Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 161

Episode Date: December 21, 2024

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  Anarchism in Paraguay feat. Andrew What’s Happening In Rojava The Madison, Wisconsin School Shooter Was A Columbine Copycat: Here's What That Means Who Is Running South Korea? Collective Media in the Second Trump Era You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources: The Madison, Wisconsin School Shooter Was A Columbine Copycat: Here's What That Means ttps://shatterzone.substack.com/p/the-madison-wisconsin-school-shooter  Who Is Running South Korea? https://www.commondreams.org/news/south-korean-president-impeachment https://www.npr.org/2024/12/12/g-s1-37854/south-korea-yoon-martial-law https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/09/south-korea-ruling-party-accused-of-second-coup-as-opposition-pushes-for-new-impeachment-vote?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky&CMP=bsky_gu https://www.npr.org/2024/12/14/nx-s1-5228633/south-korea-parliament-impeach-president-yoon-suk-yeol https://www.npr.org/2024/12/11/g-s1-37718/south-korea-president-insurrection-charges https://www.dw.com/en/south-korean-military-faces-scrutiny-amid-officer-arrests/a-71092765 Collective Media in the Second Trump Era https://www.cawshinythings.com/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-launch-cawSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer,

the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew Sage. I'm on Andrewism over at YouTube. And I'm not on YouTube right now. I'm on It Could Happen here. And I'm joined by the disembodied voice of the one and only.

Garrison Davis. Yes. Well, one and only that I know of unless there's another one going around, which would be freaky. There might be. There might be. But today, I want to continue our journey through Latin American anarchisms and their history. Now, compared to all the other countries I've discussed so far, such as Peru and Chile and Argentina and Brazil and Cuba, this one had a bit less information about anarchism in its past. So this will be a sort of a smaller sanguage of anarchist history, perhaps fit in of the country that is languished between Argentina and Brazil.

I'm speaking of course about Paraguay, known for its fraught history of warfare, politically volatile, landscape, series of dictatorships, and indigiously intertwined cultural and social fabric. Anarchism took root in this rather unique setting, and dance to the work of Angell Capiletti and a few other scattered sources have been able to piece together the history of anarchism in Paraguay. Without further ado, most commensamos. For much of its early history, Paraguay's identity was distinct within South America, from its time as a Guarani settlement to its formation as a Spanish colony in the 16th century. Spanish Jesuit missionaries wielded significant influence, and for over a century, Paraguay

was a self-sustained colony with a rigidly hierarchical system based on the Spanish caster system. Paraguay's economy primarily revolved around agriculture and cattlehood, unlike the mining economies in other Spanish territories. The Guarani people had a significant cultural impact throughout Paraguay's history, and the language and traditions remain central even as Paraguay evolved through the centuries. Even today, most of the population speaks some variety of Guarani alongside Spanish. We fast forward to the early 19th century, as South American nations began declaring independence from Spain, Paraguay took a unique approach. Rather than aligning with the neighboring revolutionary movement, Paraguay, under the leadership of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez Davidi financier, declared independence

in 1811 and adopted an isolationist authoritarian path. Francia ruled as the country's supreme dictator for nearly three decades, envisioning a self-sufficient, comedic society. He strictly controlled foreign influences, banned European migration, and restricted trade. By the mid-19th century, Paraguay had built up a significant state infrastructure under Francia's successor, Carlos Antonio Lopez. However, this era of economic, development was short-lived, as Paraguay entered the catastrophic war of the Triple Alliance between 1864 and 1870, against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay over territorial disputes.

This conflict proved disastrous for Paraguay, as they suffered staggering losses. Nearly 70% of its population died. Its economy was shattered, and its territory was significantly reduced. And yes, you heard me right, nearly 70% of its population perished, including most of its male population. In the war's aftermath, Paraguay was plunged into political chaos, economic ruin, and a period of foreign interventions. Due to the economic devastation of the war, the country became indebted to British creditors. And with that leverage, Britain pushed for the development of a free market economy and privatization, which brought Paraguay into closer contact with the global economy, and eventually led to a more pronounced class divide

and establishment of an exploitative agricultural export system. Land that had once been communally managed was swiftly privatized, driving indigenous communities and small farmers off their land and into the workforce of larger estates. On those estates, workers would find themselves in debt bondage, tied to their estates as small debts that workers owed to landowners would spiral into insurmountable debts that would become nearly impossible to repay.

laborers, called peoners, were typically paid in vouchers or script that could only be redeemed at the estate store, where prices were exorbitantly inflated. Any attempt to leave or challenge the conditions was met with violent repercussions from estate managers, creating a cycle of economic entrapment that was essentially slavery by another name. Paraguay became a country of ever more wealthy and powerful landowners with a struggling rural working class. As the 20th century approached, the labour struggles and social divisions in Paraguayan society were glaring. Crown inequality, exploitative working conditions, and the dislocation of indigenous communities created fertile ground for radical ideas among rural campassinos and urban workers. European immigrants fleeing political oppression, brought with them some rather radical ideas that began to resonate with Paraguayan workers who were desperate for a way out of their circumstances.

For a people who had survived centuries of oppression and authoritarian rule, anarchism had a unique appeal. By the 1880s, workers in Paraguay had begun organizing mutual aid societies, and one such society of typographers would organize themselves into a union, the first in the country's history by 1886. That same year saw the rise of construction workers, carpenters, tailors, postal workers, and bakers' unions. Those bakers would also conduct the country's first ever strike action in October of 1886. The first distinctly anarchist publication of, I could find in Paraguay was organized by a group called Los Ichos del Chaco, who published a libertarian manifesto in 1892. They called themselves anarchist communists and declare their intent to abolish

private property, the clergy, the state, and the armed forces. Quote, we seek the complete emancipation of the proletariat as we fight to abolish the unjust exploitation of man by man. We dedicate all of our moral and physical strength to overturn all tyrannades to establish genuine liberty, equality and fraternity in the human family. which needs to transform private property into a common good. We cease to do so because individual properties are the basic cause of all the evil that afflict us. It's on that basis that the dregs of humanity, government, clerics, lawyers, militaries,

entrepreneurs, maintain themselves in power, live as parasites, and the continued enjoyment of their funder, finances, large armies, with the products of our labour, end quote. Even prior to that manifesto, anarchists were making moves in the graphic, railway, and bakers unions as early as 1889, fighting for and winning the eight-hour workday by 2001. Strike actions in this period were focused on that goal alongside wage increases and other improvements to working conditions.

De Anacus also tried to establish a national trade union center, but unfortunately did not succeed. In 1892, thanks in part to the growing Spanish and Argentine immigrant populations, there was a wave of libertarian union formation throughout Paraguay. De Anacus was also quite successful among the peasantry, as they helped organized armed resistance societies to aid in their struggles against the landowners. Anacus also managed to establish Rafael Barrett Cultural Center in the early 90s, hosting an impressive collection of books by fellow Paraguayan and foreign writers,

and emboldening in the formation of even more trade unions. Raphael Barrett, by the way, is one of the most significant figures in Paraguayan Anacus history, according to every account I've read. Born in Tudda Vega, Spain in 1876, Barrette's early life was typical of a well-to-do intellectual. He studied languages, piano, and eventually engineering. By his late 20s, he was drawn to Latin America, partly by adventure and partly to make a difference, driven by a growing commitment to justice and solidarity.

He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1903, where he found work as a journalist, soon making waves with an article that condemned the stark inequality he observed in Argentina's capital. This critique cost him his job. He had deepened his dedication to speak. for those who were voiceless. Barrett's experiences of seeing European immigrant workers toiling under brutal conditions, fueled his indignation against unchecked wealth

and poverty's vicious hold on the working class. In 1904, Barat made his way to Paraguay. He was initially welcomed as a correspondent for El-Di Mpo and even held government positions, including as a director of the Department of Engineers and the Railroad Agency. But his commitment to exposing the country's political and social rot soon puts him at odds with Paraguay's new liberal government.

He saw that simply swapping out conservative leaders for liberals did little to improve conditions for ordinary Pataguanians, as demonstrated by the continuous labor struggles that arose in response the industrialization undertaken by the liberal government. Workers were fighting to abolish child labor, improve their conditions, increased wages, and so on. He couldn't stand by in silence. So he resigned from government service, now fully committed to social justice. Even as his growing radicalism began to alienate the political elite.

Barrett's personal experiences sharpened his perspective, transforming him from a sympathetic observer to a dedicated anarchist. His writings in Criminal became essential reading for workers and peasants alike, urging them to see beyond superficial reforms and to challenge the entire structure of oppression. Brett condemned the government's abuses and spoke out against exploitative systems that kept the majority of Paraguayananized. He was a fiery advocate for social justice. and one right in particular, Augusto Roabastos, called him the discoverer of Paraguayan social reality,

because Barrett didn't just observe these injustices. He threw himself into exposing and condemning them with fufor. His impact was so significant that even when he was forced to flee Paraguay in 2008 under guffern pressure, his ideas endured. His health was deteriorating from tuberculosis, but he continued to write, receiving support from intellectual comrades in Uruguay and Brazil. His final years, which is a continuation of his relentless dedication, even as his health continued to decline. In 1910, he went to Paris to seek treatment, but his health failed and he passed away in December of that year. But just before Barrett's exile and passing in 1906, De Anarchus would form the first and for some time only Workers' Federation in the country by joining together the illustrators, carpenters, and drivers'

unions. Rafael Barat actually became something of a thought leader for this group. And this This was the Federation Obreras Regional Paraguay, or Fort, partially inspired by the Federation Obrera Regional Argentina or Fora, where they borrowed many of their programmatic ideas. If you recall the episodes I did on Argentina, you know that the reasoning for the name was ideological. By adding the adjective regional, it made plain that the country in question, whether Paraguay or Argentina, was not being considered a state or political unit, but a region of the world in which workers struggled for deliberation. Soon after its founding, on the 1st of May 1906,

the Forbes held the country's first international workers' day demonstration, despite police attempts to shut it down. Forbes also launched their official publication El Despertaire in the same year, and the paper carried articles about the anarchist movements in Europe and Latin America, printed works by authors such as Peter Kopkin and Anselmo Renzo, published reports of the Forbes activities, named and shamed and known strike breakers, and encourage its members to pay their union dues promptly.

Subsequent years would introduce other libertarian newspapers such as La Rebellion, La Tribune, and Asseil Futuro. After the 1908 coup by Emiliano Gonzalves Navarro destabilized the economy and restricted Asuncione's labor movement, anarchism still found strength among rural and tannin industry workers. Despite increasing hostility from figures like President's Condra and Jarrah, labor strikes continued, which were met by fierce repression,

arrests, and forced deportations. With the outbreak of the Paraguayan Civil War from 1911 to 1912, anarchist and other labour organisations faced a government crackdown. Groups like the Forp became inactive, temporarily at least. And by 1913, in the wake of the war, a schism was emerging, as some unions moved toward reformist ideologies, influenced in part by the populist Colorado Party. Meanwhile, Fork-P reaffirmed its anarchist-nicalous roots, forming a federal council that included both both workers and intellectuals, aiming to rekindle its union activities amidst a wave of reorganization. Post-World War I, a new surge in demand for Paraguayan exports revitalized labor activism. In 1916, the Corp, or Centro-Obrero Regional del Paraguay, took on the role of championing anarchist

syndicalism at Labour Rights. This will one gain support from a wide network, launching influential publications like El Combate and Renovation, other groups like Mayday and the Revolutionary Nationalist Alliance, which sought a Federalist Union of the People's Latin America, also took part in the resurgence of anarchist ideas. In 1922, the Paraguayan anarchists were able to finally establish links with the International Workers' Association. By the 1930s, Syriaco, Duarte, emerged as a prominent voice, advocating for workers' rise despite, you know, everything. He was a protege of fellow anarchist and printmaker Felix Cantalicio Arakuyo, a Paraguayan mestizo of mixed indigenous and black ancestry. At one point,

Arakuyo and his comrades had helped organize a tram-worker strike in Assuncion, which compelled the government to round them up and dump them in the middle of the jungle in Matugroso, hoping that they would die. And yet Arakuyo and his friends made their way through over 1,300 kilometers of mountain jungle, surviving on roots, fruits, and game, to make their way back to their hometown of Incarnation. And speaking of Incarnation, both Duarte and Aracuyu took part in the little-known attempt at an anarchist uprising in Paraguay, which was actually centered in Incarnation. On the 20th of February 1931, a group of 150 workers and students, organized in a couple popular assemblies, took control of the city of Incarnation with the goal of establishing a libertarian

commune, part of a plan to spark a wider anarchist-synicalist revolution in Paraguay. This was the culmination of a series of strikes and widespread leafletting by anarchists and students in support of revolution. It wasn't meant to be centered in Incarnation, as there was a planned construction worker-led general strike and insincion and similar action in Villarica and Concepcion, but key organizers in those struggles in those cities were deported in the days leading up to the action, so those planned actions ended up failing. 16 hours, when their efforts were not reinforced by workers in the rest of the nation,

the Interactionists of Incarnation took over two steamboats and made their way along the river to Brazil, but not before they attacked the Arimattoe companies and burned the records related to indentured laborers in two ports. Their solidarity never died. Even after they went through everything they went through, they didn't lose their sight on what really mattered. Sadly, the 17 students and workers who remained in Incarnation were arrested. Duarte found himself jailed and interned on Margarita Island after Liberal Party president Jose P. Cugiari outlawed trillions. Other revolutionaries were dropped off in the jungle to die at a random point along the Parana River. Seven of the captured 17 met his fate, and the other

ten spent a few months in prison before being deported to Argentina. Move one then faced distinct challenges during the Chaco War from 1932 to 135 between Paraguay and Bolivia, which halted much of the anarchist activism. Many anarchists joined the war effort, reluctantly, including Duarte, who performed duties in the rearguard while working as a typesetter for various presses, including anarchist presses. With the Paraguayan victory, following the war, the return to domestic concerns saw a resurgence of anarchist and labor activities. The government's crackdown of leftist's ideologies in the late 1930s and 1940s, under President Mory Niko's rule, led to severe repression of anarchist and syndicalist

groups. He wanted he spent some time as a worker representative at the National Labor Department, or D&T, who was under considerable fire from the communists, who were taken hold of the trading movement after anarchism waned in popularity. He finally resigned from his post in 1941 after a workers' coordinating committee of seamen, tram workers, beakers, printworkers, and other trades, issued a protest note to President Moranigo, threatening to withdraw from the workers' delegate for the infringements of their rights of assembly,

to unionize and to strike. Of course, their protest note was completely ignored. The president's authoritarian tenure pushed several anarchists and social organizers into exile. Duarte himself ended up in exile in Argentina by 1942, but eventually was able to return and reclaim his appointment as a worker representative. But then, not long after, he became a victim of a police crackdown during the 1944 general strike. After the labor movement was hijacked by the Republican workers' organizations, after 1947, Dwerte dropped out of trade union activity entirely and refocused to publish

in articles in trade union publications abroad and urging research into Paraguayan trade union history. He faced repeated arrests and took part in strikes anyway, advocating for workers' rights across various industries. He continued his activism against fascism and authoritarianism, operating from Argentina at times while still supporting strikes at anarchist literature in in Paraguay. The 1954 ascension to power of General of Fredo Stroisner marked a significant period of intensified authoritarianism. Stroisner's regime violently suppressed opposition, including anarchists, for over three decades. Even in his 70s, during the 1970s, Duarte was harassed by Strasner's secret police. Many other anarchists were imprisoned, exiled, or disappeared by Stroisner,

who imposed tight control over unions and labor organising. The 1954 to 1989 dictatorship of Streisner stifled anarchist activities severely and forced them underground, where they would have to preserve anarchist literature and ideas through secret print publications and solidarity movements. The result of this dictatorship was that anarchism in Paraguay experienced resurgence much later than other Latin American nations, with the spark rekindled only in the early 2000s.

This rebirth of anarchist sentiment emerged largely within the punk counterculture and youth-led social movements, often interconnected with struggles for indigenous rights, economic justice, and environmental causes. The establishment of spaces like La Terraza and Anacist Squat provided platforms for activists and community engagement, while publications such as Autonomia Zine and Grito Fanzine disseminated anarchist ideals. Despite Paraguay's history of anarchist repression, these newer movements, however small, signifies some small hope for a renewed interest in theitarian ideas within Paraguay, one that can be seen even more vibrantly in other parts of Latin America. Paraguayan anarchists have shown us the drive of freedom and equality

is a daily commitment to defy tyranny and resist exploitation. Despite facing decades of silencing under the destruction and dictatorship, anarchism did not disappear. The seeds of resistance lay dormant, but they are ready to bloom again as new generations, can take up the struggle. As we conclude, let us remember the words of Rafael Barrett, who fought tirelessly for the people he came to call his own.

Justice. Justice above all things. Justice, even if it costs blood. All power to all the people. Peace. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today. And I'm joined by Danny.

Danny's an engineer and photographer who lived in northeast Syria from 2018 until 23, and a founding member of the RAC, which is the Rojava Information Centre, if you're not familiar, and she worked for self-administration, civil engineering while she was there. Welcome to show, Danny. Hi, James. It's really good to be on. Yeah, cheers. Thanks for coming. I know it's like a stressful time. So what I thought we would do is there's been a lot of reporting on Syria that people have probably seen if they're living in the US or the UK.

Nearly all of it has either excluded or like footnoted what's happening in north and East Syria and specifically in the areas that are under the self-administration. So I was hoping today we could give people a little more introduction to what's happening there. There's been a lot of jubilation about what's happening in Syria, and things have been very far from universally positive. There's a massive displacement of civilians, ethnic cleansing of areas that have been captured by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army and genuine peril for the self-administration project,

the like of which we haven't seen for a long time. So perhaps if listeners aren't familiar, would you give them their real basics of the self-administration of the AANES and what it means and what's going on there? Yeah. Well, that's a big question because it's like it's a big project. It's been going on for quite some time. Yeah. Yeah, it really has kind of been lost in discussions and news about the Syrian civil war because it has been such a complex, multipolar, multi-axis, multi-ethnic conflict. and it's been going on for what, like 13, 14 years now.

Yeah. Coming up to 14 years, the Kurds in the Northeast had been preparing for some time before the outbreak of Civil War back in 2011 for something like this. Obviously, they didn't know this was going to happen, but they had been working on revolutionary emancipation for decades. And in particular, since around 2000,

and they'd been working on this concept of democratic confederism, which is moving away from a sort of what they call an old paradigm of Marxist-Leninist thought to this system they've now quite effectively built up there, where democracy is bottom up, it's structured around small communes and self-organising units, cooperatives. There's a market economy, but it's not a capitalist economy, where there's sort of radical emancipation, oppressed peoples, particular women, who are really centered in the revolutionary process and

organising there. And I think because they, maybe you can't call them conflict avoided, like they haven't avoided conflict. They very famously defeated ISIS amongst other groups in the northeast. They fought against Balin Lusra Front and various other jihadi groups. They also didn't enter into serious conflict with either their FSA as they were or the regime and the Assad regime. And so they kind of managed to carve out a sort of democratic and semi-enclave. I mean, people would describe it as a state that they quite vehemently say it's not a state in the northeast of Syria. Whilst the worst of the fighting was between the Assad regime and the FSA and groups that came out of the FSA in the west and south of the country.

Yeah, I think it's a very good summary. And I think like it gets missed maybe because of how relatively successful it's been compared to other like democratization projects within Syria. It gets missed that like when people are talking about what will happen in Syria now, bizarrely, and I don't quite like I don't quite understand how we get here. But like people seem to go to like Libya or I understand how we get here. It's through a process of like orientalism and ignorance. but we have a functioning democracy, an example of, like, it's not just Kurdish people, right? It's lots of communities living together in North and East Syria. And because of democratic and federalism, they're able to coexist and so feel

they have enough sovereignty to be safe. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think something that is hard to convey or fully understand unless you spend a lot of time there or you're deeply involved with any of these communities. quite how hard that was to do. A lot of the different ethnic groups, political groups that hate each other, you know? Yeah.

The Kurds, they brought in lots of different policies like their right to be taught in your mother tongue. When they took power 2012 onwards, they were very keen not to just sort of replace everything with Kurdish, make it a Kurdish state, you know, start being the oppressor instead of the oppressed. They made sure that they continued using Arabic as the majority language. because it is the majority language there. The north and east of Syria is still an Arab majority area. And this is despite the fact that they've been pretty horrendously oppressed

by the Arab population through the Ba'ath Party and its oppressive systems for decades. So it has been a pretty hard, ongoing process to negotiate and to put aside pretty serious conflicts between quite a few different groups that exist there. Yeah. It won't be any easier across the whole country than it was there. but they have a system that works and it's kind of frustrating to see these discussions of what happens next that just ignore

the fact that there's a functioning multi-ethnic democracy right there. If we do just look at women's liberation, you know, I've reported from lots of places around the world, lots of places in that part of the world, and the difference is profound in like everyday life. It's not just a kind of rhetorical commitment, right?

Like, at least my impression as a man is that like this is a revolution by women, not a revolution. It's about women. It's not a revolution by men that, like, seeks to liberate women, says it's going to liberate women, you know, with the US invaded Afghanistan saying it's going to liberate women and look what we got. And like the difference in just the way people are able to, like every aspect of everyday life is completely different. But that's in danger right now. The narrative, I guess, that people will be familiar with from Syria is that

the state has been defeated, the Assad regime has been defeated. And that therefore, these revolution has succeeded, but the Assad regime is not the only state in play in Syria, right? So can you explain the Turkish antipathy to the project in northern East Syria and how that's manifesting itself currently? Yeah, it's pretty hard to discuss any of the stuff without talking about Turkey and without understanding where they're coming from. I think it's something that isn't said enough or understood enough that the modern state Turkey is an ethno nationalist project.

And I don't say that as a slur. That's like a basic founding principle of the state. It's a state founded on genocide and the mass forced demographic change across the whole country. And it's continued that way. And there have been reforms for sure. But that's still a founding principle.

And even now, sort of speaking a non-Turkish language in the Turkish parliament is a pretty serious violation. And the size of Turkey, the size of its economy, the size of its military, the regional power status they have in the Middle East means that they have an enormous gravity. They have an enormous amount of power over Syria.

A lot of the goods and services that Syria relies on come in through Turkey or rely on Turkish industry. And the Turkish military is a huge supporter of their groups in the Northwest, like Hayat-Khira al-Sham and the Syrian National Army. And of course, the Kurdish question within Turkey is the main reason for their antipathy towards what's been built up in northeast Syria. As much as the self-determination for oppressed people's minorities is something that's an issue,

the fact that it's Kurdish-led, and in particular it's emancipatory for Kurdish people, threatens this ethno-nationalist aspect of their state. And they see it something that needs to be nipped in the budd, right? And they've sort of done that with northern Iraq, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, by essentially vassalizing the KDP, the main party there. And they know they can't do the same in northeast Syria,

and the military option is their best chance, their best hope of nipping Kurdish, emancipation and Kurdish self-determination in the bud and preventing it from sort of snowboarding across the region. Yeah, I think we should probably mention that like, I guess if we talk about like the electoral method or the electoral path, people in Turkish Kurdistan, in northern Kurdistan, if you want to call it, in addition to the arm struggle, which has been there since 1984, they have also like tried to vote and repeatedly seen their votes ignored or changed or their elected officials removed. Like, this is within the last year. I'm not talking about back in the 80s and 90s.

And, like, Turkey has been aggressively attacking any attempts at, like, self-determination within the country. And then, as you say, like, militarily attacking the Kurdish freedom movement within North and East Syria. Do you want to talk about the Syrian National Army or the Turkish back free Syrian army, whatever you want to call them, and explain, like, I think part of what we're dealing with is, like, that Turkey has a very well, established state media project, and they seem to do very well, unlike creating viral social media content. So people might not be fully familiar with who the SNA are, and specifically, like, Turkey's role in creating them. Do you want to explain that a bit to people?

Yeah, I mean, this is, this is one of the reasons why I think it's so hard for people to report on the Syrian civil war. It's very hard to convey, like, a simple coherent narrative of one side versus the other, you know, like Ukraine versus Russia, the Russian world and Ukrainian world, because there are, there are so many different groups in the S&A is, like, it's an important one. And they are, they're grouped together with this, like, concept of the rebels that have liberated Syria. Yeah. And despite the fact that they're not actually part of Hayyad Ther al-Sham, the liberation movement, as it calls itself, that have taken over Syria. Yeah, the Syrian in the National Army, it's kind of like a loose collection of various, some of them called themselves,

brigades or groups. It's essentially a military proxy force of Turkey. They don't have a coherent political framework. They're not revolutionary groups. They're not liberatory or emancipatory. They wouldn't describe themselves as that in the same way that maybe HTS would. I mean, the Kurds in northeast Syria described them as gangs. which kind of sounds like a propaganda term,

but when you actually look at what they do, they really are like a sort of a criminal enterprise, a criminal gang that's used as a convenient proxy force by Turkey. Because ultimately, Turkey has like a massive military. Their Navy is quite underfunded and not particularly well-staffed. The Air Force has suffered pretty seriously from the fallout of the coup in 2016. But the army is massive. It's relatively well-funded, and their drone program is huge.

The thing that they struggle with is the losses that are incurred against Kurdish groups, particularly the PKK in the mountains between Iraq and Turkey. And they need to control that because they realize that they've been fighting militarily, as you say, since the early 1980s. And they can't have a Vietnam situation, right, of a mass movement against their military occupation and against their military efforts in Syria. they can't afford financially or politically to get into a quagmire there. And so by funding this sort of collection of groups called the SNA,

that's their way of being able to incur pretty massive losses without having to report on it, without that creating unrest or opposition within the Turkish population of Turkey. Right. And I think especially when some of the things the SNA have done, which we can maybe get into in Mampij, like it gives them a deniability that wouldn't exist if that was regular soldiers doing that, like some stuff which is war crimes is, I guess, a nice way of saying it,

like a more sanitized way of saying it, but horrific stuff, really terrible stuff. This has been happening since at least 2018, but Turkey doesn't have to be held accountable for that because, like you said, it's not Turkish, it's not the Turkish army. Do you want to explain how the situation in North Syria has changed since, when was it, like two weeks ago, a week ago, I guess that they moved south from Aleppo and start the HTS-Largy with some support from SNA moved towards Damascus and then the SNA launched its own assault right on the self-administration. Can you explain a little bit of what's happened there in terms of displacement and in terms of the terrain that's the SNA have captured?

Yeah, it's been very fast moving. As you say, like it's only been two weeks since the Battle for Aleppo started, if you can call it battle. So the SDF, so this is like the alliance of military groups that falls under the remit of the self-administration in the northeast Syria. So the YPG and the YPJ are like the most famous and largest components of this force, but there are a whole bunch of Arab and Syrian and Armenian units within the SDF. They held this sort of salient pushing out into northwest Syria towards Afrin, which was captured by the SNA and Turkey in 2018. That was on one side to find it by HTS and on the other by the SNA.

When things were really kicked off, the SNA started a pretty concerted campaign to capture this area, known as Shepa. And because of its position and it's relatively difficult terrain and difficult, logistical position to resupply, they pulled back from that towards Aleppo. And Mambidge, which is the only major city that, the STS still held on the west of the Euphrates. And so this is the area closest to Aleppo. They got hit pretty hard.

If you follow live update map or any of these sort of update maps, it looked like that, because that's pretty quickly. Actually, it ended up being a sort of large grey zone of the guerrilla attacks and potentially still ongoing. It's been really marking hard to tell what's going on there. But essentially there's a large area of uncontrolled but heavily contested. territory between Aleppo and Euphrates River now

which the SDF and the SNA have been fighting over. Like one of the curious things for me is that the Turkish Air Force and military did not get involved for a while but after about a week they did and they started hitting Manbej very very heavily. And at that point when the centre of Manbech started being

contested and over the US stepped in we don't know the details over there seems to have been some kind of negotiation whereby the suggestion is that if the SDF fighters pulled back across the Euphrates, the SDF would assure their protection for many further assaults. We don't know how true that is and we know that today further negotiations on this failed, but it's really hard to tell right now as we speak what's disinformation and what's truth because stuff is only coming out officially in dribs and traps.

Yeah, and stuff's coming out unofficially, often that it's just not true every five minutes and getting blasted by maybe people who just don't understand or who do understand but have a certain agenda to push on social media especially, but on telegram too. And it can be really confusing and it's really frustrating. Yeah, for instance, like just before we came on air, I saw a couple of videos being posted by pro-Turkish accounts. So I've purportedly showing mass troop concentrations

lined up against this border war waiting to invade. And I realized that they were from 2019, when Sirakhani and Telabayad were invaded. And they were just reposting material from then. Yeah. And, you know, as disinformation on these movements and whether and tax is going to happen, what the negotiations between the US and Turkey turned out to be.

And the truth is, like, right now we don't know exactly what's going on. Yeah. And, like, you probably won't, and that's probably a good thing. One other thing is that, like, the SDF tends to have much better operational security discipline, than the SNA does. So you won't see as much of, like, media with an SDF spin or people directly streaming.

I mean, one thing the SNA likes to do is a war crime and then post it on telegram. And so, like, it could be easy to only see that and be like, oh, God, it's terrible. And it is terrible. Those things are horrific. But, like, because you're not seeing when the SGF is making movements

or making advances until a bit later, until you get something from, like, an official press channel, it can give the impression that the SNA is just romping around, which is not the case. Yeah, we saw this a few times when Mambidge was reported to have been captured by the SNA, and they posted videos of themselves in the middle of the city. And then an hour later, the SDF posted a video from the centre of the city of 20 or 30 dead S&A littering about the streets and then flying their own flag.

So, yeah, it's really hard to tell. It's also really hard as like anyone who cares about, region, it's been there, has reported on it, anyone interested in the kind of politics that the Kurds have built up in the region, and others, I should say, it's been a multi-ethnic project. If you care about that, it's really hard not to be glued to social media to see what's going on, but it can be quite detrimental to morale. It can be quite an act of self-arm to be, like, constantly checking on this because it's so murky, yeah, and as you say, like, things can turn around within two hours of info or disinfo getting out there.

Yeah, and I think it's a super important time to be looking at trusted sources and be considering if you need to be on telegram that much. Something I have been considering this weekend. So let's talk about right now, certainly the focus is on Kobani, right, but there's also, well, there's a lot of the self-administration that could potentially be under threat if Turkey decides to go as hard as it as it can against the self-administration, against the existing. of, I guess, any form of democratic project in North and East area, attempts to kind of bring the whole thing under one government from Damascus. Can you explain, like, what might happen, what people can do? And, like, we should talk about what's at stake as well, especially with the prison at our whole,

which maybe we can come to after those two things, because I think that's a lot to ask you in one question. But maybe if people aren't familiar with our whole, we'll leave that one. But can you explain at first, like, what could potentially happen if Turkey decides to go as hard as it wants to hear? I mean, I think the best way to answer that question is to look at what's already happened. So in 2018 and 19, they already captured three significant cities that were under control of the self-initration.

So the first, most famously, was Afrin, which was in the far north-west of the country, like just north of Aleppo, sort of jutting out into Turkey. That was a majority of Kurdish city. I don't know exactly that. it was something like 80 or 90%, which I think it's higher than any other city in northern Syria. And it was also like, it had seen the least fighting of pretty much anywhere in Syria by that point. So the war had been going on for like, what, seven years and everyone was pretty much untouched. So it was in a pretty good state.

And Turkey and the SNA invaded just as the war against ISIS was winding down. And I mean, it's become hell on earth. It's been almost completely depopulated. I think it's less than 10% now Kurdish ethnically. It has been ruled by a number of different groups. We can say the SNA, but different groups within the SNA and have fought over at the HTS at times have had control over certain parts of the area.

And there's been a lot of infighting. There's been horrendous war crimes committed. Yeah. Rape, murder, thousands of disappeared people. And as you say, they really like, to openly put videos out of them committing this stuff. I mean, they're pretty shameless about it. There are some pretty disturbing videos of them mutilating.

The bodies have fallen YPJ, soldiers, of committing some re-executions, of wiping out whole towns. It's been awful, and the same thing happened again in 2019, in October when they captured Serri-Kani and Talibayad. And it's worth also pointing out. these were not Kurdish majority cities as far as I think the Suriqani maybe was about 50%. And Tel Avayad, which is kind of close to Kobani, I pretty sure wasn't Kurdish majority city, but it was organised under the self-administration, and it was organised quite effectively.

And they committed the same horrific crimes there. They are an anti-Kurdish force, if we can say that. They are racist. They do have a stated goal of committing genocide against the Kurdish. That's not an exaggeration. This is something they openly say, but they don't seem to care who they steal from

or who they rape or who they extort. Wherever they go, it's death and destruction. And it still is now. And there's still something like a quarter of a million internally displaced people from these areas in northeast Syria, hoping to go back and now having to see the situation get even worse

and not knowing if they ever will be able to. Yeah. And I think like what you were talking about like we're seeing it right now in Manbeach, right? Like the SNA seems to largely be in control of the city, albeit with YPG fighters kind of more, and I guess in a guerrilla role. So it would seem still fighting there. But where I believe we're on the second day of a general strike in Manbech,

like after less than a week of the SNA holding it because of looting and executions and other like war crimes. Yeah, I think this is like actually a really good political education to see what's happening because what's been built up in the northeast has been built up over decades, right? They like to use this analogy of the mycelium and the fruiting bodies of a mushroom. They appear to magically emerge from the earth in the autumn out of nowhere, but actually, you know, they've been brewing underground for years before, and they use this analogy because it took decades to put it in.

place these structures. That's why they were ready. As soon as the regime, the Assad regime, pulled out and collapsed in the face of ISIS in the early stages of the war, they were ready to build up these structures. They already had self-organized militias. They had the economy planned out. They set to work immediately. And their SNA don't have any of that. They are a force of convenience. They're mostly sort of young men who were in groups before that were defeated in Syria, like ISIS, who are simply taking the opportunity to enrich themselves. And that's also very convenient for Turkey because they do the dirty work against the population of North East Syria. So I think it's worth saying that that aspect of it, that preparation,

that resilience is something that also works in favour in the event of the worst case, a full invasion of northern Syria. I do think they are significantly better prepared than they in 2018 and 19. Even if the worst happens, even if militarily it's defeated, that's not going to be the end of this project, right? It's not going to be the end of this emancipation. There's now an entire generation of young people in northeast Syria who have grown up entirely living amongst a liberated and emancipated region and people.

That's not something you can militarily defeat. So I, you know, I'm not completely hopeless. And obviously I'll be, like, devastating if the worst does happen there. But, like, I don't think it means the end of this incredible political. And it feels wrong to call it a project because it's not. It really is a revolution in every possible meaning of the word. And it's deeply embedded now. Yeah.

And I think everyone I spoke to there, like, there's a deeply held conviction that they're not going back. Some people who have seen, like, firsthand, and the fascist violence of ISIS, and fascist is the right word, it's something maybe worse than fascism. Like, certainly that, like, speaking to women in Rushabra about how they're not going back to the gendered violence of their experience for decades

to include ISIS, but by no means, like, only from ISIS. And I guess that kind of brings us on to, I wanted to talk a little bit about the situation in the parts of Syria that are controlled by HCS and in so much as they were, really are control, is perhaps the wrong word. Like, they haven't, like, fully established their state project yet, but they're certainly moving towards that.

They've sort of captured the institutions of the state rather than destroyed them. You'd spoken about, like, there's this very, I don't, I guess maybe I'll use an example, sorry, I'm phrasing this question in a very meandering way. I saw this CNN clip where they're like, oh, we found a guy who's liberal, who's, like, in this prison and he was stuck here. And then second part of this was not broadcast on CNN is this person turns out to be like an Air Force lieutenant who was in fact himself someone who tortured and killed civilians. And like there's this very liberatory, very excited messaging coming from media in the West,

I guess, some of which is good, right? Like it's good that the Assad regime is good. Assad was fucking terrible and tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. But that doesn't mean that things are all perfect in Damascus. Do you want to talk a little bit about like some of the worrying stuff we've seen. in the last few days from those areas. Yeah, I mean, this is something that I worry isn't being spoken about enough. I don't, as a non-Syrian, don't want to say to people, you know, you shouldn't be celebrating your own liberation because people should absolutely should be.

And it's their right to be. And I'm like extremely happy that this brutal dictator has gone. I mean, it's hard to summarize quite how awful he was. And it's deeply frustrating that he's probably not going to see. justice. But it's also really hard to see stuff, which is really reminiscent of like a 1979, Tehran, 2003 Baghdad of a sort of jubilation whilst at the same time there are videos of sort of programs being carried out against minorities. Minorities are the allies who were in control and you don't know if the person being executed in the street

was a torturer, an intelligence agent. You don't know who they were, but like this is happening. But you're also seeing, like, Salafist groups raising their flag, you know, like hardline Islamists raising their flag in places like Latakia and Tatars that have significant minority populations. I am very, I mean, concerned isn't the right word. Like, it's hard to feel that spirit of liberation when when you see not only these things happening, but that the people who have captured these state institutions are admitted former members of Al-Qaeda. and they are jihadis hardline people that have now got a very effectively have made themselves out to be moderates. But my gut feeling is that we're going to see something like

1979 Tehran of a lot of talk of reconciliation, a lot of talk of, you know, the concerns of the Kurds or working with the communists, but, you know, mass executions and oppression is not far around the corner. and I guess when the jubilation dies down, my question is what's going to happen when minorities do demand their rights or women don't want to wear a hijab inside the buildings of state institutions? And I'm finding very hard to believe that these men who are professed Islamists are going to allow a moderate future to exist. Yeah, it's, I don't know, every day we get different information.

right, but like, yeah, I don't know if concerned, it's the right word either. I don't quite know what the word is, but like, I'm worried, I guess. I'm worried that I'm especially worried when like, rather than what we saw in the self-ad administration was not like a continuation of institutions, right, when the Assad regime left in 2011 and 2012 and areas that the regime or ISIS have left since then. Like it wasn't like, okay, we'll take over these institutions, administer them differently. is we will build democracy from the bottom up. Not we'll just, you know, change the people in charge

versus what it seems like we're now seeing for Damascus is like, hey, can the police from the Assad regime, please stay at work, which is concerning. Talking of police, the last thing I wanted to address was that our whole camp. I've spoken about it before on this show and people can look back or other episodes, but if you've not heard about it, can you explain briefly what our whole is and then the massive risk that this Turkish backer. invasion poses to our hull and other camps.

I guess our hole's not the only camp, just the biggest one. Yeah, our hole is a really important point to talk about. Our hole is a very large camp. It's hard to sum up what kind of camp it is because it's so vast and has different sections. It's near Al-Husaka, which is one of the largest cities in northeast Syria. Yeah. It mostly contains families who were members or were resident in the Islamic State when it collapsed. So in the beginning of 2019, ISIS was sort of squeezed into this little corner in the eastern side of Syria between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border.

And when the state collapsed, the caliphate collapsed, a lot of these people had nowhere to go. And a lot of them were foreignly succumbing from abroad. I'm going to say a lot, I mean like tens of thousands. Yeah. There were something like 20,000 families left within Sousa and Bagos, like the last parts of the Caliphate to hold out. And they didn't have anywhere to go. And there were already camps set up for IDPs and for members of ISIS and families in North East Syria.

But Al Haul was rapidly expanded to take these on. So it's a sort of semi-prison, semi-open camp that I think peaked at 75. thousand people, which it sounds like a lot on its own, but when you consider that a large city in northern East Syria is about 150,000 people, it still is significant. I don't, you probably have more accurate recent figures than me, but I think the current population is about 40,000. Yeah, it's shrunk, definitely. I'm not sure what it is exactly. The big problem that the self-ministration have had is a multitude, really. Many of the people there are foreigners, many of them don't have papers. Many of them come from countries that either don't want them back.

or will almost certainly execute them if they're sent back like Iraq, which is against the policy of the abolition of death penalty in, in Iraqis, Syria. There are some in Al Hol, but mostly in other camps in the north and east of Syria, former ISIS members like Shemam and Begham, who come from countries like the UK, who simply won't take them back. And the UK is taking back some families that simply refuses to take back their citizens who joined ISIS as, you know, card-carrying members. So they've made a pretty massive effort to repatriate as many families as possible.

They've made a big effort to rehabilitate and de-radicalize as many people as possible. They have shrunk the camp massively, but they're still, yeah, 40,000 or something left there. And these are like really, a lot of them are really radical. Like, I think, I don't know what the exact number is, but something in the order of 10,000 them are still, like, professionally members of ISIS. And they have a lot of children. And this was something that shocked me when I was at the end of the caliphate in Bagots and witnessed tens of thousands of people coming out. And I could not have imagined how many children there were.

And this was like, what, five years ago now, coming up to six years ago. So some of them who were, you know, seven, eight, nine years old are now like heading towards their mid-teens. They've spent their entire lives being radicalized. And like, what do you do with them? Right. And it's no, I think there's no coincidence that in, previous Turkish attacks. Turkey's been attacking

the North and East of Syria for the last five, six years now through the air, through formation of warfare. A lot of their attacks have focused on trying to break the people out. They have bombed the entrances to prisons multiple times.

They provided funding and arms and ammunition to groups that are trying to break them out. And they provided a safe passage back to Turkey for those who have managed to escape. So it's massively in their favour, but of course it's a Pandora's box because if that does

very copier and if these people aren't repatriated or aren't deregicalized, then that's a lot of people who have pretty much only known their whole lives, a extremely radical, yeah, fascist, Islamist ideology. And I don't think they're just going to give it up, no. Yeah, no. They're not going to join this moderate future Syria. No, and like those people, like, have probably, like, probably have terrible experiences within that camp and that's not going to make, that does, they don't tend to be moderating and sort of pacifying

experiences and I'm sure that there'll be a lot of hate coming from there when those people come out and I don't want to like a portion blame too much but we've had a long time to deal with this the world's had a long time to deal with this. I mean I would happily apportion blame this is entirely on the hands of the coalition. Northern East Syria is a very poor place and it's it's deeply impoverished and it's been kept impoverished by sanctions by Turkey the oil refineries, the industry, the economy has been smashed at pieces. They've held on really well. And all credit to them, they have maintained this camp.

They have tried to give these people alive. But it's pretty awful conditions. Yeah. And this could have been sold if the international community, if the coalition, in particular the United States, had helped with these repatriations. So put political pressure on European countries in particular to take back their citizens. and had just provided the funding, you know, for, for, they have provided funding.

I'm not saying they haven't pretty much, but like, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the, you know, Department of Defense budget. You know, we're talking a few tens of millions here and there, as opposed to a concerted effort to de-radicalize and repatriate people that could pose a serious threat to Europe and the US. Yeah, and like you've got Britain doing the opposite of what's helpful, which is fucking, like, removing people's passports, right? like de-nationalizing them, leaving these people stateless and, like, saying it's not our problem, which is pathetic. I'm incredibly short-sighted. Yeah. I don't like using the word terror or terrorism because I think they've become meaningless terms.

But, like, ISIS did commit horrendous acts of terror in Europe and the United States. And these people, a lot of them, I'm sure, would happily do so given the opportunity. So I don't even think that the threat is, like, sufficiently understood in the West. Yeah, no, and it's going to end up biting them in the ass because they've put this off and put this off and wouldn't spend the money to have justice, right, like to go through a system and to have a chance to plead their cases, to have a tribunal, whatever it is. Instead, these people have just been essentially abandoned by most of the world. The self-administration has been forced to take care of the people who did horrific things right there. and yeah, at some point, this population will continue to grow if we don't keep removing people from it, and that's going to be a problem for the whole world, even if the whole world wants to pretend it's not happening right now.

And it is just endlessly frustrating to see it not even be covered, let alone kind of addressed in the West. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. When similar atrocities have been carried out in Europe, we see international tribunos. We see the ICC and the ICJ step in. We see arrests. We see prosecutions, you know, like Milosevic, like the newborn trials. And ISIS was a massive state. It had something like 10 million inhabitants.

It committed multiple genocides. And this isn't just, you know, people in the region saying, they're committing genocide. These are like Western, highly studied, highly understood, accepted by Western states as genocide against like the Yazidis. Yeah. They committed horrendous atrocities. they pose an international threat and a massive regional threat.

And at the end of the Caliphate, as a territorial realm, as a serious military presence, it just, yeah, it just disappeared off the radar. I think this is like a, you know, a really, it really shows the sort of racist and colonial mindset behind this rules-based international order that the people who are their victims and who have left big up the pieces after it's got very little support for recognition. and they've been calling for tribunals for years, and it's just fallen on death ears. Yeah, and sadly, I don't see that changing,

given the incoming administration in the United States. Like, it's deeply concerning. Deeply concerning to the wrong word, it's just fucked. I want to ask, like, people, I think, want to be in solidarity with the revolution. They want to help if they can. They want to support. I did a fundraiser last night.

Thank you to everyone who gave their money and came. That was really nice. But what can people do to, you know, it's one thing to like be in solidarity or post or whatever, but like what concrete actions can they take to help? This is a question that gets asked a lot. Yeah. I think doing anything is helpful. Yeah.

It's also a question that's really hard to answer, given how things are just across the border in Palestine. You know, I personally find it hard to engage and ask for help and ask for solidarity when, you know, there's a genocide being committed next door, but we might be about to see the same thing happen in Syria. And I do think we should be taking it seriously. And yeah, anything from raising awareness to actually going there and lending support, anything on that spectrum, it's not just like, it's not just the material contribution that you can make.

It's the people that do really feel left out. They feel betrayed. They feel let down by. the international community by the rest of the world. Yeah. And any act of solidarity goes out incredibly well. Like the first year I was there, I was basically useless because I didn't speak the language. I didn't know my way around.

I was like a burden on society, more or less. And for people just like happy that you're there, you know, showing solidarity. And it's not about being useful. It's about that act. It's about more than that. That's what I'm trying to say. And if you can show solidarity in any way, you can. Like, this is, you know, incredibly important.

trying to do it. Yeah, I think like, I don't know, if I go back to when I moved to the US, which was 2008, George W. Bush was president. And like I had my little free Palestine badge when I got off the plane and my little Kaffir and like was immediately sent to secondary inspection by the customs people because like that was not really, of course there were Palestinian people and people in solidarity with the people of Palestine and the US in and they were for a long time before. But like, I would never have imagined that I would see thousands of people in the. streets for the Palestinian cause. And the only thing that has materially held back the genocide of the Palestinian people

has been the solidarity that they've experienced. And that shows the power that people have, though obviously it's been able to do comparatively little and Israel still seems to be killing little children every day. But like, it shows that we can build solidarity really quickly and really meaningfully. And like, you don't have to go, but you can go. It's much harder to get to Palestine. is to get to North East Syria. I went last year.

And I think people who are already organizing can bring that into their organizing too. These things don't have to compete. Like, there's a lot of solidarity to go around. But I would say a lot of the news we see, unfortunately, from Turkey. And that will unfortunately give you information of the extremely biased when it comes to northeast Syria. So being conscious of your media consumption, it's very important. Yeah, absolutely. I think I would just add to that to say that, you know, solidarity with any group is a long-term project, right?

You're not going to jump in and be able to make a huge difference immediately, but also at the same time, like if the worst happens, if Turkey invades, Phelon, and there's genocide in northern Syria, that isn't the end of it. It's a massive international movement, and there are practices from it that are being put in place in things that actually don't even have anything to do with the Kurds of the nation. and there are ways of organizing. There are matters that they use. There's personality analysis.

There's criticism and self-criticism. There's a lot of that that goes far beyond a single geographic region. And I think engaging with that can, and I've seen with my own eyes since I've been back, like there's a lot of groups around the UK that use techniques for self-organisation within land rights movement, within worker struggle, within anti-cuts, campaigning. And these have got nothing to do with Rajava, but they have seen that through solidarity with Rajava and Kodistan, that there are ways they can improve their own practice and their own actions.

Yeah, I think that's really important too. And those are things maybe we'll cover in the future, and there are plenty of good resources online. Are there any resources you'd like to plug or, like, personal social media, things you think people could follow to get good information on what's happening? Definitely, the RRIC, that's the RJava Information Centre, They are probably the best source on the ground in Rojava. And they are a collective of journalists, a mixture of locals and internationalists

who've been working there for six years now. So they're Rojava I see on various social media platforms. You can follow me as at Lapinesk, L-A-P-I-N-E-S-Q-U-E. I'm also posting about it, although I'm not there anymore. I'm posting updates from friends, people I know there. my take on the situation based on my experiences of being there for these five years. Yeah, I think good to follow if you can. Thank you very much, Danny.

What we're going to do now is I got some voice notes from some friends who are at the front with a tecosina anacist, which means anarchist struggle in Kurdish. They're a group within the SDF that is an anarchist group that's there fighting and in this case, actually doing frontline medical support on behalf of the self-administration on behalf of the Revolution. They sent me some notes this morning, it's Monday, today, from their positions on the front line. So, like, obviously those notes will be a little bit.

There'll be, like, 24 hours old by the time you hear them, but I still think it's very important to hear from people who are there when we can, not from, like, someone who's supposedly an expert, but hasn't set foot in Syria in 15 years and hasn't really talked to anyone who's Syrian either. So we'll drop those in after a little advertising break here. And with that, I will say thank you very much, Danny. Thanks for giving us your time, and we really appreciate all your insight today.

Thanks very much, James. I'm talking from the Provisional British Office of the Bushanologist. We wanted to share it about the situation ongoing here in Northeastern Syria, because as you probably know, the regime has fallen. Marciarza had left the country in the 8th of December. after a big offensive that started from Eclipse that took over quite soon, quite fast, the city of Lapo and continued moving on.

We wanted to explain how is the situation right now on the ground and also give some insight on the situation of not in Syria and what the media is actually not covering of the different events and situations that are ongoing here. The main thing to remind us to remember. that this can be a bit of a confusing interview for those that are maybe not familiar with the ongoing situation. To give a short context, we can mention that there are right now two main conflicts ongoing,

military conflicts. One is widely reported, the other not so much. We are talking about the war that HTS or the offensive that HDS launch against the Syrian Arab army and the other is the offensive that the SMA and Turkish proxy forces

that write under the name of that Syrian National Army but that they are like trained, paid and supported by the Turkish state the offensive that they have been launching against North East Syria and the Democratic

administration of Northern Syria that is the area also known, sometimes as for Java that is started as the core desiration movement leading the war against the Islamic State and establishing this autonomous administration. So let's go shortly to the first conflict. This offensive of H.T.S. or the heath of real sham,

that it's a Islamist group, direct heritage of Anousra, that was the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, that has been governing, having some like, governed and distract regions in the region of Euclip in the north-west of Syria and was under heavy siege from the regime forces in the Syrian Arab army. And the 27th of November, they launched this big offensive

that led to the collapse of the regime. We could reflect deeply about the reasons. Now, on one side, the Syrian Arab army was exhausted after years of war here in Syria. But especially their main allies and supporters were also in a bad situation. We're talking mostly about Russia and Iran. As we probably know, Russia has been entrenched in a war in Ukraine for two years almost. Iran recently had been also engaged in supporting their militias in the conflicts against Israel

after the virtual occupation that Israel started on NASA a year ago. So these two conflicts create a situation that both partners, like Russia and Iran, were not able to support the Syrian Arab army as did it in the past. And this led also to the collapse of the front lines of the Syrian Arab army, allowing the offensive of HTS to open. were ran very fast the defenses in the city of Aleppo and also taking control of the city of Hamas. These sparked also other groups that also oppose the region for a long time

to start also taking action in southern Syria in the regions of like Swayza and Dara and Khomeika. There was also an autonomous military operation room that started to coordinated insurgents and the region. This sparked the collapse of the regime. A lot of soldiers were defecting their positions and finally the different military groups within the offensive took Damascus. This was an offensive that was really not very blooded

in the sense of a lot of the Syrian Army soldiers were just leaving their positions and running away and the offensive was able to advance very fast, very easily. Right now, this offensive led to the transition that we are seeing in Damascus, where the leader of the HDS had been doing really public speeches and declaring the triumph of the revolution, trying to harvest the revolution, the revolution, period of 2011 for their own benefit.

And they imposed or opposed a transitional government that is formed exclusively by like members connected or aligned to HDS. Could be good to discuss more about HTS, but maybe it's not the focus of our interview right now. And just mentioned that their authoritarian government in Egypt has been also really criticized by local population organizing protest against it. And right now, running this interim government, they are already making proposals for like a morality police,

Islamic courts. So I don't know how much this comparison has been already shared that clearly what we saw in Afghanistan with Taliban taking over, the state structures is probably a good guide to understand what could be happening in Syria if it's their control of the state as it seems to be happening. So this is one of the conflict going that is widely reported. The only one maybe is not so much reported. We see how the Turkish has been for long time,

the Turkish state has been for long time attacking the region of that Nordic Syria, especially in the Kurdish areas, and this is connected not to their war against the Kurdish liberation movement that has been going for more than 40 years. And the last chapter of these started in coordination with this offensive of HDS, where their proxy forces

and started to attack, mainly the region of Tafat, that was an area where a lot of the refugees from Afrin were living. Afrin was a region that was already occupied by Turkey in 2018, and a lot of the people from the city was displaced and living in refugee camps in the region of Shava and the city of Tahrirat.

And these Turkish proxy forces attacked and conquered that region, forcing all these people that array had to leave their homes more than five years ago, 2018. Yeah. So forcing them to flee once again. A lot of these people was trapped in a caravan that suffered brutal raids, attacks, kidnapping, ransoms. Like, it has been like a really terrible experience

for people that was trying to flee the offensive of these Turkish proxy forces. And most of them are now arriving to TAPTA and to RACA, to the regions of the self-inistration, where they are founding and they can find shelter. And for those willing to help, we can mention that Hevasat is the humanitarian organization, one of the biggest humanitarian organizations working in North East Syria and has been providing tents and flanks and flunkets

and everything they can to support all these people that is arriving on these areas. areas. So those willing to support economically and this humanitarian crisis that we're experiencing, they can easily find the website and the bank of Al-Calma-Ghevasor to donate to them to support all these people that once again lost their homes. But the offensive didn't stop on Chaffa and the SNA continued their attacks and took over the city of Manor. which already right now. This was a really heavy crashes. It was a really serious military conflict that has been totally supported by Turkish artillery and air force. We are talking about drones, sitting different positions and even airplanes. That of course, like NATO Air Force, had been bombing

positions of the Syrian Democratic forces allowing these different different Islamist groups that are part of this coalition of the SMA, these Turkish Paxi forces, to control of the city. At the moment, there is already several days that Man Beach, this city have been organizing protest and even a general strike that started yesterday against the occupation. Because these groups that occupy the city are looting and even killing local population, in a really terrible situation that is experienced in the local people living in Malmage.

And they are willing to continue. They had been threatening the city of Kobani, the symbol of resistance of the Rezawa Revolution against the Islamic State. And these threats on the city are not just the bondings of the Turkish Air Force and artillery, but also a lot of military personnel of the Turkish proxy forces gathering on the bridge that connects the divisions of Man Beach

and Kobane and all across the Eurthage River. So this war is not so reported, but it's been really brutal attacks against the self-administration in northeast Syria. We are trying to report and update about the situation. We also published two statements to topple out attention for comrades about what is ongoing here. And maybe I'll also talk a bit about the work that we had been doing on the ground. We need to remark that this offensive over Manbridge and now this stretch on Kovani had not been the only attacks that the Turkish army and their proxy forces are doing.

all around the street that they occupied in 2019 and 2019, the areas around the city of Siliconia and Inisa, next to the border with Turkey, also hosts a lot of Islamist groups that are part of this Turkish-Pozy coalition, and they had been intensively bombing the areas and their surroundings, and there had been quiet, widespread from, or of these Islamic groups, gathering forces

to continue their attacks on the self-administration of northern Syria and the war against the Syrian Democratic forces. We, from Tukashina, R.C, which have been working in medical capacity, providing materials for

the medical planes in the front lines and being present in the front lines together with the Syrian democratic forces in case that a new invasion and it's happening. Right now, the bombings are hitting different areas and it has been really intense in the last days.

The Syrian democratic forces are in maximum alert and especially there is an important call in solidarity with the city of Kobani, a symbol of resistance that is now once again under threat. We have been seeing also demonstrations all around the world in solidarity, would like the revolution here. And this has been also bringing a lot of motivation

and to continue the resistance on the ground. Right now, these situations of lack in stability and political transition is still playing in ways that are difficult to predict. We can see how the self-administration has been sending political delegations to Damascus to never shed with this new provision government with the attempt to reach autonomy for the region that connects with the ideas of democratic

countryism. The ideas of democratic countries don't expect to run a state institution because we don't want to live in a society that is ruled by a state and are calling for autonomous economy in a local governments where the different communities can live together, coaches together, administrate their social affairs together and also their defense. We see how the Syrian Democratic forces is like a military coalition of different local military forces, that it's based on the principles of self-defense. Maybe to give a bit of context also, affect what we have been doing here for several years that our organization has been operating in

northern Syria. As anarchists, we came here in solidarity, international solidarity with this revolution, because their political values and their political project is really close to our ideas. We see big similarities with the ideas of libertarian socialism and social ecology, like thinkers and moral books in had been a big inspiration for a Duderjahm, the leader of the Gordes liberation movement, that has been proposing this political frame called democratic conformism, where especially with the principles of Bonal liberation, social ecology and stimulus democracy, has been the political compass of the revolution here,

building autonomy in the different regions has been also a very important element to develop the project and especially during the war against the Islamic State as soon as the different territories were liberated there was a big emphasis on creating local continents civilian and military councils both that can run their own affairs

This is very interesting from an anarchist perspective, not to see how one of the main political points is this promoting self-defense and creating a military force that is not based on a centralized monopoly of violence, but on allowing every community to take care of their own defense and their own affairs. This is a really inspiring element that for us has been also a really extraordinary learning process. process. Being part of a revolution living day to day, the developments that are happening here, and see what does it mean to make a revolution? Because it's something that sometimes we at anarchists look back often in the epic times of like Spain and 36 or Ukraine in the 20s to see examples of like an anarchist revolution. And this is something that today is happening here. has been for a long time leading resistance against the logic of national states, especially in Turkey, but we saw how it has been finally in Syria where this movement found a space to put in practice,

these ideas, and to develop the revolution in society that has been theorized for a long time. So even if we cannot say that Georgia is an anarchist vision, but we can say how anarchist principles inspired the problem. project and that it's been developed here and implemented. This is a really an important school. It brings a lot of lessons of the big challenges of like reorganizing a society with principles of libertarian socialism. It is especially complicated here because of external reasons, just like the situation of

the embargo, the constant threat of the British army. And this is something that for sure we can point out as like, well, it's very difficult to make a revolution with these factors. But this is a solution that making a revolution will always be difficult and we'll always have that really big factors that make the situation very difficult. If making a revolution would be easy, we would already have done it. So, of course, it's something that brings a lot of difficulties, a lot of contradictions, a lot of challenges, and being here day-to-day living what it means to build our evolutionary society brought to a lot of lessons and reflections

that we also aim to translate and to reflect together with the anarchist movements from around the world to learn from this experience and to be able to analyze together and reflect and discuss together of what it means to build anarchism in the 21st century

what it means to build libertarian socialism nowadays in the current society with all the different elements that we see. And of course, in the military conflict that became going, it can seem maybe sometimes far away, not for comrades in Western countries, but I think it's important to remember that. Revolution and war has been always to sides of the St. Colin. and it's in these moments of instability of war where the logic and the status quo of national states is more weak because we can also see it in other times, in other moments,

or even in other places nowadays. What is happening, for example, in the matter what is happening in different areas where the logic of the national state is in question, creates instability, It creates a situation where different actors will push to take control. And we know that often those actors will be led by a nationalist and fascist mentality with an authoritarian logic to just impose their ideas and their aims by force.

And it's very important that we think and we reflect and we have nice force that is able to react to that situation because authoritarian and hierarchic military structures are quite fast to react. We as anarchists, we need time to organize horizontally because our instructors function based on trust, based on us, knowing each other. And even if I really believe that they are much more solid and much more reliable in a long term, In a short time, we can face big, big challenge. So it's important to see fascism is also advancing all around the world. And we can see how the tensions are growing.

So maybe this is a so-called knowledge to learn from the lessons here, to learn from how the Kurdish movement have been working and preparing for decades. and what happened in Syria made possible for the revolutionary movement to put their cards on the table, to organize together with the people, and to defend their people and their communities building this revolutionary process that nowadays is like so many people has been like taking inspiration from. So yeah, probably this is a bit confusing and maybe not so quiet. Sorry, we have been quiet some hours. We've had several weeks that have been extremely challenging

without a really few hours of sleep. But I hope this is more or less clear. And please, is there something that it's not so understandable. I'm always welcoming new questions and hoping we can answer and share more perspective. We had been also writing some statements, and we are also trying to answer all those people interested in learning more about the situation here and in ways to support this revolution. Welcome to What Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis, and this episode is going to be a special audio companion piece to an article published last night on Substant.

at Shatterzone. That's Robert's usual substack, though last night I published an article detailing the online history and transvestigation discourse regarding a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin. The article has pictures and hyperlinks, which might help explain some of the stuff I'm talking about,

but I'll do my best to relay it here to you on the podcast feed. Another Monday in America and another school show. shooting. On the morning of December 16th, a female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed a teacher and fellow student and injured six others before killing herself. Initially, police falsely reported the shooter was 17 years old, but late Monday night, they correctly identified the deceased shooter as 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow,

who went by Samantha or Sam. In the aftermath of this horrific event, right-wing influencers and content creators wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people, labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged transgender terrorists. But what really happened here had nothing to do with trans people and is sadly ordinary for the United States. In August of 2024, the father of the future school shooter took his daughter to a gun range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing the logo of a band, KMFDM. In another photo of the shooter, we can see the front of this shirt. The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris, who is a fan of the band.

The bulk of this new shooter's online footprint suggests a general obsession with school shooters and the TCC, or True Crime Community, a nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This sort of content dominates Samantha's Tumblr, which last posted in May of 2024. An alleged online friend of the shooter said that she, quote, posted about school shooters all the time, unquote, and quote, had school shooter leanings, unquote. Samantha is hardly alone in this. There have been over 100 copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since 1999.

A Twitter account believed to have belonged to the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her own shooting. The account was created in December of 2024 and the profile picture featured a young man in camo pants and a tactical backpack. The male profile picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers

that the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers cannot agree on whether she was female to male or male to female. One user constructed an overlay, trying to compare the photo of the shooter with her Twitter profile picture. This is a ridiculous diagram with about seven images

overlaid at different opacities, trying to layer the faces and body shapes of these two people on top of each other. This post is only proof that most of what gets passed off as quote-unquote, OSENT online. Today is just completely incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with this diagram is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat, a school shooter from Russia, who, similar to Samantha, was only 15 years old

when he carried out his shooting. Hours after the shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, while right-wing accounts were still arguing about what sort of transgender the shooter had been, a neo-Nazi Twitter account named Nitro, claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord, and repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her our quote-unquote biological woman. An early complicating factor in establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that her alleged Twitter account posted a link to a Google Doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the visibility setting public, so you couldn't access the Google Doc. You had to put in an email for approval,

and the person who was supposed to approve your email was now dead. So there was no way to actually look at this person's manifesto. The shooter's alleged Discord friend, Nitro, claims to find what he believed to be a snippet of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a Discord group chat. Nitro is based out of the UK, and so if this is legitimate, and that is a big if, this message would have been sent about an hour and a half

before the shooting, per the Discord timestamp. I'm going to read a bit of this alleged writing from the shooter. Quote, women are the only hope for this wretched world, but even women have been brainwashed by moids for too long. They've internalized the patriarchy and turned on each other, always begging for male approval and validation. It's disgusting. I realize the truth.

Men are irredeemable. Radfem Hitler was, is fucking. vindicated now. They can't be reformed or redeemed. They are a fucking scourge upon the earth. The only solution is to total exterminate them. And every foid who worships these fucking parasites, every single male must be wiped out from babies to the elderly. Only then can women be free to create a new world. All be the pioneer. I'll be the first one to take the first step. I don't care if they're fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, teachers, police, and especially N-word. or politicians.

I've been craving to kill them all. This is my mission. Only when their parasitic sludge has been expunged from the earth is when then the world will be clean and women can start over. It's the only way. In approximately 10 minutes,

I should be dead. It's strange, but it feels good, unquote. Hopefully to most people, this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary, quote unquote, feminist screed about initiation a wave of male targeted violence to cleanse the earth, with peppering of moids and foids, which is internet in-cell slang for male and female, respectively, also included are racial slurs,

and something called, quote-unquote, rad femme Hitler. That last part is a reference to a Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle Hollow Earth Turf, whose content is a mix of Trad-influenced right-wing feminism with anti-trans flourishes, advocating for a mass purge of moids. This includes trans women. This account is derided by those both on the right and left, but has a small dedicated following of conservative radfem and anti-trans, women with trad or often occult interests. The Discord Nazi Nitro claimed that the shooter was quote-unquote, a fan of Radfem Hitler and talked about the account frequently on Discord, though Nitro previously believed

her interest in the account was merely ironic. Now, obviously, an anonymous Twitter Nazi is certainly not the most reliable source, but Nitro was the first person to correctly identify and post photos of the shooter, though they could be utilizing this newfound clout to troll a widely disliked Twitter user. But the fact that he's been right about all other details, inclines me to not discount his claims just altogether, but instead just to hold them with a billion pounds of salt. Allegations that the shooter was a neo-Nazi radfemm, certainly sent Radfem Hitler into a panic,

who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile, some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been quote-unquote e-dating, with the apparent intention of disproving any time, ties the shooter had to the Twitter rad femme orbit. Through this alleged online boyfriend, the right-wing turf ecosystem

claimed to have acquired a copy of the quote-unquote full manifesto. This purported manifesto lacks the anti-male, anti-moid ramblings of the Discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly, shares its use of racial slurs and glorification of violence. At times evocative of Peca Eric Ovenin's

Manifesto, a Finnish school shooter from 2007 who killed eight people. Avinan considered himself a, quote-unquote, natural selector, who had evolved beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha's purported manifesto, he is mentioned by name as a quote-unquote true inspiration. Over the course of eight hours, a rad femme Twitter account released six pages of what they claimed to be Samantha's writing. It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being quote-unquote scum.

The writing describes a difficult family life, suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists. Though it briefly references the accelerationist Terror Graham Saints, the whole of this piece of writing is much more reminiscent of old-school column biners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu. The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters, and includes a paragraph on Vladaskov Roslayakov, another Columbine copycat, but from Crimea, who also cosplayed as one of the Columbine shooters during his own mass shooting. Though the Discord Nazi and the reactionary radfemms questioned the authenticity of the other's alleged manifesto, what both sides of the InCell War do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender. We're going to go in a quick ad break and come back to discuss transvestigation and the trans terror panic.

Okay, we are back. It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated is to do a school shooting. Transvestigating is the practice of trying to determine if an individual is transgender. It's often leveled against celebrities, athletes, and politicians. But in recent years, there's been a new common subject of, transvestigation, mass shooters, in particular school shooters. Myself, Robert Evans, and James Stout, previously reported on this trend back in 2023, right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant School shooting, which police say was committed by a trans man. We theorized that the online

right was testing out a new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and plain disinformation. That fear has come to pass. The modicum of believability provided by the Nashville shooting, as it's the only legitimate trans-related incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass shooting databases, was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for the next two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted to link

nearly every viral mass slash school shooting to trans people to create a false trend. The strategy operates as follows. During the first few chaotic hours after a shooting, a small group of right-wing content creators weaponized the lack of verified information to make posts framing an alleged shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the use of out-of-context social media posts, doctored photographs, photos of other people, or simply pictures of long or dyed hair. All they need is a collection of loose evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter is really transgender. For more context on this, you can listen to an episode of It Could Happen Here I wrote earlier this year covering the rise of fake trans terrorists. The goal is to get as

many of their followers to see and spread these claims as fast as possible. Even if it's widely debunked the next day, many who heard the false claim, won't be aware of the verified correction. All these anti-trans influencers need is a brief window of time to plant the idea into people's minds. And then that becomes remembered history. If this strategy is repeated every few months

whenever there's a new mass shooting, then it's pretty easy to create the false perception of a growing trend. Now, in reality, trans people per capita are actually way less likely to commit a shooting compared to cis people and are much more likely to be the victim of gun violence. But this past Monday,

conservative and anti-trans influencers tried once again to weaponize a tragedy for their own hateful agenda. Monday afternoon, Ian Miles Chung posted, Transterrorism must end. Hours later, Laura Lumer wrote, quote, The trans movement is really turning out to be a terrorist movement, unquote. Just minutes after,

police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer Matt Wallace posted that an unknown, quote unquote, witness said that the shooter, quote, looked to be transgender, unquote. Wallace, who has over 2.2 million followers on Twitter, provided no source or citation and has since deleted this post. But others in the online mega orbit parroted this language before any identifying information was released. With the user, Just Jeff from Cal, writing, a trans person targeted an open to fire on students at abundant life Christian school in Wisconsin, 12 hit, unquote. The right-wing content creator Ryan Mata baselessly claimed that the shooter was on hormone

replacement therapy, calling the shooter, quote, another mentally unstable psychopath who was prescribed puberty blocker and hormones, unquote. Mata hosts a show on the right-wing YouTube alternative Rumble and has over 123,000 followers on Twitter. His tweet claiming the shooter was on HART, racked up 1.6 million, quote-unquote, views, and 17,000 likes in just 12 hours. Larger accounts like Chaya Rijek's libs of TikTok fueled undue speculation about the gender identity of the shooter, seeding confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for political gain. Quoting the police chief saying, quote, I don't know if the shooter is male or female, unquote. A small group of conservative

of influencers have just so successfully created in alternate reality, in which nearly every new mass shooter is transgender, that they don't even have to outright say it anymore. Accounts like Libs of TikTok and Malaysian blogger Ian Miles Chung can merely gesture to this reality tunnel they've intentionally created. And now thousands of people will affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth, backed up by historical precedent of fabricated memory. Matt Wallace posted a photo of the shooter and the male profile picture saying, What do you notice about the shooter again?

Ian Miles Chung posted, quote, Police are unable to identify if the school shooter in Madison, Wisconsin is male or female. But they do know who did it and identified them as a student. Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking, unquote? This speculation fueled conspiracy theories, which spread claiming that police were intentionally withholding information about the shooter's gender identity in service of some hidden agenda. And actually, they were just waiting to, like, let the family know that their daughter was dead

and making sure they had the correct identification. Very basic stuff, police always do this. But no, it's all part of some secret agenda and some hidden narrative. As early as 1 p.m. E.S.T. on Monday, which is just like an hour after the shooting would have taken place, the neo-Nazi Twitter account Nitro correctly identified the shooter as his online friend Sam slash Samantha. As this name spread online, the multi-gendered nature of the name added to the speculation that the shooter was trans. Scarlett Johnson, an activist with the ultra-conservative parents' rights group, Moms for Liberty, shared self-admitted, unconfirmed reports that the shooter was quote-unquote a transgender teen who went by Sam or Sam, Samantha. As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online, courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation

of the shooter only intensified. An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter's given name matches the ancient Sam Hyde meme, in which extremely online people try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a new mass shooting was the American comedian Sam Hyde. In recent years, the meme has turned into the Samantha Hyde meme used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One hide post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey raked up over 600,000 views, 4.5,000 likes, and 1.5,000 retweets.

Massey posted, quote, when you put disturbed children on hormone blockers and sexually mutilate them, you're not curing them, you're creating potential school shooters, unquote. Now, it should go without saying, but the use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence. We're going to go on one last break and return to conclude our discussion of transvestigating school shooters. Okay, we are back. Time to talk about the potential double flipper. So as this transvestigation continued, the quote-unquote, we can always tell crowd,

ended up transvestigating in both directions. seemingly unsure of what assigned gender at birth the shooter must have had. Some believe the shooter was trans femme, while others concluded they were transmask. With one reply to an end-wokeness tweet reading, quote, those do not look like female hands. And another transvestigation post saying, The shooter is a trans kid, a female, pretending to be a male. Exactly why we keep our Second Amendment rights to protect our children from this mental health crisis.

zoom in close on her shirt and hand gesture, unquote. A now deleted post from a turf account also attempted to pass off the shooter as a trans girl, saying, quote, the Wisconsin school shooter was a 17-year-old trans-identified male. It just keeps happening. Now, quote-unquote, trans-identified male was usually a transphobic dog whistle to refer to a trans woman, as in a male who identifies as a trans woman. But sometimes transphobes get confused by, words, and use the phrase to refer to trans people who quote unquote identify as men.

Like this other trans investigation post saying, quote, shooter was a 17-year-old trans, but identified male. Now, one of the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans guy, came from an anti-Semitic doctor in Denmark with 1.4 million followers. She falsely claimed with no evidence that the shooter was taking testosterone, right? quote, the Wisconsin school shooter has been identified as a 17-year-old trans-identified male, another mentally ill girl on testosterone, unquote. As of Tuesday morning, this post has over 3 million views, 22,000 likes, and 8.3,000 retweets.

In a following post, this doctor blamed, quote, unquote, the Jews for inventing transgenderism. As a note, extremism researchers have argued that transphobia is structurally similar to anti-Semitism. Now, a common piece of anti-transmimimetic propaganda deployed in the wake of mass shootings is the trans shooter collage. This format spread after the Nashville School shooting in 2023, and this week, Matt Wallace provided us with a brand new version. This post is an ugly mishmash of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven people's faces with a very, variety of backgrounds, a purposeless red circle in the middle of the image, and text that reads, quote, almost every child killed in a mass shooting in the last few years was killed by a transgender shooter. Now, out of all those pictures in this collage, only one person in this collage has actually reported to be

transgender, the Nashville shooter in the upper left. The rest of the people pictured are not trans and have never claimed to be trans. The person with long hair in the lower half of the image is Colt Gray, who was falsely labeled as trans by far-right influencers like End Wokeness and Mike Cernovich. Colt Gray's Discord posts reveal he actually held transphobic beliefs. A more classic version of the trans shooter collage format is just five pictures with text next to each of them reading the X shooter identified as trans. The X shooter identified as trans, right? Just a big list of five of these names saying that they all identified as trans. The version I'm using here is courtesy of Libs of TikTok admin Chaya Reichek, who posted this earlier this year.

But just as before, the majority of the subjects in this meme aren't actually trans, and it's just full of disinformation. The Colorado Springs shooter who targeted a queer club is not actually non-binary, and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as the Denver shooter is not trans, as never clans. to be trans. He just has dyed hair. This individual pictured did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is not pictured. Now lastly, though the person pictured as the Yuvaldi shooter is trans, this is not the actual Yuvaldi shooter. It's a random trans girl who was one of two trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the shooter as transgender. The other two people in this image is the Nashville shooter who does appear to be trans and the perpetrator of the

Aberdeen workplace shooting. But back to Madison, Wisconsin. So after all of that transvestigating, what do we have? Just another column binder with neo-Nazi ties. The right has gotten so good at deploying the trans shooter as a smoke bomb. It obscures the reality of the over-availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization, and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth. Instead of focusing on all that, on the victims of this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to spend a whole day debunking the late shooter's pronouns. And that's the point. That's what they want us talking about.

Those who delete their quote-unquote trans-terrorist posts after being conclusively proven wrong will try the exact same schick in a few months after the next mass shooting goes viral. Others won't even care that much. They'll just leave up their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel they helped to create. I'm going to close with a quote from Sartra. Never believe that fascists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.

This post has been deleted. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about the worst coups in all of history. I'm your host, Bia Wong, and we are returning to one of the worst coups I have ever seen, because a whole bunch more stuff has happened in our most recent unbelievably dog shit coup in South Korea, the six-hour coup at which President Yun declared martial law and tried to shut down the National Assembly and then the National Assembly. Assembly got together and voted to end the martial law and then it stopped. Extremely bizarre and baffling series of events.

And, you know, when we last left our intrepid heroes, the people of South Korea, they had just successfully overturned a coup. No one quite knew what was going to happen in the aftermath. We knew an impeachment vote was coming. A vote to impeach President Yun. The reason we're coming back to this, though, is that the aftermath of all of this has been absolutely baffling. And I think this has all been lost in the news cycle because about a trillion things are happening right now. But the situation in South Korea has been unbelievably weird.

And so we're now going to take a look at the actual impeachment of President Yun and the unbelievably bizarre path that led to it because, oh my God, the more I talk to people, the more I realize that people don't know how unbelievably unhinged everything has been, since the military coup because everyone has moved on, so we're going back. So immediately after the coup, there was this whole wave of military guys going, like, we didn't know we were taking part in the coup. We're totally innocents. Like, they just let us out of the trucks.

And suddenly we were at the National Assembly. We were like, oh, what are we doing? And there's also been this whole thing of all these Special Forces guys going like, oh, yeah, no, no, yeah. We totally could have taken the National Assembly in 20 minutes if we wanted to. we just, uh, we just like didn't want to take a national assembly. Like, we didn't really want to do it, man. Like, our heart wasn't in this coup.

And like, really, I have seen the videos of that shit, man. Like, I didn't see you, like, going in there and kicking ass and taking names. I saw you getting your ass kicked by a guy just, like, blowing your ass up with a fire extinguisher. And, like, not being able to break a bunch of very well-constructed barricades set up by, like, fucking Senate aides. So, that's been extremely funny. so you like vanished for the entire time this coup was going on and like nobody knew where he was

and no one had seen him and things were kind of fiascoe he was just gone so he finally like reappeared right and as he sort of reappears he tries to like do this explanation of why he did

the coup it goes about as badly as you would expect from someone who just failed the worst coup that we've ever seen here's from NPR quote In his speech on Thursday, Yun, a former chief prosecutor,

attempted to justify his actions and downplay its significance. He argued that the opposition's, quote, legislative dictatorship, unquote, paralyzed state affairs and disturbed social order. Now, this is going back to the thing, you know, he did at the time, right? He has this thing where he keeps calling the parliament, which is controlled by the Democratic Party,

which is like the liberal opposition party. He kept calling the parliaments like opposition anti-state forces and like my brother in Christ what the fuck is a legislative dictatorship? I mean like you know you could be really strictly anarchist about it and be like well yeah all legislators are dictatorships

but my dude you are not living under a dictatorship because the parliament that your country elected hates you and refuses to pass your dogship budget because no one likes you that is simply not what the word dictatorship means it reminds me of this thing we're like you know if you go back and you read like people in the 1800s talking about or like in the 1800s like 1700s too you'll read

them talking about monarchies right and they'll be like ah if the king can like overrule the will of the nobles we would be living at a pure dictatorship it's like what the fuck are you talking about like sir you live under a monarchy like you are already in a dictatorship you are also like part of the authoritarian apparatus of the dictatorship and this is just like the inverse of that where it's like ah the legislature won't let me do whatever the fuck I want so this is now a dictatorship. And so like, you know, that's simply not what the word dictatorship means. And you can't get away with that shit as much in a country where people, like, in living memory,

have lived through an actual military dictatorship and understand what that's like. The parliament refusing to pass your terrible budget. That's not an excuse to institute martial law and try to shut down the legislature. So this was not received well, as you would expect, from whatever unhinged speech that was. He did apologize for imposing martial law, which is a very funny place to end up. It's like you try to do a coup

and then you have to go on TV and apologize for trying to do the coup and also try to argue you didn't just try to do a coup. So this is received very poorly. As we sort of predicted immediately, the opposition Democratic Party immediately tries to impeach you.

And from the way the headlines kind of work in the West and from the way this is being talked about and even from the way this episode sort of opened, you'd think that this impeachment vote was how we got impeached. But no, no. The first impeachment vote is not how Eun gets impeached. Everything is way, way weirder than that.

Now, Ewan's party, the People's Power Party, which is henceforth going to be called the PPP because I am not going to say the words people power party over and over again, good Lord. The PPP got a lot of credit from people outside of South Korea for like, you know, some of their members legitimately did show up to parliament to vote against a martial law declaration.

And at the time in the last episode, I said, that's bullshit. You don't get credit for voting against martial law and also, like, most of them weren't there. And I kind of got shit for this. And I have been absolutely 100% vindicated because the impeachment vote, the first one rolls around.

The first one happens very quickly after the first coup, right? Well, the first cue. Hopefully the only coup. hopefully there's not a second coup. But this happens very quickly. And, okay, so the vote rolls around. And the entire PPP, the entire party, except maybe like two people, just walk out of the chambers.

And because they walk out of the chambers, the vote fails because they don't have, they don't have quorum. If you don't have a quorum is like, there's like a minimum number of members that has to be in attendance for whatever you're doing to be legal to stop like two people from showing up in the middle of the night and being like, aha, I am in the parliament. We've just passed this like order that makes me dictator or whatever. And again, the entire PPP just walks out and they leave. And the vote fails because the PPP managed to whip basically its entire membership into trying to keep Ewan in power.

And here begins the what the fuck is going on part of this episode. Because A, all reports we have suggest that Eun was planning to have the leadership of the PPP arrested. And B, he just literally tried to do a coup. And they're still backing him. And C, we stumble into a very, very thorny question that, I saw from people in Korea, like the moment after all this stuff happens, but didn't really hit the Western press until later, if at all, and didn't really hit, like, the mainstream consciousness. And this question will become apparent in a second. So here's from The Guardian.

Senior PPP politicians have claimed you can continue as president while delegating his powers to the prime minister. An arrangement park, that's Parkshan Day, who's a very powerful Democratic Party politician. an arrangement Park described as, quote, a blatant constitutional violation with no legal basis. Now, this is true. What Park is saying is right, right? And the fact that the Guardian is saying, like, their way of framing this is,

oh, the opposition party person says that this is a blatant violation of constitutional law with no legal basis. That's not just a thing that he says, like, this is true. Like, there is no legal mechanism for, well, we don't want to impeach our presidents, but also he just tried to do a coup so instead we're going to take his powers away

and give it to the prime minister so he can still serve without us impeaching him like that's not a thing you can't do this there's no mechanism for this the Democratic Party people are just completely correct here but because for some reason the guardian feels it I mean it's the guardian right but they feel it necessary to sort of both sides again a fucking coup

this is where we are here's more from the guardian quote the leader of the PPP Pondong Hun said at the weekend that Yun would not be involved in foreign and other state affairs with control of the administration shifting to the prime minister, Han Duxu. Han said Yun's televised apology was effectively a promise to leave office.

Now, no, it wasn't. It was not a promise to leave office. What the fuck are you talking about? Like, everyone could just go listen to his apology. He didn't say that. He did not say he was going to leave office, right? And no, hell, he says, it's effectively a promise to leave office, but it simply isn't, right?

Everyone could just, like, see this. And, and again, like, you know, Okay, so like the thing that the thing that the PPP is trying to do, right? The PPP is trying to have their prime ministers, like, gain control of the administration. Now, there is a mechanism to do this under the Constitution. It's called impeachment. The thing it happens when you get impeached is that you get kicked out of office, as we're going to get to this later, but you get kicked out of office,

and the prime minister gets put into power, and this happens until the Supreme Court decides whether your impeachment should go through or not, right? So, like, there's a mechanism for this. The PPP doesn't want to, like, impeach you, but they also, don't want him seemingly running the country because he appears to be like absolutely unhinged and just again declared martial law and tried to knock off the legislature. So you have this,

you have this whole sort of steaming mess of a situation where the PPP is trying to like have it both ways of like not having union power but also not impeaching him. But this also begs one very important question. Who the fuck was running the country between the first impeachment vote and the second one? no one knows

no one knows who was running this fucking country this is a country with 51 million people and nobody knew who was fucking running the country and this this barely made the news I'm going insane how how why why why is this a thing that just like completely

disappeared beneath the fucking like chatter of the news waves this just this just vanish entirely and speaking of vanishing entirely we were going to vanish entirely to do these ads and we are back.

So as you would imagine from a situation where, again, you have a country of 51 million people where no one knows who is running the country, things have been extremely chaotic. So, you know, we covered in the last episode that, like, a bunch of ministers were resigning, right? Because, you know, they had just taken part in a coup and they were like, well, shit. The ex-defense minister, who's one of the people who's been sort of implicated as being like, saying that he's to a large extent behind the coup, like, is true. But I mean, this was a cooperative effort between you, the defense minister, and a bunch of the people in the army.

And the defense minister who resigned in disgrace, like, got thrown in jail. So that's fucking wild. Like, he just got, like, arrested by the police. A bunch of testimony also has come out from the National Assembly investigation, which I'm not covering much of the testimony from the National Assembly investigation. because it's really unclear exactly how reputable all this stuff is because a lot of people are just

saying shit, right? And some of it may be real. Some of it may be stuff that people have, you know, obtained through their sources, but some of it's probably not. But like to get a sense of like the kind of stuff that is coming out in this investigation. One of the big claims was from,

I think it's from like a TV host who claimed he got texted it by a, guy in the army. But apparently he was saying that the plan by Union in the army, the plan was to have the head of the PPP killed and then drop a North Korean uniform nearby to like

do a false flag and implicate North Korean Special Forces. Now, this is unbelievably unhinged, right? What the fuck? And it probably isn't true. But, you know, the source isn't great.

But like, who knows? right? Like we don't we don't actually know if they were planning to do this and fucked it up or if they weren't planning to do this or if this person is this person just lying this person did get this text but the person was misinformed. We don't know if this is just like misinformation that's being spread around. This is a good demonstration of what the sort of chaos of this moment has been. And you know, and there's been a lot of other stuff that I think in any other time and place probably would have been like front page news. So one of, one of, one of the, one of the, One of the things that happens in this whole process is that the South Korean police tried to raid the house of the president.

And, you know, like, as part of their investigation, there's a whole thing where you know, you've been ordered by, like, the investigatorial services to not leave the country because he's just actively under investigation for this military coup being illegal by just like the regular ass police. And so South Korean police, like, try to raid his house. And they can't do it because the South Korean equivalent of the Secret Service stops them from doing the raid. and this in and of itself is something that like again would be a giant news headline at any other point in time and it's just been completely lost and it's like it's not sort of clear right now how this is all sort of going to play out and whether the police are going to be able to do this and you know what's actually going to happen to eun after he presumably leaves office i mean i guess the stream court could save him but like you know there's there's a real chance that that he, we're going to get into this more in a second. There's a real chance that he just like fucking goes to prison, right? And

unlike the last president who was removed from office, like, I can't imagine him getting pardoned by the next administration because that was merely an unhinged corruption scandal involving the president of South Korea being under the influence of a shaman and doing a bunch

of corruption that did a bunch of horrible shit. But this is, you know, this is like, he tried to do a coup Right. So it's sort of unclear if he's going to get saved from that. It does seem very likely that he's going to face a bunch of charges for this because everyone is unbelievably pissed off. Here's from DW. On Monday, former head of Special Warfare Command, Kwok Jong-Guin, and former head of the Capital Defense Command, Li Jin Wu, were arrested on charges of deploying military personnel to the parliament. former chief of the Defense Counterintelligence Command, Yo In Hong, has been accused of orchestrating the implementation of martial law, and army chief Park Ansu has been suspended from his role.

Yun's former defense minister, Kim Yong Hyun, who stepped down immediately following the boarded martial law declaration, and former interior minister Li Song Min also faced investigations. So what we're seeing here effectively, right, is the house cleaning of the ranks of the Korean military, who have been involved with this whole thing, right? And they're going through a lot of different people. Part of this is also clearing out some of like the cliques in the military

who've been sort of backing Yun and who people have suspected have been a bunch of people behind a lot of this stuff. And this is a good and necessary process. The entire time this has been going on, everyone has been terrified of the possibility of a second coup. And the only way to avoid that in the short term is to remove the senior leadership of the military and get them away from their troops.

They don't have the ability to sort of plan anything. And sometimes this can make people just go for it, right? Like that's what happens in Bolivia, it looks like, where the failed Bolivian coup was a product of, you know, people trying to do house cleaning

and get rid of military guys before they did a coup. And so this makes them go off half-cocked and like, you know, that's a bad situation for, I mean, it's a bad situation for everyone in the sense that there's a coup happening, but it's a bad situation,

especially for the military, because they don't have their coup preparations in place so it's easier to knock them off. But what's interesting about this too is that to a large extent, we're seeing other parts of the Korean state like really go after the military, right? And this, I don't know, I mean, like, I'm hoping this kind of like has a precedent inside of the sort of Korean like liberal democratic societal norms that like you can't let this just unhinged military do all of this.

this stuff, the precedent of this sort of like military house cleaning, I think, is a good one, right? This is going to be a rare, a rare Mia agrees with the people who founded the U.S. moment because, oh my God, those people suck shit, like a bunch of slave owning genocidal bastards. But, you know, one of the things that they were right about is the political danger to any democratic system of having a standing army, right? And especially when you have a standing army that's like permanently on a semi-war footing the way the South Korea's is, there's always a real

political risk that they attempt to seize power and you have to fucking stop them from doing that. And ideally, you just fucking acts as much of it as you possibly can, right? I mean, I think you should ask the entire political system to make sure this doesn't happen. But, you know, this is a, this is

hopefully a good first step. I also want to mention that the specific charge of insurrection is being thrown at a lot of these people. And also at Yun himself, And, like, he absolutely did it, right? Like, there's not much of a dispute that he did, in fact, do an insurrection under, under sort of Korean law. And this technically, like, carries the death penalty, but I don't think they're going to kill him.

But, you know, this is the sort of severity of this stuff under the Korean legal system. And, okay, so, like, all of this fucking chaos is happening, right? And eventually there's a second impeachment vote. and this time the public pressure is enough that the PPP stays in the chamber to vote no and only about a dozen per MPR only about a dozen PPP lawmakers actually vote to impeach the guy

who just tried to have their fucking parliament disbanded you know and this is like one of the really depressing things about this right even after everything right and this is something that that we can trace back to sort of the roots of the conservatism of the PPP even after all of this shit Right. Like these people still backed him. And that's a really, really grim and depressing thing. And part of the reaction to this has been from the South Korean Trid Union movement, which has been calling for just to straight up the disbanding of the PPP as a political party. Right. And that's something that I think is extremely reasonable. Again, if your party's president tries to do a military coup, I think you shouldn't be allowed to have a party anymore. This is the neoliberal opinions, right? Okay, so eventually this vote does go through. And the stage that we're at right now is that, okay, so once you get impeached by the National Assembly, you're suspended from all your duties and the Prime Minister takes power.

So what's happening right now is he doesn't have any power formally, but we're still in this sort of holding period. We're waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in and either, like, approve the impeachment or not. and that's that's kind of where things stand now after an unbelievably unhinged week at a half of just everything being extremely unblooded two weeks i guess everything being just unbelievably extremely weird and yeah but i think i think there is a mild hopeful note which is that like if you fight back against these people they can be defeated it sucks but you can't eventually get them to crumble and all i can really say for this is i hope the South Korean people prevail over the shitty military dictators. And I hope that we two are

able to sort of prevail in the U.S. against our sort of equivalence of these forces. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast that I introduced the same way almost every time. I don't know. You listen to the show, right? You're listening at like some point in the future. You probably know the things falling apart, putting back together again intro. I don't have to do it. We are doing something that we have done before, and I guess we'll continue to do, which is talking to other anarchist media projects about their work and how things are going. And yeah, the general why, how, what of it all. And today we're talking with the collective anarchist writers. And very specifically, we're talking to Shulie Branson, who is a writer, translator, and teacher currently living in so-called New York, Parlojoi Bergman, who lives across the border in Canada and is a mom writer, artist, and love. loves, crows, very important. We'll be coming back to that in a second. And Vicki Osterweil, who is a worker, writer, and agitator based in Philadelphia. And all three of you, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having us. Hi. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks for having us. Love your project.

Also, I just wanted to give a shout out to our fourth member, Danny Berlison, who's not here today because she's working, paid work, who just rounds us out so beautifully and just wanted to say her name. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. And partly I'm excited to talk about it because the acronym for this is caw and there's a whole crow theme going on and we we love a crow here in portland it is maybe our big thing yeah i'm in vancouver well i was in vancouver i just up from there but pacific northwest and so it's crow highway you know thousands and thousands of crows oh yeah i get it i think the crow is like what ultimately sealed the project for us honestly yeah yeah yeah it was it really came together around

around the Corvid theme, I think, yeah. Yeah. The combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence, and never-ending spite, I think are all sort of motivating factors for all of us. Yep, yep. And that there are collective and have meetings often throughout the day. A collective called a murder, which is also pretty badass. Yeah, there's a huge thing in Portland here where we have the mega murder.

So every morning, all the crows sort of fly off into the, their different like little murders and they go they go out and hang out in the city and then at around sunset every day all of the crows fly back into the city to have their like giant mega murder meeting there's thousands and thousands of them you look up and you

just see them like the herds like the murders of crow is flying past and if you there's specific spots in Portland where you can just go see all of the all the crows hanging out and you know doing doing whatever the things crows do when literally an entire city's where the

crows gathered together every night? Oh no, it's a spokes council. It's not a spokes council though because all of them are there. So I feel like that's an assembly. It's more assembly, yeah. Yeah, in Vancouver it's called the Crow Highway. Yeah. Hell yeah.

Because it's so massive and goes forever and ever and ever to their roost. Brief story on crows and resistance. A really incredible story in Vancouver when a park was a colonial person created a park in the downtown, which was like displaced a lot of indigenous people in their homes and designed this park that was filled with crows as well. They also brought in animals from Europe as well to make it pretty. And the crows, the crows made it really hard for these animals.

And so the city of Vancouver for 50 years from 1900 to 1950 gave pre-rable. to the Vancouver gun people to go into the park and shoot crows every day. Oh, my God. And when I see, like, the amount of crows that are still alive, it's just a metaphor for indigenous resilience, you know? Like, it's just so powerful. So it's another reason why I'm, like, interested in them in terms of where I was, like, living. As I've been gathering images for our project, I've been specifically trying to find

images of crows attacking people because I think that's good. So it's like, you know, the follow-up to what you were saying, Carla, is the crow's revenge. Yes. Yeah, one of the things that, you know, you kind of have to do here in Portland is you have to kind of like negotiate

with the crows, you have to let you leave them like peace offerings and you sort of you know, when your friends come you let you introduce them to the crows so the crows know that you're okay. It's very sweet. Shiny things. Yeah. We love a crow base society. And speaking of a crow-based society, yeah, do you want to, I guess, give a brief sort of

overview of what Kaa is before we get sort of more into it? Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that. This is Vicky, by the way. Yeah, so Kha is sort of like, I mean, it's an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is a collective of anarchist writers. It's also a core of it working group. There's a lot of different acronyms for it. And what we are doing is we are bringing all four, at first just all four of our efforts together. So, So a lot of us work on separate podcasts. We have pedagogical tasks. We have many activist projects that center around culture.

You know, I have a newsletter. She really has a Patreon. Carla has a newsletter. Danny has also has like an email list. There's all these different projects. And we realized that like for all of our talk about mutual aid and working collectively, when it comes to writing and creativity, the market has been so fractured and so alienated and sort of so turned into like everyone has an individual newsletter.

that they're competing with one another, you know, even though they don't want to be like they want to be, but that's sort of ultimately what's happening is that there's limited sort of customers. And there's also this other trend going on right now of this really exciting kind of worker-owned journals, a lot of them local journalism. There's some in New York and Chicago and there's one in Asheville and all over the country, as well as like on special topics. So like Aftermath, which like does, I think, they're the video games and there's 404 media who does tech. There's just like all these different sort of sites doing this sort of thing. And I think in some ways all of us are sort of.

collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort of stolen and destroyed by capital, you know, in a big way. Yeah. So there's sort of two goals that we have, and I think Carla, Carla, speaks really eloquently to some of this, but one of which is to make writing radical culture work, beautiful, joyful, fun, and also critical, like, movement work to make it sustainable for us and for anyone else who wants to share in this project, who we can sort of expand towards, but also to make it easier for people who are reading to have access to these things, like in one place,

instead of having to, you know, decide who they care for and who they like in order to sort of, you know, do that math of like, who can I afford to subscribe to? Like, I personally, I don't know if this is true for everyone else, but personally, I usually have about two or three people I can afford to subscribe to a month and they switch it out just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know, or something like that. That was very technical and financially focused. But what we're really excited to do mostly is support our each other's work, Because I think we all really love and admire each other's work and have for a long time. And this is just this really exciting opportunity.

Instead of my writing, just being for me, it's for Shulie and Carla and Danny now. And that just makes it feel more inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process. Yeah, I mean, connected to the financial aspect, but I think when we were initially discussing this, the experience of being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. Yeah. And if you're trying to get paid for that, you have to sell it to people, right? And so it's very hard to get paid at all for writing, and it's very hard to place your writing in venues that publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle, because

people do not really want to publish things that come to anarchist conclusions. Like, they want you to do all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you to think about, like, what an action is like. So, like, you know, you could write for some of the lefty, so-called lefty socialist, whatever, rags, but they don't, yeah, they won't feature anarchists. They basically even just act as if anarchism doesn't exist, never exists, you know, never existed. They erased the whole history of it. The only serious kind of political forces, some kind of democratic socialism. So to us, we wanted to create a place where we can do the writing we want to do without having to make compromises

in what we want to say just to get published. Because that, yeah, just that game of like, of shopping your stuff around is it's demeaning, it's totally time-consuming, it distracts you from actually doing the work. So we were like, let's band together instead of each of us going off, wasting our time,

trying to write. Yeah, and I think one of the other issues with this too also is like the pay is just so bad like even the left, like almost especially the leftist groups like page is so rancid and all of the combinations of those things make it really, really hard to just sort of be an independent writer.

And also, okay, jumping back a second to their erasing anarchism exists. This is my, the one that makes me always lose my mind is like, I'm specifically going to name Jockman here because I don't like them. But like, one of the things that Jochcombe will do is they'll be covering a strike that is organized by the IWW.

It is an IWW union. They will have pictures of the strike where there are a bunch of people holding IWBB banners and they will never mention that it was the IW who organized the strike. So like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy of silence, I guess, about our politics and the stuff that we do in the world. It's so glaring. Jacobin is definitely a big culprit. And then the podcast associated with the

dig, like they will be talking about history where anarchists have been very involved and they just will not mention them. And sometimes there's really good history and analysis on that podcast, but like this is an omission that they clearly are choosing. Yeah. And I think, you know, self-organization is effectively the only way out of this because otherwise you just sort of, I don't know, have to deal with all the sort of media gatekeepers like sitting there in front of you

with a stick going no anarchism. Bunk. Yeah, and even the projects that have sustained that have survived, which are all really awesome, you know, like an exciting, like very few of them have offered real sustainability like on a professional level. And like, I've been publishing like, quote unquote professionally for 15 years. And like, I'm,

the newest writer on the scene, like, from our crew, basically. Like, we're incredibly experienced. And all of us have books out. All of us have edited volumes. All of us have, like, podcasts. And, like, are people who I, like, really respect whose names, I think, are big and important in the world of theory and activism and, like, in the Anglophone world especially. And none of us can sustain ourselves as writers as such because of the way that just, you know, both politically, but also just like the way the market has come down. Yeah. And it just feels like something we could apply our politics to solving as a workplace issue rather than just sort of as like a, you know, are you committed enough to sacrifice all your time issue? And so hopefully like that will also

function to make more work available to produce and to platform and to yeah, to sort of work as an example simultaneously. Unfortunately, speaking of sustaining work as a platform, unfortunately the way we are sustained here is with these ads. So hold on. And we are back. And this, I guess, brings us to the kind of work that's happening here. I was very excited because one of the things you all have done is an interview with Raul Zabekhi, who is the author of like one of my favorite quotes of all time. I think I've said on this show like multiple times.

I really ran into in a sort of completely unrelated book called Rhythms of the Pachikudy, which is about the sort of the water and gas wars in Bolivia. I talked about this book on the show like all the time. This quote goes roughly like struggle illuminates. the divisions of a society, like lightning illuminates the sky. And I love it. It's like, it's the best explanation of what happened during 2020 that I've ever seen. And this is sort of what's happening like right now too is like you have these sort of flashpoint moments where suddenly like all of how society works very briefly becomes visible. And you have this sort of

moment when you're illuminated by it to act. And so I'm, I don't know, I'm really excited that you know, are talking to him and yeah, because you talk to me about more about what's been going on and what's to come? I'm sure. Thanks. That was a highlight definitely this year was talking to Raoul. Obviously, you know, out of Pat Costco, we talked for quite a bit longer than what was on the show. And I think like reading his newest book that was translated and then doing that show with him, it was completely connected to me, like reaching out to Shulay about doing Ka. because there was a way that he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries that the Zapatistas are working on, like this idea of really truly looking at all the fault lines within horizontality or autonomy that we don't actually enact in our day-to-day lives.

And so I really started to reflect on my own lives that way. And not so much Vicky at this point yet, but like Shulie and Danny, both of them, like we're blurbing each other's books. and like supporting each other, connecting to publishers or trying to connect each other to publishers and just like trying to disrupt a competitive nature that's running underneath, even when we're all really committed to not being competitive. But there's like it is. Like there's a, you know. So all of this to say that for me, like collaboration is at the heart of what we're doing here

in a deep, deep way. And for me, collaboration just means that when something is created that wouldn't be created otherwise without this collaboration. So I'm just really excited to see what sparks and comes up individually, but also like with each other and even like through collaborations like the show with Raul and like how that spreads seeds and ideas. Yeah. So like for myself, I'm going to definitely focus on collaboration in a deep way. I don't think I'll write very much solo stuff for the for call. I think it will always be in conversation with others and just trying to double down on doing it together instead of individual pursuits.

Yeah, and that's something I think is useful for everyone listening to this, is that it's a lot easier to develop better ideas, and it makes your writing more clear. It makes the way that you, you know, just the way you act in the world a lot more clear when you're working with other people. And it's, you know, it's the process by which the best stuff gets created. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really, like, true.

and I think like I have for a long time now sort of accepted that writing is never going to support or sustain me. And all I needed was a push from a few other people to be like, wait, what if we like actually tried to do it collectively to be like, oh yeah, like I could actually try that? Like I don't have to just accept that like I'll always have like a full time job plus whatever writing like whatever hours I can steal, you know? And like, you know, with great difficulty put out some writing sometimes and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting out enough to like sustain myself. like that whole process. I think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle, you know, of having gigs and work and lots of other important things to do. And, and, you know, sort of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like, what's so inspiring about, you know, because Carla, and as Carla was just mentioning, they sort of brought, I'm the last one on the, on the crew.

And I was sort of the, the closer, you know, or whatever. But I think, like, I don't know what that means. Genuinely. But, uh, but I was brought in. And I think just having them propose it already, just as a project that we've been thinking of has changed the way I've been thinking about what is possible with the writing I'm already doing. And so I think just to underline that point and go on and on and on collaborations really, really like important and supporting one another is so powerful. Yeah, when Carla and I initially had like the seed conversation of this, like Carla said something about collectivizing as writers. Like we talk about it with all these other workplaces and industries and whatever. And it was a lot of

like when when you said that, I was like, oh yeah. Like that makes so much sense. Like, we're off here doing our own thing. And as Vicki said, you do it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable. You steal your time to do it. Even the supposed jobs that are there to enable you to write actually make you do all this other works. So like the time for writing is always like endlessly deferred. And, you know, we have that image also like of the patron or something.

like Virginia Woolf says you need like money enough to have a room of one's own. But if we put ourselves together in this way, then we are trying to, yeah, I don't know, create more time for ourselves to write. And then like going back to something Vicki said earlier about like reinventing the newspaper, there was a time in anarchism where like, I think we talked about this amongst ourselves, like where like every block had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper, right? It wasn't like you had one newspaper telling all the anarchists what to think. it was like it was hyper local in a way and there was so many voices. And so I think that's another

thing that we want to do is like help for that proliferation because in the sort of spirit of collaboration, like the reason to write as an anarchist for me is to have conversations, to produce the possibility for people to like receive it and then contact me and I get into conversations with people and learn things from them. Yeah. And I think there's an angle there too where like I think we're kind of, okay, so I was a tiny baby when all this was happening. So I'm going to have to rely on y'all for this. But like, you know, one of the things I get from sort of reading the record about like the older anarchist movement. I mean, when I say older, I mean like like anti-globalization era stuff was like there were, there seemed like there was a lot more of a kind of like anarchist media sphere.

Are you talking about like the late 90s? Yeah. Yeah. Like through the 2000s to some extent. Like Battle Seattle. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was like the, you know, the birth of anarchy again, right?

Yeah. I was definitely around. I'm in my late 50s. But the same struggle was there. Like that we're swimming in liberalism. And like that socialist worker like capturing of the movement was just as powerful then. And it was, you saw it at all the rallies and stuff. And, you know, immediately anarchism was marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and not practical for the revolution. And this is why it's splintered off in all these kind of sex.

sectarian movements in the, that's my take anyway, I think that's... No, it makes sense. It makes sense. I mean, I've hashed this out with so many older anarchists that I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies. Like, we talked about this a lot, this phenomenon, or with Scott Crow, and you can just see the direct line of where it went into sectarianism from this sort of rebirth. Sorry, I went off on a different thing instead of like journals and media, but yes. No, no. Well, this is good, too, because like, I think, that's the everything I've been realizing is like people don't, I mean, in my generation too, but like people younger than me don't

really know the history of this stuff. Like all the time, I have conversations to people where I start talking about like the Oaxaca uprising and they have no idea what I'm talking about. And I'm like, oh no, we need to like, we need to like resuscitate the history of like the 2000s because stuff happened there. So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I was like very adjacent to some of that stuff at the moment. And some of that was actually because a lot of what was going on in the alter globalization movement in that period was happening through culture.

I think most famously, like touring punk bands would also bring zine libraries with them so they would have someone distroying zines and playing the show. And like, I mean, I got radicalized through punk. I know a lot of people who did.

That was, you know, when I finally did, it was after that movement had largely crested. But I think there was a lot of focus on culture and also a critique of culture was also pretty central to how people were thinking and moving.

And I think the explosion of social media and like posting and like this sort of quote unquote democratization and leveling of communication capabilities, which in some ways was more real in the early 2010s than it is, certainly than it is now. It wasn't totally like a made up narrative, but it was also over-relied on. I think people sort of reached for a kind of like, well, anyone who can use these tools to communicate, like that's valuable. So critiquing sort of media in general or critiquing sort of capitalist media is sort of beside the point. Because we can go around it.

We can sort of go, we can go on Twitter and subvert it. And we can, like, do all these, you know, go sideways around it. So I was, you know, a participant in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, which people also don't know anything about because that's just being older. But Occupy Wall Street was started by a magazine called Ad Busters, which came out of the WTO movement and sort of managed to stick around. And by 2011, when they did that, we thought it was like a joke. It was like, oh, these culture jammers who like make fun of advertisements.

like they started the movement, like that's ridiculous, right? Like, that's silly. And like, this is not to defend ad busters. I think whatever. Yeah, there's some issues with them, but yeah, yeah. They also did think, I don't know. Yeah, but also I think that reaction of like culture jamming is sort of stupid or like, you know, like talking about, who wants to talk about culture at this point?

I think that that made sense in the context in which we were moving and organizing, but like now, once again, it is clear that by abandoning the cultural sphere in many ways, we have, in fact, lost a tremendous amount of ground. So I think it's actually really important to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory, that aren't just news, but that are like really talking about art and beauty and like excitement and joy and fiction and all these things that we find really important because, you know, I think a lot of people sort of think, well, it's a crisis moment, you know, the world's ending. Why would you do that? But like the world has been ending since 1492. Like the world worth defending has been ending since then. And it hasn't ended yet. And one of the ways it hasn't ended is by indigenous and, black and other marginalized cultures and stories and narratives and works of art has been an important mode of history and resistance just as much as organizing and struggle. And yeah, I think we can move some struggle on that terrain right now. And I think there's a lot of craving for it now because I think also for a while things felt really oversaturated. But the last five years,

the internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. No. Everything feels like streaming is a mess. Like everything's a mess. There's no access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates what they're doing. They know it's exploiting the artists. They know, you know, Spotify is giving people pennies and that, you know, HBO and all those, you know, all the streaming services, you know, support Amazon and they're just miserable, right? And I think there's a real opening and a real desire for something else at this moment, at the same time that things are indeed quite on fire, literally, ecocidally, but also sort of politically. Yeah, so we think of everything being on fire, we need to take an ad break, and then we will come back and I think the deliberate political intervention here.

We are back from capital hellscape to mildly less capital hellscape. Yeah, surely you were going to say? Yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing because after October 7th, when people are getting together to try to figure out how in the United States to do some kind of work and action and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian liberation movement, like, people were just sort of like, what the hell can we even do? And one of the things that I would say to people is like just putting up stickers and writing about Gaza on the walls like in graffiti has a huge impact. And it's overlooked often, I think, as like something that's effective. But we can see that there has been a giant cultural shift after October 7th in terms of people's awareness of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and then support for the Palestinians. I think that it has to do really, you know, post-October 7th with the fact that this was like, like kind of plastered everywhere.

And so it's easy to kind of think that that isn't action. But to me, in a way, doing something like that is more effective than the kind of marching in circles that we can do that we call protest. And, you know, like going back to punk, I think also punk has, has, gets a bad rap sometimes because, you know, in that line of like the kind of bookshin lifestyleism. But I don't think we should downplay. Like punk created its own culture of. people doing everything themselves to make it happen. It's where I got radicalized to, and they were

like, it was anarchist, right? It was like explicitly anarchist. And you were living in an anarchist way and like creating things in an anarchist way. And it was this whole other world. So like, if we put our anarchist energy into culture, it's part of making a world that we want to live in, you know, over and against this world, this hell world that we're also trying to destroy at the same time. So I think we shouldn't kind of just like dismiss this as as less important than the other kinds of actions that we can take. Yeah. And that brings me to something I wanted to sort of ask about like more deliberately, which is like what's the kind of specific political intervention that you're trying to make into this moment with with this project and both sort of,

I guess a bit more generally too? Big question. I mean, I my work has always been about intervening around any kind of dominant narratives that things are just now bad or that people don't know what anything or pedagogically they're lacking. Like, I've always tried to intervene around this idea that we've always been otherwise and we always are. And there's always cracks everywhere and eruptions of radical ways of being and knowing and doing. And so it's like a deepening of that. And I think probably on a systemic, thinking systemically is really about

disrupting individualism or liberalism or empire, whatever you want, a colonialism to really, like, live it in the everyday. So that's partly that. And then on just a super practical level, like, you know, all of us don't have wealth, don't have generational wealth, are working all the time to try to meet ends meet. And some of us have housing insecurity and other real basic needs are insecure and health stuff. And so like actually showing up for each of us is at the core of it for me. Like I, it feels so good in my body to know that I'm not just showing up to think about what to do for Ka for me. It's like it's in the act of collectivism for each other. And so I'm just open to what sparks and emerges with our work. I don't have an agenda except for

to disrupt and intervene belief systems that are ideologically driven by empire. And I also came of age in the early 80s in the punk scene and had a venue space. And to me, punk is, and I would say hip-hop as well, underground hip-hop stuff, is like always the way to disrupt being captured by empire or from liberalism is to keep that punk ethos of doing it together and keeping it low to the ground. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, just to like to build on that, Carla, because I think that was really beautiful. I second everything that you said is that like many of us have a perspective, you know, that huge structural change is going to need to come and that often that will come through these big social movements, that these explosions of energy that, you know, these lightning strikes, right? But you can't force those. You can't make those happen. Yeah. And in the meantime, you can, I think I've spent a lot of my in the meantime in trying to sort of organize stuff that sort of orienting. did towards mass movement, you know, and it just feels, often feels like wheel spinning.

You know, like, I'm trying to build mass movement organizing, like, you know, like, whatever that means. And in the 2010s, like, one of the things that happened from like 2011, arguably 2009, but definitely 2011 to 2020, was that wherever you were, it was never more than probably 18 months before there was like something else going off in the streets. And so, although those could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult, you still had a lot of periods where, you know, you could just sort of be waiting and it would just sort of happen again. That was certainly what I was doing in that decade in a way that I don't think I appreciated until it was over. Yeah.

Because the last four years has been very different. The rhythm has been very different since the pandemic started. And I can't just say Panini on this podcast. Okay. Everyone does it, right? Yeah, since the dynamic started, you know, those rhythms have been disrupted. And I think the Biden counter-revolution against 2020, which has also been, really disrupted those things. And in that space, it has felt very clear to me personally,

and I'm older, you know, whatever. I'm like, you know, a movement elder at this point, just because our movements are so youth focused, not because I'm actually old. Like, the decade before 2011, from like 2001, you know, from 9-11 until sort of occupies, so I periodize it a bit. There wasn't a ton of street movement. You had the Iraq war stuff that was really, really big. And there were important exceptions to that in the U.S. I'm doing a pod in history here. Obviously, there's exceptions to this. But, you definitely had all this time and the stuff that was sustained and remembered were largely like sort of cultural projects. And so like I think like now as we're moving into this era here

in North America on Turtle Island of extreme repressive danger, right? Like we shouldn't like joke about it or downplay it. Like we were facing a lot of extreme repression and a fascist's back in the streets in a big way. It doesn't feel like big political organizing of the kind that happened during the first Trump administration where people did a lot of marching in circles. But there were targets for the pressure. You know, like, they don't feel as relevant now. Now I'm really off. Now I'm way off. No, no. But no, I think, so I think like we're in this moment where the fascists both are quite empowered and very unfocused. They're confused. They don't really have us in their sights. Like, they think Liz Cheney is just as much a revolutionary as a Saddashikor or whatever, right? And like that leaves us some space to move and to build things that can maintain the spirit of resistance, that can reproduce a culture of resistance. that can also organize. And another thing that has really been important for me recently with Kaah

is that I've been doing an organizing project that I won't talk about the details of, but that the skills have largely come from punk music that I did in the 20s in my 20s, being in a touring punk band. And those skills have made this organizing really easy. And that's been a huge thing for me because I'm working with other people who are younger, who don't have that experience.

You're like, oh, how do you do this? I'm like, oh, no, no, it's so easy. You just like, do this. You know, here's these skills I learned just from doing music. I don't think that's just like accidental. As Shulie was saying, like the DIY nature of some of that work, the culture work, you know, maybe the band wasn't revolutionary. The bands I was in certainly weren't like the revolution or whatever.

But they gave me all of these powerful skills and ideas and concepts for doing really important work. And I think that that's also a reason to pursue DIY culture in a way that's genuinely sustainable and world building. I think like if I can build off this too, and I'm going to try to do some tying together of things, but like one of the ways that I think about my contribution is to think about like, let's not like, don't look there, like let's look over here. And that can mean of multiple things, which is often when people think politically, they're looking at these big moments or big actions or like top down solutions, which means that we take our attention away from these other places where we're doing all the stuff like, like Carlo was saying, like we're already doing a lot of

important kind of like life-making work. And then also there's moments in our movements where we have to be like, you all look over here while we do stuff over here, right? Like you, you don't want to be seen all the time. So we have to be able to direct our attention to the things that we do and then also keep some of that stuff under wraps. And that means it's hard sometimes to see. And because it's so decentralized and anarchism really functions through decentralization, like we're not always aware of how much power we actually have and what's going on. at any one moment. And going back to the kind of moments, even tracing back to the Battle of Seattle, and I think it's like ever more present today in all the kinds of organizing for street actions that are being done,

that a lot of the groundwork for any of these moments is done by anarchists, and then it's not either claimed by anarchists or it's stolen from anarchists. Like we make everything sort of run. And anarchism makes everything run. And then it just gets ignored because it's not about taking credit.

It's not about kind of imposing itself. And so I think like that kind of in between of saying what we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then keeping under wraps so that we can keep chugging along and then just also being aware of when our work is being stolen and then repurposed for something that goes against what we want. I think these are all ways for us to prepare for those moments of like explosion or eruption where anarchy really manifests and then we can kind of taste. freedom for a moment. Love it.

Yeah. I think the way I've always thought about it was this kind of like, is this like flame tending process where in these sort of low cycles, your job is to keep the flame alive. And eventually you know that you're going to see it like, you know,

you're going to see the explosion again, right? You're going to see the flame roar up. But like that, that doesn't happen unless the flame is still there and unless people have been tending it and people have been trying to make it grow. And you can't necessarily just like add fuel to it and be like, ah, it's gonna, it's gonna grow now, right? It, you know, you don't, you don't really have control of how it sort of moves and grows, it expands,

but you have control over your ability to, like, make sure that it keeps going. Absolutely. All about the embers. Yeah. And I think also, like, I think about the punk metaphor a lot, like, one of the ways that I've been thinking a lot about, like, what we're doing here, and it could happen here is we kind of took the, like, we took the rage against the machine gambit. Which is to say we were like, we're like, okay, we're going to go to try to go somewhat mainstream in order to, I mean, Brage, well, obviously like went way better than we did. But like, we're going to go try to, we're going to go like somewhat mainstream so we can like spread this thing to a larger group of people. That's also very, very dangerous in the sense that like it's very easy to sort of just lose yourself in the kind of mire of like the field you've walked into. But on the other hand, the upside about it is that we're not the only people doing this, right? And there's all of you out there who are, we're doing this.

Like everyone on this call is doing this, like is doing the like the DIY work that is going to be the core of what this whole thing becomes. And the more of these media projects we get and the more that people are able to sustain themselves doing this, the more that we're sort of able to break like, I don't know, just like the monomaniacal substack control of like taking your money and giving it the transphobes kind of thing, the better shape we're going to be in in the years to come. Exactly. And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad at doing is accepting that we do require money and asking for it. So I'm going to do that for the squad. We are currently fundraising because it's actually really hard to make something sustainable for four people. We have a fundraiser going on. If you like what we're talking about here, you can donate to our Indigo Go. Literally anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're going to have a pay-what-you-want subscription model. So everything will be subscribed. But we really want to have three months worth

of living wage for all of us to do two days a week on it. Right? So we're not even, you know, we're not talking full salaries. And that's $45,000. It's because four people for three months. It's not even a tremendous amount of money because we're including solidarity funds in that and like paying any writers who contribute, like lots of other stuff. So yeah, if you have a few bucks and, you know, maybe you're thinking about, you know,

getting off of one of those substacks or something and you want to throw our way, we would be absolutely honored. I'm very excited to accept anything in this lunch. And if you don't have that money, which is, I know, true for a lot of us, which is why we feel bad asking for the money, and because there are so many people who need it right now, you can subscribe online, you can find us on social media and keep in touch until we do launch,

and then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also a really great way to support us. But if you have a few bucks you want to throw, if you want to give someone a present of a year's membership, you can get that for $100 for the holidays, you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with our work. We'd really, really appreciate it. And yeah.

Thanks, Vicki. Yeah, and I don't know, I'm excited for this. There's already been a bunch of great stuff that's up on the site. We will have links to everything in the description. Yeah, thank you three for coming on the show, and I'm really excited about this. Well, thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for the chance to share it.

And like I always say, like, if anyone is interested in wants to get in touch, I'm happy to hear from you. Yeah. Yeah, same. And to reach out to us to a few of ideas on what cause stands for. We love hearing from people. My favorite is can anarchists write? That's what it stands for. I don't know who came out with that.

I think that might have been Shulair Vicki, but it's a good one. TBD. TBD. So, yeah, send in what you think. Amios are going to have an advice column that's going to be launched soon. Yeah, so send us questions or individually or whatever, but, you know, disrupt individualism. Reach out to us. Yeah.

Yeah, thanks so much. And, yeah, as a long-time listener, first-time caller, it's really exciting to be on here, so thank you, Mia, so much. That's not true. Hold on. Oh, second time. Dang it. Sorry, I was on a movie once.

It's like, hold on, hold on. I just go on so many podcasts, Mia. Like, can you blame me? No, I'm just kidding. Sorry, yeah. Well, anyway, it's really exciting to be here and talking to everyone. And we have to meet y'all in the future. And we'll have a, well, we will have a Discord community.

We'll be having, like, writing class. We're going to have a lot of, like, really exciting stuff. So even if you can't throw in money right now, please sign up to our website, Koshanathings.com, stay in touch and find out all the really cool stuff we're doing. And just to reiterate, like, all the stuff that we're already doing is now going to have a home in Kha. So, like, my essays and podcasts, Vicki's reviews and essays, and Carla's many projects, which include podcasts and writing and these interviews, Danny's writing and classes. Yeah, this is all moving there, plus new things. Doing it together.

Yeah. In that spirit, you two do listeners can. can do things together and go disrupt this world. So go do that now instead of listening to whatever else is happening on the show. This ending's not going well, but go disrupt things. Thanks so much. 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 IHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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