Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 135

Episode Date: June 15, 2024

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Listen to Every Day Better on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 gonna be nothing new here for you but you can make your own decisions. It's riot time when it could happen here this is this is the podcast that you're listening to it's about. This is this was kind of about bad things this is this is about a bunch of riots in the past. I'm your host, be along with James and Garrison. Hello, I mean, so one of the kind of. I don't know the trends of 2024 is everyone looking at this year and going, this is 1968 again, there's campus occupations

or that are anti-war protests, there is a Democratic National Convention that is expected to be extremely hot. And so one of the things that we are doing in the run-up to the Democratic Convention is we are going to go do some episodes about 1968. And we are eventually going to do episodes about the Columbia campus occupations and about the DNC. But unfortunately, in order to do that, we have to why I say unfortunately, this is actually not unfortunately, this this mostly rules. I don't know some of it's bad. But in order to talk about this, and this is this is the part of this whole thing that has been completely forgotten, right? You know, there's there's become this kind of like, I don't know, state cult isn't quite the right word,

but there's become this sort of like professional institutional history of 1968 where like all of these universities like proudly have banners from like 1968 protests. Everyone has been like, you know, incredibly willing to embrace the legacy of the anti-war movements and the campus occupations. And, you know, like insofar as they tell people not to embrace the legacy of the anti-war movement and the campus occupations and, you know, like in so far as they tell people not to embrace things, it's this stuff about like, you know, you hear this constant screaming about don't repeat the 68 convention. But there's one part of this story that has is just gone, has been excised from the historical record. It is extremely clear that no one wants you to remember it whatsoever.

And that is the Holy Week uprising. Do you two know, whatsoever. And that is the Holy Week uprising. Do you do you to know if you heard of the Holy Week uprising? Not before you started talking about it in our work meetings. I'm familiar with it. I've covered it in U.S. history courses before. Not as that name. I think people might be more familiar with it.

If you describe the events. Yeah. So the other name for is the MLK riots, which is a week. I mean, OK, so it's OK. Yeah, OK. Yeah. So OK, so and I should be clear about this. OK, so there are there are really two things going on here. There is one the actually is usually thought of as about a week, but it's it's actually longer than that.

There's like a couple of months of writing in various places over the South stage of MLK. The other thing that's going on here is a wave of urban rebellion. And when I say urban here, I'm not just talking about, you know, like Watts or Detroit or Chicago, like these like giant urban cities, which is how, you know, insofar as anyone ever talks about writing in this period, it is about these larger urban centers. No, they are writing in Milwaukee. The most intense fighting that we're going to talk about in this episode happens in York, Pennsylvania. In this period for about, it's about 1963 to roughly by 1971, 72, it is kind of over, there are a staggering number of urban uprisings. I'm going to read a quote from a book called The Great Uprising, which is about that sort of period.

Between 1963 and 1972, America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Upwards of 525 cities were affected, including nearly every one with a black population over 50,000. The two largest wave of uprisings came during the summer of 1967, entering Holy Week in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In these two years alone, 125 people were killed,

nearly 7,000 were injured, approximately 45,000 arrests were made, and property damage topped $127 million or approximately $900 million in 2017. You can even stretch this out to like, can I just give you the spin? I put on this in my history class and then we can continue. Yeah, okay. So the way I perceive this is the process of decolonization begins, like in the colonies and it comes back to the Metropole, right? And we see like this physical decolonization in places like Algeria,

right? And then the impact of witnessing that returns to the Metropole along with the theories that like, if you want to say they decolonize the mind, I think that that's an acceptable way. And like, this sort of struggle, even the aesthetic, right, like the aesthetic of the Battle of Algiers is present in some of these uprisings. And you can stretch it out to like, you know, I like to talk about Wounded Knee, but a second occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. I think you could also see that as part of this decolonization struggle. And that's my yeah, that's my angle on it.

Yeah. And I think there's definitely a lot of like, I don't know, there's a lot of inspiration taken there. I think the way it's usually seen in the U.S. is as this is the sort of I don't know, it's kind of as it's seen as this kind of this is where everything went off the rails after the civil rights movement, which isn't what happens yet. And the other way I think is to see and this is, I don't know, a lens that I is kind of useful to talk about this, but kind of isn't

is about the sort of quote unquote long 1968. So, you know, we're going to be covering a lot of 1968 stuff on this show. You know, so like there's obviously this 1968 in France. I think I think if you want to look at the origin point of. The sort of like wave uprisings that are specifically 1968 and that are aren't sort of like the decolonization arc, I think it probably starts in China with with the January storm in 1967. But on the other hand, sort of

and this is you know, one of the things about this period is everything is happening so much at the same time, right? Like we have a lot of experience about this. But like, you know, as the January storm, so the January storm is this part of the Cultural Revolution, where Mao kind of loses control. And Mao kind of incites a bunch of these, like a bunch of workers in Shanghai to like take the city. But then they actually take the city and they run the party out, they run the PLA out. And for a brief period of time, Shanghai has just been taken by its working class and is not being run by the party.

And there's this whole massive, you know, massive series of struggles and kind of struggles. But the, the, the thing, the thing about the sort of the way 68 is understood is, you know, even some people will even include that, but these riots, specifically the Holy week riots are almost never talked about as, as part of this process, which I think they obviously are. And I think, you know, part of the reason we're talking about them now is that you can't understand the Columbia campus occupations. You can't understand the kind of politics that's going to come after that.

You can't understand the DNC. You can't understand like the rise of black radicalism. Like none of this is comprehensible at all unless you understand these riots, because this was the uprising that sort of kicked everything off. It's also, this is a very hard thing to write about because like this, I've had the time riots because this was the uprising that sort of kicked everything off. It's also this is a very hard thing to write about because like this, I've had the time of my life trying to put this together because this thing should be like 35 hours and I don't have 35 hours. I have 30 minutes.

So that that being said, let's get into why these are happening. So obviously, there is the civil rights movement happening. You know, 1965, you get you get the Voting Rights Act. We there is the civil rights movement happening. You know, 1965, you get the Voting Rights Act, we've had some civil rights acts. But, comma, if you are, like, you are a part of the black working class in 1960s America, A, society is still unbelievably racist. Like, they're, like, you know, like, on a very basic level, there's a bunch of people walking around calling you the N words. You are restricted to the shittiest jobs available, assuming you can find work at all.

One of the biggest ones, and this is something that this is something that was a very big focus of the kind of later civil rights movement that kind of has been erased from the struggle memory was struggle over housing. I'm going to read another thing from The Great Uprising. SNCC field worker John Baptiste, who took over for Robinson and Hanson, described many of the homes in the Second Ward. This is in Cambridge, which is one of the places where there's really intense rioting both.

We'll talk about this in a little bit, but both in 63 and in 67. Described many of the homes in the second ward as nothing more than converted horse barns, corn cribs, and company shacks which lacked hot running water, flush toilets, and electricity. Separate and independent investigations by federal officials confirm Batiste's claims. We were shown block after block of tottering single-family frame structures often lined along dirt roads and generally with little or no setback, crowded almost against each other and on small lots sometimes of no more than 50 or 60-foot depth, reported one U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development official.

These dwellings were obviously obsolete and in disrepair, with tumbling porches and steps. Many were without inside toilets, and in several instances the outside privy served more than one family. Hot water is rarely available, and several are without inside water. Overcrowding is a common pattern." So this is one of the centers of these struggles that these people are living in like 1930s Barnes. And this, you know, there is there is a sort of staggering amount of anger about this and the other the other aspect of this is that, you know, OK, so these people are living in like places that are not fit for human habitation. places that are not fit for human habitation. Also, they're on average 56% more of their income goes to rent than white people,

than white people pay to rent, which means that, you know, and this is also one of the things that's happening in this period is that there's a bunch of money for like white people that the government is giving them or giving people sort of loans and subsidies and tax credits to go buy houses. None of this is happening for black people so what you have is a situation where. Like if you are black basically all of your money is being absorbed into rents there is no possibility of use saving or you know like saving to buy a house. Like other than the sort of like ramshackle shit that you're in. Like the conventional civil rights movement right you're sort of like nonviolent marches. This hasn't done shit to deal with any of these problems. You're

also dealing with really, really intense labor discrimination, you know, and I mean, these are things like, like, there's this kind of like example in Baltimore, where, you know, you'll have union locals that are literally all white locals. And they will cut these deals with management, where they'll be like, well, management will hands hiring and firing power over to the unions. And the unions go, oh, great, OK.

And this is a negotiated thing between the two. The unions are like, OK, only union members can work at the shop, which in theory is good. But in practice, what this means is because these are all white unions, they've now created a system by which you can just not hire black people ever. Yeah. The Brianna Wu method. Oh, God. Yeah. You know, it's a reference to a terrible tweet that hopefully people haven't seen. Oh, God. Yeah. And, you know, the other things that are sort of happening here, right, is so in theory, desegregation is supposed to be happening in practice.

That shit is not happening. People are making people are doing these like, you know, like white progressives are giving these speeches about how like segregation is like ending. We're like integrating quickly. And it's not happening. And all of this kind of. You know, all of this sort of fuel and also, and obviously this sort of immediate spark of a lot of a lot of these uprisings, particularly in 67, is that as as happens today, you know, you all statistically

have lived. I don't know why I say statistically, all of you have lived through this. All of you probably have been to at least one protest. is this is that the cops just murder people. And all of this. Sets off. A set of kindling and is going to lead to a simply staggering wave of uprisings but first do you know what I won't lead to a simply staggering set of uprisings if you if you buy them. It's the production and consumption of created needs as described by her but mark who's a. you know what, I won't lead to a simply staggering set of uprisings if you if you buy them. It's the production and consumption of created needs as described by Herbert Marcuse. That's right, James.

Yes. For more on that, here's these ads. So we are back. All right. So let's start actually talking about some of these riots. OK, so I've mentioned before that these riots are happening in a lot of places that are not like that are not typically considered. And we're actually not going to sort of stunningly for thing about this. We're not going to talk about the Watts riots,

which are probably the biggest and most famous of the riots in this period. We're not going to talk about Detroit either, even though that was another really big one, because, you know, you can go out and you can find a bunch of people kind of talking about these. We are going to start in Omaha. Where Quirrell, good things begin. Yeah, like, but again, this is something that's very important, is that this is not just a sort of uprising of the urban ghettos,

which is which is how it's like very explicit. This is literally the language that is used at this time to describe what's happening. But like, no, this is happening in a bunch like again, Cincinnati. And Omaha is interesting because it has one of the very, very common. One of the other big sort of rallying points in this era is price gouging. So if you're in one of these like ninety nine percent

black communities, like the one like the one white person who was there is the shop owner. And the thing the shop owner is doing is the shop owner is gouging you for food because you don't you don, you don't have any other options to buy food from. So they're going to gouge you and they're going to give you like the worst products you can ever you've ever seen in your life. And so by 1966, people are just fed up with this. They're they're start there start to be sort of protests,

like specifically at these white stores. There's a bunch of people, you know, throwing rocks at the cops. Yeah. And so, you know, so I mean, OK, the other thing that's very important to understand about these places is that these riots don't just start out of nowhere, right? These are mostly places where there have been existing civil rights movements, and they kind of just ran into a stonewall. You know, one of the big things in this period, too, and this is something that like, like, you know, this is what MLK and the Poor People's Campaign was sort of working on at the same time was, you know at the same time was these demands for job programs.

And so people are marching around, they're doing pickets. Omaha, has Malcolm X come speak at one point? He's talking about, you get these protests of people marching outside of Safeway saying, we want jobs. And these protests start getting attacked by the police. And this is something that, you know, this is something that that has been happening to these nonviolent sit ins. I'm going to read a passage from the book, Then the Burning's Began. From there, Omaha police, Wallace's quote unquote, goon squad and spectators began to beat the protesters out of the auditorium using batons and metal folding chairs reeling from the attacks African-American youth retaliated in the streets. So like like they'll be in meetings with communities

like like the mayor or whatever. And these fucking moths will start beating people with chairs. The goon squad, you say? Yeah, yeah. God reminds me of the we've been running ads to free that I've held here a week, but the the guardians of the aglala nation but literally call themselves the goons. I'm guessing they're incredible.

Not not the people participating in this particular meeting. No, no. Any such cases in this era? Yeah. And this gets to another aspect of these of these riots that a lot of them are started by rioters they're started by a bunch of like a white mob showing up and attacking people and So, you know in Omaha and this something that we're going to see a lot that is something that kind of doesn't happen as much now is like

They just the cops just fucking kill people in the streets when protests are happening I'm in Omaha. They like they just they murder a kid with a riot gun. And this sets off the patterns that we're sort of used to seeing, of these sort of escalating riots. And this is a very kind of familiar riot, right? I think we've all had the like, okay, so the police attacked a bunch of people, so it caused a riot kind of thing. Yeah, so now a riot starts

Yeah, and this is this is a relatively nonviolent riot, which is to say that people are mostly throwing stones and Molotov's. Um that is Absolutely not true of a huge amount of the rest of these riots and particularly as we sort of get closer to Holy Week Something something that is is very important about the 68 riots that is not true about any rise that we've ever lived through, is that not only are people extremely well armed, they are the state's monopoly on violence in 1968 is nowhere near as powerful as it is now. People will just fucking shoot. And one of the constant things you read about when you're reading about these

riots is that is, you know, every police account has police like like screaming about snipers. And like I didn't believe this, right. So I was reading this. I was like, OK, whatever other police, right. They talk about snipers all the time. You see this in radical accounts, too, where people will talk about like, well, yeah, like the National Guard in Watts will be talking about how they're taking sniper fires. So start shooting machine guns and like the ruse of build a gap buildings. Right.

But no, it turned like this was real. People actually were like doing this. And, you know, I was I was really sort of like, like on the on the fence about this, like, was this what was actually happening? And then the next thing I read was an interview with a guy who'd been a black nationalist who starts talking about how they they they they they were using all of their dynamite stores and how they didn't have fuses for the dynamite. So they had to like they had to plant the dynamite

and then retreat across the street to shoot at the dynamite so the dynamite would go off. It sounds like a fun exercise. Yeah, it was it was nuts. It was like the kind of stuff these people were doing is sort of just really it, it's really staggering. This, like you say, the state just didn't have that same monopoly on on violence. Like there was it didn't have that over.

Cops didn't have like the overwhelming force that they do now. They didn't possess tanks. And like it was a lot harder to trace gun purchases in 1960s because not everyone used credit cards. It made it a whole lot easier for folks to have and keep guns. Yeah. Well, the other thing is like, you know, this is something that that in some of the this is something that played into some of the the NAACP like chapters in the south that were just sort of like black working class chapters.

Is that like so if you were if you were an NRA chapter, you could just buy at a really cheap bulk rate like surplus M1 Garands for the US Army and ammo and they would just sell it to you. Yeah. You can still buy them at a really cheap bulk rate, like surplus M1 Garands for the US Army and ammo, and they would just sell it to you. Yeah. You can still buy them at a pretty cheap rate. You see him. Yeah. Yeah. But you could buy like like really large quantities of them, as long as you were sort of like, you know, there was this kind of like popular, like popular, like gun marksman culture that we don't like.

We have an in like our gun culture is kind of insane. And this was like a very different thing from. Yeah, definitely. And you had like like Rob Williams was the the you familiar with Rob Williams? Yeah. Yeah. He wrote a book called Negroes with Guns. He was the he was the leader of the NRA chapter.

Right. In Monroe. But then also a member of the NAACP, which like the NRA has has has pivoted a long way from what it was. Yeah, yeah. Well, and part of what's happening here is people are just kind of like picking up whatever institution they have and using it to like build a move. It's a tool. Yeah. Yeah. So all right.

We're going to we're going to move on from sort of Omaha and Cincinnati. Like, you know, so we're talking about some of the I guess you'd call like the uprising proper. So I guess before we fully head into this, it should be noted that there's it's generally not talked about this before. There's generally the way these riots are understood as a thing that is discontinuous from the civil rights movement. And that's just not true. A lot of the civil rights movement, like things that people now think of as like nonviolent campaigns weren't like a lot of the stuff in. Oh, my fucking God. Like a lot of a lot of the fights in Louisiana, like are just straight up riots.

Yeah. And one of the important sort of bridge figures here is Gloria Richardson, who's I wish we could do like an entire episode about her right now, but that'll have to wait till later. She is a civil rights activist in Cambridge and her movements like, you know, like she is in a lot of ways that like kind of dedicated to nonviolence, but she's very explicit that we're going to do arm self-defense. And a lot of the stuff that she leads, I mean, this is, you know, getting back like 1963, like the civil rights stuff that she's doing is extremely effective.

And a lot of it is just straight up riots to the point where like there's a very famous thing for the civil rights era called the Treaty of Cambridge, where like she and her people agreed to like stop rioting. And this the city agreed to completely integrate. But by the time he gets in 1967, they haven't done it. And so the riots started off in Cambridge again. And you have this incredibly sort of hot. Like summer over the course of 1967, this is just there's this

like enormous wave of riots and, you know, like Cambridge is famous one, but like Detroit's another big one. And this. I know this should have given people warning that there there would be, you know, giant uprisings if anyone did anything to MLK. But apparently it didn't. And, you know, I you know what else I won't, I don't know, set off. I've already used the, you know, what else won't set off massive waves of uprisings. Pivot, I really, I really didn't prepare good enough pivots for this.

What won't assassinate a civil rights leader? We can't promise that. We really cannot promise that. Companies would never do anything like that. What are you talking about, James? Certainly not the meal kit delivery service that we can't mention by name. Alright, we are back. So alright, it is now officially time for holy week. So on April 4th, 1968, MLK is giving is, you know, like he is preparing to support a bunch

of striking sanitation workers and they fucking kill him. Who the they is, is kind of unclear. MLK's family later sued the US government to make the government prove that they didn't have, they weren't involved in the assassination. The government paid them $1 instead. So, you know, make of that what you will. But what did happen is that, you know, he was he was killed by white people. And this this detonates a fucking nuclear weapon in the US. You know, reading accounts of me, it reminds me of the first week of the George Floyd uprisings in 2012. I don't know if people remember this.

There's this picture of this guy in Philly with an Elmo with like wearing wearing like an Elmo like head. And he has his fist raised and he's standing in front of a bunch of things of fire like this. This is what this is what that looks like. I'm going to read a quote from one of the people who was people who was there. I mean, I was sad when I first heard the news of King's death, but not but not like the world around me. The city was burning and I'm walking through the city and the city is burning and that's what we wanted. This was our time.

I mean, fire all around my house. I mean, my house almost got caught on fire when I was living because 7th Street, the whole block was burning and it was just we thought we were in a war. Again, simple, simple. One of the interesting parts about this is that a lot of civil rights leaders and this is not just true of like, obviously, the moderate civil rights leaders are trying to tell people not to riot. But even like Stokesly Carmichael, like comes out to the crowd and tries to go like, please don't like don't riot. Don't do this.

And the crowd basically tells him to fuck off and does it anyways. And the fact that they killed MLK, who was, you know, MLK was, I mean, like even at that time, like the sort of living human symbol of nonviolence, right. But he was also the symbol of sort of cooperation of of of this belief that, you know, you could you could do sort of peaceful, you do peaceful integration. It is something that MLK is kind of like. Even he's kind of getting cynical about by by 68. But the fact that they killed him, it.

It is it is a kind of psychological blow that I don't think we've ever experienced. Like maybe maybe if you took like if you took like Trump's election, like on at the same time as a 2020 uprising that like maybe, maybe kind of captures what people are feeling in this moment. And I want to read another account. I want to read an account that's it's sort of secondhand accounts by this priest is like a Catholic priest in a largely black area. This is from the Great Uprising.

Yet other observers saw the uprising as a clear protest against the persistence of racial inequality. Father Richard Lawrence, an activist priest whose Catholic parish served many blacks, recalled encountering one of his parishioners on the street after the revolt had begun. Father, you don't understand. I know you've been with the demonstrations and all that sort of thing," the parishioner explained to Lawrence. But you were born white, and you can't really totally understand. I mean, I've done the civil rights thing too, you know it.

I've been there. I've been to the marches. I've been to the rallies. You name it. Nobody's listening. His parishioner continued. Murdering Dr. King was just the last straw that nobody's listening. We can go on demonstrating as long as we want.

No one will listen.'" I don't know what to try next, but maybe blood flowing in the streets is what it takes. Maybe some of his blood with some of my blood flows in the streets. Then maybe the man will listen. Maybe not, but I've got nothing left to try. I don't care if I got killed. I've got two kids and I'm not going't care if I got killed. I've got two kids and I'm not going to have them come up in the world I came up with up in. I'm just not going to

have it. And this is, this is, I think a really important part of these riots is that these are people who had fought, who had fought for a decade and over it. I mean, this is this point, it's about a decade and a half of struggle. They've everything they've done strikes they've done boycotts they've done sit ins they voted they got the right to vote right in march it is civil disobedience. And you know the product of this is that they're living in a dilapidated house with a shitty job and then they fucking killed him okay. killed MLK and the country burns. The National Guard straight up is there are, there are, there are like, there are just straight up military occupations in an enormous number of cities. DC is occupied by the 503rd military police battalion, the National Guard, and famously the 82nd airborne.

So like the regular US army is being sent into to like, to like, is being sent into these cities. The level of burning here, too. And this is the thing that's I think kind of the most famous part of these riots is they burn staggering parts of cities. There were, I mean, just like unbelievable numbers of buildings are burned. And people, people sort of people, people go out to fight. People are people are shooting at the police. The police are shooting back at them.

I mean, there's I wasn't able to find the footage. One of my friends was telling me about like there's there's footage from from news people in New York of like a guy shooting outside of a window. And they have footage of like a police like SWAT team. Basically, I think this is like still pre-swap like a police like team coming in just killing him. And you know, I mean, Richard M. Daly famously has has a he's the mayor of Chicago has a shoot to kill order. You know, his his words are quote, shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov

cocktail and quote, shoot to cripple or maim anyone looting any stores in our city. Jesus. It's really fucking bad. And you know, this is something that's that's about about these these riots. Right. Like, OK, if you look at even the watch riot or if you look at 2020, if you look at like 2014, like the Baltimore uprising in 2015, there are like people having a good time. Like, this is always a thing in riots. There's always like someone who's like having a great time.

Fucking no one. I read like dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews of people from people from the Hollywood uprising. Every single person involved in this is having the absolute worst time of their lives. That's like on every single side, right? That everyone is fucking miserable. And, you know, but part of what's happening here, too, is these are these these uprisings are also about Vietnam, because, you know, a lot of these people

either have been sent to Vietnam or like their families have been sent to Vietnam. Black people are dying at an unbelievable rate in Vietnam. And these people come back and they're like, well, we're going to fucking die anyway. So I rather die. I'd rather go out fighting the cops than, you know, than than dying in Vietnam. And also, you know, I've been talking a lot about kind of like the snipers in the windows. But one of the most common ways people get killed.

Well, OK, probably most common ways they get trapped in a burning building, which is terrible. But one of the other really common ways is that these are these are gun fights. You know, we kind of saw this in 2020, but there's a lot. There are like white store owners are like popping out of their businesses to take pot shots at protesters and like they're, you know, one of the people that they interviewed was a guy who had been like walking past a store and the guy had pulled out a gun and shot him.

And he had he had managed to knock it off. The guy next to him got shot. So he took out a molotov and like burned the store down. And this is a lot of the kind of dynamics of this right. Or like it's not just that people are furious. It's not just the people sort of, you know, like people want this world to burn. It's that like they are very directly responding to the fact that the like white people also fucking lose their minds when this starts happening.

And you you get this degree of sort of urban conflict that kind of. You know, we don't really have this now. Not here. Yeah, like, like even even our riots are like largely nonviolent, like people don't shoot it out with the cops or each other in the same way that like, you know, like people don't shoot it out with the cops or each other in the same way that like, you know, like, like it happens sometimes like this is happening fucking all over the country. Like this is happening in like, like, like, you know, like, like fucking

small ass cities in the Midwest. There are people getting in gunfights, right? You know, and so eventually. OK, so what the other very important thing about this that is that's really interesting and not marked upon very much is that. OK, so like obviously the police in Chicago go fucking feral, right? The National Guard commanders. Come in and like the general, the National Guard goes,

OK, you motherfuckers, you're going to kill someone. None of you are allowed to have loaded weapons. You're not allowed to have loaded weapons. And I mean, these guys, they like they have bayonets on their rifles. This used to be a thing like they used bayonets as a form of like like a weapon. They just fucking stab you with a bayonet and their bayonet or to be covered.

And because of this, the guard doesn't actually kill anyone during the 68 riots, unlike the 67 riots where they fucking murdered a bunch of people. And this was a really smart decision by the National Guard people, because if they had started actually shooting into these crowds like this wouldn't have been one week of really intense rioting that ends with the Civil Rights Act, which we'll talk about. Well, it doesn't end with the Civil Rights Act, but like, you know, it sort of gets that.

This would have been like apocalyptic on a scale that I don't think anyone kind of like has the capacity to imagine. But instead, they kind of, you know, there's really intense riots, they kind of. They kind of wind down over the course of a couple of months and. Like they kind of they wind down faster in a lot of ways than 2020 did. But on the other hand, that is not the end of these riots. And the thing I want to close this episode on, well, we're going to talk about. Actually, OK, let's talk about civil rights act first, because it is a very, very weird piece of legislation.

So like five days in to now, seven a week into the riots, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1968. And this is a very, very weird piece of legislation. I mean, it's obviously something that's been like frantically like scrambled out because like this, you know, the like there are just straight up armed uprisings in a huge portion of the United States and Congress's responses. So they passed the Fair Housing Act.

That's like that's probably the most famous part of this bill. It is very I mean, it it it has done. It's not like a perfect piece of legislation, but it has done a staggering amount of good. Right. And it is in some sense, a direct answer to the protesters demands. Right. Like it does. It does improve discrimination of sort of housing. But it's also OK. There's a bunch of stuff about the Bill of Rights

applying to indigenous people that is good, but we'll cover that. I don't know. Maybe if we do an aim occupation episode, we'll talk about that more later. That's kind of outside the scope of this one. But the other part of it is this absolutely deranged like conspiracy thing about. Like because like the line, you know, the line here, as it was in 2020, this is all being caused by outside agitators.

So part of this thing is what's known as the riot act, which is it bans like, quote, travel and interstate commerce with the intent to incite, promote, engage or participate in or carry out a riot. It's not used very much. This is like straight up. A conspiracy theory, right? So it's a conspiracy theory about what happened in the 1967 uprising in Cambridge.

So like that uprising, like that's the thing that produced Spiro Agnew, who was like Nixon's deranged V.P. who Nixon picked to be so deranged that no one would assassinate him because assassinating him would put Spiro Agnew in charge. But like, actually, Agnew had been like a liberal, like he'd been a liberal Republican. But then there are these riots in Cambridge, 68 in 67. And the narrative that comes out of it is what happened was

a black power leader named H.H. Rapp Brown came in, gave a speech, and then there was like riots. Right. And this is this is the standard line for like 70 years. What actually happened was that he gave a you know, rep gives rep. Brown. H. Rapp Brown gives a very militant speech, right? Like he does give a speech telling people to burn a school down. Like he's saying you need to like five people.

But then everyone just goes home as H. Rapp Brown is, you know, they're like dispersing this young woman asked to like be escorted home. She doesn't get beat up by the police. And so H. Rapp Brown and, you know, they're like dispersing. This young woman asked to like be escorted home. She doesn't get beat up by the police. And so H. Rapp Brown and 30 people like, OK, and so they try to go home and the police walk up to them and start shooting them with shotguns. H. Rapp Brown gets hit by a fucking shotgun blast. And that that is the boy. It was after that that the rioting started. Right.

So, you know, so that's what actually happened. But but the memory of it is that it was like, oh, like these these like these black nationalists came in and they started this riot. And like this literally is now law in the US. And this is this is very famously at the end of this episode. We're going to talk about who this was used against. But before I need to do that, I need to make it clear that these riots don't end in 68, right?

But and in fact, I think the one that is the most intensive these. Is York in your Pennsylvania, which I promised you the beginning of this episode we were going to do. And that is in 1969, because again, like the conditions that cause these urban uprisings, like haven't changed. So, you know, like the immediate flames of sort of like of the Holy Week uprising, like of this rebellion by MLK sort of, you know, eventually trickle out. But there's just more of them. So this this is another one. What one of the things you come across when you research this is that like every single

the conventional like accepted public narrative about why these started, they're all wrong. This one. So it's generally attributed to this black kid lying about being set on fire. And like that did happen, but this kid's like 14. Right. But what actually happened was that there were two black guys talking to a black police officer and two members of this like white power white supremacist street gang like walked up and shot them both. And this kicks off a series of shootings, brickings and fistfights between black and white people like all over the city.

And this is a kind of this is also the other kind of right in this period. Like we don't really have this anymore. Like there, but you know, there are places where just effectively straight up race wars start. Well, you know, one of the things that happens here, this happens in a lot of cities, they'll just be like a bunch of white people in a van driving around, shooting at people out their windows. And we sort, you know, like this happened in Portland, right.

But it was like they were shooting paintballs. These guys are just shooting actual guns like out their windows. Any black people they see on the street, right? There's there's a crowd of like eventually like protest start and like this this crowd of like pretty well armed black people and this eye and like a line of cops are facing each other. And. You know, this is one of these, there's two sides to the story. The cops claim that the crowd just started shooting at them.

Like everyone in the crowd claims that the cops shot at them first and they started shooting back. And so there's just this fucking shootout between the cops and this giant crowd. There are like there are reports of cops like just set up on the rooftop of a factory, just shooting everyone they can find. Like white gangs or firebombing black houses. One of the I don't like it. It's a that like should be infamous, but like I've never fucking seen

talked about anywhere is a fucking police armored truck. There's a lot of people who have like come out to their lawn to figure out what the fuck is going on in a police armored truck rolls up and just start shooting them. And so, you know, people and people are shooting back. And there's a bunch of like people eventually get sort of tried for this. And one of the one of the things people talk about is like, yeah, there's like 20 guys in their houses, like having a shootout

with this armored car because the armored car is just fucking started murdering everyone. And, you know, the sort of remarkable thing about this, I mean, one of the remarkable things about this is that literally the day before this happens, all of these cops had been at a police training seminar about the best way to respond to civil unrest. Amazing. And the police seminar and they are correct correctly, because this is actually if you are the police, the best way to handle one of these sort of uprisings.

You know, they're they're told in no uncertain terms. The best way to do this is do not confront the crowd. Do not shoot at the crowd. Like, you know, OK, like, do you like containment? But don't don't like walk up and fight them because that will make people fight them back. And then literally the next day they are having running shootouts with like the entire black population of this town. And, you know, like York is a place that has had civil rights

to women's stuff before this. It's also has, you know, again, like it has just literal white power, like street gangs who the police are in. I mean, the police literally just call them the boys. Like that's how that's how that's how tight these people are. Right. But and this is the thing, you know, one of the notes I want to close on is that like a lot of the focus and I get why people focus on this, a lot of the focus

from sort of radical accounts of this period is about. You know, because these riots, these uprisings, like these are this is the crucible on which sort of black power is forged in. And so there's a lot of attention paid to sort of like black power, like people who are going to become black power leaders and people influenced by these movements, like doing arm self defense. And that is true. And that is important. But also, just regular ass people are also doing this.

Right. Like the guys, the 20 guys who are having a shootout with a police armored vehicle, they are just like some of them are Vietnam vets. But like they're just they're they're just regular people who saw the police fucking roll up, like into like roll up on a fucking house and start shooting people. There is a sense in, you know, in this period that the thing that guns are for are to protect you from the government. Right. And people actually believe this like JFK, you know, on one, one, one of the there's a really good article in Strange Matters called The Double

Counterinsurgency that's about this that talks about how JFK literally gives a speech where he talks about, again, who is a liberal, gives a speech about how, yeah, we need guns to defend ourselves against the tyranny of the government. And yeah, if you are a black person in York in 1969 and you are watching the police from an armored vehicle shooting people on their front lawn, the response people had was, okay, we're going to die here or we're going to die in Vietnam. And so I'm going to, I am choosing to die here, fighting the cops. And that's, I think that's important, I think, because a lot of, you know, a lot of what we're going to talk about next, right, are these student radicals. And everyone now looks at these student radicals and goes, these people were insane, these people were stupid, these people didn't understand what was happening. There was no way a revolution was ever going to happen.

And they're wrong. Those people are fucking wrong. What what these people were watching, right, they were watching this, they were watching hundreds of cities going into open revolt. They were watching people having shootouts with the cops. They were watching people. People tended not to shoot at the National Guard because people had enough military experience to realize

if you try to shoot the National Guard, you're not going to win because they have machine guns and stuff. But people did it still right there. There are still numbers of this. They are watching. They are watching armed uprisings in basically every mayor, every major in my and not even major, every minor American city has one of these. And these people assume that this is the revolution

and that, you know, like this is the opening stages of the revolution that is coming. And they weren't they weren't wrong to think that like it didn't happen. But it's not that these people like, you know, it's not these people were sort of die or foolish. It was they had the same rational reaction to what they were seeing that the FBI and the Nixon administration did. And I think that's the place I'm going to close. So I think the next one of these episodes is going to be about the Columbia student occupations. think that's the place I'm going to close. So I think the next one of these

episodes is going to be about the Columbia student occupations. But the one after that. Well, I might do basically in there, but we are eventually going to get to the DNC part. And I promised you the the a thing about the people

who were charged under the riot act. Yeah. So the people who are going to the most famous people who are going to be charged with this like interstate riot shit are the Chicago seven, seven people arrested at the Democratic National Convention. So when we come back in, however long it takes to do the rest of the 1968

self-reduce before we get to that, we will come back to to this civil rights act fucking over a bunch of people's lives. I look forward to that. ["Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck"] ["Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck"] Hello, acclaimed comics writer and notorious Scott Summers hater Rosie Knight. Well, hello, Emmy-winning podcaster and totally unbiased Targaryen royal supporter, Jason Concepcion.

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Rose. This time we'll be discussing the treatment of migrants inside the European Union and specifically the treatment of migrants by the government of the Netherlands in a place called Terre Apple. Welcome to the show guys. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Good to be back. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thank you. It's Good to be back. Thanks for having us. Thank you. It's good to have you. I wonder if you could begin. We were talking about this before you recorded. And I think it's very, obviously, the migration laws in Europe are very different. But so are the situations with like regard to shelter and just like facilities

with the US being so big, we have them dotted all over the place. So you were just explaining that this is a place where anyone who wants to register for asylum in the Netherlands has to go, is that right? Yeah, so that's almost entirely right. So everyone who arrives in the Netherlands and wants to ask for asylum has to go to this village all the way on the northeastern border with Germany. And that's where the only registration center is for most asylum seekers. I believe only people who do family reunification can go somewhere else.

But yeah, we have like one registration center for the entire country. And yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a tiny country, but it still became a huge bottleneck, because it was the only one. So it didn't work out that well. Apparently, and that's why we're talking about it, right? So just so people understand where these people are in their asylum journey, like they've entered the EU, right?

And then they've traveled to the Netherlands, which is a country where they want to claim asylum, is that right? Yeah then they've traveled to the Netherlands, which is a country where they want to claim asylum. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. So basically they arrived at their final destination. So most people that I met into Apple had already been traveling for weeks, months, sometimes years, depending on how much money and luck they had usually. So yeah, they would have either crossed the Mediterranean Sea or gotten into Europe through Turkey or Belarus. And then they would have crossed many, many borders and many, many border guards and fences. And they would have gotten stuck in places

for weeks or months before they could move on again. Yeah. And people who would actually go to the registration center in the Netherlands. That means they wanted to ask for asylum there and probably stay there. Right, that would be their country of residence going forward. So can you explain, I mean I'm looking at pictures of it right now, it's not hard. If you want to look up pictures you can spell it T-E-R-A-P-E-L. But can you explain the condition set Seb, because looking at it, it's atrocious, like from the pictures I can see. Yeah, I mean, I saw many pictures before I went

there myself. It's basically just a tent. So, I mean, it's a shelter, right? So, it used to be an army base. It can hold 2,000 people. It has loads of small housing units where people live. It has a lot of offices for all the registration steps and the immigration service, the police, the shelter organization, blah, blah, blah. One and a half years ago, there was a lack of shelter in the whole country, but specifically also in Tarapple. And yeah, somehow the authorities decided that the solution would be to just leave people on the fields that was inside of the registr... in front of the registration center. And so there was just an informal camp. Like people were sleeping outside for weeks or months, not even in tents, but they would have

like huge kind of banners or tarps that would kind of provide some shade. So it was like mid-summer, it was a very dry summer, which for us was crazy lucky. The climate activists were not happy, but we were happy. Yeah, so yeah, people were just like, laying on the ground. And that was yeah, there were some that water, there were like Dixies for toilets that were obviously gross. And so yeah, what you would see if you Google it, you just see people lying on the field and, and just being there for extended periods of time. But when I personally went there the first time, it was kind of worse than what I expected it to be. Because I think the level of neglect was not visible on photo or on video. So people would come to us and tell us that they had like show us really big wounds that were infected. Or people would come and tell us like, hey, I had a heart attack a few weeks ago, I need this medication, or I have diabetes or whatever.

So there was just this dystopian situation of this enormous facility that can hold thousands of people and then a big fence around it. And then people with clearly like very serious conditions, just standing in front of the gate. And the security guards just being like, no, maybe a staff member will show up today, maybe not. But we don't care how dangerous the situation is or something. Yeah, just the fact that there was no proper place to wash, there were no toilets. The food was like, yeah, I worked in camps across the borders, uh, across European borders and I've seen a lot of like horrible food, but like in their apple, they just decided to rent, uh, yeah, like if you have like, um, uh, a party or something,

you just rent this place that will just sell fries. So they were just giving fries to people like every single day. Jesus. Yeah, just, I mean, just, just three, three packed food from the supermarket would be more healthy than just fries every day for a month. Right. So, yeah. So just the level of like, yeah, neglect, lack of care, um, was just even, even more more than what you can see on the pictures. Yeah, and like a complete lack of failure of the government to address their basic rights and needs.

How long can people expect to spend in that situation then? They have to go there, right? If they want the asylum, they have to go there. have to go there, right? Like if they want the asylum, they have to go there. Yeah, so like the irony was that the only way to get shelter was to be there and then be without shelter for you wouldn't know how long. Like, yeah, I mean, sometimes it was hours, especially for the women and children. It was usually they would usually be let in in the evening. But yeah, men definitely days sometimes if they were not lucky weeks. And it was just also so unclear. So people would just not get any information.

They would be there and then all of a sudden hear someone shout and all start running towards where the shout came from because maybe they would be let in or yeah, I don't know, like guards would just shout at them in Dutch and then be like, why don't you understand me? Or like, it was all just like consciously, like it's so unnecessarily chaotic. And therefore also like people pushing around, police getting like intimidating and violence.

And yeah, just this very chaotic and disrespectful approach to people. Yeah. It's worryingly similar to what we see in open-air detention sites here. They'll do that people are outside there too. They have an ex-signal shelter there too. We volunteers make the food, so it's better than that. Yeah, they'll turn up in a bus.

I've seen them turn up in a bus and just shout run. And like, if you understand English, you run. If you don't understand English, you see everyone else running. So you run and then they can only take 30 people and you've now had more than a hundred people come stampeding across, like just, you know, they've got to grab their bags and everything and it's yeah, completely unnecessarily chaotic and cruel. And then once they're let in, what can they expect from that? They're staying in like a barracks or something while they're processed? Yeah, so it was very, very chaotic.

I think it took them like almost a year to actually process everyone because they would just, if a municipality would say like, oh, I have space for 100 people, they would just randomly put 100 people in a bus and drop them there. And then a year later, it would turn out that they were never properly registered for something. So but yeah, I think like there was a night shelter not so far away from to Apple. So that was always like late in the evening, there would still be a few buses going to that night shelter. That was just a big sports hall, I think, full of beds, bunk beds or stretchers.

And yeah, no privacy, just like hundreds of people in one room. The lights would stay on all night for safety reasons. But of course, that's also very cruel. And then if people would get registered, they would be usually sent to like a temporary, uh, like emergency shelter because there was such a huge shortage of regular shelters. So some people were living in sports halls without much privacy for like half a year or a year, or some people are still there to be honest.

Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. It's atrocious. Talking of atrocious, unfortunately, we have to break for ads. We'll do that. Okay, we're back. I hope you enjoy those ads.

And we're talking about Terrapple, this, I guess, migrant reception registration center in the Netherlands. One thing I saw when I was sort of doing some reading about this recently was babies born to mothers or people in the Terrapple asylum center are seven times more likely to die in or around Perth. That is shocking. Yeah. So is there just no access to medical care? Are people delivering babies in this asylum center?

Well, I think the excuse of the government is that they didn't have proper care during the pregnancy because they were still traveling. Of course, that is often the case. Yeah, but still it's insanely high. Seven times more people dying. Especially when the super chaotic situation occurred, we would have people in the field that we were suspecting they were getting hypothermia or some sort of strong physical reaction to the tough conditions they were facing, but they could be dropped in the night shelter, kicked out

again in the morning, being back on the field, staying on the field for a few nights, again, going from one night to a night shelter, being transferred to an emergency camp for two days, being transferred to another emergency camp for three days. And during this time, there is no coherence medical care. Right? Yeah. And of course, it would usually be a little bit better for women and especially pregnant women.

So they would try to put them in a more stable place and like not move them around that much. But trying is yeah, they would not always actually manage to do that. So there's definitely also been complaints of, yeah, of people and especially like pregnant, pregnant women, still being forced to move to a different camp, like really close to the day that the baby was expected to come. And yeah, that definitely doesn't help. So I mean, the care on the field was absolutely horrendous. I think women were usually not exposed to it that much

because we do. Yeah, there's also this weird sexism in migration that men can always suffer more, which is not always true, especially if you're not filtering out the really thick man either, because I was definitely a lot more healthy than a lot of the men walking around there. But yeah, at least in the case of like pregnant women, I think they would be pulled out pretty quickly. But yeah, it was chaotic. And then also you have like, of course, you have a lot of people who speak Arabic or Farsi or Tigrinya, but you also have people who speak a language that is only spoken in a province of a country. It's very hard to get proper translation for all the possible

languages of people that apply for asylum. I definitely think the conditions, especially when there were so many people living in really bad emergency shelters or even on the streets, did not help babies at all. Yeah, or anyone, I guess. No. Can you explain then, like, this situation arose about a year ago, I think, right? So you were part of a group of people that were able to respond to help, at least, I guess, make it a little bit less terrible. Can you explain a little bit about the group, about what you're able to do? Yeah, so I mean, we just, so I was already a part of Migrate, which is an

organization that, like, I personally worked on the borders, like providing food and clothes and stuff like that to people on the move. My grades were also more an activist organization, so organizing protests or campaigns and stuff like that. We just went to see what was going on and then we very quickly realized that it was worse than it looked, but also that there were so many basic things that were not being done by the government that we were actually able to do.

So, yeah, we just asked around a lot for hours and hours. Like, what do you need? What's going on? What is missing? Like, what is your primary issue at this moment? And one of the main things people were saying was like the food is fucking driving them insane. Like, yeah, just the lack of flavor, but also just the lack of health and people would just get diarrhea and stuff. And then it turned out, of course, that there were already some people around that wanted to do stuff. So we just had a big call. And then it turned out that there was this squat where they had a big kitchen and they were like, yeah, of course you can cook here. And then there was another former squat where they also had a big soup kitchen. And then they were like, yeah, of course you can cook here. And then there was another like former squads where they also had a big soup kitchen. And then I was like, okay, this is like, it was a big like media storm. It was a big thing for the Netherlands that there was, this was happening because

we have this like, yeah, idea that we are perfectly organized and blah, blah, blah. And that's like all the bad things happen on the border is still like, that's the, and it like, with a very clear role of our politicians, but like somehow, blah, blah. And that's like, all the bad things happen on the border still like, that's the like, with a very clear role of our politicians, but like, somehow, yeah, there's not much talk about that. So it was it was like on the front page every single day for weeks. So I thought, yeah, like, because the people that were already trying to do something, they were like, how can we get enough money for the groceries? And how can we get volunteers? And then, yeah, I was like, we'll manage. If there's one thing I learned from the borders, like if you start doing something, people will will come and join. Yeah. And we first

said like, okay, let's just cook two times a week, you know, one time in this squad and another time in the other squad. And then it's like super doable, blah, blah, blah. And then basically, we started and it's yeah, there was just no way back. So, uh, yeah, we said like, okay, let's send out food twice. And then, yeah, I just went like day and nights being on the field and quite quickly we moved to full distribution every day because there were so many people in the area that wanted to cook. Um was like an Islamic group, there were churches,

there were like, yeah, from all over the country, people were coming into action. And yeah, so first we did food, kind of because people really wanted it, but also kind of because we just knew how to do it because we had some people who had a big kitchen and some experience cooking in large quantities. And then quickly it became colder and rainy as well. So we started to move towards sleeping bags and ponchos and just big distributions. And then we also started to hand out tents. And then we got into a whole fight with the municipality and the police because they were constantly confiscating the tents. But we just started with what we thought would be feasible to do, I guess, and then it escalated really quickly to us being responsible for a lot of basic needs of everyone on the field and also

us monitoring, informing journalists because like the government would be like, oh no, there's nobody there on the field right now. And then we would just like, five minutes. I'd be like, no one. Yeah. So we also quite quickly like became a big like part of the whole political debate where like the government was saying one thing and we were saying another and like They were all all the time trying to pretend that nothing was wrong and everything was fine. And yeah Yeah, I think it's it's such a common and sadly a common experience, right? It's being like a the government is lying to you

Like you can see this with your eyes so that you're being lied to and be like They're just gonna leave these people. If we don't do something, no one will. Something that we've had here. We see, as you say, every border in Europe, more or less, right? Like, it's just a consequence of the way that like, neoliberal capitalism has decided to deal with migration, which is to make to be as cruel as possible and to make it as hard as possible for people. I wonder, like, you've been organizing there, at least in this place, for like a year.

I think, I want this to be instructive for people, because, like, we've been organizing here, too, and we've learned a lot. Are there things that you've learned that you think other people could take from the organizing? Or, like, I know, Mick, you also are a part of organizing in your area. If either of you have things that you've learned about specifically organizing to help migrants, I'd love to hear them. Oh, so many things. I'm probably going to forget some of the things I've learned.

Well, I think one thing that I've learned and that I've learned over and over and over again is that if you start doing something, you will find people who will join. And I think that's one of the scary things when you see a gigantic problem. And even if you know a concrete thing that you can do about it, it's still, yeah, there is a lot of things that you cannot do as a single human being. But I found this true in many countries across the world, that if you just start and you say that you're doing it, people will actually join. And I found that especially painful in the Apple that we were on this field and there had been so much media attention and there was nobody there. Everyone was speaking about it and no one was doing anything.

And there was nobody there. Like everyone was speaking about it and no one was doing anything. And it was kind of depressing to witness that and to feel that nobody, it felt like nobody cared, right? But as soon as we just started with the small thing, like, okay, you can donate groceries, you can come help cook, you can come help do the dishes, like concrete things that you can do.

Yeah. We were like, I think we got like a thousand people who wanted to volunteer with us, which was like way too much. We never got back to all of them because it was just insane. We did not need thousand people to cook food for 200 people. So like, yeah, but we just started and I think, yeah, I think that was really helpful. Or I think that can be very helpful if you're thinking about doing something like start small, but, but don't be afraid that it will not kind of grow because people will join and people will make it into something bigger.

Yeah. Also a great lesson that I learned. Well, it's very basic and understandable actually, but like try to make, yeah, my experience is usually with like mass distribution. So you have hundreds of people, you have food or blankets or whatever, something that people really need. And it's like so important to, to really plan the distribution well and to really inform and discuss with people because that's one thing that also happened in their Apple that at some point people were

just dumping shit on the field and they were actually causing fights and causing tensions between people because you cannot, you cannot show up with five sleeping bags when hundreds of people are in desperate need of a sleeping bag. You know, like that's kind of inhumane. I get that people have good intentions and I get that it could potentially mean that five people are less cold. But like, yeah, some sort of shelter is a basic necessity.

So you cannot give that to a few and not to others. So yeah, I think like the first time we did the distribution into Apple, I was kind of scared because people were spreading like was a lot of rumor about like, oh, it's so violent. And these people are like, blah, blah, blah. And, and of course, I kind of didn't believe it, because I worked with migrants for a long time. And I know that they're human beings. So like shockingly different than, but I've also learned that you need to be, they did not learn at all

to trust anyone there because like people were lying to them. People were telling them they would get shelter in the night, but they would not. People would say that they would see a doctor and they would not get to see a doctor. So like the, I think it's really important if you want to help people that you take them seriously and that you build up some trust. So for example, we went, the first time we cooked so much food, we're like, it's, we cannot make it run out, you know, like we want everyone to get as much as they want and more. Even if we have to trash because like these people for once have to get the feeling that it's like that we're there for everyone. So yeah, if you make, if you do a mass distribution, you usually

make like lines and people have to like wait for their turn. But we spent hours just telling people like, Hey, we're going to give out food. There's so much food, you know, don't worry. Like it's chill. And then also actually live up to that. Of course. Right.

Make sure that there is enough food. Yeah. And, and like, try to make it fun. And it's kind of awkward because I kind of feel awkward about putting people in a line and telling them to wait. Because you're kind of bossing them around. But if it goes well once and everyone just feels like, hey, here I don't have to fight to get to the front and here I can just chill out and we can make a chat with each other and we can just smile and

wish each other a good day. Then, yeah, I think it's also really important to try to make distributions kind of fun or at least as chill as possible and to try to not make it another survival of the fittest moment because that is exactly what the state is pushing people into and that is what I don't want people to get into. Yeah I think that's very true like we've definitely learned a lot of those similar things. I can't like put enough emphasis on planning before you just show up and do a distribution like we had so many fucking chaotic it is no yeah like so people are fucking hungry and they've had to fight to get fed for the duration of

the journey, be that days, weeks, months or years. And they're doing what they understand to be the necessary thing. Yeah, and it's absolutely not humane to just recreate that that mode, you know, like it's amazing to be able to create a nice atmosphere where people can relax and feel safe and feel finally treated like equally and somehow, like fairly again, even if it's just for a very simple meal, but it's Yeah. I mean, you can already get moody if someone jumps in front of you at the

supermarket. Like I can I can get moody if someone jumps in front of you at the supermarket. I can get moody with that, but then way more extreme and for actual things that you need to survive all the time. It's hard to imagine, I guess, if you've never really been in a survival situation. But yeah, it can be so much fun also. Maybe that's another good one because I remember people were feeling sorry for me a lot when I was working there. Like, oh my god, this must be so hard. And I mean, it was fucking hard sometimes. Like I have literally been standing there like pushing away tears and being like, no, I'm fine, but I'm not fine at all. But also it's fun.

Like you're just joking around and you're making each other happy and you feel like you're part of something bigger and you feel. I think it's very empowering to be like, the state is fucking it up and we can actually do it better. Yeah, very much so. Like, I think it's very like affirming, right? Like to be like the way we don't't need anyone telling us what to do. We don't need anyone trying to control us.

We can take care of these people ourselves without creating mechanisms of control. And I think for me, that was one of the reasons I really enjoy doing it, is that me and my friends can care for these people. And it's like, I don't know, from my perspective, I've had conversations with hundreds of people from all around the world.

We would do things like play music while people waited for food. If we had a friend who was able to play music, we had enough people. We'd always recruit people from among the migrants to help us with food distribution, which turned out to be great because they taught us different words in different languages in like, I can say hot sauce in like 25 languages now. It was-

The important parts. Yeah, right. The real stuff. But yeah, it was very, and then I remember one night, it was like in September, it was so cold. One of the colder nights, it was in September, and it was just about freezing. And like, there were very few of us back then. And we, my friend had some guitars and like drums. And we like parked the van to block the wind. And everyone sat around and played the guitar and they played the different songs and like we had all these really happy moments. Yeah, it's not like we sit around crying all the time. Like it's a no, not at all. Not very empowering. I think it's important what you just said that also a lot of work can be done by people themselves.

So I remember a volunteer being like, I want to give out the food. Whereas these guys were giving out the food. Whereas these guys were giving out the food every day and they had this whole routine and they were much faster. And you know, like, and also it's not about you feeling good about, you know, like, yeah, yeah, not there to help you. Yeah. Like, listen to people like really spend a lot of time understanding what people need and what they want and because it's really often not what you expect. And yeah, make sure that people can also do stuff themselves. And also like, for example, if we would have tents, but not for everyone, or blankets,

but not for everyone, instead of making like a very rigid decision of like, you get it and you don't, it's so useful to just talk to people and just be like, hey, sorry, this is the situation. Or yeah, there were a lot of fights because families were always allowed to go first, but it was not really clearly communicated by the government's hand facility and stuff. But when we were just discussing with them,

how can we make the distribution more chill? They were like, well, can women and children and elderly people just go first? And I was like, yeah, or, you know, it's not really any of my business. Like, yeah, and then if everyone just understands it, and it's kind of clear and understandable and explained, it's like so much more chill. Whereas if you're just shouting at people and assuming that they will not understand or assume that they will be selfish, you are also forcing people into that role. And I think it's really beautiful if you can snap out of that and you can just be somewhat equal even though like legally you are in a completely different situation.

Yeah, totally. So what you're telling me is that if you talk to people and treat them as human beings that has positive results for bad situations. This is a hot take, a very hot take. Yeah, breaking news. I don't have nearly the amount of like field experience that Rose has. So, but another thing that I think is really important to highlight is that it's not just the necessities. I was part of... I did first aid at the No Border Camp near Tirapol last summer.

And some of the activists there did a really admirable job. I think they did not go to Tirapol because it was too politically hot at the time. So they went to different centers where migrants were living and they handed out toys and they hired a bouncy castle for the kids to play on. It was really basic in the sense that it didn't need massive funds or incredible amounts of organization that you need bureaucracies to handle. It was just people thinking of ways like, hey, how can we make these people happier or more comfortable or at least forget for like a few hours about like the situation

they're in because our media likes to dive onto every time there's a fight in a migrant center. But it's rarely discussed that if you put a lot of people in a stressful situation on top of each other, there will be tensions and there will be fights, which is I think we don't cover that enough. Right. Right. No, and also nobody really cares. Because I think it's one of the most beautiful things for me as well, is that the solidarity that people show each other.

And like, yeah, you don't even see it half the time, but people give each other like their waterproof jackets. Or I remember one night, it was a horrible night in Fair Apple, and we didn't expect people to be there. And all of a sudden there were hundreds of people and they hadn't had food since the morning. And then people in the camp, they all get microwave meals and they kind of hate them.

But it's like they all have kind of a stash. So they all like started to heat up microwave meals and bring them outside. And they were actually way more able to provide food on such a short notice than we were. And it was not the best food, but everyone had food and they were even sharing it with us and we were all just so glad to be eating after 10 hours in the rain and in the cold. And yeah, people, I don't know, carrying luggage for someone who has like, it's all the time you see people standing up for each other. And I think that is honestly an amazing thing.

And maybe more tough situations bring that out somehow more as well. Like it's easy for most people in Western societies to be very individualist and live very isolated and yeah, non fulfilling lives. But then if you are in this kind of situation, in some ways it can also bring out the best in people. Yeah, I think so. Like we were just talking about before we started how like yesterday I was out helping down by the border and I ran into two Mauritanian guys who had carried a Chinese man with a leg injury for two days. Like, and they couldn't even share the same language.

And that hike is no joke. Like I do that with a big backpack full of water. That's hard. And I do a lot of hiking, but I wasn't carrying another human. It can actually really bring out some incredible acts of kindness. I wonder guys, we're running close to the end of our signed time. If people want to help, either to say they're in the Netherlands and they want to come and help, or if they want to help in a financial financial way or maybe they can do some remote sort of help. Maybe they can respond to the thousand volunteers via email for you. How can they do that? Yeah, donations are always welcome.

We're currently not working in Therapel, but it doesn't look good. So usually the influx is highest in summer and early autumn. We have a far-right majority in parliament since a few months. So we wouldn't be surprised if we have people out on the streets again. Also, I think there's a very big chance that the shelters for undocumented people might close. So we would have a lot of people on the streets then. So we need a lot of solidarity networks and a lot of things, like a lot. Yeah. So like, yeah, financial support is always welcome.

But I think it's also really important that people think about what they can do in their lives and that it is also something that they can manage inside of their lives. So like not everyone can drop everything and yeah move to the other side of the country or whatever but if you can host one person or if you can support someone else who's hosting like there are ways I think I think migrates does not have like all the options to volunteer but like we we really hope that there will be a lot of networks of solidarity that we just need them across the country, I think. And I do think there is a serious risk of more criminalization of aid workers. We were also criminalized for handing out tents. I got a letter that said that I risked three months of imprisonment for handing out tents.

Wow. Yeah. Jesus. But yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Group democracy moments. Yeah, we need that European social democracy model that everyone's talking about. Yeah, we are just doing great. Yeah.

Yeah. And so like tents were constantly confiscated and stuff. And it was intense there because people had to be there to get shelter, which they legally were entitled to. But it is a bigger trend. So regular homeless people will also see their tents confiscated or smashed without them getting an offer to get into a shelter. Right. So I think the criminalization in our case was a bit extreme because most of the criminalization had to do with at least a very fake relationship with like smuggling or people crossing borders.

Whereas like handing out fences like the most humanitarian basic thing that you can possibly do and somehow they still thought it was a good idea to criminalize that. Yeah, I think we need to like prepare for the fact that our borders and our migration policies are going to get more cruel and that the only thing that we can do to help is really strong networks of solidarity and resistance, and that we might sometimes risk prison time, but that we still probably need to do it. Because the alternative is that we're just letting people be destroyed in the system. I think that's very good. Mick, do you have anything to add? Where can people follow you, find more ways to support, ways to show solidarity? I think what I plugged last time, like the Abolish Frontex campaign, find your local activist group.

Or start it because we... Exactly, exactly. activist group or start it because we exactly exactly even if you're just one person that's like yeah like through social media you can find a lot of people find your local squad they will be they will want to help yeah oh and maybe what you just said like uh there's every year a no border camp somewhere in the netherlands so that's also a good place to start. Yeah. Yes. You can find them on Instagram, I think.

I'm not on Instagram. I don't know. Yeah, it's there. That's definitely an option. Atmosphere is great there. I'm not on the socials, so you can't find me if you want to. I'm sorry. Well, I'm also like, Rose, you said,

I do some stuff with like a first aid collective. So if you guys, if you are doing something and you're like, hey, we could use some people with some degree of medical training. Reach out to me. You have my contacts. Because that is the kind of thing I will most definitely get. Well, excited is the wrong word. If shit hits the van into our Apple, we could really use some first aid as well then.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Reach out. on first aid as well then. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Reach out. I will gladly come over there with all the medical supplies that are scattered around my room. Yeah, I think that's a good illustration there, right? To finish up, like, everybody has a skill that we can use. Like, you might not think you do, but you probably do. Like someone knitted hats for us, you know, if you're a person who likes to knit. We had people who didn't think they had much to offer and then came and just made sandwiches

and they created a method for making sandwiches in bulk that like allowed us to make more sandwiches more quickly. Everybody has, even if you want to be the person who washes the blankets and that's a massive task, that means somebody's warm at night. Yeah, that's an insane task. And also like maybe the more intimidating tasks, like I think it could be intimidating to be like, oh, we're going to, I don't know, hundreds of men and everyone says they're scary and all that.

But indeed there's also so much things happening in the background, like collecting blankets, getting clothes, getting groceries. There's so many layers to it. And it can also be that you collect 10 blankets, but hundreds of people collect 10 blankets. So you're always part of something bigger. I think that it's always very good to think that if you're always part of something bigger and there's always a, there's always, I think that it's always very good to think that like, if you're faced with a big problem, it's very hard to get to the solution of it. But at the same time, it's very easy to do a tiny thing about it. And I think it's much more useful to do that tiny thing than to be like, oh, I can never

get to the real solution of this problem. And in the end, you will kind of get to it by doing that with more and more people and actually building up collective power and resistance. Yeah. About the collecting thing, like, for example, I know my parents still have like old toys from when we and my brother were younger. If you're in an area with a refugee center, you could always just give those toys to the people there. If you have old children's books or something, people can use that to get a grasp on the gibberish that is the Dutch language. These little things also matter a lot. And it's something very

impactful that you can do that doesn't take much of your own effort. Yeah, it's very low threshold. Right. And it makes a huge difference. It makes someone feel cared for and welcome. That can make all the difference in the world. And what is can you just spell out the migrate website for us? MIGREAT.org. Perfect. It's like migration is great. Migrate. Migrate, yeah. I see what you did there. All right.

Thank you so much, both of you. Thanks. Thank you for having us. Hey, I'm Melissa Fumero. I'm a developer. I'm a developer. I'm a developer. I'm a developer.

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pleasure. Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen here, the show about things falling apart. And often what's falling apart is kind of our general agreed upon sense of what reality is. And that's kind of what we're talking about here today. We're going to talk about the latest batch of new transgender conspiracy theories. And to join me in this exciting journey is Mia Wong. Hello, Mia. You know, why is it that whatever we're covering transgender conspiracy, it's not like conspiracies

that trans people made up. It's always conspiracies about trans people. It's like, ah, like can we never get one that like... Not often. I can't remember the last time I had like a positive Pride Month episode, which I feel kind of bad about, but I don't know. It's still an interesting topic and I've not seen this discussed as much as it should be. And you know, last week I really thought I was going to have, you know, a difficult work week researching Trump pornography. I thought that'd be like, you know, the low part of my month. But it turns out spending three days sifting through mass shooter data is actually much worse, much worse than looking through Trump porn.

So can I can I can I can I recommend that you to spend your time listening to a bunch of writers talking about the absolute worst time of their life? Much better. All right, so let's get into it. We're going to talk first about video games. I'm going to quote a tweet from a kind of failure of a far right influencer, which is exciting because they're mostly going to be talking about successful ones. But there's this guy named Ben Koo, UK flag and bio, so opinion immediately discarded. But he has said a few days ago, quote, Activision's Call of Duty has added transgender bullets to the game in honor of Pride Month. So you can literally play as a transgender mass shooter." Unquote. This tweet was almost ripped word for word by Ian Miles Chung.

Basically said the exact same thing, except he said role play, not play. Extremely funny. And I did not realize the bolts themselves identified as trans, but good for she, her, they, them, I guess. So we started to see this claim repeated through the anti-trans far-right grifter media space, right? Libs of TikTok said that, quote, "'Call of Duty' is now enabling kids to role play

being a literal trans terrorist." And for some reason, whenever Libs of TikTok writes terrorist, she asterisk out the O's. I don't know why, but this started to pick up steam. There was an article in Glenn Beck's The Blaze, quote, Call of Duty pride bundle. Let's players simulate murder using trans flag adorned guns and bullets. S, I'm so excited for these people to find out about Counter-Strike. There are going to be literally so many, so

many articles that just have the video clip of the thing at place at the end where it says, terrorists win. The quartering wrote, Call of Duty is selling trans pride bullets, what every mass shooter wants. So what's going on here? Because this, you know, if you're not as online as some of us, some other people are, you know, this is maybe confusing. Why are they saying that trans people are all mass shooters now? What's going on? And, you know, and also if you're thinking it's kind of odd that there would be a Call of Duty update where you can literally play as a transgender mass shooter and shoot transgender bullets, you would be right. Because that never happened.

It's false. No way. Not this time. We created it. Not this time. No. Not this time. So let's get into what's really going on with this Call of Duty Pride update and then we'll discuss why so many of these far-right influences are pushing this kind of trans-terrorist story. So on June 1st, Activision did release an update for the terrible new Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. It contained anime mecha skins and seven free weapon skins themed after various pride flags. Now some would argue that the mecha suits are essentially also pride themed, but I digress. For this pride weapon camo pack, it will color your gun with the flag of your choosing. One of the said flags is the

blue, pink, and white trans flag. Yet if you apply the trans skin to any of the regular guns in the game, the bullets will not be transed. So what gives? Without the transgender bullets, how is anyone supposed to literally roleplay a mass shooter like Libs of TikTok and Ian Miles Chung say we can? So it turns out these quote unquote transgender bullets were in fact not intentionally added to the game in honor of Pride Month and are most likely a bug that affects one single gun when one exclusive attachment is equipped. I'm going to quote from Kotaku quote, modern warfare 3's M4 came with a special sole harvester weapon blueprint which includes a skin and a specific attachment for the M4, and quote-unquote Tracer Rounds, which are colorful ammo options

that also leave traces of different visual effects, like paint splatters or rose petals. This special blueprint was for people who spent $100 to purchase the Vault Edition of the game. Based on Kotaku's testing, it appears the quote-unquote Trans Bullets only appear when applying the Transgender Flag camo skin on this specific weapon blueprint. It's unclear this is a bug. At one point during testing, the bullets in the cartridge were only the pink colors in the flag, or is just an extremely idiosyncratic reflection of how Call of Duty's complex

shader system interacts across thousands of items and cosmetics. During testing, any other camo skin applied to the M4 Soul Harvester blueprint resulted in bullets in the cartridge changing the color to match that skin." Now I do think it's a little bit silly that there's so much uproar about these trans-colored bullets but not as much about like just a trans-colored gun., why is the bullet the big thing? And we all know that you can't play as a mass shooter in Call of Duty, you play as a war criminal. And most transgender war criminals are just drone pilots or work for Raytheon. If you want to play a mass shooter game, you can just play GTA 5 or Hitman where you play as cis men. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,

but the Russian terrorist airport level, don't at me, I as cis men. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but the Russian terrorist airport level don't add me. I don't care. Anyway, there was a there was a great article in former Tucker Carlson project, the Daily Caller, with the headline Pride Month finally comes for one of the last bastions of manhood. And the opening tagline is gamers,ers. They targeted gamers. Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo year and a half, using a mix of cherry-picked data, bad stats, and often outright lies to convince people that there is an increasing epidemic of transgender mass killing attacks sweeping the nation. When discussing this Call of Duty Pride Pack, Libs of TikTok said, quote, with the uptick in actual trans violence we've been seeing, it's alarming that Call of Duty would introduce this. And a Blaze article read, quote, critics have suggested Activision Blizzard may

want to reconsider given the recent mass shootings executed by LGBT radicals. There have been multiple mass shootings executed, attempted, or at the very least planned by transvestites and LGBTQ radicals in recent years. So this plays article begins by listing four alleged instances of these trans mass shooters. Two of these simply never happened, as the alleged transgender individuals, a trans guy and a 56-year-old organ Nazi, were arrested after they made concerning posts online. And the other two, which did happen, these were shootings, except these were never actually done by trans people. It's a made up tale. It's a total fabrication.

It never happened. It never happened. This one was invented by a writer. So although this transgender mass shooter narrative might not be real, do you know what is real Mia? Is it capitalism? It is, and capitalism is fueled, at least currently, by the products and sponsors that support this podcast.

Okay, we are back. Now trying to frame every new mass shooter as some like crazed leftist of some variety is an old tactic, popularized by the likes of Andy No, which is ironic considering the fact that political extremist-related killings from the past 10 years are overwhelmingly done by individuals tied to right-wing extremism. The ADL puts it at 75%, whereas leftist extremism, which is categorized as including anarchists as well as black nationalist groups, are responsible for just 4%. Most of the rest they categorize as Islamic violent extremists, including the 2016 Pulse Nightclub Massacre targeted against

queer people in Orlando, although one could argue that that is also right-wing extremism. Yeah, like they are also right-wingers. It turns out the ADL might have some troubling ways of collecting data, breaking news. Anyway, regardless of the actual facts, lying about the political demographic of mass shooters is an old tactic employed by far-right content creators to gain clicks and influence the talking points of more popular media figures and politicians. And now, the past few years, we've seen a new iteration of this tactic, where in the confusion and chaos of the first few minutes and hours after a shooting, anti-trans influencers

will do everything they can to frame an alleged or suspected shooter of being transgender, often using out of context social media posts, doctored photographs, photos of other people, or just pictures of like long or dyed hair to affirm that a mass shooter must actually be transgender. Now even if this claim is like widely debunked later on, most of the people that follow these far right accounts won't be hearing about that. So all they need to do is use this brief window of chaos to seed the idea into people's minds. And if you do this thing frequently enough, after each new mass shooting, then it's pretty easy to create a false perception of this increasing trend. Now this style of propaganda has been largely spearheaded by Chaya Reitrich using her Libs of TikTok account. Here's another quote from her, quote, the modern LGBTQ plus movement is

radicalizing young activists into becoming violent terrorist extremists. The uptick in trans violence is going to get worse unquote. But this sort of rhetoric has been spread by many other online figures in this orbit, like disgraced Buzzfeed writer Benny Johnson and chronic poster Ian Miles Chung. Their rhetoric has been spread by sitting politicians Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk. Now to clarify, people have been lying about the gender identity of mass shooters for like a long time. It's one of the oldest jokes on 4chan. But what's been going on the past two years is something different.

And it requires a little bit more in-depth examination of this propaganda trend. Now, to get into more specific examples here, I like to break down a common meme format used to spread this type of false propaganda. It's usually about five pictures of mass shooters with text next to each picture that reads something like, the Nashville shooter identified as trans, the ex shooter identified as trans. It'll just list all of these people that allegedly are mass shooters and allegedly identified as trans. Now, police did identify the Nashville Covenant school shooter as a trans man. We have to take their word for it. They've released no other info on that. Typically this is seen as like the first legitimate

mass shooting done by a transgender individual and for the past year we've been waiting for more and more context to come out about this mass shooting and its possible motivations. So I'm not even gonna really discuss this one right now. We'll just say sure this is a trans person who happened to do a mass shooting and leave it at that, even though it's not totally clear. Yeah, I mean, I do. I want to add one thing briefly, which is that trying to find out information from the police about a mass shooting

is such a crap shoot. Like, they just, you know, there'll be like an initial flurry of press releases or whatever. And then they just will never talk about it again until maybe the trial. And sometimes you get something that well. And in often cases for mass shooters who often die, there is no trial. Never. So, yeah, yeah.

And if they're dead, like. But even keeping this Nashville incident as a legitimate mass shooting done by a person who happens to be trans, when talking about this meme, the thing is, is that with these five pictures When talking about this meme, the thing is is that with these five pictures that are on this meme, most typically three out of the five people that have their pictures here aren't even trans. Not this time. It never happened. It's false. It never happened. It's a fake. It's fiction. Now most famously, we have the Colorado Springs shooter Anderson Lee Aldrick, who killed five people and injured 25 others at a queer club in 2022.

Later on, his lawyer claimed that the shooter was non-binary, which I believe is a disgusting and disingenuous attempt to get out of the more than now 50 hate crime charges that the shooter is facing. And this opinion is shared not only by the DA, but also all other legitimate extremism researchers. Prior to these claims in court, there was no indication whatsoever that the shooter was non-binary or used they-them pronouns. However, they did own rainbow flag shooting targets, ran a neo-Nazi website that posted gun training videos, and was known by online acquaintances to frequently post racist and homophobic content.

Now I should clarify, when I say shooting targets, I don't mean that it's pride themed shooting targets. It's that the people that you are shooting are painted like they are gay. So there you go. Now pictured next in the meme is someone with purple colored hair labeled as the Denver shooter. This person is not trans, has never claimed to be trans. He just has dyed hair. He killed one person in a school shooting that he planned with a 16 year old trans guy. That's not even a mass shooting. Correct. Correct. We will.

We will get into we will get into this later because the definition of mass shooting is getting stretched liberally here. Now, the third person pictured who isn't trans changes more frequently in different versions of the meme that you can find online. One version includes someone referenced as the Philadelphia shooter. This is referencing a shooting spree

that resulted in five people being killed. This shooter had previously posted photos of himself cross-dressing in women's clothes, and this was used by figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene to claim that the cis male shooter was actually quote, another trans shooter. The family of this shooter referred to him as a quote unquote biblical extremist, and he often posted bizarre Christian spiritual conspiracy theories and was an outspoken fan of Tucker Carlson. In another version of the meme, posted by Chaya Rychek, she identifies the Yuvaldi school

shooter as trans and includes a picture of a trans woman holding the trans pride flag. This was posted in January of this year. Elon Musk replied to the tweet with two exclamation points. Now in the hours after the Yuvalde School shooting, pictures of two or three different trans women were used to falsely label the shooter as trans, with at least one of these trans women being from New York, the other from Georgia. Both of these women received a great deal of harassment after the shooting. Arizona Congressman Paul Gozar tweeted that the shooter was, quote, a transsexual leftist illegal alien, unquote,

which is frankly amazing because every word in that sentence is wrong. We made this one up. It's a made up tale. It's a total fabrication. It never happened. It never happened. Now the other person in this meme that is typically accepted to be trans is the Aberdeen shooter.

Now I'm going to just quote from the Washington Post here, quote, in 2018 in Aberdeen, Maryland, a 26 year old shot and killed three people at a pharmaceuticals distribution center before turning the weapon on themselves. The sheriff said the shooter had been diagnosed as mentally ill in 2016. A close friend reported the shooter, quote, suffered from bipolar disorder and struggled since early in high school with severe depression, partly connected to their feelings of not being accepted when they first came out as a gay teenage girl and later as transgender, unquote. By most accounts, this is a transgender guy who began transitioning shortly before the accepted when they first came out as a gay teenage girl and later as transgender." By most accounts, this is a transgender guy who began transitioning shortly before the shooting.

Pronouns and stuff are unclear. They also worked at this distribution center a few weeks prior to them doing the shooting. This incident is typically not categorized as a mass shooting because only three people were killed, excluding the shooter. Now one of the more recent attempts at this transgender terrorist Psyop was in the aftermath of the shooting at Joel Osteen's megachurch in Houston earlier this February. The shooter was a 36 year old woman carrying her seven year old son, sadly both of whom died along with one other person. Just hours after the shooting, far right accounts like the Libsip TikTok and EndWokeness claimed that she was transgender, pointing to documents where she used the name Jeffrey. Now, Chaya Rychek called the shooting, quote, another act of trans terrorism.

We need to have a national conversation about the LGBTQ movement turning youth into violent extremists, unquote. Didn't she literally say that exact thing with the last one? Yeah. They don't even come up with new tweets. They really just have the same five tweets in rotation. Marjorie Taylor Greene called her quote, a trans from El Salvador unquote. Missouri representative Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and Elon Musk all posted about this quote unquote epidemic of trans violence.

These claims were boosted by Donald Trump Jr. and Ted Cruz. Fox News ran a whole story with a headline about the shooter being transgender. And guess what? She's not trans. She is a cis woman who gave birth to a child and has always identified as a woman. It just appears that she was given a masculine name at birth and later changed it to a more feminine name. The far-right content sphere created so much uproar that the police had to do a whole press conference about how the shooter was not trans. And after the police lawyers clarified she was not trans, Fox News changed their claim, now saying on air that the shooter, quote, identified as both genders,

and was, quote, a biological woman who sometimes identified as a man named Jeffrey, unquote. Which just isn't true. Jesus Christ. But the thing about this one is that it wasn't just far-right influencers in Fox News who ran with this transgender narrative. MSNBC jumped on, very early, to say that the shooter was quote a Hispanic transgender woman, who quote unquote identified as a woman unquote. It's totally made up.

Pure fiction. It's fiction. It's fiction. We made it up. MSNBC more like MSNB shit. Great, great one Mia, great, great one. I'm doing great this morning. Do you know what's also doing great, Mia?

Is it the products and services that support this podcast? They're pretty consistent. Yeah, they are. They are still around. And here you can listen to their important messages. All right, we are so back. So there's there's so many more cases like the ones that I've talked about, right? The reason I started working on this episode in the first place was due to far right accounts claiming that a man named Jared Revieres, who killed his 70-year-old roommate and went on a mass stabbing spree last month outside

of an AMC theater and a McDonald's in Massachusetts, was claimed to be a quote mentally ill trans terrorist by Libs of TikTok and a trans activist quote unquote, who's a man who thinks he's a woman, which is a line Libs of TikTok loves using. Now, Jared claimed to be an artist and a model, but was actually like this really weird, like grifter entrepreneur. He kind of reminds me of that weird Canadian cat killer, Luke Magniata, who like read a whole bunch of fake posts to like pretend to be famous and like created like fake fans. He it's very similar to this case.

And later, this guy, Luke in Canada, also killed a gay man. Very similar cases, honestly. Jared here, again, this he's like pretending to be like an international entrepreneur. He looks like this weird, like hippie surfer dude with long bleached hair. Jared's father is a wealthy Christian therapist who looks very similar. Anti-trans influencers have pointed to the word she on Jared's Instagram profile, but Jared's actual gender identity is unclear. He's never pictured wearing women's clothing. He would frequently post shirtless buff selfies. Jared has never claimed to be trans or a woman,

and has never used transgender language or iconography. Jared did file a name change request last April, but it was to change his last name. He goes by Jared. That same month, April, so two months ago, Jared sexually harassed a model at a Beverly Hills hotel, saying that he wanted to have kids with her, and proposed to her, saying, I'm going to be a good husband. You're going to be my wife unquote. This person simply, we have no, no reason to think they're trans. They do this. They do like weird, like art stuff. And I don't know, they're like California Beverly Hills poison brain. And it seems that they seem to have gone through some kind of mental health breakdown, which resulted in them killing their roommate, two dogs and stabbing like six or seven people in Massachusetts.

But another trans terrorist. Sure. Why not? In January of this year in Iowa, a teenager opened at a school, killing one person and then himself. Again, the usual suspects were super quick to label him as another trans terrorist, Elon Musk saying, this is happening a lot, something is deeply wrong. This kid largely seemed like a regular Gen Z liberal. He listed his pronouns as he, they. He posted things like nominally in support of trans people. He used the hashtag genderfluid a single time in a TikTok video filmed with what appears to be a trans friend of his.

He also posted on Reddit two years ago that he didn't want to transition because he didn't quote want to look ugly. He never specifically identified as trans. This is just kind of a tragic case. I don't know what the deal with this kid was. They seemed deeply confused and upset and killed someone and then killed themselves. It's it sucks. But it's not a mass shooting. And it doesn't it doesn't link to anything being a being a pattern of transgender terrorism. Yeah, that does not stop someone like Donald Trump Jr. saying, quote, the modern LGBTQ plus movement is radicalizing our youth into becoming violent extremists. Per capita, is there a more violent group of people anywhere in the world than radicalized trans activists? Given the tiny fraction of the population they make up, it doesn't seem

like anyone else comes even close. We have a lot of claims like this, which is why I need to start talking about statistics. My least favorite thing because this sort of messaging is repeated a lot. We have this post from I think Benny Johnson or or Donald Trump Jr. I can't tell which one because unfortunately it got deleted before I was able to log who did it. So apologies for that. But it's a very similar sort of thing saying there's been at least five massive attacks by transgender people since 2018. Considering the group makes up less than 0.5%

of the population, that's a massive overrepresentation. We'll get into that in a sec. So often when these people are talking about this trend of trans mass shooters, They're focusing specifically on the period of time between 2018 and 2024. Because largely a lot of conservatives think that trans people were kind of like invented around 2018. That's when they first started to kind of like notice that people were trans, which is something we've talked about before in terms of like the arc of homophobia and transphobia

in relation to gay marriage and a few other things. This is something we've reported about consistently on this show. So they're very often only looking at data from select years. And as we've discussed here, they largely inflate the number of quote unquote mass shooters as well as the number of mass shooters who they call transgender. They will often very loosely define what a mass shooting is when it suits them, and then very strictly define it when it doesn't. In the Blaze article about that Call of Duty Pride Pack, they say, quote, trans-identifying

suspects' share of public mass shootings nationwide over the 2018 to 2023 period is reportedly well over seven times their share of the population, which links to a very sketchy right-wing crime stats website that doesn't publish any of their data. So, sure. So, there is a few different ways to categorize what a mass shooting is. There's no universal definition for what makes a mass shooting versus a mass killing. So, different groups categorize things kind of differently. The Mass Killing Database is a partnership between the AP, USA Today, and Northwestern

University, and it defines mass killings, quote, as the intentional killing of four or more victims, excluding the deaths of unborn children and the offenders, by any means within a 24-hour period. Their database currently lists 590 such killings since 2006. James Allen Fox, professor of criminology and law at Northwestern University, who manages the database, has said, quote, you can count the number of transgender and non-binary shooters on one hand. They're actually underrepresented, unquote. And again, it's possible that because of how successful the right has been at the SIOP, when you're counting these number of transgender non-binary shooters on one

hand, that's also super overrepresented, because they're most likely containing like the Colorado Spring shooter and a lot of these other people. Now, trans people on average are reported to make up about one percent of the U.S. population, but that number is steadily growing. We got to pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers. Now, it's also just US population. But that number is steadily growing. We got to pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers. Now it's also just kind of unclear what that number actually is. That's the current one from the US Census Bureau and kind of an average doubt because a lot of stats of like people older than 25 say the numbers are like around

0.5, 0.6% versus people under 25. Reportedly, it's like 1.5%. So you know, I'm just going to say around 1%. Now under most criteria for mass killings, only one incident, the one in Nashville qualifies for inclusion. Another data source called the violence project has recorded data on mass shootings in the US since 1966. They more narrowly define a mass killing as for more people killed in a public unconnected to other criminal activity. Their current database has 193 entries. A spokesperson for their organization told Reuters that the 2023 Nashville shooting, quote, is the first case of a trans perpetrator in their database per their methodology. Another more broad

data collection project is called the Gun Violence Archive. I'm just going to quote from Reuters here, quote, the Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in the US in 2013, recorded more than 4,400 mass shootings in the last decade. Its definition of a mass shooting is four or more people shot, resulting in injury or death, excluding the perpetrator. Of those, quote, the number of known suspects in a mass shooting which are trans is under 10 for the last decade, which translated to 0.11% of the 4,400 shootings, unquote. Which is about 9 times lower than cis people per capita if we use the 1% trans population stat. And even using the more conservative mass killing dataset,

the rate of this sort of violence by trans people is far lower than what would match our population margin. I'm going to add in a short quote from the Washington Post to kind of add in some context here. Quote, The gun violence archive methodology would allow for inclusion of the Aberdeen and Denver cases. With 0.6% of the population, one would expect at least 16 mass shootings to be conducted by people identifying as trans in the past five years. Instead, there are just three possible cases cited by most conservatives." So after looking over all of this data, it would actually appear that transgender

people are less likely to commit a mass shooting than cis people, even by some of the more conservative estimates. The other side of this is that not only are trans people less likely to do this sort of violence, they are way more likely to be on the receiving end than cis people. Per the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, LGBTQ plus people are more than twice as likely to be a victim of gun violence than their cisgender and straight peers. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 29% of transgender youth have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property compared to 7% of cisgender youth.

So even for school shootings, you are so much more likely to face gun violence at school if you are trans. Transgender non-binary and gender questioning people have reportedly higher rates of being impacted or knowing someone who's been impacted by a mass shooting compared to their cisgender queer peers. This is a data average, but it's usually around 22% to 19%. And this whole topic gets so much more dark and grounded when you know that 320 trans people were killed last year according to data from the annual Trans Murder Monitoring Report, which is like it's so dark that we even have something called the Trans Murder Monitoring Report.

Also, we need to mention this because I don't think people this is really badly understood by people who aren't trans, but those numbers are always significant undercounts because yes, those projects are people scraping basically news reports or trying to find like the families of victims. And there are a lot of people who get killed, who the only people who know what their friends and those people fucking either aren't talking to the press or the press has never like covers it or, you know, the police give their dead name and never talk about it.

So they just are dead. And everyone thinks they're sis. Yep. And just in the United States last year, 33 trans people were murdered. And again, this is a vast undercount, like Mia said. Meanwhile, we have all these people on the right who will talk about all of these all these alleged mass shootings by alleged trans people. And one of their favorite lines when they try to like affirm that a shooter is actually trans is, quote, watch how quickly the story will now disappear, unquote, which is just

ironic for a few reasons. One, because that's how news works, is that we move on to a new thing. But also, it'll probably disappear as well, because they're not actually trans. You know, when you're in the case of the Yuvaldi shooter in the case of the Mecha Church shooter from last year. Yeah, people move on, but also they're not going to keep harping on your weird conspiracy theory because it's a weird conspiracy theory. It's not true. Even if this is even if they were right, which they are not. It also is just like imagine in like 1920, you're like, we have a problematic rise in left handed mass shooters. And we're like, well, yeah, because there's more left

handed people, there's going to be at least some level of correlation statistically. Again, these people act like trans people were only invented in 2018, and are just like slowly like recruiting in numbers, which hey, you know, at least we are kind of slowly recruiting. And like the actual goal of this rhetoric beyond just, you know, altering the fabric of reality is to just encourage violence against trans people. That is what they're doing. It's it's to see trans people as a threat so that you feel justified in doing violence against them. Just a few weeks ago, a very popular gun YouTuber made this joke where they were talking about, you know, getting, getting ready to shoot a T word and they stopped and they were like, oh, sorry, I mean, a school shooter, wink, wink. So like they're trying to use school shooter

to be a dog whistle for trans people. This is all just to justify violence. That's all this is doing. And to some degree it's working. Just last week, a trans kid was assaulted in the men's bathroom at school and reportedly one of their teeth exploded. This was a trans girl who was using the men's bathroom at school and reportedly one of their teeth exploded. This was a trans girl who was using the men's bathroom like all of these freaks want them

to and she still got assaulted. I think it's super important when talking about this sort of unreality propaganda is that like these people like Libs of Tik Tok, Emile Chong, they're not just like falling further into a delusional conspiracy theory. Same thing with Elon Musk, right? It's it's easy. I think it's easy to be like, oh, they just actually like legitimately are like falling into this like, conspiratorial delusion. And it's not that. What it is, is they are actually intentionally crafting reality. It's not them like falling victim to this like, unfortunate delusion, They are choosing which aversion of reality to believe in because it's the one that they want.

And that's what they're doing. And they want it to be a reality where more people feel comfortable assaulting and killing trans people. That's the actual goal of this propaganda. We need to be very clear about this, about what's sort of happening here, which is one of the fastest ways to get a group

of people to commit a genocide is by convincing them that they are all about to be killed. This is one of the things behind the Bosnian genocide. This is one of the things behind Rwanda is if you can convince a lot of people that their neighbors are about to fucking kill them, that's how you get them to do the genocide. Because the thing that they believe is that like, oh, this is self-defense. These people are about to kill us. That's how you get them to do the genocide, because the thing that they believe is that, oh, this is self-defense. These people are about to kill us. And that is the kind of reality tunnel being mobilized here,

is it called genocide. And the other side of this that I think is so grim is that there used to be a time as a society where we attempted to explain why there were mass shootings. This is something that I remember living through. If you go back to 2016, 2017, 2015, there used to be people other than these genocidal fascists attempting to explain why these shootings were happening.

The actual data on trans mass shooters and how few of them there are is quietly devastating to a lot of the theories that used to be sort of bandied about, right? The theories that this was about sort of objection, the theory that this was about this, you know, like sort of deindustrialization and like the consequences that this has had on people and that there were, you know, it was this sort of like downward social mobility that was causing this violence, right? If any of that were true, there would be a fucking million mass shooters. Because

again, the trans-poverty rate is like like it's it's it's around 30 percent. Right. For the rest of the country, it is like a quarter as well as that quarter. It's like a third of that much. Right. You there should be if it was just purely a product of like material conditions, there would be a lot more trans men shooters, but there aren't. Because again, you know, the actual theory that fits this data and fits also the behavior of, of all of these people, like all of these sort of fascist trying to explain mass shootings as being about trans people.

The thing that it fits is this is the theory that this is basically the replacement of clan rallies, right? We don't have, we don't have collective lynchings anymore. We have individual ones and all of these fucking people are trying to make sure that there's just more lynchings, and that these lynchings are, you know, it's like they're sort of like armed follower fanatics, go and shoot a bunch more trans people in a nightclub. And then, you know, once that happens, they will disavow it by saying, oh, hey, this nightclub shooting was, this is actually done by a fucking trans person. They'll keep doing this until

they have enough political power to openly come out and claim that all of these people were their fucking revolutionary heroes in their new fucking pantheon of the fascist state. And there was that trans boy who was assaulted in the bathroom a few months ago, and died days later in the hospital. There's this, it keeps happening. And I didn't want this to be like a depressing episode. I wanted this to break down a conspiracy theory I've been seeing more frequently. Talk about, you know, what's fueling it, actually go over the instances that are included in it

to kind of, you know, debunk for lack of a better term, this sort of rhetoric. And just so you can be more aware of it when you see it. Because often you'll see this meme with five pictures, you'll see a copypasta version of it. So just being aware of what this is, what this that trans people are far, far more likely to be a victim of gun violence and mass shootings. Yeah, than cis people. Than they ever, than cis people and are actually less likely to participate in such violence, statistically speaking.

So yeah, that is the episode today. Not meant to be depressing, just meant to be informative, but you know, when it comes to me, those things often overlap. Many such cases. I hope you have a good Pride Month. Stay safe and stay dangerous. Hey, I'm Melissa Fumero and I'm Stephanie Beatriz. You may know us from television. And now we're here with our very own podcast, More Better with Stephanie and Melissa. We've known each other for thousands of years. And we've been through it all together. And we are totally killing it.

We are literally the best. No notes, life is great. None of that was true. J.K., J.K., join us on our excellent adventure as we take on topics like listening to yourself. There were a lot of red flags and it did take me eight years to get there, but I got there.

The challenge of self care. This is important, cause now you're about to be a mom of two kids. And making friends as an adult. We're gonna share our struggles. Just white knuckling through life, babe. We're gonna speak to experts and we're gonna share everything we learned with you.

Listen to more better with Stephanie and Melissa as part of the Michael Duda Podcast Network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, acclaimed comics writer and notorious Scott Summers hater, Rosie Knight. Well, hello, Emmy-winning podcaster and totally unbiased Targaryen royal supporter, Jason Concepcion.

Rosie, somehow the X-Ray Vision podcast has returned. It feels so good. It does. And like always, we'll be here every week covering the wide world of TV, movies, comics, and geek culture. That's right. We'll be talking about Batman, heroes of that stature, and of course, we'll be inviting our friends in the industry to come geek out with us and share stories.

We'll hear from TV writers, actors, comics, creators, pop culture critics, and more. Nothing is off the table because geek culture is pop culture. And we can't wait to share our love of it all with you every single week. Listen to X-Ray Vision on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, I'm home. radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, I'm home. Everyone knows that it's dad's job to be a bit of a joker. Sorry I'm late everyone.

There was an accident at the factory. Monty fell into the upholstery machine. Don't worry though, he's fully recovered. Good one dad. Did you get the pizza for dinner? Don't worry though, he's fully recovered. Good one dad! Did you get the pizza for dinner? So he likes to keep everyone happy with some dad jokes. Yep, right here. I had a coupon and it saved me a lot of dough. Well the truth is, dad is just a fun guy.

Hey, I'm not a mushroom. Please stop. Where does he get these stupid jokes from? He listens to the Daily Dad Jokes podcast. Oh great, more dad jokes for me. We've delivered over 15,000 jokes to over 3 million listeners and man, the postage fees are killing us. Listen to the Daily Dad Jokes podcast every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. to name a few. We're serving the whole story. From rags to riches. And all the tea in between. I'm Lilliana Vasquez. And I'm Joseph Carrillo. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon Season Two.

Guess who's back in a house. And we're bringing you even more stories behind the world's biggest stars in Latin music. Certified Latin royalty. Consider us your star sleuths, your cheese my besties, digging beneath los mejores exitos to bring you everything you didn't know about your favorite Latin icons. Hey, you know what, my boo? You're my favorite icon. Oh, Joseph! Listen to Becoming an Icon, part of the Michael Theodore Podcast Network, available on the iHeart Radio app,

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Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. this is Shireen and today we are going to be talking about the current quote unquote peace plan that was presented by the US in what they say is their attempt to end the genocide in Rizeh. They call it a war and I call it what it is, which is a genocide. Earlier this month, Joe Biden announced what he claimed was an Israeli peace plan to bring about an eventual ceasefire in Rizeh. But according to journalists and anyone with eyes, the new plan is almost indistinguishable from previous plans proposed by Hamas. We're going to get into the details of the U.S. plan in a little bit, but first I want to address the immense loss of Palestinian life that

has led up to this plan. Because if the plan is successful, it would usher in a ceasefire to a genocide that has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, which is a very low estimate, and the majority of these deaths are women and children. Not only have Palestinian children been brutally slaughtered for months, but Gaza now has the largest population of child amputees in the world. In November, Children in Gaza hosted a press conference in English to beg the world for life. It's June now. And all we've seen since then is massacre after massacre. And while I think drawing attention to the children and the women who have been slaughtered

is immensely necessary and important, I also want to emphasize that Palestinian men are not expendable, and not mentioning the immense loss that we have suffered across the board with men included implies to the world that Arab men are not worth mourning, not worth saving, nor protecting. That they are all terrorists or terrorists-to-be, who are simply killed as casualties in the quote fog of war. I also think that the mention of children is specifically used as a way to at least try to make the world empathize and fucking feel something about the lives that have been stolen. Parents literally hold up the limp and decapitated bodies of their babies and it's broadcast

worldwide and yet the dehumanization of Arabs runs so deep That such graphic displays of horror and death are considered normal. No one bats an eye It is insane that 274 Palestinians were slaughtered for four prisoners of war who could have been released in a prisoner exchange Exchanges and deals that Israel has repeatedly rejected. We will get into this more in this episode. And people are celebrating this shameful military operation which US troops were a part of and ignoring the Palestinians that were killed and murdered in the process, further emphasizing that Palestinian life is not as

important as Israeli life by a huge margin. And in case you didn't hear the details about this operation that I'm talking about, US and Israeli troops infiltrated a refugee camp in trucks disguised as humanitarian aid to Trojan horse their way into further massacring and maiming people who were already being forcibly starved. Are you hearing this? One more time, they infiltrated a refugee camp in trucks disguised as humanitarian aid. Israeli special forces were also disguised as Palestinian refugees looking for a place

to live when they entered the buildings where they thought the hostages were being held. Remember in January when there was also video evidence of the IOF pretending to be medical staff in a hospital and then shooting and killing unarmed doctors, nurses, and patients? Oh, and then there was the discovery of at least three mass graves at El Shifa hospital where bodies including many wearing scrubs were found zip-tied and buried in piles. Israel has been doing this for months and years and decades, and they've been getting away with it for months and years and decades. No one is hiding how they feel anymore. They are out here showing us with their actions. It's not ambiguous. It is not confusing. They are making it very simple. They are making it crystal clear. Palestinians do not matter.

And Israel's intention is to continue their ethnic cleansing of Palestine. What's happening in Gaza is not about the hostages, and it has never been about the hostages. If that isn't clear to you by now, you have not been paying attention. A few things about the hostages. Hamas has repeatedly offered since last year to release all hostages in exchange for Israel releasing all Palestinian prisoners. As of November 1, according to Human Rights Watch, Israel held nearly 7,000 Palestinians in its prisons, and many of those held captive by Israel are not convicted of

any crime. At least 3,660 Palestinians being held in Israel are under what is called administrative detention. An administrative detainee is someone held in prison without charge nor trial. Without charge. No crime committed. I want to take a moment to bring up a report that came out recently that's not getting nearly enough attention. It's truly horrific and I don't know how people are just glossing over it. But the New York Times recently reported that Palestinians are being tortured and abused in Israeli prisons. Two journalists from the New York Times spent three months interviewing Israeli soldiers as well as Palestinians who were detained at one particular prison.

I'm not going to pretend I know how to pronounce it, it's spelled S-D-E space T-E-I-M-A-N, said Taiman. I'm just going to go with that. But essentially Israel is carrying out a policy of systematic torture in this army base. And this army base has been used as a detention camp for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. This was all confirmed by a New York Times investigation. Reports of abuse at this site had already emerged in both Israeli and Arab media, and

this was followed by outcries from local and international rights groups about the horrific conditions there. Apparently it was mainly used as a quote, makeshift interrogation center, but now it has become a major focus for the accusations that the Israeli military has mistreated its detainees, including people who were later determined to have no ties to Hamas or any other armed groups. The investigation revealed that at least 1200 Palestinian civilians were detained at this site in quote demeaning conditions without the ability to plead their cases to a judge for up to 75 days and additionally denied access to lawyers for up to 90 days. Eight former detainees, all of whom the military confirmed were held at the site and spoke

on the record, said they had been punched, kicked, and beaten with batons, rifle butts, and a handheld metal detector while they were in custody. Others said that they had been forced to wear a diaper while being interrogated, and that they had received electric shocks during their interrogation. According to the New York Times, most of these testimonies were corroborated by interviews conducted by officials from the UNRWA, the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees. The agency interviewed hundreds of returning detainees who reported widespread abuse at this site, as well as other Israeli detention facilities, including the beatings and the use of an electric probe. An Israeli soldier who served at this

site also disclosed to the New York Times that his fellow soldiers often bragged about beating detainees, and he observed many instances of such treatment. He was speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid prosecution, but he said a detainee had been taken for treatment at the site's makeshift field hospital with a bone that had been broken during his detention, while another person was briefly taken out of sight and then returned with bleeding around his rib cage. I strongly urge you to read the New York Times Peace and Full. It details the most horrific things I've read in recent memory. I would be remiss to not mention at least a few of them just so you understand the severity,

but this report essentially proves that Palestinians are experiencing sexual violence and have experienced sexual violence in Israeli prisons. This is one example. Mr. El Hamlawi, a senior nurse, said a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. He said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him in unbearable pain. A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators made him sit on something like

a hot metal stick that felt like fire, and he said that another detainee died after they put the electric stick up his anus. Dr. El Hamlawi also recalled being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity. He said he was shocked so often that after initially urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urinating for several days. He said that he too had been forced to wear nothing but a diaper to stop him from soiling the floor. Ibrahim Shaheen, 38, a truck driver, he said he was shocked roughly half a dozen times

while sitting in a chair. Officers had accused him of concealing information about the location of dead hostages, which ended up having no connection to him at all. Another man, Mr. Beckett, said that he was also forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity, sending a current pulsing through his body that made him pass out. Mr. Beckett also said, along with other detainees that corroborated this, he only received roughly three meager snacks on most days, mostly bread with small quantities of cheese or jam or tuna. The military said the food provisions had been approved by an authorized nutritionist in order to maintain their health. But according to several of these detainees, that's not

nearly enough, and they lost more than 40 pounds during their detention. Again, I urge you to read the report in full. It needs more attention than it's getting, but it is horrific and this is proof of the vile mistreatment of Palestinians. And it's from the New York Times, if you need a source that you quote-unquote trust more than an Al Jazeera or something, which makes no sense. But for those who do, there it is. Now, let's go back to the topic at hand. We were talking about the hostages and how Hamas had offered many times in the past to release all the hostages in exchange for releasing Palestinian prisoners. And despite Hamas's offers, Israel has never agreed to any deal which involves the release

of all Israeli hostages. On October 9th, two days after October 7th, Hamas offered to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IOF not entering the Gaza Strip. But Israel rejected that offer, and many hostages have died since then, which could have been avoided if Israel cared. A few stats. 105 Israeli hostages were freed via a temporary ceasefire in November of last year. Four other hostages were released by Hamas.

Three hostages were killed by I.O.F. quote, friendly fire, because the I.O.F. considered them a threat as they were waving white flags. During four Israeli quote, rescue missions, one hostage was killed. One soldier was saved. In what Israel called Operation Golden Hand on February 12th of this year, two hostages were saved, and at least 94 Palestinians were killed. And then on June 8th, what is now being called Operation Arnan, four Israeli hostages were rescued, and at least 274 Palestinians were killed. In a statement released after the attack, Hamas said,

In exchange for them, the four Israeli hostages, your own army killed three of your own captives in the same attack, one of them holding a U.S. citizenship. And it must be mentioned that the Israeli attacks on Gaza have also killed an unknown number of hostages in Hamas captivity as well as the at least 37,000 Palestinians killed since October 7th. Relentlessly bombing a tiny strip of land where Israel knows its hostages are located doesn't really indicate that Israel gives a shit about the lives of the hostages. The hostages are pawns

being used in a disgusting political game. And I have seen several unhinged and deranged comments about this latest operation, which again killed 274 Palestinians including children in the process of saving four hostages. The comments range in severity and psychopathy, but a lot of them are basically saying, how else were they supposed to get the hostages. The comments range in severity and psychopathy, but a lot of them are basically saying how else were they supposed to get the hostages back, and Israel must rescue its people by any means necessary, and that this is what you get when you mess with Israel. But after reading the previous numbers, it is an absolute fact that the only mass release of hostages has come through ceasefire and prisoner exchanges.

More hostages have been killed by the Israeli army than rescued by them. A ceasefire deal means freed hostages without mass death. And so if Israel really cared about the lives of these hostages, why on earth wouldn't they agree to a deal that can guarantee their safety? I want to take a quick tangent only to mention that the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is most likely far, far greater than the reported number, because the infrastructure that was used to document the death toll has been decimated, along with nearly everything else in Gaza. The number 37,000 also does not include the

thousands and thousands of Palestinians buried underneath rubble who are unable to be found nor retrieved. The Health Ministry's Director of International Cooperation in the West Bank, Dr. Yasser Bozya, says he works closely with ministry colleagues in Rize. When he spoke with NPR in late January from his office in Ramallah, he said an estimated 10,000 people were missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Ghazzeh. But even that number was low. It's like a snowball, he said. It's only an estimation. The actual number is much, much higher.

Bozia and doctors in Ghazzeh say the death count published by the Health Ministry also largely excludes people who have died from a lack of adequate treatment, disease, and other impacts from the war, like hunger. The death toll only includes people killed by the quote, occupation bombardment, he said. The Health Ministry describes its casualty figures as those resulting from Israeli aggression. Bozjas as a colleague in Gaza told him that the only way to really know how many people have died is to count the number of people still alive compared with the population of Gaza before October 7th. He said that because of the continued brutal genocide going on in Gaza, it is impossible to have the real number. It will only be revealed

after the violence has stopped. The death toll also does not make clear how many militants are among the dead. Israel says its forces have killed more than 10,000 fighters in Gaza, but Israel has also not provided any sort of evidence or detailed information to back up its estimate. In every interview every Israeli correspondent or spokesperson has given, they always give a number for the estimated fighters or terrorists killed in Gaza, but they're very unsure about how many civilians have been killed. And now to go back to the US peace plan that is basically identical to previous peace plans

proposed by and agreed to by Hamas. What does this US plan propose? This plan has three stages. The first stage proposes to involve a six-week ceasefire during which the Israeli army will withdraw from the populated areas of Gaza. Hostages, including the elderly and women, would be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Civilians would also return to all of Gaza, with 600 trucks carrying humanitarian aid flooding the enclave daily,

Biden said. The second phase would see Hamas and Israel negotiate terms for a permanent end to hostilities. Biden said, the ceasefire will still continue as long as negotiations continue. In the third phase, a permanent ceasefire would follow, facilitating the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, including 60% of clinics, schools, universities, and religious buildings damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces. This plan is nearly identical to a previous plan that Hamas had already agreed to on May 6th, a deal which Israel ended up rejecting.

We will talk more about that deal later on, but for now let's focus on the US's plagiarized version of this plan and who supports it. But first, let's take a mad break. And we'll be right back. Okay, and we are back. So soon after the announcement of the US deal, Hamas said that it views the proposals in this deal positively. This week US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, fucking tool, arrived in the Middle East on

his latest trip to the region, which he said will focus on Washington's Gaza truce proposal and the future of the Palestinian territory. Blinken met Egyptian President El Sisi in Cairo on Monday, repeating US calls for Hamas to accept the truce deal. Speaking to reporters before leaving Egypt, Blinken squarely blamed Hamas for prolonging the quote-unquote war, saying that Hamas is an outlier in the region for not agreeing to the US deal. Blinken arrived in Israel later on that same day and met with Na'anyahu. He will further hold talks in Qatar and Jordan this week. The State Department said Blinken will be meeting with Na'anyahu in the next week. Blinken's visit to the region was a sign of his commitment to the region. He said he was a big fan of the region and that he would be a part of the region's

future. Blinken also said he would be a big fan of the with Netanyahu. He will further hold talks in Qatar and Jordan this week. The State Department said Blinken reaffirmed the quote, ironclad U.S. commitment to Israel's security during his meeting with Netanyahu. A curious note is that while Blinken portrayed the truce plan as Biden's proposal, when Biden made the deal public initially, he said it was an Israeli plan. This could be just a little slip because Biden is very old, or it could be a slip that just confirms what we've all known to be the case all along. But the US and Israel are one and the same,

especially when it comes to their political interests and military power. And while US officials have insisted that Israel agreed to this proposal, various Israeli officials, including the Anyahu, have vowed to continue fighting until the elimination of Hamas. Just days before Biden announced his initiative, a top Israeli official said the military would fight in Gaza until at least the end of the year. On the other hand, Hamas has said that it will only agree to a deal that would lead to a lasting end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. Hamas reiterated its position on Monday after its political chief Ismael Haniye met with officials from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed group, in Duhah.

Hamas said in a statement, The two delegations discussed the indirect negotiations and efforts to end the war, stressing that any agreement must include a permanent ceasefire, complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, reconstruction, ending the siege, and a serious prisoners' exchange. Hamas previously called for an explicit commitment from Israel to a lasting ceasefire. And despite the lack of clarity in the Israeli position, Biden administration officials have repeatedly said that Hamas is the only hurdle to ending the war in Gaza. The US blaming Hamas for prolonging what it calls a quote-unquote war,

again not a war, a genocide, is ridiculous. Hamas has accepted previous peace deals. It has offered previous peace deals. Israel has been the one to reject them. And then the US comes along and just repackages one of these previously agreed on deals that Hamas had endorsed and has the audacity to then blame Hamas for obstructing peace. Just give me a break. Additionally, the U.S. truce plan does not outline plans for the future of Gaza after the war, but the U.S. government has said that it would not accept Hamas rule in the territory. The Biden administration says it wants a, quote, reformed Palestinian authority, aka the PA to eventually govern Gaza.

But the Israeli government has ruled out allowing the occupied West Bank based PA to govern Gaza, with Netanyahu likening Fatah, the dominant faction in the PA to Hamas. Other support for the plan has come from some Israeli politicians, as well as the families of the hostages and the international community. Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Israel's three-man war cabinet and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's principal rival, spoke positively of the proposal and asked his two colleagues in the war cabinet, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Golanat, to convene

to discuss the quote next steps. Gantz had previously threatened to leave the cabinet by June 8th if no plan for Gaza beyond the war had been agreed on, and on Sunday, June 9th, he officially announced his resignation. Gantz's resignation does not immediately pose a threat to Netanyahu, who still controls a majority coalition in parliament. But it does mean that the Israeli leader becomes more heavily reliant on his far-right allies. Gantz said that Netanyahu was making, quote, total victory impossible, and that the government needs to put a return of the hostages seized on October 7th by Hamas above political survival. Gantz is a popular former military chief, and he joined the Anyahu's government shortly

after the Hamas attack in a show of unity. His presence also boosted Israel's credibility with its international partners. Gantz has good working relations with U.S. officials. Gantz canceled a planned news conference the night of June 8th, after the four Israeli hostages were rescued from Gaza earlier in the day, which again was Israel's largest operation since October. Another reminder that 274 Palestinians, including children, were killed in the assault. Another Israeli politician who supported the US peace plan was opposition leader

Yair Lapid, who also promised to support the plan, pledging support of his party Yesh Atid, which translates from Hebrew to There is a Future, if those from ultra-nationalists and far-right parties withdraw support. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres also endorsed the plan, as have many of Israel's political allies, including the UK and Germany. So who doesn't like the plan? Much of the opposition to the peace plan has come from within the Israeli cabinet. Netanyahu said any initiative that did not include a, quote, elimination of Hamas's capacity to govern and make war was a non-starter. In his announcement on Friday, May 31st, Biden seemed to indicate that he regarded

Hamas's presence within Gaza to have been so downgraded that a repeat of October 7th was impossible. As expected, the ultra-nationalists and extreme right members of Netanyahu's right-wing coalition, which includes Itamar Ben-Gavir and Bezalel Semotrich, threaten to withdraw from the government and cause its collapse if the proposals were accepted. So as far as Israel's politics are concerned, it seems like the outcome may end up depending on what El-Jazeera describes as, quote, parliamentary arithmetic. The far right and ultranationalist parties hold 14 seats, while Gantz's block only has 8 seats, meaning the far right has far more influence on a prime minister who wants to stay in power.

As for Lapid, his 17 seats are offered as support only in what pertains to the peace proposals. This leaves Anyahu reliant on the far right block. As far as the deal being accepted, that is still not clear, despite what the US says. The families of Israeli hostages are putting pressure on the government to accept the deal, as are some parts of Israel's political class. But pressures to reject the deal are just as strong, and it will remain to be seen whether the Anyahu chooses his own survival or the return of the hostages. But if one thing is clear, it is that Netanyahu does not really care about the hostages, because

the IOF under his command continues to bombard areas where the hostages can be held, and may I remind you that the IOF have already killed Israeli hostages that they have mistakenly identified as threats. Speaking of threats... um, I'm kidding. There is no ad break and there is no threat. That's the end of part one. And if you want to listen to part two, tune in tomorrow, talking about the history of Hamas and how we got here. So yeah, see you then.'re Palestine. Hey, I'm Melissa Fumero and I'm Stephanie Beatriz. You may know us from television. And now we're here with our very own podcast, More Better with Stephanie and Melissa. We've known each other for thousands of years.

And we've been through it all together. And we are totally killing it. We are literally the best. No notes. Life is great. Ha ha ha ha. None of that was true. JK, JK, join us on our excellent adventure

as we take on topics like listening to yourself. There were a lot of red flags, and it did take me eight years to get there, but I got there. The challenge of self-care. This is important because now you're about to be a mom of two kids. And making friends as an adult. We're going to share our struggles just white knuckling through life, babe. We're going to speak to experts and we're going to share everything we learn with you. Listen to more better with Stephanie and Melissa as part of the Michael Duda

podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello acclaimed comics writer and notorious Scott Summers hater Rosie Knight. Well, hello Emmy winning podcaster and totally unbiased Targaryen royal supporter, Jason Concepcion. Rosie, somehow the X-Ray Vision podcast has returned! It feels so good. It does! And like always, we'll be here every week covering the wide world of TV, movies, comics,

and geek culture. That's right. We'll be talking about Batman, heroes of that stature, and of course, we'll be inviting our friends in the industry to come geek out with us and share stories. We'll hear from TV writers, actors, comics creators, pop culture critics, and more. Nothing is off the table, because geek culture

is pop culture. And we can't wait to share our love of it all with you every single week. Listen to X-Ray Vision on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, I'm home. Everyone knows that it's dad's job to be a bit of a joker. Sorry I'm late everyone. There was an accident at the factory.

Monty fell into the upholstery machine. Don't worry though, he's fully recovered. Good one dad. Did you get the pizza for dinner? So he likes to keep everyone happy with some dad jokes. Yep, right here. I had a coupon and it saved me a lot of dough. Well the truth is, dad is just a fun guy. Hey, I'm not a mushroom.

Please stop. Where does he get these stupid jokes from? He listens to the Daily Dad Jokes podcast. Oh great, more Dad jokes for me. We've delivered over 15,000 jokes to over 3 million listeners and man, the postage fees are killing us. million listeners and man, the postage fees are killing us. Listen to the Daily Dad Jokes podcast every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Juan Gabriel. Juan Guiis.

Selena. Selena. Celia Cruz. Azucar. Peril G. La Bichota. Christina Aguilera. Xtina.

Just to name a few. We're serving the whole story. From rags to riches. An awesome story. From rags to riches. An awesome story. From rags to riches. Christina Aguilera. Extina. Just to name a few. We're serving the whole story. From rags to riches. And all the tea in between. I'm Liliana Vasquez.

And I'm Joseph Carrillo. And we're the host of Becoming an Icon Season Two. Guess who's back in a house. And we're bringing you even more stories behind the world's biggest stars in Latin music. Certified Latin royals. Consider us your star sleuths, your cheese my besties, digging beneath los mejores exitos to bring you everything you didn't know about your favorite Latin icons.

Hey, you know what, my boo? You're my favorite icon. Aww, Joseph! Listen to Becoming an Icon, part of the Michael Thurow Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My simple solution to the problem was remove people from the scene and help them feel safer.

In response to attacks against Asian-Americans, Maddie Park raised over $250,000 to donate cab rides to the Asian community. There is so much more work to be done. We really need to come together and tackle this issue as a community. Support the Asian community. Learn how at lovehasnolabels.com. Brought to you by Love Has No Labels and the Ad Council. Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. This is Shireen. And today we are continuing our conversation from yesterday where we talked about the U.S.

proposed peace deal for Hamas and Israel. That looks suspiciously like a deal Hamas had already agreed to just a few weeks before that, and Israel did not agree to. We had ended part one talking about how the IOWF literally killed their own hostages when they mistakenly thought they were threats. And I ended saying, speaking of threats, and I'm going to continue,

because that's what professionals do. So, since October 7th, Israel has described Hamas as an existential threat, saying that it needs to destroy the group and won't stop the violence in Gaza until it does so. But I would argue that most people who are pro-Israel or western Zionists in general don't actually know anything about Hamas other than thinking they're this big bad evil that has to be eradicated by the quote only democracy in the Middle East, which I hope by this point

people realize is a sick joke. Hamas is suddenly being talked about on every news channel, and anything even remotely pro-Palestine is now labeled as pro-Hamas, when most people in this country I would argue most likely had never even heard of Hamas before October 7th. Labeling something as pro-Hamas truly just means nothing. As far as Israel is concerned, the UN is Hamas. In May, Israel's ambassador to the UN, G'lad Erdan, said in an interview with Israel's army radio that the UN has quote, turned into a collaborator with Hamas. Maybe even more than that. A terror organization unto itself.

Wow. Israeli leadership has just continued to one-up themselves when it comes to saying the most insane fucking shit. And then according to Zionists, the college campus protests that were calling for a literal end to genocide are also pro-Hamas. Earlier this month, a lawsuit was filed in Virginia by a US law firm and an Israeli legal group who have teamed up to sue two organizations involved in recent college campus protests, the American Muslims for Palestine and National Students

for Justice in Palestine. They accused these groups of collaborating with Hamas to serve as their quote propaganda division in the US. Arson Avtrosky, the CEO of the International Legal Forum, who was working with this US legal team of Greenberg, Tarig, and the National Jewish Advocacy Center, called the American Muslims for Palestine and the National Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as all the protesters supporting Palestine, most of whom are students, as quote, the foot soldiers of Hamas. If I was going to go through everything that Israel and Zionists

have labeled as pro-Hamas, this episode would never end, but I hope it's clear that this label and accusation isn't based on any real sort of evidence or proof, and it is only a way to scare people into blindly supporting Israel in quote, defending itself, big quotes there, against this growing evil spreading across the globe and invading our campuses. When in reality, there would be no Hamas without Israel. Although Hamas eventually grew into being the most active armed resistance group in Gaza, it definitely didn't start that way, and it wouldn't have even had the power to grow the way it did if it weren't for intentional actions by Israeli leadership that started decades ago. Before we get into a timeline of the recent Hamas peace deals that have led to this very

similar deal that the US proposed, all deals that again Israel has rejected, I want to make sure we at least have an understanding of what Hamas even is. Hamas, which is an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, would not exist today if it wasn't for Israel. American and Israeli politicians are always saying the same thing, how dangerous and evil Hamas is, without mentioning how Israel itself helped create Hamas. The TLDR of it all is that Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the

world's most notorious militant groups. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a confirmed fact. Former Israeli officials such as Brigadier General Isaac Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, have openly spoken about this. After his tenure, Segev told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a quote, counterweight to secularists and leftists of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, aka the PLO, as well as the Fatah Party, which was led by Yasser Arafat. Arafat, too, referred to Hamas as quote, a creature of Israel.

Hamas was officially founded in 1987 at the start of the first Palestinian Intifada or uprising against the Israeli occupation. But its beginnings actually started much earlier. Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had been repressed by Egyptians in Gaza prior to 1967, but once the Israelis invaded and occupied the Gaza Strip, they chose to encourage this group of extremist Islamists. The dominant Palestinian political force in Palestine at the time was the PLO, and it was deemed a threat to Israel, and so Israel

sought to undermine its power. The PLO is a nationalist coalition which was centered around the secular Fatah party led by Yasser Arafat. By empowering Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood, Israel thought they could divide the occupied Palestinian people and eventually rule over them by playing them against each other. Secular nationalists versus religious Islamists. In 1978, Yassin wanted to officially register his Islamic Association which was basically the precursor to present-day Hamas. The Israelis jumped on the opportunity to help make this happen. Yassin built and grew a network of Islamist social institutions across Gaza, funded largely by Israel. Avner Cohen is a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more

than two decades. In 2009, he told the Wall Street Journal, Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide and rule in the occupied territories by backing Palestinian Islamists against the Palestinian secularists. He wrote in his report, I suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before reality jumps in our face. Clearly his superiors did not listen to him, and Hamas was the result. To be clear, Israelis had helped build up a militant strain of extremist political Islam

in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors and allowed it free reign in order to quiet any chance of progress in Palestine. And then, when it became convenient for their Zionist narrative, the Israelis tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence. David Hashem, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, said the, quote, original sin was Israel's support of Yassin in the 1970s. He said, "'When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.

Yeah, no shit. The only American politician that I know of who has ever referenced how Israel is responsible for Hamas's creation is Ron Paul. In 2001, on the floor of the house, Ron Paul said, Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat. Speaking of Arafat, not only did he himself tell an Italian newspaper that Hamas is a creature of Israel,

he also said that the former Israeli Prime Minister, Yasser Rabin, admitted this to him, calling it a, quote, fatal error. Yassin was eventually assassinated by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on March 22nd, 2004. Silvan Shalom, former Israeli vice prime minister, said after Yassin's death that quote, Sheikh Yassin and his organization, Hamas, are responsible for the killings of more than 400 Israelis. When actually, no, Israel is clearly largely responsible. David Long, a former Middle East expert in the US State Department under Ronald Reagan, told journalist Robert Dreyfuss, I thought the Israelis were

playing with fire. This of course is not a unique development, as there have been dozens of instances of unneeded and malignant US intervention in other countries for its own gain. And since then Hamas has killed far more Israelis than any secular Palestinian militant group. Israel built up Yassin and Hamas as a rival to Arafat's Fatah, then they killed Yassin, and then they doubled down and making Hamas Israel's worst enemy, an enemy it would use to justify to the entire world that it was not only okay but necessary to control and massacre millions of Palestinians in the process of destroying this threat. Israel spent more than 20 years helping build up Hamas, and then spent another

20 years trying build up Hamas, and then spent another 20 years trying to destroy it. All of this is to say that aside from the purposeful assistance from Israel in creating Hamas, that Hamas wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for the Israeli occupation. There would be no resistance, because without the ethnic cleansing and forced violent occupation, there would be nothing to resist. In the process of bolstering this militant group, Hamas also became the main armed force behind the Palestinian resistance.

And many view Hamas as the only group even attempting to defend Palestinians in the face of Israeli occupation. And the organization itself has changed over the years, especially in the last decade. It seems like Hamas was and is increasingly trying to establish a more favorable status quo for the Palestinian people. Hamas's leaders were shaped by the hard realities of a brutal occupation, which was marked by mass arrests of Palestinians, the expropriation of Palestinian lands, and control of their resources. More than half a million Palestinians were arrested and tried in Israel's military-run courts between 1967 and 1987, and over 1,500 Palestinian homes were demolished, and thousands of Palestinians were forcibly deported, aka ethnically cleansed.

After Hamas won the 2006 elections in Gaza, its leader Haneeyah said the group accepted a state on the 1967 borders, as well as all the decisions taken by the PA and the PLO, but there were no takers. Hamas leaders also backed the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative that called for the following, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in 1967, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they had been forcibly displaced from since 1948, and the formation of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state in return for Arab recognition of Israel. But Hamas's offers were repeatedly dismissed by Israel and ignored by Israel's Western allies, including the U.S., despite Washington's claims of playing the role of a quote, honest broker in the

conflict. Tarek Bacone, author of Hamas Contained, The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, told Al Jazeera, Hamas has always said that they are ready to offer a truce and to stop targeting civilians if the Israeli occupation removes its settlers. At least 750,000 Israelis live in hundreds of fortified illegal settlements and outposts across the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the vast majority of which are again built illegally either entirely or partially on private Palestinian land, and thus they violate international law. One of the more infuriating and frankly incredibly stupid talking points that Zionists have when it comes to talking about Hamas is the 2006 election where Palestinians elected Hamas as their appointed leadership.

I want to remind everyone of a few things. The Gaza Strip has a very young population. Most of the inhabitants in Gaza are under 15 years old. The largest population group in Gaza are children between the ages of five and nine years old. This population wasn't even born yet, let alone old enough to vote, in 2006. And furthermore, leadership does not indicate your right to live a life. Your right to not be killed. If you're in America, and Trump is your elected president, and you hate Trump and maybe other foreign entities hate Trump, do you deserve to die?

No, you don't. The resistance fighters in Hamas are not the ones who wrote the original charter. They're not the ones who established Hamas in the first place. They're young people that are joining the most active armed resistance to defend Palestine. It's their only option. And Palestinians have tried other nonviolent forms of resistance against this occupation. In 2018 to 2019, there was something called the Great March of Return. It started on March 30, 2018 and ended December 27, 2019. Every Friday for those years, Palestinians in Gaza demonstrated and protested along the border fence between Israel and Gaza

for a right to return to their homes and to demand an end to the Israeli blockade in Gaza. During this time, the Israeli army killed a total of 223 people. Over 3,601,000 people, including nearly 8,800 children, were injured. This is after a peaceful attempt at demonstrating, after a peaceful attempt at trying to resist occupation. They're still shot and killed. They're shot with the intention to kill. Expecting Palestinians to be pacifists when it comes to resisting a brutal, violent occupation that has been now almost a century long is very small-minded and entitled and frankly, wrong.

Palestinians have the right to resist. Armed resistance is legal under international law when it comes to resisting and occupying power. What does this mean? Maybe you've heard that train of thought before. Let me explain it to you. Let's go back in time a little bit. The General Assembly of the United Nations, the UNGA,

which was once described as the collective conscious of the world, noted the right of peoples to self-determination, independent, and human rights. As early as 1974, resolution 3314 of the UNGA prohibited states from any military occupation, however temporary. Hmm, curious, Israel has been doing that for decades now. In the relevant part of the resolution, the resolution not only went on to affirm the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence of peoples forcibly deprived of

that right, and particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination, but it also noted the right of the occupied to quote struggle and to seek and receive support in that effort. The term armed struggle was implied without precise definition in that resolution and many early other ones that upheld the right of Indigenous peoples to evict an occupier. Again, the right of an Indigenous people to evict their occupier. But the imprecise language was changed on December 3, 1982. At that time, the WNGA Resolution 37-43 removed any doubt or debate over the lawful entitlement of occupied people to resist occupying forces by any and all lawful means. The resolution reaffirmed, quote, the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity, and liberation from colonial and foreign domination

and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle." And although Israel has tried, time and time again, to recast this ambiguous intent of this precise resolution trying to place its now nearly century-long violent brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza beyond this resolution's application, the declaration itself proceeds to be very explicit in its language when it comes to Palestine. Section 21 of the resolution strongly condemned, quote, the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East and the continual bombing of Palestinian civilians,

which constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people. That's what I mean, and that's what many people mean, when they say that Palestinians have the right to resist and armed resistance is illegal under international law. I want to bring that up because even if Hamas does not reflect the viewpoint of some Palestinians, Hamas is also the main armed resistance group that has been fighting against the I.O.F. in defending Palestine, Gaza in particular, against Israel. And they have a right to do that. Clearly as international law states.

Regardless, let's go back to talk about the history of Hamas and how they amended their charter in 2017. In 2017, Hamas formally amended its original 1988 charter. The new charter holds that armed resistance against an occupying power is justified under international law. And while the 1988 Hamas charter has been widely criticized for its anti-Semitism, a 2007 document states that Hamas' fight is not with the Jewish people but with the Zionist project. And as you should realize by now, anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. The new charter also announced

once again that it would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. This would recognize, in effect, a two-state solution, and therefore the existence of Israel as a legitimate entity. a two-state solution, and therefore the existence of Israel as a legitimate entity. This was proposed even as Israel continued to insist that it can no longer allow Hamas to exist, and as Israeli politicians, led by Netanyahu, repeatedly ruled out a two-state solution. Hamas political leader Khaled Mashal said at the time, The Hamas thinking from the very start was clear. We are not facing a religious war.

Hamas, ever since its inception, realizes the nature of the struggle against the Israeli occupier, that it is not a struggle because they are Jews, but because they are occupiers. Israeli officials dismiss the new policy paper as lies. In a video, Na'anyahu symbolically and dramatically threw the document into a trash bin, saying it was an attempt to deceive the world. Through its actions which span across decades, Israel has not shown any interest in a political agreement, whether with Hamas or other Palestinian political parties, like Fatah, which governs the occupied West Bank. Sari Arabi, a Ramallah-based political analyst, told Al Jazeera, the issue is not about Gaza. It's also not about whether Israel or Hamas started the war. There are daily killings and assaults in the occupied West Bank.

There are attacks on the Al Aqsa Mosque. There are prisoners and checkpoints. The people in Gaza are refugees. They were isolated and separated from the rest of the Palestinian people. And the vast majority of Gaza's population are refugees, who were forcibly expelled from their homes and villages in the 1948 Nakba by Zionist militias. Many political analysts also blame Israel for the failure of the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and 1995, between Israel and the PLO, which was representative of the Palestinian people at the time. The agreements led to the formation of the PA, an interim five-year governing body meant to lead to an independent Palestinian state, comprising of the occupied territory of East Jerusalem, and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, 30 years into its existence, the PA has failed to create a state in the face

of Israeli occupation, illegal land grabs, and settlements. And then Hamas took control of Gaza from the PA in 2007. While there was initial support for the Oslo Accords among Palestinians, the failure to reach a final peace agreement by 1999 and the growing settlement projects particularly under Netanyahu left many disappointed. In a leaked video in 2010, Netanyahu boasted about how he made sure the Oslo Accords did not succeed. The hopes of the Oslo Accords turned into despair as Israeli policies under successive governments continued to undermine the PA and its aspirations.

Today the PA has limited administrative rule over pockets of the occupied West Bank, while Israeli settlements, which are again considered illegal under international law, have grown rapidly. The settler population in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem has grown from 250,000 Israelis in 1993 to more than 700,000 this year. In his talk with El-Jazeera, author Tarek Barconi said, the Israelis wanted Oslo because that's how they maintain their colonization, by maintaining the facade of a peace process. Hamas was showing a mirror to the Israelis to say, if you're actually talking about the possibility of ending the occupation, then end it.

That was their offer, instead of the 1993 Oslo agreements, that they would stop armed resistance if Israel let Palestinians be in the eastern side of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. When we look into the history of Hamas, we see that its political leadership has over the years proposed numerous long-term truces or ceasefires to Israel in exchange for the realization of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state. But Israel has rejected those offers, arguing that Hamas could not

be trusted to adhere to any long-term ceasefire, and insisting that any proposal for a short-term pause in fighting were insincere and strategically aimed only at helping the armed movement regroup from losses. I've said this before but it bears repeating. Every Zionist accusation is a confession. The reality is that Israel is the one who could not be trusted to adhere to any long term ceasefire, as we have seen time and time again. Here is a summarized timeline of the most recent peace deal attempts that have been proposed since October 7th, since the genocide in Gaza started. In January 2024, Naanyahu rejected a Hamas proposal to end the war and release more than

a hundred captives held by the group, in exchange for a withdrawal of Israeli forces, the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, and recognition of Hamas governance over Gaza. And then on May 6th, Hamas said it accepted a Gaza ceasefire proposal, which was put forward by Egypt and Qatar. This deal would come in three stages that would see an initial halt in the fighting, leading to lasting calm and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Palestinian territory. It would also ensure the release of Israeli captives in Gaza, as well as an unspecified number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

The framework of the agreement in brief is the release of all Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip, civilians or military, alive or otherwise, from all periods, in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel as agreed upon, and a return to a sustainable calm that leads to a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip, as well as its reconstruction and the lifting of the siege. Hmm, it seems a little familiar, doesn't it? But Israel unsurprisingly did not agree to this proposal. Instead, it bombed Rafa.

Which made the Israeli government's message clear. There will be no permanent ceasefire. Israel's bombing of Rafah was justified by Israel as a way to disband Hamas battalions and seize control of the Gaza-Egyptian crossing, which Israel accuses Hamas of using to smuggle weapons into Gaza. But humanitarian groups were quick to point out that a closure of such a crossing would only lead to further disastrous consequences for the more than 1 million Palestinians living in the Rafah, the majority of them displaced from other areas of Gaza, who fled to Rafah after being told by Israel that it was a quote-unquote safe zone. Israel said at the time that the terms of the May Hamas ceasefire deal differed from previous proposals it had seen, but analysts believe that the wider issue is that Israel

is not willing to agree to a permanent ceasefire, even after Hamas releases all Israeli captives. Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the Middle East Council for Global Affairs, spoke about this in May, saying, "...the last couple of days have proved that Israel was not really negotiating in good faith. The moment that Hamas agreed to a deal, Israel was willing to blow that up by commencing their assault on Rafah. The goal is to destroy Gaza in its totality."

And then on May 31st, the US announced its own ceasefire proposal that Biden said would lead to a quote lasting ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. He said the proposal involves three phases, the first of which would last six weeks and would include a full and complete ceasefire as well as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza. Again, this peace plan is almost indistinguishable from the one that Hamas agreed to on May 6th. A quick reminder that only 25 days before this announcement on May 6th, Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire proposal by Egypt and Qatar that is almost identical to the one Biden announced on May 31st, and Israeli leaders rejected that initiative.

On June 7th, Israel rejected the UN's resolution of its own hostage deal offer, which was a permanent ceasefire in exchange for release of all hostages. A reminder that the only mass release of hostages has come through ceasefire exchanges, and that a ceasefire deal means freed hostages without mass death. It boggles my mind that there are still people defending Israel and saying all this Palestinian death is for the hostages, because again, if Israel cared about their lives at all, they would agree to a deal, because that deal can guarantee the safety of the hostages. But they do not care about the hostages.

Every time Israel rejects a deal, they are telling you that. And yet their supporters are too entrenched in the lies and propaganda of Zionism to ever see clearly. So just to summarize, the US proposed a ceasefire deal, which was almost indistinguishable from previous plans agreed to by Hamas. And then while seemingly waiting for Israel to accept the deal, the US launched a military operation and committed more war crimes to murder hundreds of Palestinians, and they did this by hiding in humanitarian aid trucks. While deceiving the world and the Palestinians into thinking that they were trying to formulate a ceasefire agreement,

the U.S. helped Israel plan and carry out its massacres. This is what peacemaking looks like to the United States. A ceasefire deal is the absolute bare minimum and it is nowhere near enough. The removal of Netanyahu is nowhere near enough. He's being set up as the fall guy and scapegoat for Israel, skirting the responsibility of what the Israeli state has done to Palestinian people since 1948. The fight for Palestine is a liberation movement which demands nothing less than the full dignity, freedom, and security of all who live under this violent military occupation. It's a demand to end Israeli apartheid. And until that happens, Israel will continue to get away with the Necba that started in 1948 and continues today. The Necba never ended. Israel will continue to get away with

the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people until Israel and its apartheid is dismantled. A ceasefire is the absolute bare minimum to achieving that. And that, my friends, is our episode for today. Please keep sharing and learning about what is happening in Palestine and go stop talking about it. Free Palestine. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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