Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 139

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

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Ever get the feeling someone's watching you? We know they're looking for us. Well, in 1971, a group of anti-war activists had that feeling. I was in the heart of the dragon and it was my job to stop the fire. So they decided to do something insane, break in to the FBI and expose J. Edgar Hoover's dirty secrets. We had some idea that this was pretty explosive. I'm Ed Helms.

Listen to season two of Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast, There and Gone. It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck and vanished. A truck and two people just don't disappear.

The FBI called it murder for hire. But which victim was the intended target and why? Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1980, while El Salvador sat on the brink of war, one man held together the fragile peace, Archbishop Oscar Romero.

He was brutally assassinated in front of dozens of his loyal followers. His death marked the start of a civil war that left more than 75,000 people dead and a million more displaced around the world. My family includes both, those that fled and those that died. Listen to Sacred Scandal, Nation of Saints on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat

less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Karapun here, but you know, very few things actually happen. I'm Andrew Sage of the YouTube channel Andrewism. Now, indigeneity is a contentious topic, now more than ever. Not when it comes to flora and fauna, of course.

As far as I know, it's a pretty simple matter of being considered indigenous to an ecosystem when they haven't been introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation, as over millions of years, these living things have become well-suited to their habitats, carefully adapted to the region's soil, climate, and food web. When it comes to people, we're talking politics. There can be some confusion about what it means to be Indigenous, especially when questions of land rights, autonomy, and reparations enter the equation. Most people understand that Native American nations and Aboriginal Australians are indigenous,

but they don't really know what that means. Some might then ask, well, if indigenous just means originating from a place, then aren't all Homo sapiens indigenous to Africa? Why should one group's claim of indigeneity take precedence over any other? Others may ask the question, if a group occupies a region for several generations, does that then make them indigenous? Are white Americans indigenous if their family has been there since the founding of the US? Are French people indigenous to France?

And if so, does that somehow justify their xenophobia toward refugees? But when generations of marginalized groups have been struggling to retain their social, cultural, economic, and political sovereignty, and achieve justice, reparations, and liberation after centuries of oppression and attempted annihilation, we need to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for us to understand what it means to be Indigenous. From what I gather through my research, which was focused on the work of just a few North American Indigenous scholars, Tayaki Alfred, Jeff Qu Cornicell, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, indigeneity can be interpreted as a matter of colonial relationship and or as a matter of a

land relationship, a relationship to place. These two definitions are of course highly overlapping. You really can't get away from how colonization informed the land and vice versa. But let's start with the first interpretation of indigeneity. According to Tayyar K. Alfred and Jeff Cordesell, indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. It is an existence oppositional to colonial societies and states and a consciousness of struggle against such forces of colonization. No two indigenous groups are exactly alike, of course. There is significant diversity in their cultures, contexts, and relationships

with colonial forces, but they do share that struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence. Efforts to marginalise and eradicate indigenous peoples may not always be as overt as they once were, with some noticeably overt exceptions, but the historic and ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples, the erasure of indigenous histories, geographies and languages, and the current situation of deprivation, persist nonetheless. Even so-called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality that Indigenous peoples

remain as in earlier colonial eras, fundamentally occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own homelands and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival. By this understanding of indigeneity, it can be said that without a coloniser, without systems in place and actions being taken to marginalise, disempower and destroy their societies in favour of a colonial replacement, there is no need for the concept of indigenous. Without colonialism, there would be no status the concept of indigenous. Without colonialism,

there would be no status of indigenous to be imposed upon the groups of people whose very existence and claim to the land is an obstacle to that colonial endeavor. The UN Working Group of Indigenous issues drew partially from this understanding when attempting to define indigenous peoples in 1986. Quote, Indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies they developed in their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit

to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity as the basis of their continued existence as peoples in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems. By this definition, Amerindians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivases in India, Native North and South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, Kurds, Syrians, Yazidi, Palestinians, Amazigh, Sami, Basque, Sápmi, Basques, Hawaiians, Maori, San, Mibuti, Papuans, Chams, and many more are all indigenous peoples. There are layers of nuance yet to be highlighted.

The colonial situation is not a simple binary of indigenous and colonist. For example, in much of the Americas, Africans who were indigenous to their own homelands were displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime. They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they weren't driving settler colonial society either. In fact, some were enslaved by indigenous people as well. At the same time, some members of the African diaspora would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own, such as the Garifuna of St. Vincent, Honduras, and Belize. Meanwhile, in modern day Africa, though all African ethnic groups can technically be considered

indigenous to the continent, the concept of specific indigenous peoples within Africa refers to those groups whose traditional practices and land claims have been placed outside of the dominant state systems and exist in conflict with the objectives and policies implemented by post-colonial governments, companies, and the surrounding dominant societies. Such a definition can similarly be applied to modern-day Asia, where governments like Indonesia, India, China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh have infamously refused to recognize the existence of indigenous peoples within their territories. These countries, like most countries in the world, did not ratify the International Labour Organization Convention 169 in 1989, known as the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention,

considering the rights of Indigenous Peoples. The UN's Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, passed in 2007, would, however, be voted on approvingly by most of the world, including the same countries that haven't recognised the indigenous peoples within their borders. All four of the countries that rejected that particular resolution, Canada, America, Australia, and New Zealand, would later change their vote in favour of the Declaration, of course with their own tacked on interpretations and emphasis on the declaration's legally non-binding nature, as is to be expected from settler colonial societies. There are approximately 250 to 600 million indigenous peoples around the world today,

each facing the reality of having their lands, cultures, and forms of organization attacked, co-opted, commodified, and reconstructed by various states. Regardless of their legal recognition, Indigenous peoples themselves have long understood that their endurance as a people will continue to depend on their connection to land, culture, and community. Which brings us to the second interpretation of indigeneity, closely related to the first, as an identity rooted in a relationship to place, whether that be physical as with land, social as with community, or cultural as with culture.

An indigenous relationship to land must be reciprocal, with give and take, based on a view of the land and water as a gift that must be cared for over generations. According to Haudenosaunee mythology, as recounted by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, the mother goddess Sky Woman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land, learning from other species to understand how to live on it, giving as she received, and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake of those who would inherit it when she passed on.

In their view, the land is identity. It is ancestral connection. It is pharmacy, it is library, and it is home, the source of all that sustains, and the sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to the world. By this understanding, it can be said that indigeneity is born out of land connection established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by choice or by force, but regardless of where they might find themselves, homeland or not, even if there were other

indigenous peoples in their new environments, as long as they observed the processes and ceremonies of generational relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love for the land in arise, why aren't settlers and dishes the place if their family has lived on land for generations? The answer lies in relationship. Settler society as a whole is based on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land, focused on exploiting the land and its resources. Without a relationship with the land that extends reverence to a deeper understanding of its complex interdependence, settler society can never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes without saying that not every indigenous group or indigenous practice is perfectly

sustainable. Some have been rather destructive and even specicidal. But if we are to work with this definition, to conceive of being indigenous as something based on cultivating a long-term relationship to place, that indigeneity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity of that relationship. With our community, there cannot be indigeneity. Much like the trees in a forest are interconnected by subterranean networks of mycorrhizae, which enable them to share resources and survive as a whole, in order to be indigenous to place, community must exist to sustain that web of reciprocity with the land so that it all may

flourish. Indigeneity to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply tied to the land it develops on. Cultural ceremonies, according to Kimura, focus attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. Such practices should be reciprocal, as ceremonies create communities and communities create

ceremonies, as well as organic, not appropriating existing cultural celebrations or tending toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and fragmented by the pace of modern life, leaving little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rites of personal transition such as birthdays, weddings, and funerals. But ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community. When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia, and excitement builds in the social atmosphere, hopefully fueling the confidence and strength of those who are going on to pursue their passions. But Kimura wants us to imagine standing by a river, flooded with those same feelings as the

salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Being indigenous to place means cultivating cultural ceremonies that honor the land and all the cycles and seasons of life within it. Now that we have a clearer understanding of these two distinct yet related understandings of indigeneity, as both an identity formed as part of a colonial relationship and an identity rooted in a relationship to place, I believe that we should explore how this understanding can be applied to decolonization and social revolution. Decolonization is the process of unsettling colonial power structures, whether that be

through overturning acts of enclosure by building new commons, overturning acts of possession by reclaiming our spaces and identities, or overturning acts of administration through social revolution. Social revolution is a complete transformation of our society, economy, culture, philosophy, technology, relationships, and politics. An ongoing and heterogeneous change in people's powers, drives, and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and transformation of existing systems and institutions, punctuated by major ruptures and advances, all with the aim of self-liberation.

It takes confrontation with the powers that be, non-cooperation with the established order of things, and prefiguration of new social relations, institutions, and infrastructure and practices into here and now. If we maintain the interpretation of indigeneity as based on one's position in a colonial relationship, then the decolonization process will entail the abolition of that relationship as the premise of identity, and therefore the abolition of indigeneity as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally, socially, and spiritually weakened within the narrow parameters of the

state, where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power and develop the process of decolonization toward mimicking the practices of the dominant non-indigenous legal political institutions through, for example, land claims and self-government processes. What the decolonization movement needs, according to Maya Yukateko poet Feliciano Sanchez Chan, are zones of refuge, places where Indigenous knowledge can be guarded, exercised, and sustained. In Mesoamerica, these zones of refuge represent safe spaces where the diverse cultural expressions of the region can persist in spite of state efforts to create a homogenized Mexican national

identity. The concept of zones of refuge is consistent with the traditional objectives of cultural preservation and autonomy, and with the social revolutionary aims of prefiguration, which seeks to sow the seeds of future relationships, institutions, and practices in the here and now. Through the expansion of zones of refuge and other institutions of resistance and autonomy, we can realize decolonization in reality. But again, this idea of indigeneity via colonization is just one understanding of the two. We need to explore another approach to decolonization, one that recognizes the power and potential

of indigenous relationships with the land. Globally, the UN recognizes that indigenous people protect 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity, and scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada, and Australia provide the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly clear that the colonial approach of conservation via dispossession removes the very people who take care of our most important ecosystems. Over the course of Braid and Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer highlights the reciprocal relationship with the earth that many indigenous groups, including her Potawatomi culture, have cultivated

over generations. The principles of the Gift Economy is an essential aspect to this relationship, which forms the basis of indigeneity to place. The Gift Economy is a system of exchange where resources and services are shared without expectation of remuneration or quid pro quo. The gift economy extends not just to people, but also our non-human kin, caring and being cared for in turn. If we want to restore that relationship, we can start by planting a garden. A garden can be a haven for native flora, a resting place for various fauna, a feast

for endangered pollinators, a sustainer of local water table, and a hub of thriving soil. Not only does it benefit both our health and the health of the planet, but it is also a nursery for nurturing a connection that extends beyond that small patch of dirt. I don't believe that merely building a connection with the land can make someone indigenous, but not being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiding the renewal of the world. Kimmer uses the example of the broadleaf plantain, also known as the white man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honored member of the plant community because it thrives as a good neighbour instead of as a destructive invader. While other

invasive species poison the soil or overrun the land, the white man's footprint took on a strategy of helpful coexistence, even sharing some of its healing properties with those who ask of it. It is not indigenous, but it has become naturalised. Quote, being naturalized to a place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters. To take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it,

because they do. Decolonization requires to uproot invasive, irreverent, and destructive individualist-capitalist settler societies in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that we share and are responsible for. It requires to receive and honor the knowledge in the land, to care for its keepers, and pass on that knowledge to the next generation. And it is crucial that we elevate Indigenous voices, knowledges, and pedagogical approaches in pursuit of this aim.

War power to all the people. This has been It G'ra'a'a'p'n'eir. Peace. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast, There and Gone. It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything.

Did they run away? Was it an accident? Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes he's innocent,

but in my eyes he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. Listen to There and Gone South Street and get justice for Richard and Danielle. All that they know. Listen to They're and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's the hardest question you've ever asked your mom?

Mom, what happened to your sister Margarita? For me, it's about a murder that's haunted my family for decades. They said that they took her, and the next day she was already dead. To find the answers, I went to the place where my family is from, El Salvador, and found that the story starts with a priest who was killed on the altar and sparked a war. I'm Jasmine Romero, and on Sacred Scandal Nation of Saints, join me as we uncover an unholy war, one that includes government cover-ups and politicians turned death squad leaders.

But I'll also tell you the story of one family, mine, because on this journey, I found out that we had more secrets than I knew. Listen to Sacred Scandal, Nation of Saints, as part of the MyCultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Late on the evening of March 8, 1971, a group of anti-war activists did something insane. Holy s***, we are really here. This is really happening. They weren't professional criminals.

They were ordinary citizens, but they needed to know the truth about the FBI. Burglaries forged blackmail letters and threats of violence were used to try to stop anti war marches. Even if that meant risking everything, I just felt like I was living in the heart of the dragon

and it was just my job to stop the fire. I'm Ed Helms, host of Snafu, season two Medburg, the story of a daring heist that exposed J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI. If it meant some risks that were involved, well, that's what citizens sometimes have to do. Listen to season two of Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome. This is It Could Happen Here, and I am Shireen. And today is another silly little episode. Well, it's not silly. Well, it is silly,

but I think it's actually also interesting. So maybe you will too. If not, oops. But the point of this is I do not like being on my phone. I hate being on my phone. I've always hated being on my phone. I waited until the last possible moment I could until I even got a smartphone. I waited until the last possible moment I could until I even got a smartphone. But I just hate it. I hate texting. I hate it all. And so, especially the last several years, I've been trying to read more, and it's been great. But sometimes my brain just needs a task for me to do, like with my hands, so I can trick myself to thinking I'm being productive just because I'm physically doing something. And recently, that something are puzzles.

And look, I like all puzzles. You can't show me a puzzle that I won't at least try. Physical jigsaw puzzles that can take hours or days to complete, like sign me up. But ever since getting a cat, it feels a little too precarious to commit to one of these jigsaw puzzles for the fear of her prancing around on the pieces, or knocking them over under furniture to never be found again, or chewing on them, or eating them. And so, the puzzles I have been increasingly turning to recently, which I have always loved, are word and number puzzles. Tadoku, KenKen, classics, incredible. Crosswords, cryptograms, code breakers.

I can do those for hours. I will say though, I do find word searches pretty tedious and boring, but if I was completely out of options, I would probably do those too. There's just something really satisfying about physically putting pen to paper and solving something. And yes, I always use pen because I live on the edge. And as I said, I do not like being on my phone. So I've been buying puzzle books so I can have a physical thing to write on. I've had puzzle books for years, but recently it's become a bit of a problem. I bought four different puzzle books

in the span of like two weeks, and not because I completed all the puzzles in them per se, but because I just completed the ones I wanted to do, usually skipping the word searches or long riddles or whatever. And honestly, a much better use of my freaking time could go to something like learning literally anything else, like picking up a new skill, learning a new language. But no, my smooth brain wants to do a fucking puzzle, so I do a puzzle. Multiple puzzles, usually. Maybe you have noticed a trend, dear listener, in my episodes that are not about Palestine

or the so-called Middle East. Most likely you haven't noticed only because I think about myself far more than anybody else does. But in order to not want to jump off a cliff every day, I've realized I need to write and learn about things that I like? Wow. Incredible discovery. But for real, I think we all need a balance of making sure we're informed about the world and connecting with our humanity as well as doing things as human beings that allow us to continue to want to be informed about the world and connect with our humanity. So one day I won't need this big preamble before every episode that's on about Palestine, but today is not the day.

Anyways, because I love puzzles, I wanted to learn about puzzles. How long have humans been putting together word and number games for the sole purpose of exercising our minds or dare I say, have fun? I needed to know. It's truly one of the most wholesome things the species has ever done.

So I did some research. This episode is going to be about the crossword. That's where I wanted to start. I think most of us would agree that the crossword is the most popular or well-known word game or word puzzle. I will admit that every time I see a random newspaper in a cafe or hotel lobby or something, I always steal the crossword. And I ignore everything else because now is simply not the time. But how did the crossword come to be as this ubiquitous

normal thing? The crossword is a fairly recent invention, born out of desperation. Arthur Wynne is regarded as the inventor of the modern crossword puzzle. He was born in 1871 in Liverpool, England, and his father was the editor of the local newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury. When Arthur was 19, he immigrated to the United States, settling for a time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. While in Pittsburgh, Wynne worked on the Pittsburgh Press newspaper, and he played the violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. We love a well-rounded chap. He later moved to New York City, where he worked as an editor for the New York World newspaper. And then, in 1913,

he invented the crossword puzzle. While working at the New York World, he needed something to fill up the space in the Christmas edition of the paper's fun supplement. Fun in all caps. So he took advantage of the new technology at the time that could print blank grids cheaply, and he created a diamond-shaped set of boxes with clues to fill in the blanks, smack in the center of the fun supplement. with clues to fill in the blanks smack in the center of the fun supplement. So, for the December 21st, 1913 edition of the New York World, he introduced this puzzle with a diamond shape and a hollow center, with the letters F-U-N already being filled in. He called it a Word Cross puzzle. And nearly overnight, the Word Cross puzzle went from a space-filling ploy

to the most popular feature of the page. A few weeks after the first Word Cross appeared, the name of the puzzle was actually changed to Crossword, but this was only a result of a type setting error. However, these puzzles have been known as Crosswords ever since. However, these puzzles have been known as crosswords ever since. Arthur Wynn didn't necessarily invent word puzzles, though. Ever since we've had language, we've played games with words. Crosswords are basically where two long-standing strands of word puzzles interconnect. The first being word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren't necessarily using deliberate deception, and the second being riddles, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren't necessarily using deliberate

deception, and the second being riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don't necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through. Maybe you're wondering, what's a word square? Maybe you're not wondering that but I'm going to tell you anyway. The word square is the direct precursor of the crossword grid. It's a special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words can be read across and down. The number of letters in the square is called its order. While two squares and three squares are easy to create in English, by the time you reach order six you're very likely to get stuck. And order 10 square is a holy grail for those who are regarded as logologists, that is, wordplay experts. So a word square is a puzzle

requiring the discovery of a set of words of equal length written one under another to read the same down as across. Apparently, the ancient Romans loved word puzzles. The first known word square, the so-called Satyr Square, was found on a slab in the ruins of Pompeii. The Satyr Square, which I don't know if I'm saying that right, but it's spelled S-A-T-O-R. It's also known as the Rotus Square, depending on which way you read it, because rotus is satyr backwards. And I say this because word order apparently doesn't matter in Latin. But this square that was found is a 5x5, 5-word Latin palindrome.

I'm going to say it in Latin, but I'll tell you what it means, so apologies on this pronunciation, but Sator Arepo tenant opera rotus. The farmer Arepo works a plow, a palindrome, just a reminder that it's something spelled the same way forwards and back. So that's not necessarily the English translation, but in Latin that's what it is. Author Adrienne Ruffel described the Satyr Square as the quote, kill Roy was here of the Roman Empire. For those who don't know or need a refresher, I'm not going to pretend on you this either, but Killroy was here was a popular American graffiti that was seen overseas throughout World War II. The words Killroy was here were accompanied by a

cartoon drawing of a man looking over a wall, and this became a popular piece of graffiti that was drawn by American troops in the Atlantic theater and then later in the Pacific Theater. It eventually came to be a universal sign that American soldiers had come through an area and left their mark. And then, during the Second World War, Kilroy became so popular that this graffiti could be found everywhere. It was on ship holds, bathrooms, bridges, and it was painted on the shells of air force missiles. Its origins most likely come from a British cartoon and the name of an American shipyard

inspector. The myths surrounding it are numerous, and they often center on a German belief that Kilroy was some kind of super spy who could go anywhere he pleased. Apparently there are two Kilroy inscriptions hidden in the World War II memorial in Washington DC and these were found tucked in the corners of both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the memorial. And so the Satyr Square was essentially the Kilroy was here of the Roman Empire. The square was found scrawled from Rome to Carinium, which is in modern England, to Dura Europos, which is modern Syria. It's unclear why this ancient meme was such a thing. Maybe it was the first meme ever. I guess

it depends on what your definition of a meme is. To repeat what the square says, the words in the square are Sator Arepo tenant opera rotus, the farmer Arepo works on a plow. Arepo is what's known as a hapax legomenon, which means it is a term of which only one instance of its use is recorded or can be found. This means that the Sator Square is the only place where the word Arepo shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature. The best working theory as to why this is, is that it's a proper name invented only to make the square work. But the Satyr Square has more tricks up its sleeve. If you reshuffle the letters around the central N, which was in the word tenant, you can make a Greek cross that reads Pachyrnoster in both directions, and this means our father!

I mean, come on. So clever. And then the four leftover letters, the two A's and two O's, those stand for Alpha and Omega. Early Christians might have used the square as a discrete way to signal their presence to one another. And the Sader Square stuck around for a very, very long time. In the Middle Ages, it was regarded as a magical object, gaining a reputation as a talisman against fire, theft, and illness. The devil, apparently, gets confused by palindromes. So with the devil not knowing which way to read, a 5x5 two-dimensional palindrome is an extra-powerful devil repellent. The Satyr Square also appears etched into tablets as

a prevention against mad dogs, a snakebite cure, and a charm to protect cattle from witchcraft. While word squares have maintained their quasi-magical reputation for hundreds of years to come, other visual word games also became popular during the 19th century. In the Victorian era, visual word games became extremely popular. These visual word games include double acrostics, which paved the way pretty directly for the crossword. Queen Victoria, I guess, was regarded as a cruciverbalist, which apparently means a person skillful in creating or solving crossword puzzles. In researching all of this, I have learned many English words.

I had no idea were even words to begin with. So, Crusoe verbalist Queen Victoria constructed what's known as the Windsor Enigma to teach her subject how to bring coals to Newcastle. In her 1861 book, Victorian Enigmas, author Charlotte Eliza Cappell attributes the Windsor Enigma puzzle to Queen Victoria. The Queen was known to be fond of riddles and enigmas. One hoax apparently kept her occupied for half a week! From a passage from The Private Life of the Queen by quote one of Her Majesty's servants written in 1897, quote, Her Majesty Queen Victoria takes delight in a clever riddle or rebus, but on one occasion she was very angry at having been hoaxed over a riddle which was sent to her with a letter

to the effect that it had been made by the Bishop of Salisbury. For four days the Queen and Prince Albert sought for the reply, when Charles Murray, controller of the household, was directed to write to the bishop and ask for the solution. The answer received was that the bishop had not made the riddle, nor could he solve it." End quote. Okay Queen! We love feminism. Anyway, the Windsor Enigma was basically like a riddle, and this is what it said. The Windsor Enigma. The initials of the following places form the name of a town in England, and the finals

read upwards what that town is famous for. And these are the nine clues in this enigma. A city in Italy. A river in Germany. A town in the United States. A town in North America. A town in Holland, the Turkish name for Constantinople, a town in Bosnia.

I wasn't saying that with a list, but it's not Bosnia, it's spelled Bo-th-nia, just FYI. A city in Greece, a circle on the globe. So when you solve these nine clues, the nine letters which are on the left hand side of these answers, it spells out Newcastle. And then on the right side, it says coal mines when you read it from the bottom to the top as the riddle says to do. So Newcastle is famous for its coal mines. You know what else is famous for its coal mines? I can't actually answer that

question I have no idea. But here's some ads. Okay, we're back. So, another old word game which was a precursor to the crossword is a game called Doublets. It was invented by Oxford mathematician Charles Dawson, who was better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll. In this game you transform one word into another of equal length, changing a single letter at a time, using as few moves as possible. All the linking steps also have to be legitimate words. A lot of modern puzzle books have doublets in them, including a bunch of the ones that I have, and they're pretty fun!

As in a crossword, the process of moving stepwise letter to letter forces you to think about all the possible word combinations, and each doublet has a theme, a kind of mini alchemy that keeps the words all somehow related to each other. In Charles Dawkins or Lewis Carroll's 1880 book, Doublet's A Word Puzzle, there are examples of this where he says to quote, drive pig into stye, raise four to five, Make wheat into bread.

So the idea is that those words become the other one with a couple of changes. A classic, classic word puzzle. And we're inching closer and closer to how the crossword came to be. And the crossword came about when riddles entered the grid. Crossword clues trace their origins to Riddles. Riddles have been around since the dawn of time and can be found in basically every religious book in Arsena mythology and literature for centuries and centuries. The Exeter Book is an 11th century Old English manuscript, and it's the largest and perhaps

oldest known manuscript of Old English literature, containing about a sixth of all the old English poetry that has survived until today. That's a lot. And it has about a hundred riddles of all types. They say there are quote unquote about a hundred, because these riddles still to this day drive people crazy. In the 10 centuries since their composition, scholars haven't conclusively solved every riddle. There are four basic ways that quote riddle logic operates. One, true riddles. Two, wordplay. Three, neck riddles. And four, anti-riddles. The enigma, which is a metaphorical statement that's designed to feel like it has one solution but actually contains unresolvable multitudes, is different than this.

The word enigma comes from a Greek word that means, quote, to speak in riddles. It applies to things as well as people that puzzle one's mind. Examples of enigmas can be Egypt's ancient pyramids and how the hell they were built, Emilia Earhart going poof, or the Bermuda Triangle being weird. Plenty of enigmas occur in modern times too. One example that people point to of this is the 2014 disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. On March 8, 2014, the airplane departed Kuala Lumpur. It was bound for Beijing, China, but 39 minutes after takeoff, the plane disappeared. It quite literally vanished without a trace,

becoming one of aviation's greatest mysteries. And over a decade later, investigators still do not know exactly what happened to the plane and its 239 passengers. But just a few months ago in March of 2024, Malaysia's government said it may renew the hunt for MH370 after an American marine robotics company that tried to find the plane in 2018 proposed a fresh search. A massive multinational search at the time in the southern Indian Ocean, where the jet is believed to have crashed, found nothing. Apart from some small fragments that later washed ashore, no bodies or wreckage have

ever been found. Spooky! So that's an enigma. Examples of enigmas with word puzzles could be something like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? These are logic knots that want to stay knotted or not solved. Haha, there's another little pun for you. Or riddle!

Anyway, riddles on the other hand do want to be solved. A true riddle, one of these four basic ways that riddle logic operates. Transforms thing A into solution B. True riddles rely on a logical connection that's not obvious on the surface, so you need to think more deeply about it in maybe a non-conventional or non-literal way in order to reach the solution. When riddles become baked into culture, they can turn into inside jokes. Riddles have been around for millennia, and the best riddles have been repeated for just as long. One quote-unquote famous riddle, if you will, is the Sphinx's Riddle in Greek mythology.

Just some background on the Greek Sphinx, because I personally found it fascinating and very interesting. But the Greek Sphinx was clearly inspired by the Egyptian Sphinx. But the Greeks modified the Sphinx and made it their own. The Greek Sphinx had a woman's face and breasts and a lion's body with birds wings, while the Egyptian Sphinx had a male head, which could be either human or animal. The word Sphinx is Greek and it means quote strangler, perhaps stemming from the fact that lionesses usually kill their prey by strangling it. Since sphinxes were seen as very intimidating the Greeks frequently put them on gravestones to frighten away would-be grave robbers. This

use is called apotropaic, meaning causing someone to turn away. Most of the examples of ancient Greek sphinxes that we have today are from ancient gravestones. So in Greek mythology, there was one famous sphinx who turned up in Thebes shortly after its king, Laius, had been killed while on his way to consult the Delphic oracle. This sphinx flew on top of the city walls and asked all the Theban youths a riddle. When they could not answer it, she ate them! Feminism! Strikes again! At the time, Creon was the regent in Thebes since Laius had died, and he was so desperate to get rid of the sphinx that he promised the kingship and the hand of the widowed Queen Jocasta, who also happened to be his sister, in marriage to

anyone who could solve the Sphinx's riddle. This was the Sphinx's riddle. Which you may have heard before, which is why I said it was quote unquote famous. What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet in midday, and three feet in the evening? In the myth, around this time, Oedipus came into Thebes and he solved the riddle. Oedipus said, the answer is man, because a man crawls on all fours in the morning of his life, he walks on two feet in the midday of his life, and then he uses a cane for extra support when he is old. The sphinx was so upset that Oedipus had answered the riddle correctly that she

threw herself down from the walls of thieves and she died. You know what else died? My soul when I realized we need ads to make money. So here you go! Okay, we're back and we were talking about types of riddles. Again, there are four basic ways that riddle logic operates. True riddles, wordplay, neck riddles, and anti-riddles. And we talked about the true riddles before the break. And so now, let's talk about wordplay riddles, wordplay, neck riddles, and anti-riddles. And we talked about the true riddles before the break. And so now let's talk about wordplay riddles. A wordplay riddle does the same thing as a true riddle, but it adds an extra layer of trickiness to it.

So it's thing A turning into solution B, but there is a slight catch in between that has to interrupt the pathway between those things first. Wordplay riddles include puns and other bits of linguistic slight catch in between that has to interrupt the pathway between those things first. Wordplay riddles include puns and other bits of linguistic gymnastics to take the anticipated answer to the next step. A rebus is an example of a wordplay riddle, which uses letters as part of the clue. A rebus is a puzzle device in which words are represented by combinations of letters

and pictures. A neck riddle gives a solution that would be impossible for the solver to arrive at without context, so? equals b. The term neck riddle comes from stories in which the hero of the story uses an unsolvable riddle to outwit a judge or a monster and save himself from being hanged. So a neck riddle saves your neck. Wow. This is one typical folktale example. As I walked out and in again from the dead the living came six there is and seven there will be so tell me this riddle or set me free." You're probably never going to get this answer unless you've heard it before, but the answer is a horse's skull that contains a bird hatching

eggs. Six have hatched, but one is still to come. What? So a neck riddle has an answer that's so specific it's deeply unsatisfying. Because that's precisely the point. After all, it's not meant to actually be solvable. It has to stump the other person, or in this case a judge or a monster, to ensure that you or the hero gets off scott-free. Often that's achieved through over-precision, but sometimes a change in perspective will do the trick. In The Hobbit, our hero Bilbo Baggins bests Gollum in a riddle contest by asking him the unknowable, what's in my pocket? And then there's the anti-riddle. An anti-riddle is one that tricks the reader because it looks like a riddle, but it's actually

not a riddle at all. Basically A equals A. For example, why did the chicken cross the road seems like a riddle, but the answer to get to the other side is just the literal answer. So in conclusion, a word grid and a bunch of riddles. Those two things are what evolved over time and over the centuries to bring us what we know today as the crossword puzzle. Author Adrian Ruffel, who wrote the book Thinking Inside the Box Adventures with Crosswords of the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them, wrote in the Paris Review in 2020, quote, If you're a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a hard time solving

a crossword. You'd have to separate the puzzle into two separate strands of problems to tackle the issue. How to figure out what a clue is saying, or rather, what it's precisely not saying, and how to fill the letters in the grid in the way that makes the most sense. Crosswords force the brain to cross wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the visual spatial part of the brain with the logic run part of the brain. This is part of the reason why even the best crossword solving AI in the world isn't yet better than the best human.

The AI can fill in the grid pretty quickly, but in terms of resolving that grid through riddle logic, humans are still a step ahead. The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that, through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do, it created an itch we didn't know we had. And yet we've always been primed to solve them." And that is just a beautiful way to end this episode. So that's it. That's the crossword.

I'm going to go do a crossword right now because why not? I told you I needed things to do in the beginning of this episode and this is my thing to do that does not include scrolling on my phone and wanting to die. So with that, bye. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast, There and Gone. It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to

their truck and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle,

not for Richard. He's your son. And in your eyes, he's innocent. But in my eyes, he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. All that they know. and get justice for Richard and Danielle.

Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's the hardest question you've ever asked your mom? Mom, what happened to your sister, Margarita? For me, it's about a murder that's haunted my family for decades. They said that they took her, and the next day she was already dead. To find the answers, I went to the place where my family is from, El Salvador, and found that the story starts with a priest who was killed on the altar and sparked a war.

I'm Jasmine Romero, and on Sacred Scandal Nation of Saints, join me as we uncover an unholy war, one that includes government cover-ups and politicians turned death squad leaders. But I'll also tell you the story of one family, mine. Because on this journey, I found out that we had more secrets than I knew. Listen to Sacred Scandal, Nation of Saints, as part of the MyCultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Late on the evening of March 8, 1971, a group of anti-war activists did something insane. Holy s***, we are really here. This is really happening. They weren't professional criminals. They were ordinary citizens, but they needed to know the truth about the FBI. Burglaries, forged blackmail letters, and threats of violence were used

to try to stop anti-war marches. Even if that meant risking everything. I just felt like I was living in the heart of the dragon and it was just my job to stop the fire. I'm Ed Helms, host of Snafu, season two Medburg, the story of a daring heist that exposed J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI. If it meant some risks that were involved, well that's what citizens sometimes have to do. Listen to season two of Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here.

It being the slow crumbling of the old world and the painful birth of the new. And here to talk about the painful birth of the new world is someone who was compared to me very recently born, Garrison Davis. How are you doing, Gar? Good, good. As a new member of the Kayhive Nation, I have a new life under me now. Yeah. You've embraced the Kamala of it all and are now just are now just vibing. Yeah, it's a beautiful place to be.

Yeah, unfortunately, it might be just as delusional as Biden's own insistence that he should be the one to run. And that's kind of what we're talking about here today. Oh, good. I love delusion and its impact on American political life. So our our initial post debate comments were a little bit frenzied, a little bit chaotic, as was the debate, I suppose. And post debate polls were also just kind of a mess initially with with wildly differing results from source to source. But over time they have since stabilized and kind of synced up to like succinctly put it.

Essentially the debate undid most of the pro Biden shifts that had happened in the wake of Trump's felony conviction. Yeah, and I've seen some polls have shown it tightening up a little bit again, but it's it's very, I mean, I always wonder like how much I you've got kind of two camps, broadly speaking, in terms of the people who seem like they're not completely insane. One of them is kind of the Nate Silver side of things, which shows Biden as having fallen fairly far behind and having, you know, he's got Biden at about a 30% chance, which is where Trump was in 2016. So that doesn't mean zero.

Whereas the new 538 polling average, and I kind of have been following their new head of statistics for a while, has it still close to a dead heat? And then obviously, I, you know, there's arguments that people will make that Trump or that Biden is actually very far behind, which have more to it than the arguments that Biden, that Biden is going to win in a landslide, the kind of democratic, like the polls are wrong entirely.

I don't think that's likely, but I think we're looking at somewhere between Biden as a definite like underdog or more or less tight. I guess that's where it seems to me like the evidence still is. Yep, a USA Today Suffolk University poll conducted immediately after the debate gave Trump a four point boost. The week after the debate, a New York Times Siena poll

found Trump's lead had increased by 3%, now leading by six points with likely voters. Other questions were pulled in the wake of the debate. A CNN poll found that 75% of Democrats believe the party would have a better chance at defeating Trump with a candidate other than Biden. And overall, yes, his number dropped or kind of coasted with what it had been in like, you know,

April, March, February. And according to Politico, other than Trump in 2020, no incumbent has trailed this far behind in horse race polling since Jimmy Carter's re-election bid 44 years ago, which does not make me feel super optimistic. It's not great. And man, it would be, I suspect the polls are still over-emphasizing it to a degree, because if Biden losing by 6% would be like the big, the worst

performance of a Democrat, totally like a generation, like in a long, long time. And I, I just don't believe it's going to be that far off, but like it is definitely things are a lot uglier than they were when we recorded our last horse time. And I just don't believe it's going to be that far off, but like it is definitely, things are a lot uglier than they were when we recorded our last horse race episode. Right? Like the debate was somewhere between pretty bad and catastrophe in terms of its impact on the polls. Absolutely. But Trump, what Trump actually gained himself as a candidate is not very much. It's mostly decreases on Biden.

And five pollsters did pre and post debate polls. And Trump is gaining on the margin, but in none of the polls did he gain anything more than a four point swing. So they're all pretty consistent. And it's not all the end of the world here either. A poll released last Saturday by Bloomberg and Morning Consult showed Biden narrowing Trump's post-debate lead specifically in swing states, with only a 2% difference between all seven swing states, with Biden being ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Yeah. 2% is within that margin of error. So things are also starting to level up over time. Yeah. And I think some of this may have to do, we're going to talk a bit about project 2025, which, which I tend to think, and we've been chatting about this online all week. In our work chat, people are over emphasizing as opposed to what Trump is, because agenda 20 project 2025 is basically a blueprint for a fat Christian fascist taker of the US

published by the heritage foundation and a lot of people who have been affiliated with Trump who were in his, his, his administration last time have are on board with it have talked about it have boosted it. So people are obviously scared of it. I think what Trump has actually promised to do in office, which is the agenda 47. We did a whole week of stuff on it is a more realistic thing to be afraid of, but either way, I think that some of that tightening is probably a mix of you've got every, you got a bunch of kind of on the fence voters swing away from Biden because

he performed so badly in the debate. voters swing away from Biden because he performed so badly in the debate. And then it has, Dems have done a pretty intensive job of spreading out a lot of, you know, what you might call fear porn over a fascist takeover of the country. And I think that's part of why things might be tightening back up. I mean, it would be nice to eventually one year vote for vote for something instead of just be voting against something. But again, I'm not sure if we'll ever get to that point. Yeah.

Ha ha. Hasn't happened yet. Well, no, no, no. I mean, I was I remember I got to vote for Obama the first time he ran and it was hard not to be optimistic. So immediately after the debate, we had a whole bunch of like friends of Biden, kind of upper level Democrat, not like online influencers, but like actual like influential, like like pundits and people, you know, call for perhaps by and should step down, perhaps we should find somebody else. And this has kind of been the ongoing post debate ever since the debate has been this question. And we'll get we'll kind of get to this a little bit more later.

been this question. And we'll get we'll kind of get to this a little bit more later. Honestly, I think we had a stronger chance at this possibility a week or two ago. I think by now, Democrats have largely kind of closed ranks around Biden. But this is this is definitely still developing. And I've been keeping up with all of Biden's appearances in the media since the debate, just because I've been interested to see how he will handle this kind of universal flub. just because I've been interested to see how he will handle this kind of universal flub. I watched his ABC interview and his recent like phone calls into various morning news shows. In all of those, he did not perform especially well, as expected. They were slow and sometimes kind of like mumbly. But neither have they been like the death blow to his campaign needed to finalize the shift to an alternative candidate.

to his campaign needed to finalize the shift to an alternative candidate. Instead we're just kind of coasting along with this general uncertainty regarding the Democratic candidacy. And meanwhile, Biden is just continuing to affirm that he will be the one to lead the ticket. I'm going to quote from Washington Post here, quote, As of Sunday, nine House Democrats, four privately and five publicly, had called for Biden to exit the race. In addition, at least 18 current and former top Democrats, as of Saturday, had publicly raised concerns about Biden's fitness for office

and his ability to defeat Trump, unquote. And it has remained the same since then. There is going to be meetings in the next few days, including the day after we record this recording this on Monday. So there's going to be meetings in the Senate and in the House about kind of this issue. So this is definitely still developing, but you're starting to see more and more politicians

fall into rank. AOC just put out a statement saying, no, we're gonna all support Biden. So like, there was this uncertainty for a while and now I think people are kind of being told to like, come on, get on the platform. Yeah. But Biden hasn't been handling this well,

like personally either. No. He Biden hasn't been handling this well, like personally, either. No. He's come off cost like very angry. No, the emails I've been getting from the Biden campaign have been wild. Blaming podcasters. He's been blaming media.

And I'm kind of bummed that it's the pod save guys he got angry at. We've been we've been shitty to Joe Biden for so much longer than those assholes. Yeah, he's been treating it very weirdly. He's been doing a lot of like a denial of the polling. He's been doing some revisionist history.

Very magical thinking regarding like 2020 polling. I think I think kind of referencing the Democratic primary, but still the way that he's talking about it, it's making it sound like he you know, like he was behind in the polls in 2020, that Democrats were behind in the polls in 2022, which just wasn't true. The red wave comment was certain pundits and Republicans trying to conjure a red wave, but the actual polls were very accurate in 2022. And he's also crediting himself for that red wave not happening in 2022. So he's been having a lot of weird statements like blaming media and blaming the elites

for trying to replace him on the ticket. I'll include one clip here from the morning Joe. Come on, give me a break. I'm getting so frustrated by the elites. Now I'm not talking about you guys, but about the elites in the party who they know so much more. But if any of these guys don't think I should run

against me, go and announce the president, challenge me at the convention. Kind of his continuous line to justify his own candidacy is, has been him claiming that he won the primary, which is a ridiculous thing to say as an incumbent, because like, come on, like, come on. Come on. And he has repeatedly said that Democratic voters in the primaries have, quote, spoken clearly and decisively.

They've chosen me to be the nominee of the party. That's not how it worked. Quote, do we now just say that process didn't matter? That the voters don't have a say? I decline to do that. How could we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party? I cannot do that.

I will not do that unquote. Which is just absurd, right? Cause like, especially there was many people who actually voted in the false primary for like the other option. Yeah, I mean, one of the polls I just saw was like 70% of them, 75% of Americans would prefer to vote for someone besides bite like it's

It's absurd especially when you're running like an uncontested as an incumbent if you want people to challenge you you could have said so Like it's come on like this is there was there was no pretty goofy No real primary for the Dems and there usually isn't, that's not abnormal with an incumbent, but in this case, people have severe questions about the incumbent's fitness to do the job in a physical way. Like I hate to say it, but like Trump might physically be better able to survive a four year term than Biden is, you know, not, not, not that I think he's mentally a better president. I don't think honestly, part of what we are accepting here is that like, that doesn't really matter, right? Like we're all kind of acknowledging,

if you're on team anything but Trump because he might end the concept of democracy in this country, then you're accepting that like, yeah, I am not, I am voting for a guy who probably can't really do the job anymore. And just assuming that the people around him will not be as evil. Like you do kind of have to accept that. Otherwise, you're just lying to yourself about the state that Joe is in, because he's not, he's not all there. He's not all there the way he was in 2020.

No, but do you know what still is here? Just like it was back in 2020. Capitalism, baby. We didn't manage to take it out even though we elected this, our communist leader, Joseph Biden, Chairman Joe. Enjoy these capitalism sponsored ads. All right, we are back. Yeah, so there was a report that came out from Chip 50, which is like an analytics project. It's like the Civic Health and Institution Project. So it's like a survey of all 50 US states.

And they did a survey on like opinions of voters before and after the debate. And there showed like barely small movement, like very little was changed at all in terms of like, and primarily what was changed wasn't people going from Biden to Trump, but from people preferring from preferring Biden to preferring other, right? Like that someone else, someone else, right? And that. Someone else, someone else. Right. And so that does kind of go back to what we're like. People are not making their minds up about Trump. Like, and I think what the dims can do if Biden stays in and he doesn't seem like

he's leaving, it seems like the primary thing that will make progress for them is hitting on how dangerous Trump having a second term will be. That seems to be what moves the needle. Which is part of their current strategy, but their strategy is kind of all in flux right now because of the poor performance in the debate. They're trying to save face on Biden's part, as well as emphasizing that Trump

is like a dangerous possibility. And again, like even if Biden does decide to drop out or step down, he is gonna keep saying he's running until literally the day that happens, right? Because that is what you do as a politician. You are going to keep insisting it until one day you are no longer doing that. And that's just kind of how politics goes. But he has made continuous gestures towards the fact that he is going to stay.

He has no plans on stepping down. He wants to win in November this Monday He personally made 20 calls to congressional members trying to convince them that he is going to be the one on the ticket No, really guys. It's going to be me again. Really and I think part of what he's doing here is like he does not have to demonstrate at the moment that he will be like Survive until like November what all he has to do right now is run out the clock until the convention, and then it'll be too late to swap him out for anyone else. There's a few other people kind of saying this,

and I believe that is kind of what is happening. All they need to do is just keep delaying this question, keep this uncertainty until the convention, and then it's going to get locked in in there and that's all he needs to do He doesn't need to demonstrate his viability come November he just needs to make sure that he gets that he gets the official nomination this August and I don't know Biden supporters reactions to this have been really weird Including we've kind of had like a new upgrowth of a pro-Biden personality cult among liberals.

Boy do we. I feel like largely like a culmination of like MSNBC, Russiagate, like Blue-Anon type stuff that people are just now convinced there's like a secret conspiracy to take down Biden. And any attempts to question Biden's legibility as a candidate could only be rooted in some secret agenda to get Trump elected. So I think this is why they're so volatile about this, is that they think like the only one who would ever propagate questions over Biden's legibility would be someone who secretly wants Trump to be in office again. And that is such a threat to them that they're lashing out very, very oddly and very conspiratorially against anyone raising questions about maybe Biden's

not the best guy, actually. And they're spinning this into like, actually being secret Trumpers. It's odd because even the way Biden talks about his his own drive to beat Trump is kind of wishy washy. Certain like more polished statements will be like, yes, this is like a threat to democracy. We have to we have to do this to keep Trump out of office. This is an existential threat. But in that in that ABC interview, he gave a really kind of soft answer to this question, saying that all that he needs to do is just give it his all. And if you stay in and Trump is elected, and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January? I feel as long as I gave it my all, and I did the goodest jobs I know I can do,

that's what this is about. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. So that's not convincing. That's such like a, like ninth, like cartoons for ninth graders way of saying it. Like, well, what matters is that I tried, put all my best work forward. No, man, that doesn't matter at all.

Yeah, it is. It's not great. It's it's it's not it's not reassuring because it doesn't matter if you give it your all. People's lives are are are on the line here. And you're just like, hey, I'll give it the old college try. You're like, OK, it means one of two things. He's either he either is completely delusional

to the point where he doesn't realize how nonsensical that is, or he doesn't really think that Trump is a threat to democracy in people's lives. And I guess the third option would be he doesn't care. Like if he loses reelection, fuck everybody. If he doesn't get to keep being president, like maybe he is just that kind of person.

I do have a feeling that only that kind of person can become president of the United States. Yeah, and I mean, like that was kind of my read after the ABC interviews that he seemed just kind of like delusional and narcissistic. Like he really believes after 2020 that he's the only one that can beat Trump. And this feels like a very genuine view of himself

that he's the only one strong enough to beat Trump. Yeah. And the more and more that there's been pushback against his legibility, the more he's been digging his heels in. And I think if things continue like this, I don't think the Democratic Party will be able to organize and unite enough to do like a soft coup and convince Biden to step down. And without a complete united front against Biden,

he himself would need some kind of like excuse to allow himself to step down. And without a complete united front against Biden, he himself would need some kind of excuse to allow himself to step down without sacrificing his pride and showing weakness both in himself and the party. This could be like a convenient medical diagnosis, right? Although the increasing number of calls for him to undergo thorough neurological examination will probably have the same backfire effect of Biden attempting as much as he can to avoid any in-depth medical and neurological testing. He's been making these comments like, every day I take a neurological test by doing my job. And like, come on, man. We also were watching you do your job. It's not a problem, bro. Like you got up in front of the like again, referred to the last episode

you and I did on the horse race, our attitude was like, yeah, things have really improved for Biden. I think he's probably the smart money bet. And like sitting down and watching that, it was horrifying. Like, yeah, there's no dinner. That's part of why this, you have to,

if you're still on team, like I don't think it's fair what people are saying to Joe. If you're on team, this was bad strategy from the beginning, expressing any kind of doubt. Well, maybe that's right, but I don't know what else people are supposed to do. If you don't, if you really think that this is, he has not demonstrated like a seriously concerning

incapacity for the work, Think about how unprecedented having this degree of open challenging of him as the candidate, this close to an election. So I've never seen anything like this. Nobody has. Especially on an like an incumbent. Yes, the president, yeah. And an incumbent who served two times as vice.

Like that's ridiculous. And like the last real neurological medical examination that he undertook was last February, which for an 81 year old is a very long time, especially if you compare like news clips of him from like the debate to clips of him from last February or last year, there actually is like a decent difference. And I don't know, it seems it seems kind of absurd that he that he keeps harping on this line of for his ABC interview. He declined to take a cognitive test and make the results public in order to reassure voters that he was fit to serve another term, saying that I have a cognitive test every single day. Doing this job, everything I do is a test.

No, not great. No. He also said that only the Lord Almighty could persuade him to change his mind and drop out of the race. What the fuck? What the fuck? So there we go. Seriously, man. So that's again, not not super reassuring. But you know what?

I can be reassured by Robert. The fact that sweet lady capitalism is always there for us. It's always there. Like a good uncle or something. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something, something that state farm ad. I agree. All right, we are back.

It is certainly feeling like 1968 all over again, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's obviously having an open convention in 68. The chaos around that did not help the Democrats. They did not know that election. No, we got fucking Dick Nixon. So that's not good the Democrats. They did not know that election. We got fucking Dick Nixon.

So that's not good. No, it's not great. And with with with campus protests and everything, it all is starting to feel like 68 over here. So yeah, a lot of people are saying if Biden does step down before the DNC in Chicago this August, we could have ourselves an open convention to nominate a new candidate. The last time this method was used by Democrats was in 68 at the also Chicago DNC after the leading candidate, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated weeks before the convention by a 24-year-old Palestinian man for his support of Israel during the Six-Day War. So again, there is a lot of parallels

here. And if it's not gonna be Biden Biden, then who is it going to be? This was a bigger question last week, and it still is kind of a lingering question in a lot of people's minds. Who's it going to be? Probably Kavala. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, there's really, for a lot of reasons in terms of including, I think, what would have to happen with the donations, if it were to be a totally new group of people The that would cause insurmountable

Bullshit and also like if you're talking about from a wargaming this out perspective You know Kamala does not look bad in the polling and might might in fact be just for a variety of reasons One of the better choices like I, I can in my head think, wow, I sure wish it was, you know, Pritzker and Whitmer maybe. But like, I think that a lot of what I've seen in the polls has kind of convinced me that Kamal is probably our best all around bet. And if you include practicality and actually like beating Trump. Yes, in the polls, she is consistently higher than any other potential democratic replacements and doing if not as well,

often better than Biden against Trump. Usually closing that race out, I think a CNN poll from last Wednesday showed that she's in the margin of error against Trump nationally with 45 to his 47, which is much better than

than Biden is doing nationally. And she's projected to do much better in an electoral college race than Biden is doing nationally, and she's projected to do much better in an electoral college race than Biden specifically. So there we go. I'm going to quote from CNN here, An anonymously written Google doc titled Unburdened by What Has Been, The Case for Kamala, written by self-described senior operatives within democratic political institutions, has been popping up in group chats of democratic donors and leading coalition groups. It lays out a detailed argument and plan for a campaign." So this doc, I was able to get ahold of a copy and parts of it definitely read like

an Aaron Sorkin script. Like that is the closest thing I can describe this thing as. But I think it is worth digging into here for our last section. So I'm going to read some small parts of this doc. And Robert, I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on this. It starts by saying, we are currently losing. We need to do something different to win. The number one most important priority above all others is defeating Donald Trump. Nothing is more important. And we need to be very real that we are currently losing.

So off to a good start. Okay. That is, I would argue accurate. Quote, Biden's debate performance, the campaign's defensive response, and the total lack of plan to reassure his base and the voters about his capability should shake everyone's confidence that he can win this election. Now we have three possible options.

Biden can take the necessary steps to demonstrate that he is up to the job, he can step aside for another candidate, or Trump will win. The discourse around potential alternative candidates in the event that Biden does step down is increasingly detached from reality. Donors, pundits, and democratic elites are freely slinging around wild ideas about dream tickets. This chaos is used as a shield by stay the course advocates who frame the choice as Biden or chaos. The swirl over different possible candidates

is obscuring the fact that there's a single clear path forward. There's one path out of this mess and it's Kamala." Unquote. And this is one of the interesting things I found about this doc, is that theala unquote. And this is one of the interesting things I found about this doc is that the way that they view this kind of current chaos as we win, just as a deliberate strategy

and as a deliberate tactics, just to continue this uncertainty all the way to the to the convention. And a lot of what this doc advocates for is that we need to call this as soon as possible to give whatever option we're going to go forward with the most amount of success, whether that's Biden, whether that's Kamala. It needs to we need to decide what it is so we don't spend the next few months doing weird like Democratic Party infighting and instead actually like lock down what's happening so that there is a cohesive strategy. And they argue that Kamala has the strongest claim to democratic legibility among all other alternative candidates. Quote, she's the only candidate that can take the reins right now instead of in late August with less than three months to go. To be clear, this isn't an

argument about deservedness or why you should personally love Kamala. It's about strategy and winning in the face of unimaginable electoral stakes. Yeah., the doctors point out that only Biden himself has the power to drop out and choose to head off chaos by anointing Harris. But Biden does listen to people and the people that he listens to listens to other people. And that is the audience for the people reading this doc. That's what this is circulating among. That was like the intention. And they argue that if Biden does drop out, Democrats have to unite

quickly behind the elected successor, as opposed to inviting this extended period of chaos. Although Kamala has limitations in polls regarding her name recognition, she currently wins any poll of alternative Democratic candidates by a very wide margin. This doc does point out that Kamala is by no means a perfect candidate. She does have real deficits, but they are mostly addressable. The doc mentions her Biden-level approval rating, her involvement with Biden's immigration shortcomings, and her awkward camera moments reminiscent of a drunk aunt. And quote, after years of a relatively low profile, voters don't see her as a strong

leader for the country. But running as a presidential candidate will allow Harris to present herself in a more commanding light. She'll be a prosecutor going up against a convicted felon, a woman fighting against the man who ended Roe v. Wade." Unquote. And that is a lot of the type sort of messaging that they are promoting, uh, if Kamala does end up being the option. A morning consult political poll on the vice president from June reflects a number of advantages she would have over Trump in a head-to-head match

based on his greatest vulnerabilities. A majority of voters see Kamala as mentally fit, level-headed and prepared, contrast to Trump and even Biden. And a majority of voters trust Kamala on jobs, abortion, climate change, and LGBTQ rights. Public opinion is already moving towards Harris over Biden. 43% of voters indicate Harris is fit to run

compared to Biden's 35. And while the issue is complex and the distance here is relative, she's broadly considered to be on Biden's left on Israel-Palestine, an issue where he has major vulnerabilities. Kamala also has advantages with the younger and POC voters that the Democrats are currently

bleeding. In the doc here, they contain some stats on this, saying Biden won the 2020 election by just 44,000 votes, and most of those are votes that he is bleeding. A New York Times CNN poll in February found that Harris is nearly 10 points ahead of Biden with black voters and 15 points up with Latino voters, 20 points up with young voters. These are massive advantages. Now that is older data, but it's probably worth some consideration. Part of the reason why she's also favored among other democratic contenders is that she has direct access to the Biden Harris campaign war chest of over $91 million in cash, which would create a smoother transition. Yeah, and is probably, I mean, again, just given the amount of chaos that would be inherent

in a totally open convention, it just seems like the only feasible option. And what they're advocating for is that if if Kamala takes the position now or soon to now, she'll have an extra month and massive structural advantages. If we can unite behind Harris in July, we have an extra month of party unity and message unity. That's a month where we can keep the media focused on Donald Trump, Project 2025, and mega-extremism instead of waiting in dread for the next Biden misstep. We're talking about Democrats fighting it out to win delicate count. Fear of racism and sexism is playing an outsized role

not supported by data. The impact of sexism and racism on the vote is marginal compared to the potential to make gains in the crucial block that will decide the election. Right now, this race hinges on alienated and unenthusiastic double haters who dislike both Biden and Trump and want an alternative choice.

Some polls put the size of this group at 25 percent nationally or even higher, nearly 30 percent amongst basically everyone I know, like especially among inconsistent voters who are likely who are likely to decide the election in key battleground states for these double haters. Vote choice is being driven not by prejudice, but by anti-enthusiasm for the two currently 80-year-old white men presented here as the only options. These voters are also more likely to be young,

Hispanic, black, and women in urban or suburban areas, the exact kind of voter profile that Kamala is gaining appeal with. And I find this little bit to be the most compelling statement in this entire document, because that lays out an actual map towards how Kamala would have a better election viability than Biden, especially in the voters that he's been bleeding dramatically in the past six, seven months. Now the DACA does close by saying, if Biden stays the course, we need Kamala to be strong. The most likely outcome

is that President Biden declines to step back. In that case, Kamala's role is more crucial than ever. She will be the strong communicator on the ticket, especially on our most important issue, abortion. Second, many voters will understand her to be Biden's near-guaranteed successor, and we will need to feel comfortable with her potential ascent to the presidency to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket. For anyone into Biden's the nominee and we must rally around him camp, it's essential that we project confidence in his selection of a running mate. By one, pushing the administration to stop sidelining Kamala. By two, promoting Kamala as the leader of the party and country. Three, be prepared to align with political and financial support.

And three, debate over and ultimately organize around a new running mate Consolidation around vice president Harris will not guarantee victory in November No option is free of risk at this point, but this is our clearest path to win We should take it and that's how the document ends. Yeah, and I I like some of the arguments they make here I don't like Kamala as a person. I think no many many issues both as a person and as a- She's a cop. I don't like cops. Absolutely. Especially if their messaging will be like, Kamala the prosecutor against Trump the felon, which I personally don't like, but also- But that could work. That could work. That's not going to lose her important voters. That's not going to lose her all of the anarchists who already aren't going to vote. Yeah, that might be a really good strategy,

because Americans do not feel the same way about prosecutors as I do and he's you do, right? Like we have to accept that at a certain point. I think so I, I, and I think that's most frustrating to me about the fact that it doesn't look like Biden's going to step down is that Like the smartest thing they could do strategy wise would be to drop that announcement on like monday of next week and utterly like cut the wind out of the sales of the rnc. Yeah like suddenly the biggest story is that and not you know everything that the republicans are putting out like you can actually really do some damage to them. Is there's there's not really anything that they could do in response. And so much media attention right now is being focused on Biden very clearly not being fit for office. Yeah. And all of that would go away if Kamala gets put

into the spot, then everyone will start focusing once again on how bad Trump is. And I can understand some of like the Biden camps like upset at this at like the fact that currently there is just so much attention on Biden and everyone kind of is ignoring Trump. But that just is due to how poorly he himself has been behaving like that, like that is ultimately the Biden campaign's fault that they didn't plan for this contingency. And if they want all of that like discourse to stop, they have a very easy option to and it's just reliant on

Biden not being too personally prideful and acknowledging that he's just too old for office and there are better candidates out there. So yeah, that is that is the current that is the current situation on the rise of the K hive. Something I at this point, I'm very skeptical to think will actually happen. But it may be actually a viable strategy for the Democratic Party. will actually happen, but it may be actually a viable strategy for the Democratic Party. Yep. I mean, we'll see what they actually do. Probably keep running Joe Biden and hope that Americans panic enough about Trump to, but you know, I, we can all dream. To that point, we can also dream that like that, that like the delegates will just like rebel against.

Yes, they're like polite duty. Yeah. By by not committing to their to their non binding promises, although that would be extremely unprecedented. And it would make the DNC a lot more fun. Oh, we would we would have a great DNC if that were to go down. Yep. Anyway, well, we're gonna have fun at the RNC instead. Yeah, we sure will. Garrison, you and I are gonna be on the ground in the exclusion zone and at the convention itself where we cannot have backpacks or gas masks. Or canned food. But I might be able to carry a gun.

Let me see if they do reciprocity. What is this? Is this Minnesota? No, this is not Minnesota. This is Wisconsin. Oh, Wisconsin. This is Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You can see how well prepared I am. Let me see. That could make a fun episode all its own. I do have an idea for an episode that I will mention to you off air that I really want to do for the RNC. Wait, it looks like yes with restrictions.

I love restrictions. That's great. We'll see what those are. Stay tuned to hear about those restrictions. Stay tuned everybody. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha.

Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast, There and Gone. It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear.

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Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's the hardest question you've ever asked your mom? Mom, what happened to your sister Margarita? For me, it's about a murder that's haunted my family for decades. They said that they took her and the next day she was already dead. To find the answers, I went to the place where my family is from, El Salvador, and found that the story starts with a priest who was killed on the altar and sparked a war. I'm Jasmine Romero, and on Sacred Scandal Nation of Saints, join me as we uncover an

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straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. Some will be unsettling. When she was with her imaginary friend, she would turn and look at you and you felt like something else was looking at you too. Some unnerving. The more I looked at it, I realized that the some look more like a claw, like a demon. Some even downright terrifying. The things that I saw, heard, felt in that house were purely demonic.

But all of them will be totally true. Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you live and get your podcasts. Esports! Oh god, okay, that was not a great intro. This is like an app here, a podcast that we do. I'm Neil Wogg, with me is James. We're doing another Be a James episode. Yep, we're back. We don't have a theme for our episodes, I feel like.

Yeah. Maybe it is Petrodollars. I guess it is. Yeah, yeah. We brought to you today by Big Fossil Fuel. You know, this entire episode is the, what do you do with your fossil fuel money episode? So we did an episode like a year ago about sports washing

and it has gotten much worse since then. Yeah. So the big kind of sports washing thing that's happening right now is this thing called the eSports World Cup that the Saudi government is putting on. Okay. It is going on right now is this thing called the eSports World Cup that the Saudi government is putting on. Okay.

It is going on right now, barring unfathomable disaster, it will still be going on by the time this episode comes out. We kind of talked about in the last episode how the Saudis have been getting into sports. I mean, it sort of starts with soccer. They start doing WWE. They get into tennis. They're in golf. They're in boxing.

They're in Formula One. And in the last like two years, specifically, they've gotten really, really deep into esports. In 2022, they spent $1.5 billion to acquire Faceit and ESL Gaming, which were two organizations that ran esports leagues. Esports, by the way, are a professional video game competition. They're the people who didn't spend their youth waking up at five in the morning to eSports leagues. eSports, by the way, are professional video game competition. Yeah. For the people who didn't spend their youth waking up at five in the morning to watch Korean Starcraft tournaments like I did. Yeah, that's me. I fall into that category.

Yeah, I feel like on this episode we have both the sports washing angles covered because you have the sports washing like regular sports angle and I've had to do the sports washing eSports angle. Yeah, I have I know what you would call them, P sports, like physical sports, meat space sports. Yeah, I've been privy to a decent amount of sports washing. Like I raced a lot against Iranian teams when I was cycling. Those dudes weren't so much sports washing as just straight up like national state sponsored doping programs. But then the UAE, Bahrain, Dubai, all these different petro-estates and Emirates will sponsor cycling teams. Very,

very common. Brunei, another one. I raced for Quebec once, which is not a petro-state. Well, I guess it's not a petro-. Yeah, yeah. No, they got big maple syrup behind them, in Catalonia, which again, not a Petro State. But yeah, it's very common in all kinds of professional sports, right? Because as sports has become more of like an entertainment industry, it's become unfathomably expensive

to own a sponsored team for like enthusiasts. And the value proposition isn't really there for brands. I don't think the amount that it costs now to even a sport like cycling, which is not a massive sport in global terms, right? It's not football, soccer for the Americans out there. It's not worth it for many brands to sponsor an entire cycling team, billions and millions of euros. But like if you can use that cycling team to launder and normalize your state's reputation, if that cycling team can be what people think of

when they hear about your country, then maybe that is worth it, right? And when you have a bottomless pot of oil money, you don't have to worry so much about whether it's worth it. Yeah, so the thing I want to do with this episode is to get into why specifically the Saudis are doing this right now. Because again, like most countries do sort of versions of this, right? But again, you know, that is $1.2 billion. They've thrown into two Star

craft leagues that I primarily know them for Starcraft. They do a bunch of stuff, but those things were not worth $1.5 billion. Like there's no way. But most of the money that had been sponsoring this stuff was crypto money, right? Okay, you know, but I wanted to get into why this is sort of happening something I think is very important to note going into this is that the sort of league thing that's being run right now is being run Directly out of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund which is called public investment fund. So this is directly state money so the eSports World Cup that's happening right now has 60 million dollars in prizes, which is unreal. It's an extraordinary amount of money.

Split around 21 eSports. There are 30 eSports teams involved. I am going to read the names of every single fucking one of them because fuck you. Okay, let's do it. Fnatic, G2 Sports, Guild eSports, Carmine Cor, Movistar, KOI, actually I've never heard of those ones. Uh, OG, Nautis... Movistar, it's, I'm guessing it's Spanish, it's a Spanish telephone network. Yeah, probably. You know, there's a couple I don't know, but like, these are like the largest esports teams in the world.

Okay. Ninjas in Pajamas, or NiP, Team Liquid, which I'm really sad about, because I was a Team Liquid fan for a fucking decade, I'm no longer one now because fuck this shit, Team Secret, Team Vitality, Tundra Esports, Virtus.Pro, 100 Thieves, Cloud9, FaZe Clan, Game and Gladiators, NRG Esports, Space Station Gaming, TSM, Blacklist International, LGD Gaming, Genie Esports, T1, Talon Esports, Weibo Gaming, Feria Esports, Loud, Team Falcons, Twisted Minds, fuck all of you for fucking doing this, doing the super PR thing.

There's been a backlash, and the backlash is largely focused on, you know, Saudi's institutionalized state homophobia and, you know, I I mean the fact that women are not full citizens Yeah, like misogyny. Yeah, I mean just are just straight-up owned by their husbands, right? Like that's that's that's how the sort of legal conservatorship works I'm not very familiar with eSports. So I can be there the podcast grimace here competitions in eSports that like gender segregated did do people all compete together basically No, there are like women's leagues, but like if you just if you want to compete, you can just compete. So you don't get forced out by sexism. This is actually a kind of big deal for Starcraft because you talked about this before, but like probably the number

two or number three best Starcraft player in the U.S. is Scarlett, who's a trans woman. And I mean, she's just in the regular league. Right. Right. Yeah. Other TERFs mad about it. You know, it's funny inside the Starcraft community. This was a huge thing for a long time. And eventually the tides just turned against them because everyone likes her because she's really good. And she's also just like a good person. And so they kind of I got to watch over the years as they just kind of got

obliterated. Weirdly, the like regular TERFs haven't really found about this, probably because StarCraft is, I don't know, too good of a game for them to be fucking dealing with. Not understanding things has not stopped them trying. That's true. That's true. It's kind of too obscure by this point. But you know, like there's been a lot of real concern for sort of queer players there. A lot of these teams, like right as they were announcing they were going to the fucking Esports World Cup, were doing all of these fucking Pride posts and talking about how they're gonna let their players wear Pride jerseys, and it's like, are you fucking kidding me?

Yeah. You know. So they physically press it in Saudi Arabia to play? Yeah, yeah. These tournaments are happening physically in Riyadh. Okay. Yeah. You know, this isn't the first one they've had. They've had some other events before this too there. But you know, like, yeah, and yeah, things are very, very bad. There was a well, a story that was famous among trans people, but I don't ever think

broke containment was there's a Saudi trans woman named Eden who was tricked into going back to like see her family. And her family just kidnapped her and locked her up and she killed herself. Jesus. And this is not an uncommon thing. It happens to cis women too sometimes when they try to like get out of the country. Sure, yeah. As though we kidnapped and like renditioned back.

Yeah, there have been some pretty good reports on that. Yeah. We'll link to them or something because it'll be too lengthy to go into here. Yeah, but I think kind of the weakness of the backlash is that it doesn't it doesn't really quite understand exactly why the Saudis are doing this. You know, they understand that the Saudi government is incredibly repressive and that it's, you know, institutionally homophobic and it's institutionally sexist. It does not understand, like just exactly how fucking bad these people are. Like this is like the most f fed up state in the entire world.

It is like, it is the fucking CIA state. And the rest of this episode is going to be us running through the exact sequence of stuff that caused the Saudis to need to do all of this fucking PR bullshit. And how the sort of structural economic cycle of funneling petrodollars around has led to genocide and then also the stupid fucking esports tournament for PR. Two things which are not the same. But first do you know who's probably not a large enough company to have sponsored this tournament although I can't promise that

it's not KitKat or whatever the fuck. Hopefully it's KitKat. I would like some KitKats if they're listening. They're one of the sponsors of this fucking esports world cup. You keep your wafer biscuit KitKat. Your hate cookie. I don't want your hate chocolate bar anymore. Yeah, it is the products and services of this podcast which hopefully are not supporting a genocide but oh good god. We can't be sure. Yep. So we are back and we are going to talk petrodollars.

So Saudi wealth takes the form of what are called petrodollars. Petrodollars are in some sense, they're very, very simple, right? It's dollars that you get from selling oil. This is important for a number of reasons, though. Technically speaking, you can sort of sell oil in other currencies now, but like most oil in the world is sold specifically in dollars. And so around the world, dollars are one of the things that if you are an economy, you need dollars in order to get oil from people. So huge sinks of American dollars from all across the world, you know,

from the US because the US imports a lot of oil flow into these sort of oil producing countries. These are called petrodollars. The most obvious manifestation of this in Saudi Arabia is the country's sovereign wealth fund, which has $900 billion of assets. Right. This is a unfathomable amount of money. It is so much money that is a structural problem for the global economy. Trying to figure out what the fuck you do with this money. This is a problem that has caused disaster around the world. It's something I'm fond of talking about on this show, but we're going to talk about again because it's important here. In the 70s and 80s, as OPEC realized that it could use its political power to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power and gain enormous amounts of petrodollars by controlling the price of oil.

Suddenly they had, you know, you have hundreds of billions of dollars floating around. And because this is capitalism, you can't just sit on that money. You have to find a way to turn that money into more money. But again, you know, I mean, just to solve from wealth fund is almost a trillion dollars. Right. I mean, just to solve from wealth fund is almost a trillion dollars. And so this is extremely hard. And it means that this money is constantly flowing around the world trying to find a way to get returns on it. In the modern era, these are things like, people remember WeWork? Oh, yeah. That incredibly stupid dude from the beginning office space rental scheme that went under.

A lot of that was funded by by Saudi money because studies have put an enormous amount of money in this Japanese bank called Softbank. And Softbank was trying to figure out what to do with this unfathomable amount of money. And they were like, okay, what if we what if we fund the dumbest project of all time? Yeah, it became a thing where they could fund it and like just buy them funding it. Its stock price will go up, right? Even if it was like we work a really shit idea. Yeah, and this is something about global capital that I don't think has been fully processed really,

but the sheer extent of capital concentration, right? The amount of money that the richest people in the world and the richest sort of families in the world in the sort of Saudi case, right? You know, like Saudi Arabia is a country where a family has access to the resources of extremely wealthy nation state, right? And that being true has structural effects on the entire rest of the economy because, you know, we've been seeing the consequences of this for a long time in the tech sector,

right? Where you don't have to fucking make money. Like your revenue stream can just be investor money. And you can you can coast for a decade off of just taking money from the Saudis who are like trying to find some way to turn this money into more money. I think this has downstream effects that we don't we haven't even begun to really understand yet. Right. But very famously in the 70s and 80s, there was all this money flowing around. And what it was poured into was the third world

debt crisis. People bought state debt with it. And then these loans were on adjustable rates, on adjustable interest rates. So when the Volcker shock hit and the US massively increased interest rates, the interest rates on these loans skyrocketed. Suddenly, you're paying 50% interest on a loan of several billion dollars. And all of these countries are just systematically looted. Their economies are destroyed. I mean,

David Gray rememberably talks about this thing in Madagascar where Madagascar had eliminated malaria, you know, but the way you eliminate malaria is through mosquito extermination, like programs are not that expensive, but they are a little bit expensive. And when the fucking government of Madagascar had to like pay off this IMF debt, they got rid of this mosquito program. And there was a malaria outbreak, and it killed unfathomable numbers of people. And stuff like this happened all over the world. And the source of all of this, right? Partially the source of this is these loans, and partially

the source of this is these enormous piles of petrodollars. You have to find some way to sort of turn into more capital. Right. And, you know, so there are sort of trademark things you can do with this money. One of them is buying a bunch of military equipment. Mostly what you're doing with that is sort of buying American patronage. If you spend enormous amount of money buying American tanks, and this is something that Saudi's been doing for ages, right? You spend a bunch of money on American defense contracts.

You can sort of buy US protection and guarantees that, for example, as is gonna happen later in this episode, you can buy a guarantee that an invading army won't sack your capital. But the thing with the Saudis is that they have a lot of equipment, but Saudi Arabia cannot maintain a strong functional army. If they had an actual serious army, there would be a coup tomorrow.

So their army is extremely well equipped, kind of, but it's trained like shit and it's run by like just dipshits intentionally, so that it sucks. But you know, so that's like sort of one thing you can do with this money. A lot of this money ended up going into real estate. And there are sort of cycles of this happening. The one thing that's of concern to us is what happens after 2008. In the sort of aftermath of 2008, there are still places in the world where, you know, you can park an extremely large amount of money in real estate and have it be a relatively liquid asset. If you have like property in a market that is, you know, where the housing market is really hot and prices are increasing rapidly, you can pretty quickly get rid of it. And you can also, there's liquidity, there's

sort of financial instruments you can do based off of your ownership of real estate. And this is something that drives the Saudis into a bunch of very, very, I don't know if risky is exactly the right word, but a bunch of moves in Yemeni real estate that really truly were about to not pay off. There's a very good book about this. It's by Isa Bloomy called Destroying Yemen, which is about like a lot of the factors that start the war in Yemen. And this is one of them, right? We can't really do a full recap of the Yemeni Civil War because that's its own 700 episode podcast. Like, oh God, it is...

Yeah. It's on a surface level, it's not that complicated, but the moment you get any granular detail on it, it's like the most complicated conflict I've ever studied. Yeah, I mean, there's so many conflicts like this, right? Like a Spanish Civil War appreciator. When I was studying Yemen in college, I longed for the simplicity of the Spanish Civil War. Like, this conflict is nuts. But for simplicity's sake, there's roughly-ish two factions. There are the sort of forces allied with what's called the coalition

government, which is the government backed by the Saudis. And then there are what's sort of in the West become called the Houthis. I mean, it's more complicated. It's all of this is enormously more complicated than that. These are all alliances. A lot of these alliances are extremely tenuous. But one of the things that happens is that when it when a government that is that is hostile to the Saudis, which like, you know, the sort of like untrue law, like that whole coalition is very hostile to the Saudis because Saudis suck shit. You know, suddenly the Saudis are looking at an enormous amount of capital they've sunk into real estate that they are, you know, based on these like incredibly corrupt land deals with the previous administration, which have been friendly to them. They are looking at suddenly losing all this land. The Saudis weren't the first people to come into sort of the Yemeni real estate market, right? On the Hawaii, Oman, a bunch of other states had sort

of been in there before. And so part of what the big part of what this sort of this like what's called the coalition is, is this, like, basically a bunch of these assholes trying to protect their housing assets. Look, that's a lot of what a lot of wars are, if we're honest, it's people trying to protect x or y assets, right? Like, unfortunately. Yeah. And it's not really seen in these terms in the way that's covered, but that's a lot of what's going on. And this produces one of the worst wars of the 21st century, which is saying something because the 21st century has had a lot of really, really terrible wars. Yeah, we've had some rough ones. Yeah, and we're going to get into what the Saudis were doing during this war after these

products and services. We have returned, and the thing we're returning into is a really really bleak war. So we said this kind of from the beginning, right? The Saudi military is not very good. The Saudis attempt to sort of end the war by like rolling a tank column over the border. It's just like, I think it's 2014, 2015, in like the early period of the war. They try to end it by just rolling tanks in and tanks get obliterated because the Saudi army isn't worth shit, right?

All of their ground forces are a joke, but their air force is very, very well equipped with a bunch of like incredibly modern US warplanes that we sell them all the fucking time. And so, you know, they don't really have good infantry. What they have the ability to do is just obliterate people with with air strikes. The kind of like terror air campaign that they're waging is something that I think we're all familiar with from Palestine, but they're doing airstrikes on school buses full of children.

They're taking the American thing. They're doing double tap drone strikes on weddings where they're they're hitting a wedding. And then when rescue workers come up, they hit they hit the rescue workers with airstrikes, right? I'm pretty sure as young when they had the triple tap fucking airstrike where they did an airstrike on someone's funeral, they did an airstrike on the rescue workers with airstrikes, right? I'm pretty sure as young as they had the triple tap fucking airstrike where they did an airstrike on someone's funeral, they did an airstrike on the rescue workers, and then when they

had a funeral for those people, they did airstrike on fucking that, right? This is a just unbelievably brutal war. And you know, and again, which we talked about, right? Like there are some, there are some parts of the Saudi coalition that can, you know, field ground forces, right? That stuff's mostly the sort of southern secessionist groups, and those people are not really that loyal. So, you know, so they have to start importing infantry to try to fight the Houthis.

And so they're importing a bunch of Colombian mercenaries. Yeah. So these are guys who've been like death squad guys in Colombia. The Colombian guys are the new, I was going to say the new Rhodesians, that it's a dark shadow to cast on a group of human beings. Yeah. It used to be that when you were running into private military contractors abroad, it would be people, white folks from Africa, right?

Like they call themselves Rhodesians, South Africans, what have you. Now you'll see a lot of private military contractors at the boots on the ground, infantry level of Colombians. Yeah. And so that's one of the sources they went to. But then part of the Saudi coalition is the UAE. And the UAE has a lot of very, very close ties to militant groups in Sudan, specifically a group of militias that's now known the West of the Rapid Response Forces. But these are the people who did the genocide in Darfur. Yeah. And they are like right now, like doing a genocide in, like in Sudan as they attempt to sort of seize control of the country.

And because the UAE is very, very well connected to these, one of the ways that the coalition tries to get ground troops is by using troops who were, you know, kidnapped by these militias. And when I say troops, I mean, child soldiers. The forces that they're deploying in Yemen in an attempt to use as cannon fodder are Sudanese child soldiers. It is unbelievably, I mean, kind of funnily, a lot of these people end up not fighting because they, you know, they get handed a rifle and get thrown

into Yemen and they just immediately sell their guns and like refuse to fight. But like, you know, but like that, that's the kind of shit. Like, again, the kind of pure evil we are dealing with is we are having the guys who did the guys who did the fucking Darfur genocide kidnap fucking villagers from Sudan, like child soldiers from Sudan and attempting to use them as cannon father in their fucking war in Yemen so they can defend their fucking real estate assets. Yeah. Right.

I think friend of the show, Eric Prince makes an appearance in Yemen as well via his triumvirate of companies which are the same company, right?. Yeah, probably I quite frankly don't remember that part But yeah, you probably also yeah, you can rely on EP to show up in a situation like this Yeah, I mean the part of this we haven't gotten to yet is the worst part of it which is so this the Saudis and the sort of coalition government they you know, they, you know, they do okay in the sort of southwest of the country, because the southern Yemen secessionist groups are well organized and are good soldiers, even if they eventually

sort of rebelled. There's this whole it's a whole mess. But in the west of the country, everything is completely different. And you know, they're basically getting their shit kicked in. And in that theater, the the Saudis plan is we are going to starve the country. So, you know, the Saudi the Saudis have naval assets, nobody else really in this war does right. And they just set up a blockade on like all of the ports in that side of the country. We do not know how many people get starved as a result of this. The last good mortality figures I could find, this war is still going on by the way. I mean, fighting has gotten a lot less intense since 2021, 2022, but I mean, it's still going. The last good numbers that I can find suggest 377,000 dead. And it's probably way, way worse than that. Because again, we

just don't know how many people died in the famines that, you know, that the Saudis set off. And this was, you know, this was explicitly their plan here was to just kill off the population of this part of Yemen by starving to death. You know, this is the genocide, right? They were attempting to do genocide. It doesn't work and it doesn't work because I mean, there's a number of reasons why it doesn't work. They basically they get defeated militarily. Houthi troops like take several cities like inside of Saudi Arabia and like they like they march across the border and take them. And, you know, I mean, it's bad enough for the Saudis that like there's a moment where it like it looks like they're going to lose Riyadh and the US has to step in and be like, no, like, okay, you guys need to fucking pull out of this shit. But that, you know, that makes the war less bad, you know, like the blockades not still

in place. But this is the situation in 2022 that we walk into when suddenly they're buying all these esports companies is that they have just attempted to commit a genocide, right? They have just attempted to exterminate a vast part of the population of Yemen. That's, I think, like really the true sort of heart of darkness evil shit, right? Like, I don't know, it's like US and Cambodia shit,

but there's stuff that got more media attention too, which was like in a lot of ways more harmful to them because the PR from it. But one of the things I think people have forgotten now, because this was six years ago, is that in 2018, they kidnapped and then killed a Washington Post columnist named Jamal Khashoggi. Yeah. By tricking him into going into a consulate, killing him, carving his body up with a bone saw. And we're pretty sure the way that they got the body

out of the consulate was by stuffing the fucking, again, bone sawed parts of his body into embassy bags in a diplomatic immunity and walking them out of the embassy. Yeah, this is one of those things that like should never be forgotten, right? Yeah. He was a citizen, right? Was he a green card holder?

I'm not a% sure. But this is obviously like a fucking unbelievable crime. I think I wish that, you know, the fact that they were doing fucking airstrikes on school buses had gotten as much attention as this did. But, you know, for a long time, right, like in the late 2010s, and the early 2020s, this was an issue in the 2020 presidential campaigns because, you know, Trump fucking went and touched the orb with Mohammed bin Salman, who's the crown prince of... Now, well, at the time was known as Mohammed bin Bonesaw because he just straight up ordered this guy to be fucking Bonesawed.

You know, but like that it was it was a real sort of issue. And this is the reputation that the Saudi government has that causes them to kind of go really, really hard into the into this eSports angle. And there's one last kind of angle to this, which is like the worst kept secret in the oil of the oil market is that the Saudis are running out of oil. It's like it's technically a secret, but it's like, everyone knows this. Like everyone knows that a lot of sort of oil that's technically sold by Saudi Aramco is not their oil, it's their labels and other people's oil. And people have known this for a long time and the Saudis obviously know it. And so the trick they have

to pull, right, in order to continue to be this fucking like nightmare dictatorship state propped up by the CIA is to find something else to base their economy on. And their plan has been a lot of like they're trying to do just tech bullshit. We're not going to get into because that's its own thing. I'm so sad. I'm so sad to be talking about the line. I'm so sorry. The light. Yeah, to be talking about the line. I'm so sorry. The line. Yeah, they're trying to build a city that is a line. That is a line, yeah. That is also a city. A really, really long city is a line.

That's going to be their tech thing. It may sound like we're oversimplifying this. We are not. No, it is. They are trying to build a city that is a line. It's not going to get built, but what it has done is they've absolutely destroyed the lives of a bunch of sort of people who are just like farmers and cattle like herders,

like semi-dematic cattle herders, people who've been there for a really long time have had their land taken away from them and their lives have been destroyed by it. So, you know, but the thing is in order for them to try to do their tech pivot, they have to fix their reputation. People, they cannot be the state that is remembered for like bonesawing a journalist and Attempting to starve an entire population and doing air strikes and school buses, right? This can't be the reputation They have this is it vision 2030 or plan 2030 or something? Yeah, yeah for their like rehabilitation and diversification of their income but like post

Jamal Khashoggi a lot of big companies were like yeah yeah, can't be like, like companies like Google, right? And like big, big tech companies kind of took a noticeable step back. And so this has been why they've been going into sports because they can throw around like we're talking $900 billion of assets, right? They can just swamp a sport. Right? Especially something like esports where people are not very well paid, there's not that much money, sources of income are tenuous. They could just sort of buy off these entire industries. And it's kind of, and it's working. And part of the reason that it's working is that, you know, the focus is on, and like, I understand why people are doing this, but the focus has been on the fact that set like the Saudi government is, you know, is sexist and homophobic. And that's true. But if that's the reputation that the Saudis have, that is a win for them. Because A, they'll be able to find people who agree with those views and B, nobody's talking about again, the fact that they

they they fucking they did an airstrike on a school bus. Like, like the bodies of children and their fucking school bags were flying over a map. They've been able to sort of avoid any kind of more reckoning with this because people are off talking about other stuff. And if this keeps working, like it's going to work. They're going to be a country that killed 370,000 people and probably more. I think also, like one of the reasons they've been able to get away with this is that our media has normalized massive amounts of death and dying of Muslim people in the Middle East. Yeah. For 20 plus years.

Right. So a lot of people's entire life of media consumption every day we've dropped bombs and killed hundreds of people in the Middle East. And it's just. Yeah. It's the background noise in US media. Yeah, I want to mention one more thing they did that wasn't in the script, but I need to fucking talk about because this is one of my former political experiences was so when the Arab Spring started, one of the biggest uprisings was in Bahrain.

This is one of the earliest uprisings in 2011. There's an attempt to knock off the monarchy of Bahrain and they probably could have won the kids in the streets in Bahrain are probably the bravest on the bravest people I've ever seen. And the Saudis rolled tanks into Bahrain to crush the protests and fucking keep the government intact. And for years, for years, like a decade afterwards, every once in a while, you get a video coming like that came out of like

the of these kids dressed in all black, chasing down an armored vehicle that's shooting at them with Molotovs. Right. I've never seen anything. I've never seen anything like it. Like there's some of the bravest people in the world and the Saudis fucking rolled tanks into their country to fucking crush them. The fucking e-sports companies here, those are the people whose money you're taking. Right.

You were you were taking the money of a bunch of people who rolled tanks into a country whose people wanted fucking democracy. And yeah, that's all I got about this. I'm extremely angry about all of this and yeah, fuck them. Yeah. If I can say from the perspective of someone who's been paid to do sports for a decent amount of my life. Yeah, you make shit money, but it's so much better to not make shit choices as well. And that goes way beyond not cheating in the manifest ways that people cheat in sports. But also just get done compromising

to the way more important than playing. Sports is supposed to be fun. And if you allow yourself to be a vehicle for things that are terrible, you're're gonna be miserable in your fucking 40s Anyway, it's your body will fall apart like don't make yourself feel guilty for this as well Yeah And one last thing I want to address because one of the defenses that Saudi people been rolling out is this like oh you guys Don't respect Muslim culture

like because because the main line of complaint has been about sort of About homophobia and sexism, and it's like, yeah, man, those fucking children in their school buses were Muslim too. Like, fuck you. Yeah, the people in Bahrain are Muslim too, right? The people whose bodies are all over the streets because they asked for a chance to have some say in how the country was run. Like, that's just, you don't get to do that.

Yeah, so this has been Nickatappen here. Fuck every single one of the scenes that's fucking doing this shit. Fuck it all. Yeah. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast, There and Gone. It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away?

Was it an accident, or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes he's innocent, but in my eyes he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation

to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. All that they know. Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's the hardest question you've ever asked your mom? Mom, what happened to your sister Margarita? For me, it's about a murder that's haunted my family for decades.

They said that they took her, and the next day she was already dead. To find the answers, I went to the place where my family is from, El Salvador, and found that the story starts with a priest who was killed on the altar and sparked a war. I'm Jasmine Romero, and on Sacred Scandal Nation of Saints, join me as we uncover an unholy war, one that includes government cover-ups and politicians turned death squad leaders. But I'll also tell you the story of one family, mine,

because on this journey, I found out that we had more secrets than I knew. Listen to Sacred Scandal, Nation of Saints, as part of the MyCultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Late on the evening of March 8, 1971, a group of anti-war activists did something insane. Holy s***, we are really here. This is really happening. They weren't professional criminals.

They were ordinary citizens. But they needed to know the truth about the FBI. Burglary's forged blackmail letters and threats of violence were used to try to stop anti-war marches. Even if that meant risking everything. I just felt like I was living in the heart of the dragon and it was just my job to stop the fire. I'm Ed Helms, host of Snafu, season two, Medburg,

the story of a daring heist that exposed J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI. If it meant some risks that were involved, well, that's what citizens sometimes have to do. Listen to season two of Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. It could happen here. Podcast for me and Shireen talk about vegetables or terrible things, depending on the week. It's me, it's Shireen and today it's a terrible thing. It's not a vegetable or a sea animal. How are you,

Shireen? How are you doing? I'm good. That's honestly a great premise just for a show in general. Like we talk about either food or something terrible. Yeah, and you never know. It's just in your playlist and then is it a fucking artichoke? Is it genocide? You don't know. You have to find out.

Yeah. And the only way is by listening. Yeah. But hi, I'm good. Thanks for having me. Good. I'm glad to hear it, Shereen. So what I wanted to talk about today is what is happening in Turkey?

Why are they like this? What is going on? Specifically, I want to talk about some of these attacks on Syrian refugees in Turkey. The people may have seen, they may not have seen. I see them in my timeline, but maybe that's because of the people I follow. I think to start off with, to understand what's happening in Turkey, you have to understand the relations between Turkey and Syria since the civil war began in Syria, which is more than a decade ago now, 13 odd years ago. So from the start of the war, Turkey has backed anti-Assad factions, right?

So those are the rebels in Syria. This is a big change. In 2008, Assad and Erdogan's family went on holiday together. Really? Yeah, yeah. They went into southern Turkey on a little beach holiday together. It's fucking disturbing. Yeah, yeah. What a time just to do Turokking by the beach. But unfortunately, they're no longer holidaying together. They might be holidaying again soon, as we'll see.

Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Yeah, they are becoming tight again. Erdogan referenced their family holiday in his most recent comments on Likun. Really? Yeah. It's so weird. He's like, our relations have been familial.

I don't like that at all. Yeah, yeah. You know, I wouldn't be going on holiday with Bashar al-Assad just as a moral principle, I think. It's just crazy to be, because you're right, I feel like we're very open about supporting the anti-Assad forces. And so to be like, suddenly, why can't we have diplomatic friendliness? Like come on. It's just like the weirdest plot twist to me.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it comes from anti-migrant sentiment in Turkey, which I want to get into. I think it's so like we are witnessing this global crackdown on migration of refugees. We see it in Europe. We see it here at the southern border. We see it here in Turkey.

We're seeing it in North Africa, we're seeing it all over. So this hasn't always been the case. At the start of the war, Turkey threw up on its borders to Syrian refugees, right? They built camps to house them, they were strong backers of the revolution, they spent $40 million caring for the refugees. The National Intelligence Organization, the MIT actually trained parts of the FSA, the Free Syrian Army. And then later they brought together the SNA.

There will be many acronyms, right? Like, every civil war loves a three-letter acronym and the Syrian one is no different. But they were really open, they were really public about being like, we welcome the refugees. I remember that was like, I don't know, as a Syrian, I was like, oh, that's nice. I remember thinking that. It was nice. It's a nice thing to do. I mean, like, at the time, no one gave a shit for the most part. So to have like a country out loud be like, we welcome the refugees, come over here, we'll help. And now they have

the largest population of Syrian refugees in the world. I don't know if you're going to mention this coming up, but I feel like the only thing that changed, not the only thing, one of the only things, the main thing that changed is that no one in Turkey thought it would last this long. Will Barron Yeah, no, yeah, absolutely not. Samar Masnari Yeah. Will Barron Yeah, we'll get into that because the nature of their legal residence there is very temporary.

Samar Masnari Yeah. Will Barron Okay, so Turkey has used the SNA, the Syrian National Army, right? Which is, We'll get into that because the nature of their legal residence there is very temporary. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Turkey has used the SNA, the Syrian National Army, right, which is it's more explicitly Turkish backed faction, as a directly linked proxy force. They've used it in their operations against the SDF, so the Syrian Democratic Forces, it's another acronym for you. The organization which includes the YPG, the YPJ, the other elements of the military forces

of the autonomous areas, North and East Syria, sometimes called Rejava. They have also used the SNA outside of Syria, in Azerbaijan, Libya, and Niger, just as a private military, as a mercenary army, more or less. You'll hear them referred to sometimes as mercenaries. Certainly when they're being used outside of Syria, it's hard to argue that they're not. And other times, when they're being used in Syria, a lot of these folks were previously parts of other groups that have been repackaged and bundled up together by Turkey.

And there are still many factions within these broadly speaking Turkish-supported Arab rebel forces in Syria. There are some Kurdish groups as well, but not so many. And there are some Turkic groups that are not Arab. So these proxy forces are really vital to the Turkish strategy in Syria. I wanted to get a sense of how numerous the redirected or re-recruited jihadists were from other groups. So I reach out to Zagros Hiwa. People are not familiar with Zagros.

He is a spokesperson of the Kurdistan Communities Union's Foreign Relations Commission. If you're not familiar with the Kurdistan Communities Union, it's the umbrella organization for the several democratic confederalist political parties of North, South, East and West Kurdistan, which are inspired by the ideology of Abdullah Osman. We're going to hear more from Zagros next week. I have a number of questions about the ongoing Turkish bombing there in the Kandil mountains in the north of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq. We're going to drop a little quote here where he talks about the interactions that the SDF

and the YPG and the other units right HPG have had with the Turkish armies Arab Syrian elements. When you hear Zagros here talking about Daesh, what he's talking about is the so called Islamic State, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, right? It's just the Arabic acronym of the same organization. So if you weren't aware, that's what he's talking about. Invading the Turkish army is that many jihadists have been incorporated into the Turkish army. They are acting as units with the Turkish, separate units with the Turkish army. They have been embedded with NATO's second largest army. I can say these jihadists are ex-Daesh members, ex-Nusra Front members, ex-Al Qaeda members. They are from many nationalities.

According to PUK officials, Patriotic Union of Kyrgyzstan officials, they say that they have learned the names of 300 of these Daesh members in the Turkish army ranks. So also underground, Kyrgyzstan freedom guerrillas themselves have observations about the inclusion of jihadist members in the ranks of the Turkish army. And many of the close-range clashes, the Blank-and-Point clashes with the Turkish army. Kurdistan freedom guerrillas hear some of the soldiers speaking Arabic, shouting, yearning in Arabic. To understand further what's going on in Turkey, I think you need to understand the phenomenon of Turkish ultranationalism and social Darwinism. This is not just endemic in Turkey, but also in European countries with a large Turkish

diaspora. The most extreme and concerning example of this is a group called the Grey Wolves. The Grey Wolves are the militant street wing of the nationalist movement party in Turkey. They've been involved in political violence there since the 1960s with their primary target being Kurds, Greeks, Alawis, Arabs, Christians, Jews, and Armenians. These are all minority ethnic groups. I guess to understand this further, you have to be able to differentiate between race, state, and nation, which is getting into things that I lecture about. But the idea of a race is like an effective biological link.

This isn't born out necessarily, but the idea of a shared biology, the idea of a nation. A nation is an imagined community, which can have many races. It could have a state aligned to it or not. The Turkish nation doesn't necessarily align with the Turkish state. There are other groups within the Turkish state who have Turkish citizenship, but do not see themselves as nationally or ethnically Turkish. For what the Grey Wolves believe is the superiority of a Turkish race and they strive for a mono-ethnic Sunni Islamic Turkish nation. They're a pan-Turkish organization so they want to join together all the Turkic peoples in one kind of renewed

Turkish empire. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they called for this revived empire that would unite Turkic people. They, like many of these extremely right-wing violent organizations, have their roots in anti-communism. In the Cold War and specifically in something called Operation Gladio, which was a sort of anti-communist guerrilla training supported by the CIA and other groups. They began as government condoned and a sort of deniable government forced to use against the left. I'm not going to be able, I can't detail everything the Grey Wolves have done and this isn't what

that episode is about. I do want to explain one incident. It's maybe one of the most heinous things that they're known for, and it's called the Marash Massacre. Are you familiar with this, Shireen? No, I'm not, actually. Okay. A little history for you. So in December of 1978, in Karaman, Marash. Karaman, Marash, and Marash, you'll hear those two terms used, both right? Karaman, I think, means hero in Turkish. There was a battle there in the early part of the 20th century. I think means hero in Turkish. There was a battle there

in the early part of 20th century, I think it was in the first world war. And so they added like hero to the start of the town. But Alavi people don't tend to use that when they talk about the massacre because it seems a little weird to be like a great town where this horrible massacre occurred. So you hear both. It's M-R-A-S, but S has a little diacritical mark, so it's a shh noise. The massacre starts in 798 when an anti-Soviet movie is being shown in a movie theater in town and someone throws a bomb into the theater. Communist boots were blamed for this. It's a little unclear if it really was them or if it was someone who wanted to start some drama by pretending to be them, if that makes

sense, right? So many alavis. Alavis are a group of Kurds. Are you familiar, Shireen? I was actually just trying to remind myself because I'm really not familiar with this sect because I know it's completely separate from Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. Is it more like Sufism? Yes, yeah, yeah. That's what I thought. They're like a 12 Sufiist, but with the incorrect elements from like veneration of nature and they have this sort of idea of sainthood. Right.

I probably used a lot of words that people aren't super familiar with. So can you explain Sufism and then Sunni and Shia maybe? So maybe you're familiar with the two different main sects of Islam, which are Sunni and Shia. The're familiar with the two different main sects of Islam, which are Sunni and Shia. The main difference between the two, if you want to really boil it down, is

who they believe the successor should have been to the Prophet Muhammad. The Shias believe that his cousin and his son-in-law Ali should have been the successor, versus the Sunnis don't believe he needed a successor at all and it was more just like passing down his teachings. There's a lot of history behind that and there's a lot of drama and violence, but that's like the most simple way to put it and it kind of grew from there. The Sufism sect, on the other hand, is a little different. It's described as a contemplative school of Islam that aims to develop an individual's consciousness of God through chanting, recitation of litanies, music, and physical movement.

Maybe you know or you've seen the Sufi, like, whirling dervishes. It's basically a form of, like, physical active meditation for them. So it definitely differs from both Sunni and Sushia Islam. It's more in a way spiritual. Is that a decent summary? Benjaminshah Da'af, me. Yeah, I think you've done a great job. And Sufis are broadly Sunni, I guess, and Alawites are like, there are 12ers and 7ers, which is like to do with the amount of people you think are the Imam's successors to Ali, which we don't need to go into, I don't think, in very great depth. But I guess Alawites would fall into the 12er camp, not traditional 12er Shia.

That's with a V. You're saying the V, Alawites. Yes, as opposed to Alawites, right? Another Shia group. Yes, Alawites is very different. Yep, yes. Like, I feel like it's very confusing because they sound so similar, but Alawites is very different. Yeah. Yes. I feel like it's very confusing because they sound so similar, but Alawites, they're considered disbelievers by the classical Sunni and Shia theologies. Their own separate group.

It's like a religious sect that kind of splintered off from early Shiaism in the ninth century. And they are the sect to which the Assad family belongs. And many other military families in Ba'athist Syria belonged, right? Yeah. When the Ba'athist party, like led by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's dad, when he took power, the Alawites in the military sect

were, or the Alawite sect in the military, were really supportive of that regime. And I feel like it's a big reason why he gained popularity and was able to like overthrow the government. Yeah. But yeah. Okay. So that's a little breakdown of Islam for you. Sorry, that was confusing. I know, it's good.

There's just so much like, like little details that I know I will miss and it's just, it's so much more complicated. But yeah, there's just many sects that stem all from the one religious book of the Quran and then just shit happens. I don't know what else to say about that. Well, maybe we'll explain it another day for people because I do think like I went to school at a very woke time in the United Kingdom's history where you could do Islam as your like religious studies. Wait, really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's because Tony Blair and the woke nurse. That's crazy. Yeah. No, it's cool. It was really

good. I learned a lot. Well, so what did I miss? You tell me. No, I'm not. I'm not here to fucking. No, I'm serious. I am absolutely not here to tell you what you got right or wrong. I think you did an excellent job. Shia comes from the party of Ali, right? That's what the word means. And I think that's the main reason why Sufism is more associated with Sunni Islam, if I'm being honest, because that's the main tenet of being Shia, is that you believe that Ali was the successor.

And so I think anything that is not that usually is more under the Sunni umbrella. Yeah. I think sometimes you'll see it like as a third, like Sufism is its own thing. Generally, like more Muslims in the world are Sunni than Shia. I'm not going to do the thing that people do where they go around naming the governments which are one or another. And like, I think that's very useful. So let's go back to 1978 in Marash, right? These alavis, for reasons that we have just

explained, are perceived, A, they are Kurdish, right? So they're not Turkic. And B, they are perceived to be heretical by people with a more conventional Sunni Islam, or some people, I should say. So, the day after this bomb goes off, a left-wing cafe in town is bombed, and two leftist teachers are murdered on their way home from school. Later, at their funeral, it's attacked by a mob of Turkish nationalists, right? Later that week, exes start appearing on the doors of the Alavi homes in this area of town, which is predominantly Alavi, right?

They made announcements from the mosques saying that communists and Alavis are burning your mosques. You should attack them and kill them. Well. And on the 23rd of December, crowds stoked by and comprised of the gray wolves rampaged through Alavi neighborhoods. Children, women, and men were murdered in their homes and their bodies were thrown in the street. Women were raped, an inch of people were removed from the hospital beds and murdered. Children were burned alive

in the furnaces of their own homes. Estimates of the amount of people who were murdered vary from like 111, which is the official government number, to 150, which I saw in the British al-Aviz Society. 550-something houses were burned and destroyed, nearly 300 businesses were looted. Writer Aziz Tunc, my apologies if I got that wrong, I'm trying my best, who has written a book about the massacre, believes that the al-Aviz were killed for refusing to assimilate to the Turkish language and culture. And he adds, it occurs to not be only victims of the attack, progressive

and leftist Turks who had opposed the official policies of Ankara were also included. The trials for this massacre actually continued until 1991. So it happened in 1978, right? Yeah. That's a long time. A total of 804 people were put on trial, which kind of shows you the scale of the mob that you have. Was it mostly the gray wolves? Yeah. So it comes out of the MHP, which is this Turkish nationalist party, right?

And it's generally attributed to the gray wolves as causality. When you get these massive crowd violence things, it's not like everyone's a card-carrying member necessarily. You'll hear people say that they consider that to be like state or organisational complicity beyond it. It wasn't a spontaneous thing. And that's an allegation that's sometimes made. 29 people were sentenced to life in prison for this by 1991. Out of 804, 29 were sentenced? Yeah. And all of them were released in 1992. Okay. As part of an anti-terrorism law.

Now is a good time, Shreen. Do you know who will not commute your life sentence? Oh my God. They won't do it. Well, whatever it is, yeah. All right, we're back. We're back. We're back.

We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. we're back.

We're moving on from massacres, thankfully. So we're talking about the gray walls, right? That's where they come from. Today, the party that they were sort of founded by the MHP is allied with Erdogan's party, and they've continued their violence, and particularly they've begun to focus on Kurdish people. Last year, groups of them in the diaspora could be found in Belgium attacking Kurds who they found to be celebrating the Kurdish New Year. Kurds celebrate New Year often with fire outside. It's pretty fucking easy to see who's doing it. They were attacked. You could see videos of this. If you scroll far enough back on

my Twitter timeline, you'll see I've shared some of them. In 2015, they protested and burned Chinese flags and attacked people who looked Asian, to include Korean folks and then folks who certainly were not Chinese, in response to the Chinese government's ban on Turkic Uighurs fasting during the month of Ramadan. They also opposed Russia due to its collaboration with Assad and its attacks on Syrian Turkmen. Some gray wolves had gone over to Syria to fight. They're fighting against Assad with Turkmen units. I guess perhaps their most famous incident in the war was in 2015 when they shot down

a Russian plane was shot down and the pirate parachuted out and then they machine gunned him while he was parachuting down. Whoa. Yeah. So they pretty strongly opposed to the Russian support of the Assad regime. Yeah. I mean, they're one of the many reasons why I really get frustrated with all these different sects that are anti-Assad and I am also anti-Assad.

But then they make it so complicated because they're terrible people. And so it's not just the rebels and these citizens of their own country trying to stand up against their government. It becomes this larger political clusterfuck that gets hard to keep track of. And I think that's why it's gone on for this long. It's not simple. It's not just like government versus people anymore. It's just simple. It's not just like government versus people anymore. It's just too many elements. Right. You have people fighting within the revolution and the government constantly exploiting those divisions, right? Yeah. So yeah, as I said, the wolves have significant support in the Turkish diaspora and they represent the largest right-wing movement

in Germany, which is pretty impressive when you consider like Germany. Yeah. movement in Germany, which is pretty impressive when you consider like Germany. Yeah. Like Germany is not known for not having much right wing. Go ahead, Shireen, you're looking, I can see there's a question inside you. I'm just okay. So the Grey Wolves believe in the superiority of the Turkish race, correct? That's correct. And you're saying that they are also big in Germany. I feel like Germany for a time also considered themselves to be the best race. This is true, Shireen.

There are some things that they share. Yeah. It does feel a little bit on the nose, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. If it makes a difference in Austria, the gray wolf salute is banned. Oh, whoa. We're going to get into the gray wolf salute.

Imagine making a little wolf with your hands, right? Wait, that's, they took that? That's like a shadow puppet. Yes, yeah. I couldn't really fuck that up. That's not fair. Yeah, no, yeah, you're no longer key to, we're going to learn about the salute, Shreen.

So if you're not familiar, your big finger and your little pinky finger up in the air, your other two fingers are touching your thumb. It's almost like the 666 rocker sign, but it's not. It's such a shadow puppet. I feel like I've done that as a kid. That's not fair. They can't take a shadow puppet. Whatever. They've done worse. Shireen's hard right youth is coming out. So if you weren't familiar with the Grayhawks before, and best salute, you might have become familiar with them this week when a Turkish footballer received a two-day ban for flashing

the salute after scoring when the team beat Austria in Euro 2024. Turkish fans responded to the ban by giving the salute en masse at the quarterfinals. So that was the next game. Whoa. Right. Yeah, yeah. It was a scene was a scene like, uh, people have obviously drawn the comparison to the previous German movement, which thought one race was better than the other races. Right. But seeing a whole crowd of people doing that in the stadium is, uh, disturbing. Yeah. It's concerning. They did it in a game in Germany. So the salutes not banned in Germany, but, uh, and then Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan postponed his

plans to visit Azerbaijan and attended the game after the suspension to show his support for the team. He defended the player saying he'd merely expressed his excitement after scoring. Germany was big mad about this in their defense. They summoned the Turkish ambassador to the foreign ministry to explain what the fuck was going on. And it has resulted in considerable amounts of violence across Europe. We saw in Austria, we saw in Germany, we saw in Belgium where

there is a large Turkish and often a large Kurdish diaspora. Because of the tensions between these two groups, which the football has increased, then we saw street fighting between these two groups in predominantly migrant neighborhoods. But I don't want this episode to just be about the football or the Turkish participation in the Syrian civil war. I want it to be about what's happening to Syrian refugees in Turkey today. So many Turkish people have come to resent the Syrian refugees who relocated there since the start of the war. Estimates range from 3.1 to 3.5. I've seen

4 million evidently. They have a land border, Turkey and Syria, so some of the people crossing will have come without being documented, whereas others will have come in a more formal process and be documented. It's millions of refugees, I think that's what matters. They are largely baselessly, evidently baselessly in some cases, accused of causing the economic troubles that include low wages and inflation. Inflation exceeded 75% in Turkey in May. They have also been blamed for the earthquake that happened in February 2023, which I'm not quite sure how, who or what the process exactly that they're postulating is there. That's crazy.

Yeah, yeah. Just to clear things up, people generally can't make earthquakes happen. So across the political spectrum, we've seen support grow for sending these refugees home. In 2016, Turkey began to accuse the SDF of ethnically cleansing Arab areas in Syria. The UN refuted these accusations. But in 2018 and 2019, with the explicit approval of President Trump, the Turkish military and its proxies attacked the SDF and seized territory inside Syria. Operation Peace Spring and Olive Branch.

In these areas, Turkey has attempted to resettle Arab refugees, right? This is why we can't understand anti-Syrian sentiment in Turkey without understanding Turkey's involvement in the Syrian civil war, right? It's trying to create what it calls a safe zone. And in this safe zone, it's trying to take the refugees that its people have decided they don't want and relocate them back into a country which is at war.

Turkey's already resettled Syrian refugees in this safe zone, but obviously some of them have been in Turkey for more than a decade. Their children have gone to school in Turkey. They speak Turkish. They've learned a new language. They've learned a new alphabet. They have lives there. So not all of them are just taking the chance to, yeah, let me get straight back to Aleppo. For very obvious reasons, people don't want to go back. Since 2018, a cost of living crisis in Turkey has been leveraged by the right to stoke anti-Syrian sentiment. Research found that in 2020, only 23% of Turkish citizens would accept a Syrian bride or groom into their family or consider having a Syrian as a business partner. And only 31% of Turkish citizens would accept a Syrian bride or groom into their family or consider having a Syrian as a business partner, and only 31% would want to have their

child educated in a class with a Syrian in it. That is... Yeah. That makes me so fucking mad. One of the things I've come across with, this doesn't by any means apply to all Turkish people. I've met some very cool Turkish people who I like very much, but people who are ultra-nationalists in Turkey, America has its fair share of bigots, right? Generally, they know that it's wrong. They're like, say it with your whole chest of the,

certainly the anti-Syrian sentiment that I've heard expressed online from Turkish people. It's not something that like it's considered shameful. They'll just just fucking say it, which is kind of wild. No, it's scary. Like, yeah, it's very scary. Like if you've raised your child in Turkey, and that's the only that's their first language, essentially, or that's the only thing they know. That's just one of the most unsafe places for them to be there. Yeah. That's scary and not fair. Yeah. I know I've met lots of Kurdish people who come in to the United States where I'm helping

out at the border and I'll greet them in Kurdish. I was talking to a guy the other day, and Kurdish is by no means great, but it took a little class and can say some words. Then also a dude walked around the market with me every morning in Camryslo and just pointed at vegetables and shouted. So I'm pretty, pretty good when it comes to like the eggplant spectrum. So I'll greet them in Comanche and they only speak Turkish, right? Like it's not that they could just drop back. And I'm sure that's true for kids who would have grown up speaking Arabic in Syria. They went to school in Turkey, so it's a language.

And it's also like not necessarily something they wanted to happen. I think that's something that really frustrates me. It's like Bashar started attacking his people and they needed somewhere to go. Turkey welcomed them. Yeah. And when you resettle and you make a home somewhere, it really feels like, especially now in this world, like if you're a refugee, it feels like you're always going to be kind of displaced in one way or another. It's heartbreaking.

Yeah, at best you're like temporary. Yeah, after the earthquake in 2023, which folks will remember, we did a little fundraiser for World Central Kitchen. Syrian refugees were accused of looting a lot on social media. Turkish Twitter had trending slogans like, immigrants should be deported. Just straight up saying it. Syrian refugees were kicked out of tent camps and left homeless. They faced verbal abuse for trying to access services. Separate shelters were set up for Syrian refugees. Literally, they couldn't be together, right? Resentment, simid amongst the groups.

Yeah, I read some NGO reports. One of the things they cite is that like women who were refugees, especially women who were on their own, preferred not to drink water because they didn't want to go to the bathroom. Like they were afraid. They wanted to stay in their tents and like, yeah. That's something I've seen in other settings too,

but like it is obvious, like that's a pretty fucked situation to be in. You're in a hard place and you're choosing to dehydrate yourself. NGOs later reported that refugees did not receive mobile container homes until displaced Turkish residents received them and that refugee women in particular experienced violence in these container camps. That's when they're dropping shipping containers for people to live in because all the houses fell down because of the earthquake. Many Turkish refugees have a sort of temporary protected status. That temporary protected status only allows them to live in the provinces that they arrived in. Many of those provinces are obviously border provinces. Initially,

many Syrian folks had come to Turkey hoping that they could then continue. Turkey kind of bridges between Asia and Europe. They had hoped that they could go through Turkey from east to west and then continue into the European Union, perhaps, and live there. That didn't work. Many of them found themselves stuck in Turkey and are not even able to leave the province that they lived in. After the earthquake, Turkey lifted those restrictions on movement and you saw tons

of Syrian folks traveling around Turkey and being like, whoa, like Istanbul, how cool is this? Like having lived there for 10 years, right? But they couldn't leave their province before. For this generation of Syrians, some of them, like I was reading some of their like social media, like some folks I think meaningfully became, felt more Turkish when they were able to access their things. But other folks, they went back to Syria to visit family, they were briefly allowed to

do that, they weren't allowed to do that before. But it also broadened their resentment against them, I think it's fair to say. And in the 2023 presidential election, there wasn't really an option that wasn't hostile to refugees. Erdogan was probably the least hostile, but still hostile. Neither did the Turkey-EU deals to prevent further migration westward help. All of this just continues to turn up the temperature. Between January and December 2023, over 57,000 Syrians were deported according to Human Rights Watch. These deportations took place with the authorities, quote, pressuring the border authorities to

list the majority of border crossings as returnees or voluntary. Turkey's voluntary returns are often coerced returns to, quote unquote, safe zones that are pits of danger and despair. That's a quote from Adam Kugel, who's a deputy Middle East North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. That's bleak. Yeah, that's pretty bleak, right? Like, oh, look, we're going to volunteer you to go back to Aleppo or free. Shereen, do you know who will not force you to return to a country that is a decade long civil war?

That took me by surprise. I'm not going to lie. Yeah, that's what I striked to do, Shereen. Just when you think it couldn't get any worse, I hit you with a terrible ad pivot. We're back. And I want to talk about the most recent outburst of tension. There have been outbursts of tension, outbursts of violence against Syrian refugees before in Turkey, and 2021 brings to mind. But recently, this all came to a head in early July when a Syrian man was accused of molesting his seven-year-old cousin in a public

toilet in central Turkey, which is a pretty fucked thing to do. The guy was arrested, the young girl was taken into protective custody, I think along with her mother. But it didn't stop violence exploding in the town where this happened that night. Cars were destroyed, Syrian shops were attacked, and homes were set on fire. The next night the violence spread in the border city of Gaziantep, which has like a 25% Syrian population. A man was stabbed.

I've seen other videos of like teenage boys, like I don't know if they're dead or unconscious, but they're certainly not capable of responding and mobs of people are stamping on them, kicking them, and it's pretty horrible stuff. Yeah, the videos I've seen of the riots and the mobs are really terrifying. Yeah, like it's petrifying to think of like a mob of people coming for you because of who you are, where your parents came from.

With nothing you can do to defend yourself, right? Turkey's interior minister said that 474 arrests have been made and Erdogan did condemn the violence but also blamed the opposition rhetoric which like- Like the opposition to him.- Like the opposition to him. Yes, the opposition to him. Yeah. When he himself has said they're going to try and send a million more people back to Syria.

Right. Unsurprisingly, several nights of these pogroms have led to anti-Turkish sentiment in areas of Syria that are controlled by Turkey and its proxy forces, right? Indeed, those very proxy forces, in some cases, turned on their Turkish backers. You could see on social media, again, I shared some of them, numerous videos last week of SNAs, so that's Syrian National Army fighters, firing on Turkish positions, tearing down and burning Turkish flags, and even mobs attacking Turkish civilians in Afrin, which is one of the cities that Turkey captured

from the SDF. You can see another Turkish occupied areas too. Demonstrators tried to storm the headquarters of Turkish backed administration. SNA fighters withdrew from their frontline positions to set up roadblocks on Turkish bases. Dozens of people stayed to sit in the Al-Hurriya Square in Afrin. Again, these are not tensions that have popped up overnight, right? It didn't just happen because mobs in Turkey attacked

Syrian refugees, but this was kind of the cork popping, if you like. And one of the things that has caused tensions to increase in recent weeks is this sort of detente between Assad and Turkey. So in response to these protests, Turkey shut off the internet, closed border crossings, and sent more troops into the area. Masses of people were arrested, and people were charged with things like desecrating national symbols of Turkey, which again, this is not in Turkey, this is in Syria, but in an area occupied by Turkey.

I think any time a government or an occupying power, like, shuts off internet, that is terrifying to me. Yeah. Because you know they're trying to do something they don't want you to see. Yeah, totally. Fortunately, it's 2024, and there's only so far that they can go.

I've seen lots of videos from those protests. But yeah, they're trying to stop people organizing. They're trying to stop them and the world seeing. It's more so the act that that power, like choosing to do that is so purposeful. And that's like a choice. Yeah, totally. Like, yeah, everyone knows what you're going for there. On the 5th of July, detainees who arrested during protests in northern Aleppo, including

a child, were forced to film themselves with a Turkish flag behind them and apologize to the Turkish government and people for burning the Turkish flag. One of the videos obtained by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights showed a child under pressure admitting to quote burning the Turkish flag and apologizing to the Turkish people before kissing the flag. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Again, when people kiss the flags on TV, it's not a great sign.

I did see videos of some of the SNA who appear to have captured some Turkish soldiers making them kiss their flag as well. Like the Syrian Revolution flag. So I want to talk about these Turkish safe zones, right? So-called safe zones, I guess. They're anything but safe. They've been seized through military incursions. They're rife with corruption and human rights abuses, both by Turkish back forces and Turkish

forces directly. You'll be familiar with some of this stuff from what Israel does in Palestine, specifically the destruction and theft of ancient olive orchards. You can see it listed on the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. specifically the destruction and theft of ancient olive orchards. You can see it listed on the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. They organize the areas by the name of the Turkish mission, so like Operation Peace Spring Area or Euphrates Shield or Operation Olive Branch is a real fucking on-the-nose name. And you can see like olive trees were cut down and sold for firewood or like people

reselling homes that were seized from civilians, right? And I've spoken to people who have left to free in my time in Kurdistan, in Syria and Kurdistan and in the United States. I've spoken to people who were there as part of the SDF and fled backwards. A lot of them have confirmed the same stuff, right? Destruction and property, theft of homes and houses. And then there's evidence of extortion, there's evidence of corruption in these areas today, right? Sexual violence, even torture. It's pretty bad. There are a ton of links. It'll be on our sources page. If you want to read more, I don't want to sort of traumatize you all on your way to

work here. I'll just traumatize Shireen. Oh yeah, thanks. Yeah, you're welcome. Just another day at work. Yeah, it's a normal day. Most of the protests seem to have died down now, but the situation doesn't really seem to have become any more stable.

In Turkey, just like many other countries, politicians have run to the right, respond to an economic crisis, blame refugees for problems caused by capitalism. Reports of abuse of Syrian refugees caught crossing the border are rife, and some of their data appears to have been leaked in the last few days. I can't confirm this, but I've seen this from a few places, right, that data from a registry of refugees has been leaked, which would obviously be very concerning. We look at things like the Marash massacre, we look at the totality of this sentiment and the people doing it. Tensions in the Turkish occupied areas of Syria remain high, with people there strongly

opposed to the Turkish oppression, seizure and sale of their landed homes, and the potential of a detente between the two countries. Earlier this week Erdogan said, we will extend our invitation to Assad with this invitation. We want to restore Turkey-Syria relations to the same level as in the past. Our invitation may be extended at any time. That's a readout of an interview by Turkish media. That's obviously translated. That's so vague. It's like, what point in the past? Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I think it's the correct number of relations to have with Assad is non.

Yeah. And so like anyone that is bad. There are also reports that Turkey is going to open crossings between the territory it is controlling and regime territory, right? There were protests about that. I saw in Aleppo. Syria had said that normalization can only happen after Turkey agrees to pull out the troops that it has. Turkey is opposed to this because it doesn't

want the SDF, which it believes to be an extension of the PKK, which it considers to be a terrorist group, to have territory along its border. And the SDF still does already have territory along its border. At Kamishla, where I was, you can go on top of a tall building and look across the border. But that does seem to be kind of a red line for Turkey, so I don't know where that leaves us. Yeah, that does seem something that they would never want to do. So Bashar really called their bluff there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is kind of funny, given that he's not exactly in a strong position to negotiate. No. But maybe Turkey has given up on the revolution in Syria and it just wants to join with Assad and as long as they can both say, fuck the Kurds, then that's enough for both of them. But if they can both get together on a state level and be like, fuck these Kurds, and therefore, I guess the cost of that would be sending these refugees home for Turkey, which is, I guess, not considered to be a cost by some of them. And that's millions of people, right? Millions of people who, in some cases, people are worried about having their citizenship removed. They went

there to be safe. And of course, it's a violation of international law. And of course, that doesn't matter because international law is as real as unicorns. But it leaves millions of people in limbo, right? Erdogan said he's promised to send another million refugees back. But that's not possible without the cooperation of the regime, really. I guess he could just pump them all into like a freeing or whatever, but he's pumping people into a situation where people are already actively opposed to the Turkish occupation there, right? If he pulls out his troops, he's going to have to accept that there will be Kurdish forces on his border,

which he hates. So it's a question of like, what value does he assign to the safety of these three million refugees? And it doesn't seem to be very high. And like, every time when we talk about migration, that people are leaving terrible things, right? That's why people tend to end up as refugees. But there's never been, I don't think, a more pronounced global crackdown than I've seen right now. It's not like these Syrian refugees, they can't leave their province, right? I've spoken to hundreds of people who have left Turkey in the last six months, year. It's very hard. It's very expensive. And lots of the people who have fled from Turkey only went there for a few months, right? And then kept moving. Every

country has made it harder than it ever was to immigrate. Like even, you know, that we talk about the Syrian refugee crisis in 2014-2016, that's unleashing three million people, right, that they need a safe place to go. If you try and force them back to Syria, it's either going to be an absolutely terrible humanitarian disaster or we're going to have more refugees entering the refugee system at a time when governments all around the world are indifferent at best to the survival of refugees, right? Including the fucking Biden government in this country. Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Yeah, but that fucking sucks, James. It does fucking sucks, James. It does fucking suck, Sherine. I will be back in two weeks to talk to you about what Turkey is doing in the Kurdistan autonomous region of Iraq, where they are bombing Kurdistan freedom guerrillas. They're setting up roadblocks and again, making massive incursions into another country. So that'd be great. You can all look forward to that over the weekend,

I guess. I guarantee that there are refugees, probably refugees from Turkey or Syria in the town where you live or in the nearest big town to where you live. And you can do something nice for them this weekend if you want to. Especially if you live somewhere where it's hot as shit. You can, I don't know, help out and drop off water somewhere or something. Yeah. Like, I've just been talking to Kurdish refugees who are in like the Northeast, you know, I spoke to some, they're not Kurdish or Turkish, but I spoke to some refugees who are in Scranton.

Oh. Famous for Joe Biden, always talking about it. But yeah, there are folks everywhere who need your help. You can make a difference, I guess. The fucking government isn't going to, Joe Biden isn't going to, Kamala Harris isn't going to either, and neither is fucking Hillary Clinton. I'm damn sure of that. So it is only you, and that doesn't need to make you desperate. You can do something. I spoke to so many podcasts, like another of our podcast listeners was at the border on Monday, and I met them and they were lovely and we drove around and helped people. You just need to take that yourself and you can do something.

But the first step is lurking off Twitter and getting out there. I promise you, you will feel less hopeless if you start helping, even if it's only one person that makes a difference. Yeah, that is something that James did tell me that I think about is because I get really overwhelmed with the idea of how many people need help in this world and I'm just like a big softie and it really just overwhelms me. Like, what can I, what can me, little me do to help anything? But James is right, if you change even one person's life, that's one person's whole life. That's a big deal. And so I think it has to start there. And if there are many more of you doing the same thing, then that's how actual change

happens because yeah, our government is useless. But yeah, listen to James. James is wise and British. Please don't listen to me because I'm British, because that will lead you down some dark paths in terms of gender ideology. I mean, maybe I meant that you sound wise because you're British. Yeah, that's all I got going for me. But just be nice to people. Buy someone fucking lunch this weekend if you have the money.

If not, make them lunch. Make some rice. It's cheap. And yeah, you can make a difference. No one fucking else will. If you want to talk about being a left rice, it's cheap. And yeah, you can make a difference. No one fucking else will. If you want to talk about being a leftist, that's great. But like, I have so much more respect for people who want to do stuff. So do stuff and the rest will sort itself out.

Like you don't have to argue with people about the minutia of ideology. It doesn't matter. Like helping people matters, making the world better matters. So do that. It's Friday. Hopefully you can use your weekend to do something nice for someone. 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, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonedmedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Ever get the feeling someone's watching you? Well, in 1971, a group of anti-war activists had that feeling.

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