. It's interesting to think about. But then, so in, you know, back to October of 2018, right, when these two different RAM cases get filed. Virginia's case was actually filed first. It was filed a few weeks before the case in California. So I don't know. I assume they were in communication about that. But I don't have any special insight into what their federal prosecutor was doing. But it's also possible that it just takes the government a whole ass year to do anything no matter what, right? In a recent filing in the Rundo case, the government's talking about how this investigation was developed, and it says, you're going to shit a brick, Garrison.

It says that the FBI investigation into Ram only started when a bartender in L.A. called the FBI a few weeks after Unite the Right because he overheard a patron, Ben Daley, quote, gleefully bragging about having caused havoc during the riots. Amazing. And he also, quote, bragged about hitting a guy and punching a girl in the face during protests in Berkeley. So that first comment was about Charlestville. He had just come home from Charlottesville. He was talking about how he caused havoc.

He's bragging about punching people in Berkeley. And the bartender's like, that's kind of, that's suspicious. This unnamed complainant also told the FBI that Daly and other RAM members had come to the bar often and sometimes used it for recruitment. they were recruiting the patrons at this bar. And based on what he overheard, he told the FBI that the group, quote, did not care about the issues regarding the statues in Charlottesville, but rather, quote, enjoyed going to protest just to raise havoc, cause trouble, and fight. So it wasn't until a bartender called the FBI to be like, hey, this guy's talking about, like, doing a lot of gang violence. I don't know if you guys know about this. And according to that same court filing, the FBI took until January of 2018.

So a few weeks after Unite the Right, maybe we're looking at September. It took them three or four more months until January of 2018 to discover in the course of their investigation that Ram was based in Southern California. Great work. Great work, everybody. Fantastic stuff. They're on it now, Garrison. And so at this point, the LA field office opens an investigation into members in the area. Now, kind of hope this isn't true, right? Like, I hope that this is not a correct summary of. of these events, because if it really took someone calling the FBI to say, like, hey, I heard a guy bragging about doing crime in September. That definitely, no, that is definitely how this went down.

Absolutely. That makes so much sense. But then it took three months of investigating to figure out that the guys who recruit for their Nazi gang at a bar in L.A., probably live in L.A. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is, this is kind of how the FBI investigates white supremacist groups. They have They're too busy investigating teenagers

In black hoodies They can't They can't bother to spare the manpower for this There's Antifa out there By the time they got this tip from the bartender That ProPublica article was already out Why did it take them three months To find out that the guys whose names

Were already in the newspaper Lived in California I don't know I don't have the answer to them I don't trust anyone who lives in Virginia So it took them a few months Right It took some time

I hope that's not true, but it is what the government has put on the record as the truth. So anyway, that's how this case starts, right? So these eight members of RAM are charged for in Virginia, four in California, with rioting and conspiracy to riot. Just for efficiency sake, I'll just say that the cases in Virginia are fully resolved. Daily Ms. Ellis, Gillen and White all pleaded guilty. There were some later unsuccessful appeals where after they saw what happened in the California cases, they were like, oh, actually us too, can we? But that didn't work and their convictions stood and that's all over. is daily now. Is he out again? They're out. He's out. He's out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

White didn't get any additional time after his plea because he was so cooperative and the other three all got less than three years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're out. But these California cases where Rundo was charged, they have been a mess from day one. So they're charged October 2018. In 2019, Judge Cormac Carney dismissed the charges in California saying that the Riot Act was unconstitutionally overbroad and its application violated the defendant's First Amendment rights. So true. First Amendment defender here. That's right. Travel across state lines to riot. Endorsed by this judge. That's free speech, Garrison.

Like, love it or leave it. Go back to Canada. So the prosecutor appealed that ruling because it was hot garbage. And the Ninth Circuit agreed. It takes a long time for things to get appealed. It's like slower than watching grass grow. So the Ninth Circuit reversed that ruling in March of 20. reinstateing the indictments. Things move really.

So it took two years for them to reverse it and then another year to enter the order. So it wasn't until February of 2022 that the case was formally reopened. In which case around this time, Rundo's trying to like hide in Eastern Europe and eventually

get sent back to the United States. Curiously, around the same time that Andrew Tate does. God, imagine an Andrew Tate Rob Rundo fight. Oh, okay, I wouldn't pay money because I don't want to support them, but I would love to watch that. Actually, send them both back to Romania and let them fight. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. So by the time that the California RAM defendants are re-indicted on the original charges, it's January

of 2023, and only three of them get re-indicted because Aaron Eason has died. So sad. It doesn't say much more than that. Tragic loss of life. I don't know. I don't want to I guess I don't want to speculate because it doesn't say on the record and I was unable to determine, I couldn't find anything other than the court record dismissing his charges because he was dead. I can't find any record of his death. It must have just been, you know, private. But, you know, you were talking about that RAM episode a couple years ago about how they're, you know, they're all about clean living and fighting.

They're all straight edge except for all of the ones who do trucks. A lot of them have really serious drug problems. And I don't know for a fact what was going on with Aaron Eason, but I know Robert Bowman had some trouble staying out on bond. due to a very severe meth addiction. Yes, yes. So I don't know what happened to Aaron Eason, but he isn't. Very, very pure.

You got to keep the bloodline pure. So they're re-indicted January 2023. And as you guys talked about back in 2021, Rondo had been living in Serbia for most of this time. He is overseas, making friends, doing fight club, doing Nazi stuff, hanging out. Making bad t-shirts, doing bad graffiti, mostly opening up t-shirt factories. It's really what he spent a lot of time doing. It's really about the merch. You have to merchandise.

That's, hey, if you took away one thing from revolt against the modern world, it's that Ovala loved merch. That's the biggest through line in that work. It's you got to sell those stickers, man. You have to. It's a sort of a pointy shaped operation, right? The guys on the bottom have to keep selling the stickers to the guys. It has to make new bottoms, right?

there's no bottom. It is a pyramid scheme. Patriot Front is a pyramid scheme. Well, and Patriot Front and Rundo had the same sticker manufacturer for quite a while. Their websites, well, their merch websites were identical. Look, I mean, how many webmasters can these Nazi groups have? It's got to be one guy. Yeah.

They do not have a graphic designer. So anyway, so he's in Serbia. In 2021, Serbia made a big show of saying, like, oh, like, he's not welcome here. He's deported to Bosnia. He was still in Serbia. I think Bell and Cat has some great articles tracking exactly where in Belgrade, Rundo was hanging out. But Serbia was like, no, he's not here. He's not welcome here.

He's in Bosnia. Bosnia was like, he's not fucking here. He was in Serbia. He kept trying to lie to. He tried to like make people think he was somewhere else, but he just couldn't stop posting. And if you ever post anything outside or really even is. inside. You, you, you can be found. So, like, he couldn't stop posting. And every single time, he'd be like, ha ha, the, the CIA assets and Bellingcat think I'm here when, in fact, I'm actually

over there. And you're like, no, you're actually right here. It's really easy to find out where you are. You posted yourself standing next to this tree. It's only one type of this tree in this area. It's obvious you're right here. And it's like, you can post all you, like, if you have terminal posting disease, you can keep posting, but just like, don't post photographs of yourself in a place. He can't stop. He can't stop, won't stop. My favorite old Rundo lore is that he had this YouTube series called Tea Time with Robert Rundo that I still think about about once a week where he would give his Nazi followers advice on how to flee the country if they have a felony while sitting at like a European cafe filming on his iPhone. It's the most, it's the funniest thing I've ever seen. In a sane world, evidence like that would make a judge say, I don't think we should like. you back out.

Spoiler alert. You probably shouldn't be let it on bail. Considering you've made instructions. So, finally, in March of 2023, he's freshly re-indicted in January, 2023. March of 20203, the Romanian police are like, we fucking found him.

We got him. He's here in Romania. So he's arrested in Romania. And it takes a few months to sort out all the paperwork and get him extradited back to the U.S. in August of 2023. You know what? Won't get you indicted on federal felony

charges that result in you being extradited from a Romanian prison. Listening to these ads, as long as we declare them as my FTC training today taught me how to do. So yes, these are all paid advertisements. We're not allowed to call them promoted content. We have to call them ads. These are advertisements. I believe that was part of my training today. So to make sure I don't go to prison, enjoy these paid advertisements.

Well, I hope you enjoyed those paid advertisements. Hate ads. It's, this is, we're only airing them because they're paying us money. These are not our sincere belief. We can't really say that either. There's really no way to win. There's no way to win here. Anyway, I'm going to the war against the FTC.

So, so true. So that more or less gets us up to the current controversy. So we get Rundo back August 2023. And then February 24, about 10 days ago, Judge Carney dismisses the case again. So back in 2019, Carney said, no, there's no crime here. This is just protective first amendment activities. You can't use the riot act. That's unconstitutional.

Right? And he dismisses the case. And the Ninth Circuit says, no, no, I don't think so. That's not how we're reading this. You got to take the case back. So it gets remanded back to the same judge. It goes back to Judge Carney. But of course, Rundo's missing now.

It takes a while to get him back. And so he finally gets his defendant back from his Nazi layer in Eastern Europe. He has to come up with a new reason why a Nazi street. fighting gang shouldn't be charged with a crime. Okay? So it's obvious he just doesn't want to fucking try this case. Yeah. So he has to come up with a new reason. And honestly, I think

no shade to the federal public defender, right? Rento has a public defender. It is their job to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. They are providing zealous defense to their clients. So they write up what I would say, in my personal opinion, was an absolute dog shit motion. And I think maybe they knew that too. I don't know. They're just doing their jobs.

I think Judge Carney would have agreed. read with whatever they put on paper. He gets this motion and he's like, yes, for sure, dismissed again. So true. And this time it's selective prosecution that if the government wants to charge Ram with rioting, they would have had to charge Antifa too because otherwise it's not fair. Which they do all the fucking time. It's just not fair.

I mean, this case does actually like showcase like selective prosecution. The fact that you were super willing to drop charges against a white supremacist, but we'll send like, quote unquote, Antifa, gay teenagers to prison for going to a, going to a BLM protest. Like, yeah, that actually does show exactly how these cases are very selectively prosecuted. Right, like, these guys are playing on easy mode. And as soon as they draw the wrong card, it's like, well, this deck is stacked. This deck is stacked. Right? So now I'm, again, we talked about this before you, Garrison. I'm not a lawyer. We know this. But I am an enthusiastic consumer of the law. And I did read a bunch of

law review articles today. Okay. Selected prosecution sounds like the kind of thing that could work, right? Like, oh, it's not constitutional to selectively prosecute based on maybe a protected characteristic, right? Like, if you're only prosecuting black people for a crime, like, of course that's wrong. Yeah. But here's the thing. It doesn't work.

It never works. This is not an argument that is effective. I won't say it never works. It is generally not an effective argument. even when a lay person could look at it and say, oh, yeah, that is kind of fucked up. It just doesn't work. You can't just walk into court and say, you know,

well, your honor, I was speeding. But so is everybody else on the interstate. It's unconstitutional to give me a ticket unless everyone gets a ticket, right? That's not how it works. They're picking on me. Yeah. You can't just say, you know, other people did what I did, but I'm the only one standing here, so it's not fair.

You have to, there's an actual structure to this. OJ got away with it. means I should too, right? Right. We're not catching every murderer, so like, I should get a freebie. Yeah. So you have to show not only that there was a particular other individual who engaged in the same conduct who was not charged, but also that, quote, a federal prosecutorial policy had a discriminatory effect and it was motivated by a discriminatory purpose. So in the speeding ticket analogy, right, you'd have to say, you know, I was doing 80 in the school zone, but so were these. three other particular women, like John, Jane, Gina were all doing it too. And we all got pulled over,

but the cop only gave me a ticket because he hates men or something, right? Like, you'd have to show that based misandrous cop. Right. So you'd have to show that other people did the exact same thing you did, and it was possible for them to have gotten in trouble too. Yeah. But they didn't because of a particular form of discrimination. Yeah. So in order to make a valid claim of selective prosecution, Rundo's lawyers would have to say, look, here's Joe Antifa, a real guy who exists. And here is a materially similar set of circumstances in which Joe Antifa ran an organized group that got into fights on purpose, provoke confrontations, chase people to their cars, beat women in the streets, and then use that footage to recruit people to his gang, right? Like, here's Joe Antifa bragging

online about targeting members of a particular minority group for brutal gang assaults at political rallies. Here's his group actively planning and organizing to travel to different cities and other states across the country with the explicit and stated goal of provoking and attacking people, right? You can't just say, well, Antifa didn't get charged. You have to present an actual person who did what you did. Not just some other guy who did something you don't like or somebody else who maybe did kind of a crime. You have to say this is a specific person and he did what I did in a materially similar way to the same degree that I did it and with just as much evidence to support that. Yeah. And in the RAM case, there's so much evidence because they couldn't stop

fucking posting. So they can't produce evidence that Antifa, to whatever degree, that's a meaningful term here, engaged in similar behavior to what the evidence shows RAM did. It's not just, well, other people were fighting. And in this case, that's kind of preposterous because the evidence does show that they specifically bragged. Like there's a text that was produced from Ben Daly bragging about how they were first through the barricades at Berkeley. So you're acknowledging that, you know, there was this big riot and that you started it. Sure, other people are fighting in the riot that you started on purpose. So no one else can be similarly situated to you because even if they were fighting, you started it. There has to be a real actual other person who is similarly situated.

That's an actual legal term that encompasses a sort of set of criteria. Is there a similar amount of evidence against this other person? Would it take a similar amount of state resources to investigate arrest and convict this person? We just don't have an organized militant street gang of Antifa that sold branded apparel and bragged about crimes online. There is no similarly situated uncharged actor on the other side of this. That person doesn't exist. But it's even more than that. Even if we did have Joe Antifa, the gang leader who's bragging online about doing it.

this kind of stuff, even if he existed. Even then, even then, there is what's called prosecutorial discretion. There may be reasons that we just aren't entitled to know about as to why a prosecutor made the decisions they did about who gets charged. For a selective prosecution argument to work, you have to show that this decision was made for a discriminatory purpose. And that's really hard to do because they're not going to tell you that, right? In an ideal world, selective prosecution would be an argument raised, you know, about racial

because we do know that there is racial bias in who is investigated, arrested, charged, and convicted for crimes. Like at every step along the way, there's a thumb on the scale against people of color. And even then, even when it is so obvious, even when you have, you know, a prosecutor who is a member of the fucking clan, even then these arguments don't tend to work. This should not have worked. But Judge Carney clearly just doesn't want this case prosecuted, right? I think it's very obvious that he just, like, thinks Rob Rundo is a nice boy who shouldn't have to go to jail for this. He is also, I think, notably, about to retire.

He hits the minimum retirement age in May, and he is going to retire the day that he can. I think Megan Cuniff, who has a great blog legal affairs, she's been covering this case. She noted in a tweet a few weeks ago that she knows this. he intends to retire because he, in rescheduling some hearing, said that that was the only day he could go to the retirement benefits class that he needs to go to to make sure he can retire the day he's eligible in May. So he just doesn't, he just doesn't want to deal with this, right? That this was scheduled to go to trial in March and he's retiring in May. He just doesn't want to do it. What's even the point anymore? What's even, what, what, I just, it's like,

why are they even trying here? Like, just, just, just like, kick the can down to someone else if you don't want to, like, deal with this. I don't know. It's turning this whole, like, I don't know. I've read other things from this judge how he's like, he's like very much into like this big like Antifa conspiracy theory. And he's a little bit racist. Like there was an issue. Oh, I'm shocked.

He was chief judge of the circuit briefly, but he had to step down. So he's still a judge in, in the central district of California. But he's not the chief judge anymore because he made a racist comment to the clerk. of court. So he's, I mean, I think there's some stuff going on with Judge Carney. So I think he knows when he made this ruling that like the Ninth Circuit's going to send it back, but that's not going to be his problem anymore because he's out of here in May. So he heard this like absolute dog shit argument and he was like so true, King, this is not fair. You are free to go. Go ahead. And he let him out. Same day. Like he heard this argument. He was like, absolutely. That's the one. Go on home. And he

let him out that day. The U.S. Attorney made a motion for an emergency stay saying like, okay, well, let's just, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Why don't we just hang on to him to we can talk to the Ninth Circuit about this? Because I don't know. And that's pretty normal. That would be normal for the judge to say, let's give it a day. I mean, I want him released, but we'll give it a day. We'll let you get your paperwork in order. No, he just let him out. Just let him out right that day. And considering his history of fleeing the country, not the call I would have made. It is quite the choice. So the very next day, the Ninth Circuit was like, hold on, let's get him back in custody while we think about this. And it makes no sense for Carney to deny the emergency stay.

That would be really normal to stay the decision until we have a chance to sort of think this through, right? Even if he truly believed with his whole heart that there's no way that this would ever get kicked back by the Ninth Circuit, that the case would stay dismissed and Rundo would be free to go. It would not be unusual to say, you know, well, this has been pretty contentious. the defendant has fled the country multiple times. So let's just hang on to him for 24, 48 hours while we go through the motions of getting that emergency hearing. But that's not what happened. Because Robert Rondo is the definition of a flight risk.

Yes. He is like, he's the platonic, like, ideal form of a flight risk. I've sat through a lot of bond hearings. And I know we are definitely not all using the same dictionary here when it comes to what is a flight risk. but you really can't find a guy who has done more to demonstrate that he absolutely can and will flee the country to avoid going back to court. He does not want to go to court. So back in 2018, when those two prosecutions were initially filed, right, the Virginia case was filed first. So when Ben Daly was arrested, the charges hadn't actually been filed yet against Rob Rundo.

But I guess when they came to get Ben on October 2nd, so 18 days before the charges were filed against Rob Rundo himself, they came to get Ben in L.A. and he was like, hmm, time to get out of Dodge. Right. So I think that was the moment. He was like, I got to go. You know, he knew they might be coming for him next.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So first he tries going to Ukraine, which is a great place for a militant right-wing extremist to go hang out with friends, right? Yeah. And unfortunately for him, his flight had a layover in London. I don't know if it, like, didn't occur to him that maybe when they look at your passport,

like maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe the U.S. government, like, anticipated that you would do this. But so Heathrow looks at his passport. It was like, hmm, the U.S. government says, do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not proceed to Nazi asylum. And they turn him back. Now, mind you, he's not arrested yet, right? They just won't let him go to Ukraine. Interesting.

So he does get to London, though. I think he gets to London. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're like, no, you can't. You can't go. I don't know how we got that far. Yeah, yeah. That is intriguing.

So back in California, he walked to Mexico. Yeah, which is part of his tea tie with Robert Rundo advice. Right. So he literally went on foot over the U.S.-Mexico border to avoid passport control. And then he traveled over land through Mexico into El Salvador. Yep. Where he presumably intended to try getting on a plane again. You need to get far enough south so that when you fly, you don't cross over American airspace.

other people in Ram have tried this and have not gone far south enough and their plane crosses over like the tip of U.S. Airspace around Florida and then they get flagged so that when they land they get they get like arrested or turned back. See that's so tricky. Like I bought a plane ticket. Extremely funny. I bought a plane ticket recently for for vacation. I'm not fleeing the country or anything.

Molly's fleeing everyone. I actually don't even have a passport. But when you buy a plane ticket, they do not provide for you a sort of schematic of. the flight path. So I don't know how they're figuring this out. I guess they're not. I mean, Rundo, I think typically tries to get far enough south that he just gets a direct flight to, like, somewhere in like the Middle East or Eastern Europe. Well, I don't know if it would have worked because when he got to El Salvador, the plane that he got on was not headed to Ukraine. It was headed back to LAX in the company of some FBI agents. So they brought him back and he was formally

arrested in the LA airport when they brought him back. Very funny. Because in the weeks that he had spent trying to get away, the indictment against him had come back and he was also being charged. So after Judge Carney dropped the charges the first time back in 2019, Rondo got his passport back and immediately left the country again, traveling to Europe, visiting other fascist fight clubs. And so, you know, in this time period, the U.S. attorney is appealing the dismissal of the charges. Like they want to bring this case. They're, you know, they're waiting for the Ninth Circuit to hear them. But they're watching him. but they're watching him cavorting around Eastern Europe and they're filing motion saying like

we really got to get him back like he's at a Nazi rally in Hungary he's got a podcast he's got a podcast where he's telling people how to evade capture by getting foreign passports like we've got to get him back and so when the charges were finally reinstated by the Ninth Circuit in 2021

he'd been formally expelled from Serbia where he'd been living and he was eventually arrested in and extradited from Romania And then when Judge Carney dismissed the charges again two weeks ago, and the Ninth Circuit was like, we got to get him back. Do you know where they found him? The Mexican border. Oh, curious.

Who could have predicted? Huh. So, like, he really loves leaving the country. Time is a flat circle. Right. So Carney lets him out. He tries to leave the country again immediately. The Ninth Circuit says, hold on.

Let's bring him back. And because the system works in just the most, like, insane, imaginable ways, I guess when they wrote how this was going to work, they just assumed everyone would act in good faith and they didn't put anything in for when that's not what happens. You know, I'm pretty sure that's in the Constitution. You have to assume good faith intention. That's, I believe, the 69th Amendment. You have to assume good faith. Everyone's going to be normal about this.

We don't need to build in any contingencies here. So every time the Ninth Circuit is like, oh, Judge Carney, that's nuts. They just have to send it back to him. It doesn't get sent to a different judge. It's just they just keep sending it back to the guy who is bound and determined to ruin this. So it gets sent back to Judge Carney. This case is still in front of Judge Carney. So the Ninth Circuit, they put him back in and Judge Carney's like, I'm going to let him back out.

And the Ninth Circuit is like, no, you really can't do that. You really can't do that. And he's being kind of a pissy little baby about this, right? Like, the Ninth Circuit issues an order saying, like, no one can let him. him out, but us, if he gets let out, it will because we said so. No one can let him out. You can't do it. The Ninth Circuit said so, we're up here. We're on top. This is, this is tyranny. This is fascism, this is tyranny. It's, but the bad kind, the kind I don't like, Robert Rundo. So Carney's on the bench and he's like, well, I really want to, though. And so he issues an order saying, like, he's

released. But I'm going to stay my own order. I mean, like, you know, I'm going to enter this order saying he's released, but like it won't go into effect because technically I'm not allowed. It's such a, such a dorky of like piss baby tantra move from a judge. Like you're being a real baby, Cormac. And he says, quote, I would like to be in a position to release him right now and let him walk out the door. Well, you can't. You can't. So it gets like stupid messy here, right?

So the Ninth Circuit put him back in and it comes back to Carney. And Carney's like, well, this arrest wasn't even legal. I should let him out because this. you can't even, you couldn't put him back in. You can't arrest someone without there being cause for a crime. Well, it is a little bit messy here, right? So, Carney argues that Rundo's re-arrest wasn't legal because he dismissed the case. So technically, when Rondo was arrested again, there was no charge against him.

There is currently, because the indictment was dismissed, you know, the prosecutor's appealing that dismissal. Maybe it'll get reinstated like it did. time, but like right now, he is not charged with a crime. Which is ridiculous because there's so many other things you could charge him with. Right, just like find a different crime. Like there's like between all of his, between all of his passport stuff, between all of his crossing the border, like there's, there's so much other, there's so many other things that you could, you could decide to charge him with. Surely some FBI agent has been sort of keeping tabs on his activities and they

could come up with something. But as it stands, when he was re-arrested, there was no, charge, right? So the Ninth Circuit does have the authority to stay the release order. So Carney issued a release order saying, let him out of jail, right? And so the prosecutor was like, we need an emergency hearing in front of the Ninth Circuit on that release order. So Carney issues the release order. The prosecutor goes to the Ninth Circuit and say, we need you to push the pause button on the implementation of this order. That's really normal. That should have been what happened. But because he was released immediately. You know, before they had a chance to get heard by the Ninth Circuit, Carney's argument, which I think may be true here, right, is that by the time the Ninth Circuit

heard the motion to stay the release order, it was moot. They can't hear argument on a motion that doesn't mean anything. You can't stay in order that's already been implemented. So once the release order was carried out and Rundo was no longer physically in custody, there was no order to stay, so the Ninth Circuit had nothing to rule on. So they, they re-arrested him saying, like, we're staying the release order, but the order of operations there is kind of key. At the next hearing, Carney said, I must tell you from the little things I've read, I'm quite concerned, I feel Mr. Rundo is being unconstitutionally detained. And it's, it's messy. And I don't know what the right answer is here, right? Like, it's not unusual for someone to stay in custody pending appeal,

especially if they have repeatedly attempted and succeeded at fleeing the country. Yeah. And Carney's refusal to stay the release order kind of makes you wonder if he didn't create this procedural nightmare intentionally. Sure. He kind of created this legal dilemma that that now puts Rendo's incarceration and actually, like, a point of question. Right. Like, he had to know that when the Ninth Circuit did hear this motion, they would, probably reverse him. He had to know that. And he absolutely knew Rundo would flee the country before that could happen.

And he's not wrong that it looks a little questionable to issue an arrest warrant when there is no live charge. Right? The end result that Rundo is in custody pending some kind of further ruling from the Ninth Circuit, that's not weird. That's really normal. But everything that happened in between is a mess. I don't know what the answer to that is.

is, I mean, as nuts as Carney is behaving, like, he is probably right that you can't make a ruling on a moot motion and you can't arrest someone who's not charged with a crime. Like, those things are true, but I don't, I don't know what the answer is here. And I think it's his fault. Yeah. So at this point, right, the government is appealing Carney's dismissal of the charges, just like they did back in 2019. Remember that it took almost two years from the original dismissal to the Ninth Circuit ruling reversing and remanding the case in 2021. So this could take a while. At this point, what the government is asking for is a stay of the release order to keep him in custody while they work through this appeals process because they are appealing the dismissal

of the indictment. I don't expect a lot of movement on that this week. I think the docket shows that the appellant's brief is due on the 12th. Today, as we're recording, this is the fourth. So they'll file that brief. They may file more sort of emergency petitions for his release. I'm not sure. the Ninth Circuit will do that. But is anybody's guess at this point because it's kind of a big mess. The only thing that is clear is that only the Ninth Circuit

can let Rob Rundo out. Well, what a, what an enticing Rundo down of the legal events of this case. Don't want to be in that position. You know, Garrison, I'm not sure that you'll ever be

in this position. I hope not. At least not in this exact one, unless you're running a secret Nazi gang that I do not know about, in which case, disavow. Disavow, okay. That's good. That's good. Yeah. You should, that's probably the right move. But so it'll take some time. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what else there is to say. This is like sort of inciting a lot of active club activity. You were saying earlier that, you know, RAM doesn't exist. anymore. It's morphed into these active clubs. There's these sales all over the country. And they are fired up about this. So I think

this has the potential to incite more political violence. Or at the very least, incite more t-shirt sales, which would be just as horrifying to see more of those things out in the wild. Already marketing free

Rundo merch. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. I guess even Nazis have constitutional rights. I guess they do, although it does feel, again, slightly insidious at the selective non-enforcement of some of these things. Where there is many people who are being held, especially like in Atlanta's, but many people being held without bail because they've been deemed a flight risk for a long, long time, for crimes. And not because they hold like a Serbian passport, you know? No, no, just because they attended a music festival.

Right. I mean, it's hard to get like super fired up about Rob Rundo's constitutional rights in terms of this sort of like procedural quagmire when it's like people are actively and intentionally violating everyone else's constitutional rights constantly. Yeah. The only thing I'm left to think of is how this whole system of law does not seem to work very much. And especially we often point out how a whole bunch of laws get put in place that are like ostensibly framed to like combat white supremacist terrorism or whatever. And in actuality, really only get used against people fighting for like the rights of black people, people fighting for getting trans people not to be murdered. Like that's really what all these laws get targeted against. And they face so much more harsh punishment. Because we have a judge who's treating Rob Rundo like a little baby who's this innocent little creature. Meanwhile, people can get constantly locked up for completely bullshit charges in other parts

the country for engaging in, like, actually, like, pretty valid acts of protest, not even related to any, like, alleged violence. Like, there's, it's, it's, it's quite, it's quite frustrating to, to, to, to look at, yes, there is actually a decent case of selective enforcement here. And it's the other way around. Yeah. It is, it is not, in fact, they're letting Antifa run wild and burn down cities. In fact, these Nazis get treated like little innocent First Amendment defenders as they purposely like talk about and brag about their claims of traveling across the country to assault

people and start riots. Anyway, well, that's that's not great. Things are not good. I hope only the worst for Rundo, regardless of whatever legal thing happens, just like in general. Like I like, I I wish him bad just like in life. You know, like, I hope he like trips and falls down the stairs, you know, just like in, in general, like, stub his toe really bad. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not optimistic about this situation. Like, there are a million outcomes here that are the dumbest possible ending to this story. So I'm not holding my breath for, you know, some brilliant prosecutor to save the day here. But I do hope that that Rob Rondo continues to have a bad day regardless.

Yeah. Well, thank you for. this lovely piece of legal research, Molly. I'm glad you can... Now I have to close 87 tabs. That is always the joy of wrapping up one of these episodes. It's closing the ridiculous amount of tabs that are open. Because at any moment in my research process,

if any of my friends looks at my computer, they are horrified by the stress that I'm putting my own RAM through. Different RAM than the other RAM. Yeah, computer RAM. Also under considerable strain at this time. Yeah, exactly. Well, I feel like that's as bad enough a joke to end it on as anything else. Where can people find you online, Molly?

Oh, gosh. Yeah, I am online at Socialist Dog Mom on Twitter, on my newsletter on Ghost, The Devil's Advocates. And I don't know, my dogs have an Instagram that I haven't updated lately. It's at Otto M Buck. That's it for me. How about you, Garrison? Oh, you can find me documenting my process of slowly turning my entire apartment into the Black Lodge on Twitter at Hungry Bowtie. All right.

Molly, you can actually see a little bit of it behind me. It's kind of dark, but you can see a glimmer of red curtains. Yeah, it's spooky back there. It is quite spooky back there. Wait until I turn on the strobe light. All right. Thank you for joining me today, Garrison.

All right, thank you, Molly. 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 Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer,

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