Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 168

Starting point is 00:00:00 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.

Starting point is 00:00:27 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. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today,

Starting point is 00:01:04 and I am very lucky to be joined by Azad, who is fighting in Myanmar, in Chinland specifically with the AIF. Welcome to the show, Azad. Thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Of course, yeah. This has been a project that I've been following from afar

Starting point is 00:01:19 for some time, maybe several months now, I think. But for listeners who have not been following, can you explain very briefly the role of the AIF in the struggling me, am I? Yeah, sure. Getting right into it. Yeah. First, I like to give a little bit of a spiel about like the context of the AIF. Maybe for people who aren't so familiar. Yeah. In Burma, already for decades, there have been some kind of established precedent of, we can say, foreign volunteers of some kind, or, you know, ex-military personnel or, you know, somebody who is somehow drawn to the conflict. There has already been the precedent for some decades of people coming

Starting point is 00:01:57 in a very limited capacity and helping with this group or that group. But it mostly has been participation of two big characteristics. The first characteristic is that, of course, it's been an individual basis, like whoever individual had this idea, they organized it themselves, they handled it themselves, with the exception of like the Freibemorrangers, but I wouldn't classify them as like, you know, foreign fighters or anything. They do very, very good work, but... Yeah, it's a slightly different role.

Starting point is 00:02:22 Yeah, yeah. The people who did this kind of stuff were mostly coming as individuals, you know, kind on their own prerogative. And secondly, they were overwhelmingly, we can say, non-political or, you know, ex-military guys from Western nations or, you know, from neighboring countries who were somehow drawn to the conflict and wanted to use their skills in that kind of light.

Starting point is 00:02:45 The AIF, on the other hand, is absolutely by no means like the foreign fighter organization in Myanmar, or it's not like the foreign battalion, or that's also not what the goal in the mission is. It specifically came about after 2023, 2004, there were slowly more internationals in the country, internationalists, we can say, who were here on a much more, yeah, albeit at the beginning individual, it was the same where people were organizing their own ways, organizing their own routes and connections, but with a much more different perspective of this kind of more intentional anti-fascist

Starting point is 00:03:20 internationalist perspective. Yeah. Which led over into the name. So kind of as a result of, no. discussions between me and some other people who were here and also some other people outside the country. The idea to set up a formation or an organization like this was floated. And of course, after talking with like local partners and local comrades who anyway were involved with on the ground, there was a lot of enthusiasm on both sides, both from people outside the country, both from people

Starting point is 00:03:48 inside the country. So kind of within that context, the idea to take a step forward in a more organized, explicitly consistent, yeah, to use a polite word, consistent perspective for internationalism in Myanmar, that was kind of the goal. Yeah, and if people aren't familiar, it's the anti-fascist

Starting point is 00:04:08 internationalist front, right? The AIF has a really cool logo with the peacock tail and the three arrows and the white star and a red background that I thought that was, I really appreciate your logo. Yeah. So yeah, I think

Starting point is 00:04:24 people will like, when they talk about the conflict in Myanmar, they will be like, oh, why is there not more internationalism? Why is there not more international volunteers? Something that you and I have spoken about before is that like this has always been an international conflict, right? And it's always been an anti-fascist conflict as well. Do you want to explain that to people who, because I think sometimes it's easy for people to fall into these orientalists or somewhat colonialist constructions of the conflict there. And I think you and I both agree that those are not the lens for which we should view it. Yeah, I mean, of course, the history of, let's just use a big term, the history of conflict in Burma is, of course, very deep and very complex and has a thousand different ethnic and political branches that you can go down.

Starting point is 00:05:13 But if we're really focusing in on this post-coup situation, which even though it has its roots and its context in, of course, the pre-coup with, you know, the existing ethnic resistance organizations and the democracy movement, If we're really looking at the conflict post-2020 coup, fundamentally, it is not any one nation's struggle. It is not anyone's people's struggle. It is not even like a national struggle of Burma, we can say. It is fundamentally a fight against fascism. It is an anti-fascist people's revolution, where after, of course, the coup and after these initial stages of protest and uprising, the people were faced by a choice of, do we

Starting point is 00:05:52 accept dictatorship, do we go back and do we live like normal, do we accept fascism, do we live under fascism, or do we prepare to sacrifice everything to fight against fascism? And that was the fundamental calculation in that. So insofar as it's a fight against fascism, that makes it an international struggle in itself. I mean, without even, you know, going on too much about how anyways, the so-called nation of Burma is dozens and dozens and dozens of different ethnicities and religions and cultures, which, I mean, if you aren't thinking in the traditional nation-state sense of internationalism and more thinking in the kind of brotherhood of cultures and traditions, then, yeah, of course, without the flashy, you know, foreigners coming, it's already an internationalist

Starting point is 00:06:37 struggle against fascism. But I think, you know, on a more intentional level, the dictatorship represents fundamentally the same fascism that exists all over the world, fundamentally state oppression. So, yeah, in that regard, it's very much an internationalist struggle. Yeah, and something we've spoken about before is like the links of the inspiration, I guess, that comes from the internationalist struggle in North and East Syria and Rojava and how that's very much been like a source of inspiration for young people in Myanmar. I've spoken to tons of them, even two years ago, especially young women there, right, looking at the women's revolution in Rojava and seeing like that this was a possibility,

Starting point is 00:07:19 that this was something like on the horizon. and that they could strive for. Do you want to explain your own perceptions of that and experience of it? Yeah, sure. Well, first, not to overstate things. Well, of course, Rojava is a big inspiration, I think not just for the people here in Myanmar,

Starting point is 00:07:37 but truly like a beacon of hope in general. Yeah. You know, a little biased, having spent time in Rojava, as you also have. I think, how can we say? I'll give a bit of context. In 2023, I think this,

Starting point is 00:07:52 message went out from the KNDF to the forces in Rojava, and I was there at the time. So was I. Really? What? Yeah, yeah. I was there to say we were there. We were both there. Yeah, at the same time, everyone started hitting me up for book recommendations. It's like October. I didn't know that.

Starting point is 00:08:07 Yeah. Okay. Right after October 7th, I think. Okay. Anyways, so yeah, when this came out, like some friends sent this to me and was like, hey, can you translate this? And I, like, not only me when I saw it, but also all the friends in the leadership and, you know, all of the comrades there were, like, very, one, surprised, but also very excited and

Starting point is 00:08:27 very happy to kind of see a message like this. And I think also when the message was returned, you know, some of the friends from the leadership, you know, recorded this video message and sent it back. It was very much like a very pleasant, happy surprise for everyone involved. And it really showed the degree to which fundamentally we are fighting the same struggles, even though, you know, maybe, you know, materially, we're not talking about like guns going from one place to the other. Fundamentally, we're comrades on the same very, very long front line. Now, I think what that looks like locally, especially I'm happy that you mentioned, like specifically the women's situation.

Starting point is 00:09:03 You know, I myself sometimes when I'm giving training here, I like to show videos from certain parts of Kurdistan where they're very effective, we can say. And of course, that naturally includes like the very, very heavy participation of the women's guerrilla units as well as the men's guerrilla units. And specifically here in Myanmar, we see a very difficult situation in the revolution in regards to like the position of women. Yeah. Where because of, I mean, it's a very new revolution. Lots of these people are, you know, a couple years ago they were just in, we can say, liberal society.

Starting point is 00:09:37 They weren't in any kind of, you know, maybe at best activist context, but it's not like these people had a strong revolutionary platform. And then they said, okay, let's launch a revolution against a dictatorship. it was a natural evolution from protest to resistance to revolution, no? So because of that, the same social structures that existed in liberal society were in a large part transplanted into resistance organizations, which means that, yeah, of course, thousands and thousands of women from all over the country have traveled to these camps, you know, have prepared and have readied themselves to fight against the dictatorship. But in a lot of ways, they're still facing off against, you know, the people.

Starting point is 00:10:18 patriarchy that is inherent in all of our modern society. Yeah. So I think Rojava in so much as like, I think anybody can take Rojava as an inspiration. If there is anybody who more so than anybody else can take as an inspiration, it is women and youth, as that is, of course, like the revolutionary focus of the entire paradigm of the Rojava revolution. So I won't say that it's like, you know, like the leading inspiration for the people of Myanmar or something.

Starting point is 00:10:43 But definitely the people who have interacted with it or interfaced with it in some. some capacity, be it official or unofficial, of course, have gotten a lot of inspiration from that. And us as internationalists, both me as well as some other people here, you know, having had that in-person experience with our Java revolution, of course, for us is eternal inspiration. Yeah, and it's a really beautiful thing to see, like you said, just to see people, like, when we think about alliances in conflict, right, if we look at the extremely interactional way that the United States entered into those alliances, right? It's willing to allow other people of Rojava to die for it in the battle against ISIS or Daesh,

Starting point is 00:11:22 but it's not willing to stand by them when they're being bombed by Turkey, right? Something that you and I have both seen. But to see something that instead begins with genuine solidarity and admiration. One thing I really liked was when the KNDF replied to the video that came from Rojava, they said that they still had a lot to learn, especially with regards to gender. And like, it's so rare to see revolutionary movements submitting their faults, especially during the struggle, right? During the moment of revolution. And that's something that I've been so impressed with in Myanmar for a long time is their willingness to, like, look out at the world and see things that they think are better and adopt them or to at least consider them.

Starting point is 00:12:08 It's the thing in Rajab too, some of their, one of the friends in Rajabas said that they were excited to learn more about Myanmar. because they hadn't worked everything out and that they thought that there might be some solutions that they could learn from there. And so it's really special to see that solidarity that comes from a very genuine place and not just, it's not just rhetorical. There are people such as yourself

Starting point is 00:12:30 who have made the journey to fight on behalf of the Revolution of Myanmar. But it's really a special thing. It's really a wonderful thing to see, especially with the world seemingly getting more and more isolated and more and more. nationalist as opposed to internationalists, like it's a really beautiful time for it to happen too. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I mean, not to make the podcast, you know, a democratic confederalism ideology lesson or something.

Starting point is 00:12:56 But, yeah, I think insofar as the revolution in Rojava considers itself a force on the side of democratic modernity, I think it's important to understand that they really mean it. Like, they really do see the conflicts that we're facing today against the capitalist system. against capitalist modernity, they really do see it in this all-encompassing light that even though something is happening all the way over here in Myanmar and that maybe you could only tangentially connect so what's happening over there,

Starting point is 00:13:26 they really do believe it when they say we are comrades in this same struggle. And that's why the solidarity is so beautiful to see because it's that real solidarity. It's not just like, you know, pandering to some internationalist kind of sentiment. Yeah, no, it's very real. And it has, yeah, very genuine.

Starting point is 00:13:44 in basis in sharing more than common interests, I will say. So for people who are not as familiar with the struggle way you are, which is in Chinland, would you explain a little bit of, I mean, obviously we can and we will at some point explain a little bit more of the history of Chinlan because I think it's very important and it sometimes gets marginalized from even narrative of the revolution. But can you explain like the groups and the struggle as it has been since 2021? In many ways, Chinland is where the revolution, the armed revolution began, right? So can you explain how we get to a place today where in recent weeks we've seen massive victories in Chinland?

Starting point is 00:14:34 Yeah, so as you know, the political situation, at least between the groups, is somewhat complicated. So I'll try my best to like most fairly, but also somehow accurately describe. Yeah. I'll start from the history, we can say. As you described in and around Mindat at the time of these protests, this was kind of like the catalyst and one of the first places that actual armed resistance to this dictatorship started. And that wasn't armed resistance like with guns or something. That was armed resistance like with the shotguns, like double barrel shotguns from India,

Starting point is 00:15:08 muzzle-loading traditional hunting rifles and air guns and things like this. And with that kind of weaponry, they were going and attacking police stations and checkpoints. So it really was a sign for everyone, like not only the bravery of the people, that are willing to do something like that, but the willingness and the risk that these people are able to take and the seriousness of their opposition to the dictatorship that, look, this isn't just a protest anymore.

Starting point is 00:15:31 Even we have only sticks and stones, we will dismantle this dictatorship. Yeah. So, yeah, that was a very inspiring early period. And I think even before the involvement of some of the bigger ethnic armed organizations, there were already local CDFs, which stands for Chinat Land Defense Force,

Starting point is 00:15:49 which is kind of just like PDF. it's a moniker that a lot of groups share. There were a lot of different PDFs and CDF popping up just in the days following the coup in Chinland. So yeah, like from the very beginning there was the precedent and the history of revolution there. Now, these towns that were the beginning of the revolution

Starting point is 00:16:07 have now been seized. So Mindot, as of last month, was taken by the Chin Brotherhood Alliance as well as CDF Mindat and Alliance partners. So the progress has definitely been made. The current landscape looks a little bit like this in Chin State. There's two big blocks, we can say. One block is the Chin Brotherhood, and one block is the Chin Land Council.

Starting point is 00:16:31 At first, there was only one block called the ICNCC, which stands for Interim-Chin National Coordinating Council or Committee. I always forget the last C. I have to remember the same time as you were. And that was like the political big umbrella organization. And there was the CJDC, which is the military big umbrella organization. That stands for Chinlan Joint Defense Council or Committee.

Starting point is 00:16:54 Again, last C, always ambiguous. So, yeah, for a long time, it was everyone, including one of the very old ethnic resistance organizations, the CNA, CNF, the Chin National Army, Chin National Front, was kind of involved in this one big umbrella organization, and everywhere there was resistance against the dictatorship, and on some level cooperation, both with Chin groups, as well as with the NUG.

Starting point is 00:17:18 in 2023 political events occurred and as we can say politely a disagreement in the political future of chinland separated into two groups with CNA-C-NF withdrawing from the CJDC and forming their Chinlan Council and the groups that kind of subscribed to that vision and subscribed to that path they joined the new Chinlan Council and all of the groups that remained in the CJDC and the ICNCC continued to hold on to the ICNCC as a kind of platform and umbrella organization for the people in Chin State that didn't want to subscribe to this new path. And then Chin Brotherhood was formed as the new practical military alliance of those people who remained, we can say. And since then, in only one year, I mean, both sides have had very incredible victories. No,

Starting point is 00:18:11 Chin Council has been able to, in the north of Chin State, liberate Chekhaa and Tunzong Town. And then, of course, in the south of Chin State, Schindlerhead has been able to take Montupi in Contellet and Mindat. So definitely victories all around. But, yeah, I'll stop myself before I comment too much more on that. Yeah, but victories that would have been unimaginable three years. I mean, we're almost exactly three years from the beginning of the revolution. Four years.

Starting point is 00:18:36 Yeah, yeah, 2025. God. Yeah, four years from the beginning of the revolution. When, as you say, like, those videos, that was when I first became aware of the revolution. post-coup resistance was seeing videos online of people with those traditional muzzle-loading hunting rifles, but taking on police checkpoints or attempting to organize arm resistance and those little airguns with the made of the blue plumbing pipe.

Starting point is 00:19:02 It was incredible. It's the bravery of the people and their commitment and their willingness to risk their lives and sometimes lose their lives. Because, like, as one revolutionary doctor told me a few years ago, he said, like, My grandparents died for democracy and my parents' generation died for it. And we don't think another generation should have to die for it. So, like, we're all prepared to go down fighting for this, which I thought, you know, was really impactful.

Starting point is 00:19:29 And then he was right that their willingness to risk their lives and to be so brave is unparalleled. And the revolution wouldn't have got to where it's got to. But it's such a beautiful thing that it has. I wonder, like, it's a crucial time. for the revolution now, right? Like the, the revolution is as successful it's ever been. We're reaching the fifth year.

Starting point is 00:19:54 Can you explain, like, the role of the AIF within the broader revolution? Because I think people get really confused by all the acronyms, and it can be easy to think that these groups... And it's an alphabet to you, right? I'm writing a book about this and Spain, and, like, I've spent most of the last week just trying to write the dictionary of acronyms that goes in the back of the book. But like, can you explain, these aren't groups that are necessarily. Sometimes they are opposed to each other. They have different visions for the future.

Starting point is 00:20:23 But can you explain the role of the AIF within the broad anti-Hunter movement? Sure. First, I'll say, I'm reading a book right now about like the history of the Communist Party of Burma, and that history goes from like, you know, the 30s all the way to the 90s. Yeah. And every single page has at least 10 different acronyms. And it's absolutely insane. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, about the AIF. The anti-fascist internationalist. front, which I'm hoping everyone just recognizes as AIF because it's kind of a mouthful. Our perspective so far has been that, especially as foreigners, and especially as like foreign foreigners, you know, like Western foreigners.

Starting point is 00:20:58 Yeah. We really want to avoid as much as possible the perception of we're coming here, you know, we've got military experience or we've got this knowledge or we've got that knowledge. And now it's time for us to tell you what to do or now it's time for us to train or something like that. Yeah, I would say our perspective is much more close. closer to the perspective of the, you know, the international structures in Rajava. Our goal is recognizing that this enemy, the SAC dictatorship, the SAC junta, is fundamentally

Starting point is 00:21:28 a fascist anti-human enemy. That makes it also our struggle. And so not in some kind of like presumptive way or not in some kind of like imposing way, but in a very genuine and organic manner, we want to come here and implement ourselves into the revolution. Now, we have some friends who are coming who maybe have previous experience with this or with that. And in their capacity, of course, they give training because the people here have the comrades have been overwhelmingly receptive to training like this. You know, there's been no pride or no like, oh, we don't need the help.

Starting point is 00:22:01 Yeah, quite contrarily, everyone at all stages, even the NUG is saying, I'm not talking about us, I'm just talking about publicly, you know, to everyone is saying whatever help we can get, we appreciate it. Yeah. But, you know, we're not just bringing people who are, you know, Rojava veterans or veterans of some conflict where they can come and give training. Fundamentally, it's an anti-fascist conflict, which means even people without experience are able to come and not only participate in the revolution, but in a less transactory way, not to say like, oh, I have something and I will give it to the revolution. In the most important way is to come and to learn from the revolution. Exactly, as you said, even a revolution like Rojava, which has decades and decades of history and tradition and culture and ideology and is steeped in this, yeah, I would say, you know, one of the most powerful prominent revolutions of our time is still able to say a revolution like this, of course we can learn from it, we need to learn from the struggles of our comrades there, we need to learn from the developments happening in this revolution. Our perspective in the AIF is very much the same where, yeah, okay, maybe we have some limited material things we can contribute. but ultimately it's about organically participating in this revolution which is against fascism

Starting point is 00:23:11 and in our own ways to take the lessons of this revolution, to take the fundamental meaning of this revolution and be able to translate it for ourselves and for of course the future works which are ahead of us, shall we say. Yeah, I remember when I was much, much younger, talking to a veteran of the international group and Anacus Veteran. no, it was from the International Brigade, so correct myself. And I asked him to explain anti-fascism to me, and he said that for him, like,

Starting point is 00:23:41 when someone devalues humanity, like the Hunter does in Burma, the Francoist did in Spain, right? Like Assad did in Syria. It debases his own humanity, and like anyone who attacks humanity in that way is attacking him and all humanity, and therefore it's a responsibility of all humanity to defend humanity, to defend compassion.

Starting point is 00:24:03 and kindness. Absolutely. Yeah, I think what you're doing in Myanmar is part of that desire to defend humanity against, inhumanity against whatever we want to call it. What are the struggles that the revolution faces? I know you guys have recently been doing a fundraising campaign, for example, and the revolution is almost unique in its complete lack of solidarity from the states of the world, right? There is not a state that is backing this revolution. It is entirely the force of the people of Myanmar. So can you explain some of the struggles within the revolution perhaps because of that? Yeah, I mean, as much as some people, you know, like to say CIA or something like this is involved. They can fuck off. Of course, the reality is that, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:53 I've heard the term crowdfunded revolution. I think it's incredibly accurate. Yeah. Because, no, and the AIF, we recently did a fundraiser for vehicles and equipment and things like this, but that's on our scale. On the scale of these organizations, I mean, they are fundraising from the diaspora millions and millions of dollars to be able to wage this resistance. And of course, even like local people who themselves maybe don't have a lot are giving everything they can or are any way acting any way they can or doing anything they can to help the revolution. So we can say overwhelmingly it is a popular resistance. Even I would go so far as to say, is fundamentally a people's resistance against the dictatorship.

Starting point is 00:25:31 That, of course, represents itself in a lot of different organizations, but these organizations enjoy the, like, 95% support of the people against the junta, you know? Yeah. So, yeah, in that regard, the challenge, of course, is always resources and always the strength of the enemy. No, we're still going up against jet fighters, helicopters, mortars, artillery. Yeah. You know, they have a lot of ammo, us not so much. So there's like lots of these practical problems.

Starting point is 00:25:59 I think the, how can we say, cynical kind of, as you mentioned earlier, Western outlook, has been to paint this struggle kind of in, oh, it's a tribal struggle. There's all these different groups. They're all fighting for their own area. What's going to happen after they win? Now, I disagree with that assessment. Obviously, I think, you know, yourself as you're familiar with the conflict, I think it's much deeper than that.

Starting point is 00:26:20 And even across these many different identities and cultures, there's very deep, very real coordination and cooperation where I don't think it's just like chaotic. But on the other hand, that is a, you know, not to give the cynics credit, that is a question which going forward will politically very much be on the agenda. Because, I mean, now as you're seeing, most of the country is no longer in the Junta's control. Yeah. And the parts that are in the Junta's control are contested. And then you have the tiny sliver of land which they can say they somehow without any kind of, you know, contestant.

Starting point is 00:26:55 So very soon, the onus will be on Revolutionary Forces to answer that question, okay, how are we going to consolidate? How are we going to transfer these winds on the battlefield into something that is more permanent and more lasting? And I think, you know, already as you're seeing in Chin State that I can speak of and that people are seeing in elsewhere that I can't speak of, because I don't know, there are definitely frictions. You know, I'm not going to say it's perfect. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is working together. and there's frictions that will have to be worked through but fundamentally I think the trajectory

Starting point is 00:27:27 as it currently is is positive for the resistance we can say yeah definitely I was talking to someone yesterday in another part of Myanmar and I was saying you know I'm going to come visit you hopefully soon and he was saying like oh you'll love it like just to be in the liberated zone

Starting point is 00:27:45 is so special talk to us about like liberated Chinland right Mindat's just been liberated large areas have been under the control or semi-control of a dictatorial regime that has been extremely oppressive to the chin people for decades. Like, how are people receiving their liberty? How are they governing themselves or attempting to take care of one another in these liberated spaces? Sure.

Starting point is 00:28:11 Well, I think the first thing I'll say is maybe to contrast to other parts of Myanmar, we've been relatively lucky in Chin state in that even, you know, for some years already, the junta, due to the mountainous nature of Chin State, has anyway been reduced to the cities for years. Like all of their checkpoints, all of their external places, the last of those were cleared in 2023, and most of them anyway, in 2022, were gone. So by landmass, even before these towns were seized,

Starting point is 00:28:39 the junta controlled if you were to add up all of the area that they actually physically control in Chin State, maybe a couple square kilometers, you know, just the area of like their bases and something like that. Yeah. So because of the nature of Shin State, they never had the, of course, they did these atrocities and massacres and things like this, but on the kind of like, you know, fascist dictatorship level of oppression, since after the revolution, they had not really had the opportunity to impose themselves too much. They were the ones kind of cowering in their corner. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:10 But I think especially after these towns are being seized now, you know, take Ricodar, which is the border town on India, or take Mindanao Tupi, these towns that have just been recently seized. these are towns which people are wanting to live their lives. I mean, Chin State has always been autonomous, even in British rule, in colonial rule. It was just labeled as unadministered, you know. And there was a very rich democratic tradition, or how can we say, maybe not democratic in the traditional sense, but tradition of self-rule and autonomy in Chin State. And the removal of the junta from these areas is allowing those relationships to much more naturally flourish. And I think the aspiration of a lot of people, both abroad as well as internally displaced from Chin State,

Starting point is 00:29:51 is to return to those places where there's been fighting and to continue their lives as normal, which I think finally now that not just in Chin State but all over the country, we're slowly seeing these alternative systems of, you know, let's not call them like communist or revolutionary or anything, but fundamentally they are alternative to the state administration system. Yeah, and I think that narrative that you pushed about, on already that like and we've seen it from so many like every think tank every analyst every social court expert has said the eros will only fight for their territory when they've reached the limits of what they consider to be their like ethnic homeland they will stop and that hasn't

Starting point is 00:30:31 happened right it's not happened anywhere but the fact that even if it did right or even if some of these eros have have visions for the future which is not as liberatory as maybe you and i would like The fact that there are parts of Myanmar that are free now and that where people can live their lives as they wish will never change. And that will mean that those places are always there for people to go to. And like, I'm sure lots of people you're fighting with and alongside have come to Chinland, right? Like, not all of them will be, will have spent their whole lives there. They'll have come there from, but Mara majority cities maybe. Is that correct? Look, like, not to give any specifics, so I'll just make a very broad,

Starting point is 00:31:16 term to exaggerate the fact, you can say that I have met somebody from almost every single group in Myanmar in Sinn State. Yeah. Now, that's just to say, that's not to like, you know, be shocking or something. That's just to highlight the level of interconnectedness, logistically, materially, militarily, you know, even if it's just someone sending someone to say hi from somewhere, you know? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:38 It's not like, oh, everyone's in their corners fighting. I mean, I promise you, there are soldiers here, which are giving their lives for the towns in Chin State. which maybe they never even thought about Chin State before this revolution, you know? They're coming from opposite sides of the country. Yeah, absolutely. It's fundamentally a fight against a dictatorship. It's not the fight to liberate Chinland or to liberate Kedeni or something like this. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:59 I remember speaking to Mandelaide PDF a while ago, and they were saying to me, like, they were really scared when they first left the cities because they've been told that, like, wild people lived in the mountains. Yeah, yeah. Now we're wild people. We like the wild people. But yeah, this narrative. I mean, James C. Scott talks about this right in the art of not being governed,

Starting point is 00:32:20 this idea that these mountains were never really places that were amenable to state control. And that now there are places where people can go to avoid it. But it's also important that this revolution extends beyond the mountains and into the cities and that people living there don't have to live under the bootheel of a dictatorial state, which is what's happening, right? Yeah, absolutely. People will be listening to this, I'm sure, and thinking this is long. this is laudable, this is incredible.

Starting point is 00:32:56 And A, they'll be shocked that they haven't heard about this, maybe, especially if they're newer listeners. And I do want to say that, like, you can go back and listen to our other coverage on Myanmar. There is a lot. But, like, in terms of conflicts, right, conflict is always messy, and war is never inherently a beautiful thing.

Starting point is 00:33:13 Beautiful things can happen in wars. But we rarely see wars where there is so much good on one side and so much evil on the other. and why do you think that especially the Western media has largely overlooked the conflict in Myanmar? That's a good question. Yeah. I will say just on a very base level without getting into any kind of like, you know, pondering or something like that. I've spoken with a few journalists.

Starting point is 00:33:38 And, you know, before anything, before we even talk about politics or something, there is just the material calculation that these outlets are making. From what I understand, from what I have heard, people don't care. Now, that's really unfortunate. but like these like big networks, you know, CNN, whatever. Yeah. I have to make the calculation of the people they send and the risks to send them and the actual exposure that these news articles will get from what I understand. From conversations that I've had with some people that are, you know, involved in these networks,

Starting point is 00:34:05 right now there is not on like the executive board level. There's just not a lot of push to cover me and more. And that's, you know, that's really unfortunate. And I think one really bad side effect of that is whenever there's a tragedy, the media is there. Yeah. You know, like whenever there's some massacre or whenever there's some, you know, intertribal conflict or whenever there's something bad to report about.

Starting point is 00:34:27 Or maybe, you know, on a good day, the really big, like a win, like in Loschio that we saw, you know? Yeah. Okay, yeah, for these big things, the Western media will be there. But I think even from recording these very, like, click-bady eye-catching things, it seems like they're not getting the exposure that they want to get out of this content, which is putting them off of covering the, you know, in our opinion, much more. more meaningful wall-to-wall content that exists, I mean, every day in Myanmar.

Starting point is 00:34:53 Yeah. It seems like this Western eye is only interested in the suffering, we can say, which is really unfortunate. But, you know, even if the media is not paying attention, we can say, for better or worse, the governments are paying attention, absolutely. I mean, almost like Hawks, you can say, there are every single regional government, as well as foreign governments, of course, keeping a very close eye on the situation, circling, looking at developments, I mean, China especially, no, being very involved in the process.

Starting point is 00:35:21 Yeah. So, yeah, while unfortunately the kind of liberal media eye is not so much, you know, giving me and more of the coverage that it deserves as a popular revolution, the powers at B are definitely watching its progression, we can say. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it offers an alternative for the world that, like, it's distinct even from Rojava, like the building of a revolutionary movement. Like you said, the crowdfunded revolution, the revolution, that like,

Starting point is 00:35:46 entirely, I mean, at points armed itself using guns it downloaded off the internet. You know, it offers, sometimes I think when I'm thinking about, you know, my background in studying anarchists of Spain and, like, obviously I've looked a lot at the past, but it gives me a vision of the future. And it's only in covering the small parts of the revolution that make it truly a revolution that we can see that. Like, you have an Instagram and on there you're posting about training sometimes when you're doing the trainings and there are women who are coming to train with rifles

Starting point is 00:36:22 to be, I was going to say, marks people, marks people, marks women, sniper. Yeah, okay. Yeah, only US military guys are weird about calling things snipers. Yeah, they're snipers. Yeah, okay. Yeah, let's do that. Okay, in the moment that

Starting point is 00:36:37 that they receive that training and become efficient with their weapons, like a revolution happens for that woman. And it's a very only through like following those those little revolutions that happen every day that make up a big revolution that we truly understand it. And I'm sure that's something that like you're seeing on a daily or weekly basis, right? Like people's worlds opening up and their horizons changing because of the revolution. Well, listen, absolutely. Now, of course, you know, as leftists

Starting point is 00:37:08 involved or interested in this revolution studying it, whether you're socialist, whether you're anarchist, whether you're communist, whether you're apoist, you know, however you like to describe yourself, whatever flavor you are. You know, without pontificating too much, I think fundamentally this revolution is a symbol of hope that it can be done. No, like, I'll give an example. From the conversations that I've had

Starting point is 00:37:30 with the comrades that have been involved in this revolution since it was just a protest movement in the streets, one thing that I've heard a lot is that at the beginning of the revolution, when it switched, you know, when the police were firing bullets into the crowds,

Starting point is 00:37:41 and when people made this decision that, okay, now we have no choice but armed resistance, we have no choice but to fight the dictatorship, when that calculus was made, when that decision was made, it was not made based on the kind of analysis of the situation that they could even win.

Starting point is 00:37:58 Yeah. It was not even like, okay, we're going to do this, and we have this strategy of guerrilla war, and then we'll do this, this, and this, and then we'll achieve the victory. The calculation that was made was a moral calculation. It was saying we have the choice, we can go back to our life,

Starting point is 00:38:13 we can accept this oppression, we can give up this struggle for democracy that we've been waging in one form or another, or we can make the decision to fight, even if we won't win, it's the moral imperative to resist dictatorship. And I think what this revolution is showing, not just for the people who themselves were surprised at their capability, and were themselves surprised at what they could accomplish when they actually stepped up and fought and sacrificed for revolution,

Starting point is 00:38:40 fundamentally it's a message to everyone. It says, look, these people at the beginning were going at checkpoints with like double barrels and air rifles, and at the end, now they are, like, threatening to overthrow what was previously assumed to be one of the most powerful militaries

Starting point is 00:38:54 in southeastern Asia. I mean, now, like, everyone jokes on the top of the dog because they're obviously garbage now, but, like, at the time, that wasn't the analysis, you know, it would be the same as saying, like, oh, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:05 we're going to overthrow the USA or something like that. It was fundamentally, people didn't even envision the victory, but on the moral principle to resist, they've resisted, and from that moral position, they were able to materialize the victory that they had previously not even imagined. So, you know, for me, that's what I'd take away. There's no books, there's no ideological books here that you can study and understand the underpinnings of the revolution. You know, there's no classes that you can go to that the PDF teaches you about what their revolutionary paradigm is. Fundamentally, it's a fight of the people against oppression and

Starting point is 00:39:38 against dictatorship. And while, of course, there's some strengths and some weaknesses that we face in the revolution. Ultimately, in the same way as Rajabah in the same place as other places in the world, it's a beacon of hope for democratic people who envision themselves fighting on the side of freedom and the symbol that actually, yeah, you can win. Yeah, it's given me so much hope. Like, at the time the last few years when we've all desperately needed something good to happen, like something good is happening. Incredibly good. Through the, yeah. It's breathtaking. Like, I went in 2022 during the, during the, the first year of the revolution. And I was shopping around this story for months, right? I knew these

Starting point is 00:40:18 guys who were doing the 3D printing and I went to every major outlet. I was like, this is the story that's going to make people care and no one bought it until eventually Cool Zone did and here I am. But like, even 2021, 22 talking to those guys, I was like, they might all die. It's still been worth it for them, but they might all be gone in a year. I'm unfortunately familiar with that from my line of work. But to see it succeed, it's so, like, incredible. It's, obviously, war is terrible, and terrible things have happened in the war. But, like, it's such a beautiful thing to see people refuse to accept tyranny and just through the tenacity of their refusal to create liberated spaces and to Nathra and to topple, like you say, one of what had previously been a feared army

Starting point is 00:41:06 in the region. Like, it continues to amaze me every day. Every, every time I see. people dancing in front of a captured military headquarters. I don't know. It's just such a remarkable revolution. If people wish to be in solidarity, if they wish to follow the AIF, if they want to learn more about the AIF, where can they do that?

Starting point is 00:41:29 Are there places online, or are there ways that they can support you aside from, obviously, like, being part of the struggle? Like, how can they help you? Yeah, me personally, my information platform is mostly on Instagram, where I post updates about, you know, either insights about what's going on or news updates or something like that. And that's Azad underscore AFA on Instagram.

Starting point is 00:41:49 Speller out Azad for the non-Kurdish speakers. Yeah, A-ZAD, if you will. Yeah, thank you. underscore AFA on Instagram. The AIF also has Instagram for like official posts. It's AIF, me and more. In general, about the AIF, especially at this early stages, Right now we're involved in some frontlines in Western Myanmar, and so because of that,

Starting point is 00:42:13 we don't really have a lot of information presence out right now. But in the coming weeks, in the coming months, definitely when things get published, when more things like that come out, they will come out from kind of the existing distribution circles that have been going around, like Libcom. There has been like statements going out, as well as Instagram and PR things like that. Yeah. And recently, we just completed a fundraiser. Our goal was $10,000 for the vehicles.

Starting point is 00:42:38 and the equipment that we will need to get started. Yeah. For listeners who don't know, maybe, yeah, maybe they're not aware. This only started in October of last year. So we're still in the stages of consolidating and getting our equipment. We set the goal for $10,000 and we exceeded it. We raised over $13,000 for that. Nice.

Starting point is 00:42:56 So, yeah, we're very happy to say that. But in the future, of course, there will always be more opportunities. As you know, revolution is very expensive. Yeah. So, yeah, on all fundraising platforms, we have PayPal, cash app, and Venmer. and all of those are AIF in Myanmar. And yeah, in the future, hopefully we will have more news, both about what's happening in Myanmar,

Starting point is 00:43:16 both how we specifically are involved, as well as just very exciting footage, we can say. We hope to share soon. Yeah, that'll be great to see. And I hope you'll come back and join us again, and maybe we can delve into a little bit more of the history of the revolution and the revolution in Chinland specifically,

Starting point is 00:43:32 because I think these are things that we need to cover more, and I'd love to give people a place to learn. about them. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Thank you so much. Oh, and welcome back to It Could Happen here. I am once again, your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I am joined today by Spencer Sunshine, the author of Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, the origins and afterlife of James Mason's Siege. It's available now in paperback. I have my paperback copy from Rutledge Press. So, Spencer, I guess let's get right into it. What is Siege? And why should we still be talking about it? Well, unfortunately, we should still be talking about it because it's still influential.

Starting point is 00:44:31 It was a book originally published in 1993, but that is an edited version of newsletters published in the 80s by a fellow named James Mason, who is a lifelong neo-Nazi. He joined the American Nazi Party at age 14 in 1966. He is still an active ideological believer in national socialism. It's a book that in it, he makes the argument that any kind of normal, legal political activity was pointless for neo-Nazis to engage in and like forming organizations, holding marches, making the traditional propaganda, trying to build up parties, even guerrilla warfare at the end of it, he becomes very cynical about. And he says through what are essentially

Starting point is 00:45:15 dramatic random acts of violence, of terrorism or murder, he even goes into praising serial killers like Joseph Paul Franklin, we can destabilize the government and society. And, And after this, neo-Nazis can come to power. This has become a very influential idea. More recently, he was rediscovered. It was a pretty obscure. The newsletters were very unpopular. He never made more than 100 copies.

Starting point is 00:45:40 The original book had a print run of 1,000. So it was a sort of obscure text. It was known amongst neo-Nazi circles. For some unusual reasons, it became mixed up with some countercultural figures. And that was actually what made it more well-known. But it was a revived. in 2015, it was found by these younger aspiring terrorists, let's say at the time, around a message board called Iron March. It became the Bible of the Atamoffin Division, this neo-Nazi group that its members and associates killed five people.

Starting point is 00:46:13 And out of that, everyone in the Atomuffin Division had to read Siege, which became the hashtag. And out of that grew this whole sort of network first of groups and now really of totally decentralized like propaganda channels. on telegram, dubbed Teragram, promoting these same ideas. And so it's become very influential today. It gets named in, like, terrorist manifestos, the school shooter. I think it was in Nashville, Tennessee. That just happened. He makes a reference to people who are into siege in his writings.

Starting point is 00:46:47 And more and more, I've documented before him at least 12 murders that were either by the Adam Woffon Division, by people inspired by siege culture, or by people directly linked to Terragam. So if we want to look at the main text animating neo-Nazi terrorism today, which is now spread around the glow of there's groups in Latin America, there's groups in Eastern, Western Europe, it's even influencing groups in the Middle East or people in the Middle East. They're called accelerationists.

Starting point is 00:47:11 They want to accelerate the collapse of things. And if there's a single ideological text today that's influential on this scene, it is by easily James Mason's siege. And what I particularly am enjoying about the book, and I just told you before we started recording, I haven't finished it yet. But what I'm enjoying about this book is so, you know, you're saying that James Mason started writing this in the 80s, right? But nobody was reading it. It was very sort of niche. It wasn't popular

Starting point is 00:47:36 even within its own niche. He was not a popular man. He had a lot of beefs with other leaders in the movement. It's rediscovered in the 2010s. It's big on Iron March. It's the animating force behind Adam Woffent. And so all of a sudden in the last 10 years, people like us, you know, researchers of the far right, mainstream journalists, people are talking about siege. They're talking about Mason. But this, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is the only book sort of tracing it back to its root. James Mason did not come into existence in 2015 on the pages of Iron March, right? They sort of dug back up this writing that was at that point 30 years old. But this book, I mean, it's an incredible work of research, but it's also sort of a pickeresque, right? It follows

Starting point is 00:48:19 James Mason through decades of Nazi history, right? He wasn't just a guy who wrote a newslet, he was a guy who was in a lot of rooms. He knew a lot of people. So through the lens of James Mason's life, you can follow the origins of the modern neo-Nazi movement back to the sort of splinters and sects and rival personalities of the 70s, right? That you can't understand modern neo-Nazi organizing

Starting point is 00:48:45 if you don't know the history that goes back to the 60s and 70s. Well, thank you for getting that. I had someone write a review. It was an interesting view from the viewpoint of literary criticism, and he's like, well, this is one of these books about a book. It's not.

Starting point is 00:48:58 And I'm like, yeah, it kind of is. But it's really, and I started after I started writing this, which has an unusual origin, or just maybe it is a usual origin. Like the first half is about neo-Nazism in the 1970s, which is incredibly undocumented. There's a huge problem with documentation about the far right in general before 2015. Probably more books have come out in the last 10 years about the far right in the U.S. before 2015 than came out before. And certainly about neo-Nazis who are almost always, when they are written about American neo-Nazis, it's usually in a history of the white supremacist movement, and there's no differentiation made between them. And I would say the national socialists are quite different from other white supremacists for a variety of different reasons. So there is no book about neo-Nazism in the 1970s in the U.S. at all. There are only two documents I can really name, and they're both written by national socialists, actually one in Australia.

Starting point is 00:49:54 And won the head of the New Order, which used to be the American Nazi Party. It's actually not bad. It's an eight-part series by Martin Kirk. So the first half is really reconstructing what happened in the 1970s, because this is what siege is coming out of. This siege is an answer to the questions that face neo-Nazis in the 1970s. And then the second half of the book is even, I would say, less about Mason. It's about these four countercultural figures who discover Mason, helped publish him

Starting point is 00:50:20 and eventually created it, published a disseminated siege itself. And part of that is I was just around the scene these people were part of in the 1990s. Like I saw one of them Boyd-Rice play. I had many mutual friends with another, the publisher, Adam Parfrey of Farrell House. So like I was like right around what these people were doing as part of the 90s counterculture. So I became very interested in that because these people always denied their background, you know, or left it off or something. And I found just so many smoking guns in this. And so I will say how this started is right.

Starting point is 00:50:54 After Charlottesville, they unite the right rally at Charlottesville, you say these things, and then you just give the name of the thing. And people are like, wait a minute, that's like where I live, you know. We're more than that. You know, I was in Seattle. I was like, oh, I was at Seattle referring to this 1999 demonstration. And I'm like, people are here weren't even necessarily born then and just saying at Seattle doesn't mean anything.

Starting point is 00:51:15 So after United Right, there was a spike in popularity in siege and the hashtag read exceeds because it looked like the rally followed what he said. And he said, no one in American society will allow neo-Nazis to succeed. And a lot of people don't know this, but what happened at the initial rally is that it wasn't. The street fighting people might be familiar with, even that's fading from memory, was before it was supposed to start. And when it was supposed to start at noon, the police who had been standing a block away and letting everything unfold, marched in and forced everyone out, meaning the rally never happened. Nobody ever gave a speech. Nobody gave a speech.

Starting point is 00:51:51 As we know, the car attack happened like an hour or two later. I've got to look at a timeline. It's all like garbled now, right? 1.30, yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. And the book is co-dedicated to Heather Hare. I just want to point out. So it seemed to coincide with what Mason said.

Starting point is 00:52:07 He's like, you can't do legal work. You have to do a terrorism, right? And so there was a spike in interest in it. And Adam Woffon had been doing more, Adam Woffon people are committing murders. Strange murders. They're all very strange murders, which I think speaks to a lot of the personalities who are involved in this and other forms of violence,

Starting point is 00:52:26 even in more structured political movements. I think it does attract, tends to attract fringe people, except at certain times where people are intentionally using it as a strategy as part of a bigger mass movement. Anyway, these are questions for terrorism studies. And so there was a spike of interest in it. So I was going to write a short article for a think tank I used to be associated with, which I will not name, because I had such a bad experience with them. And it was going to be an article. I couldn't get the facts to line up.

Starting point is 00:52:51 As I said, there's terrible scholarship about this period. And so I, you know, used this very sophisticated research tool called Google. And through that, I found that Mason's papers, there was a huge collection of Mason's papers at the University of Kansas and Lawrence, Kansas. So I decided I'd go there. I thought I'd just straighten these things out.

Starting point is 00:53:10 There were some documents I needed, some very obscure fanzings and stuff. It'd be the end of the day. I got through, well, first I discovered it's not easy to get to Lawrence, Kansas. You have to fly into an airport, and then I think I took an Uber for like an hour. It was like one bus a day or something. Anyway, I got there and started poking at the papers.

Starting point is 00:53:28 It was 60 boxes of his correspondence. He had letters incoming and outgoing since the early 1960s. As you mentioned, he was an insider to the neo-Nazi movement. So it was with all these people. He had kept carbon copies of his outgoing letters. It was a unique slice of national socialist life in the United States. Never seen an archive like it. People didn't keep their papers because they were doing illegal.

Starting point is 00:53:49 activities, the government sees them and has them in a warehouse somewhere or whatever. This is even in the pre-internet. I can only do this because it was pre-internet, and there were paper copies of stuff. And I'm of the age where I grew up doing all research on paper and in archives. And I quickly found out what I had, and there were two things. One, as I said, was that there was this whole story of American neo-Nazism of when the American Nazi Party splinters, it's then called the National Socialist White People's Party in the 1970s.

Starting point is 00:54:17 and all these groups come out of it, many of which we know parts of, like, William Pierce, who wrote the Turner Diaries and the Skokie incident, which is parodying the Blues Brothers. Some people don't know this. Just of Paul Franklin shooting and paralyzing us, the publisher Larry Flint, and some other things. And I was like, oh, these are all people who came out of one thing, a splintering of the party. And I realized that there basically was a terrorist wing that came out of the splintering. And people knew Mason and people knew Pierce, but there was like a couple other groups or people, but people didn't put it together that they were all like the most radical wing of these splinter

Starting point is 00:54:52 groups. So there was that story. And then as I mentioned, there was a second story about these countercultural people who had always denied that they were involved in national socialism or the level of it. It was just a joke. All these things that we hear today, almost word for word. And so I found all their letters to James Mason and they're adorned with swastikas and eights, and they're helping him. They reveal the extent that they helped him. And the funny thing is a lot of this stuff was actually available in the open. It was in published books, but it was like little pieces of flakes of gold

Starting point is 00:55:22 scattered around everything. I started picking them up because I realized you could put them together. And so one article turned out it was supposed to be one article, and then it turns two articles, and I sat down to write it and turned into a book,

Starting point is 00:55:33 and then five years later, I finally had the manuscript done. Then took another year at the publishers, and then it came out last year. So it's been seven years of work. And I've been going around doing talks. I did 17 talks. in support of the book and as many podcasts and stuff.

Starting point is 00:55:49 So I'm still, the book is still part of my life as much as I would like to sort of put it down. But thank you for having me on the podcast. This is not as great that you have me on the podcast, not against, no diss against you. No shade, no shade. No, and I'm so, I'm so jealous of your trip to Kansas to see the archives. I only recently, like a year or two discovered that his papers existed in those archives. And so I wrote to the archivist and I said, like, you know, are any of these digitized? I would love to see them.

Starting point is 00:56:16 And they're like, you know, we've only digitized, like, one box. And they sent me a couple of scans. But most of it has not been digitized. So you have to go to Kansas if you want to read this old pedophile Nazis letters to Charles Manson. Well, I do have thousands of pictures I took of this correspondence. So, yeah, if you request digital copies, they won't tell you what they've digitized. And so it's like, you know, trying to, like, randomly throw darts or something. If you get the right file, they have them.

Starting point is 00:56:43 I know. I was like, I was bagging. pleading. I was like, please, just like any letters you have with Bob Hike? I just want the Bob Hike letters. But I can give you the Bob Hike letters. I would love those. I think they'll digitize stuff for price, though. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure if I pay for it. They would do me the favor. But that's the thing is that there's so much interconnection here because these stories always get told episodically, right? Like the story of James Mason and Adam Woffon, the story of William Luther Pierce, the story of the founding of the National Socialist Movement. But, but

Starting point is 00:57:15 nobody takes those pieces and slots them together because they interlock, they all interlock, right? And so this idea of the lone wolf, I mean, I guess James Mason's life's work is to perpetuate and motivate the lone wolf, but is it really a lone wolf if he's training them? Well, the lone wolf question is a long question. A lot of people know Metzger moved to the lone wolf strategy after a war was sued by the SPLC and collapsed. But Mason was advocating this beforehand and was very tight with Metzger. So there is actually a book describing what you've said, putting the pieces together, and it's called Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fashionism.

Starting point is 00:57:53 Exactly. Which you can buy today. I mean, like I said, it's the only book that I know of that fits these pieces together. No, it is the only book. Actually, I've been in contact with James Mason, and he said a one radio interview. It's not the first of its kind, but it's the best of its kind. It's high praise from the book's Nazi pedophile sub. Why did he donate his papers to the library? Because like you said, most people are not only not preserving these items, where they're not preserving them at all because they know what they've done is illegal or embarrassing to everyone involved. And they're intentionally destroying the evidence of these kinds of communications. But he not only saved them, but he wanted to make sure we could read them. Did you talk to him at all about why he did that? Well, he sold them. He was a Wheeler dealer in especially American Nazi Party memorabilia.

Starting point is 00:58:53 You know, he sold furniture on the side, like antiques. He'd go antiquing. And he, if you've seen pictures of his apartment, it's filled with Nazi knickknacks, right? He's got a knife collection. I mean, it looks like, it looks like the Aryan Nations booth at the Tulsa Gun Show. It looks like my apartment, but like in the inverse and fewer plants. So he was a collector. So he was already, my understanding is he was already selling George Lincoln Rockwell,

Starting point is 00:59:21 memory, abelia, or whatever, papers in such to Kansas. They have this collection there called a Wilcox collection of anti-extremist stuff. This guy, Laird Wilcox, had been in early students for Democratic society before they took the, like Marx's turn, and then decided that the left and the right were the same, like in the 70s or something, and started collecting all this material. So they were one of the, they were probably the biggest collection of far-right material. And as I said at the time, libraries weren't collecting it and people weren't writing about it. They were like, oh, these are just a a bunch of cooks and wing nuts, they're not important.

Starting point is 00:59:55 And some of this is because, like, as I say in the book, the first neo-Nazi mass murder wasn't until the late 70s. Like, it was what we know as neo-Nazism today really only emerged in the 70s, is one of my arguments in the book. So the papers were there because he sold them. The second thing is he is unique, I think, and not unique, but very uncommon because he is an unabashed neo-Nazi. He does not try to hide it.

Starting point is 01:00:20 He is not like the NSM, which is actually a party he co-founded, shockingly, but left over that as they turned. Because originally it was to promote violence and then as it turned to a more traditional Hollywood Nazi party, he left. But it's the same one that was at Charlottesville and Jeff Scoop was the head of. I actually taught Jeff Scoop about how the party was founded. That was very interesting. I interviewed him for the book. Another one of those dishonest actors. Well, the guy who had made him the head of the party, who was the second head, Harrington.

Starting point is 01:00:49 Cliff Harrington. Plyford Harrington did not give him the truthful account of the party's founding. Harrington claimed he was a co-founder and he wasn't. He claimed a different date. This is one reason I spent so much time on stuff. Also that I found all these things that had been printed that were wrong, by scholars and others that were. And it wasn't their fault. They were taking.

Starting point is 01:01:07 It was harder to get these documents, especially when a group is moving. And so Harrington claimed he had been a co-founder in 1974 or whatever, but he was lying. Mason was one of the co-founders and not him. He only became the head in the 80s. So this is some of the stuff I found. Anyway, I was going to say the NSM at one point go, we're not neo-Nazis, we're national socialists. I was like, get the fuck out of here.

Starting point is 01:01:32 Like, really? Like, come. Oh, your flag is a swastikonic. Oh, I mean, this is absurd. But people will do that, right? It's like the dead parrot skit in Monty Python, if people know this. And so, but Mason is stands out because he's always been very upfront about his views. He's very proud of them.

Starting point is 01:01:49 He's not ashamed. And if this embarrassed to other people, they didn't belong. As he told to me, they didn't believe in the one true religion. So I asked him about these counterculture figures who have denied they were ever involved in this stuff. At the time, he was convinced they were national socialists. And he was like, well, they believed in something else other than the one true faith. I think that's the word he used. So, yeah, he has nothing to hide.

Starting point is 01:02:12 He's very open about it, very open about promoting terrorism. As you know, and maybe some of the listeners do young neo-Nazis go to his appointment. apartment and he tutors them. They take pictures with him. This included Sam Woodward, who murdered a young gay Jewish man, Blaise Bernstein, recently sentenced to life in prison. There's pictures of Woodward in Mason's apartment. So yeah, I mean, he wants, he wants, he's proud of his lineage and he wants it documented. And I knew I did him a favor by writing a book about his movement. I mean, they don't have the intellectuals and the resources to, and the train people to write historical books. and I did it a pretty straight-up book.

Starting point is 01:02:49 Even Mason was like, I kept waiting to read the smear. I kept waiting for the smear. There was no smear. I was like, yeah, I just wrote it as a history book. And so in a way, I've given them an insight into their history, which wouldn't exist otherwise. So this stuff is always a double-edged sword when you cover, as you know, when you cover fascist groups. They want the publicity by and large.

Starting point is 01:03:10 I was told sometimes at the SPLC, like, groups contact them and they're like, cover us, give us coverage. sending them their press releases. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think someone like Mason, I guess he doesn't see the smear because, like you said, he's proud of himself. So this, I think, is an honest appraisal of his legacy. And most people would see that as a smear, but he's proud of it.

Starting point is 01:03:31 Well, it's not a smear. I don't need to say anything bad about him. He's there promoting Nazi terrorism. What's the point of, like, you know, denouncing this or something. I mean. Whereas I think someone like Pierce, I think, sometimes when people write honestly about Pierce, I mean, obviously he's been dead for 25 years.

Starting point is 01:03:50 But he resisted the characterization that he was inciting terrorism, even though he, like Mason very much was. Oh, well, Pierce is just a liar. I mean, all these guys are liar. Exactly. That's what I mean. But I think a book like this about Pierce, I think he would not have enjoyed, whereas Mason is at least honest about his legacy.

Starting point is 01:04:08 You know, there is a terrible book about Pierce by one of his sycophants, who is a professor, actually. Robert S Griffin. Yeah. And that, again, that is one of those dishonest histories. I think we were talking before we started recording that the problem with archival research trying to write a history of these movements is they are dishonest actors. And so Robert S. Griffin, he wrote, what is it, the fame of a dead man's deeds.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Yes. Is that what it's called? He went into it, you know, saying like, I'm going to write this neutral appraisal of this figure of the movement about Willie Luther Pierce. And over the weeks that he spent on the compound to write it, and he spent time with Pierce on the compound in Hillsborough became radicalized and is a Nazi now. I mean, he's still alive. I mean, he could take issue with that characterization if he wants, but yes, I'm sure you've read the book. It's not neutral. It's a hagiography of Pierce. Yeah. There's actually a book by Pierce's son, too, which is interesting. I have read that. It's quite good.

Starting point is 01:05:04 Well, unfortunately, a lot of it's copy pasta, but. Well, I think his insight into his relationship with his father is very unique. It is called The Sins of My Fourses. I mean. It is called The Sins of My Father by Kelvin Pierce. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a window you don't often get, although I guess now we do also have the Klansman's son by Don Black's daughter. Black's daughter or son? She has transitioned.

Starting point is 01:05:25 Oh, I did not know that. Well, Mazel Tov. Yeah. Yeah, I remember reading their work before Trump, and they actually wrote one of the most moving resignations from the movement that I've read, very much taking, you know, being accountable, even though they were raised in it. I feel like children raised in this are not, like, as accountable as adults. are, right? Especially, like, they were at college at the time. But it was like a true,

Starting point is 01:05:49 interesting working through it. And I felt like heartfelt apology for it. And, uh, yeah. Actually, this is a fun fact. You may know a member of the Aryan nationalist action at ANA, this terrorist, this bank robbing group from the 80s, I think, became the first person to transition gender, uh, from Donna Langen. Donna Langen was known as pretty boy Pedro, when she was the head of the Aryan Republican Army as a bank robbery gang out of Alaheem City. Yeah. She was the first person to win a battle

Starting point is 01:06:22 with the federal government to transition in federal prison. To get surgery. Yeah. And just recently, actually, there was a filing in her case. She's trying to get the way the case is titled in the court records

Starting point is 01:06:33 is still Peter Langan, her dead name. And the judge denied her petition to retitle the case. But she has transitioned and is in a women's prison. Is she in Texas? Oh, gosh, I could live. look up in the BOP where she is.

Starting point is 01:06:46 Texas bans prisoners from changing their names. She is in FMC Carswell. Yep, that is in Dallas. In Fort Worth, Texas, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's why. Yeah. That's why. So she's still in the BOP system under her dead name, but she was allowed to physically transition.

Starting point is 01:07:02 So that's, again, just a strange twist of history, right? That the person who won that legal battle for us was a Nazi bank robber. Well, she has also long repudiated those politics. So I think she's been the only person to have surgery, trans person to have surgery, who was in prison at the time. Because I think that was recently and then everything, you know, everything. They changed. I know that they slow down their trans policies waiting to see the results of the election. So for a strange reason, I know actually a bunch of the stuff about trans people in prison.

Starting point is 01:07:37 So anyway. No, I mean, it's a remarkable history. Yeah, yeah. So you started writing this book after Unite the Right because there was this renewed interest in siege. I mean, I guess what has the experience been like, you know, over the course of spending the last six years of your life working on this, realizing that it is only becoming more relevant and not less? Well, the problem is, it's like for people like us who watch the far right, like our work is only important or people are only interested in it when there is a big upswing in it. Like, that's when people are interested, and that's when it is more important. So, at one hand, it's good that I didn't spend five years and then no one remembered what siege was, and it was just a blip.

Starting point is 01:08:18 I mean, that's good for me. But I often say what's good for me is bad for society. And so— I mean, I think it would have been an important work of history regardless. But I guess as you're working on it, realizing that the body count is only growing. Yeah, it's—I don't know. I don't really—you know, what do you say about that? I call these people empty people spreading emptiness.

Starting point is 01:08:39 Like, it's hard for me even to get mad at the more aggressive neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Like, often they're young, and I just see, like, sad young people who can't deal with their problems engaged in, like, hurting other people who are often not so different than them. You know, I mean, there's a trans man who was in Adamoff, you know, like, there are. Tyler Parker to Pepe. Yeah. And numerous stories of people being, you know, of not white descent, either they're hiding that they're not or they're a mixed race descent and they're sort of passing as wide of being Jewish, of being queer, all this stuff.

Starting point is 01:09:17 The movement's filled with these people. Sometimes it's the people are even like, how many straight white men are there in the movement? Like, and it's just sad. You're like, you're being attracted to this because you're so alienated or you're so, your identity is so shaky that you are attracted to this idea of a firm, strong identity. And, I mean, sometimes people forget fascism in Italy and Germany arose in basically the last two countries that arose and solidified in Europe. Like, those were countries that wasn't clear what Italy was going to be. There's such differences between the North and the South. There's no reason,

Starting point is 01:09:51 like, it was unclear originally whether Germany was going to be Austria, too. You know, And so they were, it's a way part of fascism was shoring up that national identity, which was very fragmented. And it works the same, I think, with people's identities. And one of the, one of the things that attracts people to neo-Nazism, I think, is this strong affirmation of an identity and people with mixed identities or conflicted about it or filled with self-loathing are drawn to this for that reason. One of the many reasons people get drawn into these things. And they recruit so young. I mean, I think in the book, you're talking about this. you know, all the way back to James Mason's origins, that he became interested in the Nazi party as a 14-year-old. Joined it. Joined it at 14. So he's a child, right, getting into this movement. And now that he is an old man, he is in turn indoctrinating children, right?

Starting point is 01:10:44 That Adam Woffin members are very young. I guess were. Adam Woffin technically doesn't exist anymore. But most of the young men who spilled blood for Adam Woffin were 20 years old, 19 years. old. And, you know, someone pointed out, the founder of the Foyer Creek Division, when he founded it, was 12. He was arrested when he was 13 or 14, but he founded it at 12. And which tragic, obviously, tragic, heartbreaking, disgusting. But imagine being one of the adults who was in that group and finding out that your fear was 12? I grew up in the

Starting point is 01:11:21 South in an extremely Protestant area at the height of that, like, 80s, fundamental. and all this Christian Christian right thing. And there were, I knew about, these are kind of an older thing, child preachers. Have you ever heard of child preachers? This was a big thing during the... Yeah, they speak in tongues and they sort of parrot the cadence

Starting point is 01:11:40 of the way adults speak. But if you listen carefully, they're not saying anything. They've memorized the way that adults give these barn-burning, you know, adult Protestants, evangelicals give these barn-burning sermons. But they don't necessarily understand what they're saying. And so, I mean, I think it's pretty common. People, adults will do this. They don't say believe in what they're saying. Maybe they understand it a little better. I think it's a

Starting point is 01:12:05 bunch of post-structuralist academics who don't even understand what they're saying, but that can happen to. And so I think people like, well, I don't know. I was a pretty smart 12-year-old. Maybe I would understand it better, but you just need somebody repeating it. The slogans and the narratives have already been formed by others. You're not necessarily innovating on it, as long as you can repeat the dogma, does it really matter who's saying it? Does it matter if you're, the person is gay or Jewish? And I mean, the Estonian 12-year-old was not a one-off, you know, like in the Ethan Melser case a year two ago, Ethan Melser was a U.S. Army private who was trying to set up his unit in Turkey to be attacked by Middle Eastern terrorist groups. And the person he was communicating with online,

Starting point is 01:12:47 sort of goading him into these acts was a child. It was a child. He was an order of nine angles, though, right? He was ONA. He wasn't a neo-Nazi, right? I always try to distinguish. There's some O-9-A's who are not. He was at the bleed point of an Adam Woffin splinter group and ONA. He was involved with Rape Wafin. A was he? Yeah. The lineage of these groups is so messy. I think some of them don't even understand the ideological lineage of the sect they've ended up in. But, but, you know, Melzer was at that sort of bleed point where Adam Woffin was becoming ONA. But I think what we're seeing now, and definitely, Definitely in these last two school shootings in the last month is a syncretic murder cult.

Starting point is 01:13:28 The guy who just did the Nashville one was black. But if you start looking at both of their manifestos, they're referring to all different kinds of things. Some of whom are white supremacist and neo-Nazis, many of whom aren't, just other school shooters. And they don't seem to have a real ideological necessarily connection to some of this, the political stuff. It's just become an oh-9A, they are founded by a neo-Nazi. many of them are neo-Nazis, as well, I was going to say, they're not, they don't have to be, and all the people aren't. And even if you were supposed to be, they aren't all.

Starting point is 01:14:00 And so we're just getting through these various online forums on Telegram and elsewhere. Sometimes they just spread over all kinds of the different platforms. We're getting just this syncretic mix of these things. And this is one of the things that made 09A and siege culture are parallel, Mason's ideas, because Mason's not a Satanist, and in fact, he's recently denounced order of nine angles. And when he was around Satanists, they were atheist Satanists around the Church of Satan, that when you start saying, hey, we need to commit random murders in this goal of destroying the, like, suppose a Jewish-controlled society so there could be a white Aryan

Starting point is 01:14:39 revolution. Like, it doesn't matter if you have a really political reason, or if you're thinking that these heretical acts will destroy somehow the consensus reality, you're just trying to goad people into these violent random acts of terrorism and more random murders. Right. And the end result is the same. Your thinking is the same and the end result is the same. So they start cross-pollinating. And then what's the difference between the school shooter cults?

Starting point is 01:15:04 You know, and now we have groups like the maniac murder cult who are ostensibly political, ostensibly neo-Nazi and Order of Nine Angles, been a reality or just like go attack old people from behind. I mean, it's just pathetic stuff. go, you know, beat up homeless people and stab them. It's like at some point I often say this in my speeches as become more and more real. It's like everything blends together in our society. I think, you know, you start with like school shooters and it's hard to distinguish them from like apolitical mass shooters and from political mass shooters, right?

Starting point is 01:15:40 At one point it just becomes this one thing that's like all mixed together because we're having in the United States, we're having these constant attacks and constant attacks and constant that often the body count is very high. Like what becomes the difference anymore? Does it really matter? Like the Allen, Texas guy who was a Latino, neo-Nazi, who killed a bunch of people in an outlet mall. It's really a neo-Nazi action. Like he was, like clearly, if you look at his stuff, or an article called Nazis of color about this dynamic. But was his action? How was his action necessarily any different than like a school shooting or whatever? It's just like, you know, it's just like he's going somewhere and killing random people.

Starting point is 01:16:19 Like, what is this about? So I think we're seeing this syncretic murder call is really, I know other people have different ways opposing this that is sprawling out on different online platforms and appealing to very young alienated people, probably whose whole lives are, you know, online. I think especially younger people who went through COVID, Zoomers, and I guess people younger than that would be Generation Alpha. Spend more time online than any other generation. Obviously, they must.

Starting point is 01:16:45 And this becomes, especially when they're much. or the horizon of their world, right? And if they're in cells and they're not really connected to other people and they're not connected to their family, like it just drives these impulses more and more. And they don't have the maturity to look outside of it or to think about the repercussions of it, or think of have the empathy to think about how it's going to affect other people and their families. So when it comes to siege, what would you say its current role in this sort of evolving,

Starting point is 01:17:23 syncretic murder culture that we have is. Is Siege's legacy now just that its ideological lineage lives on in sort of the terragram milieu, or is it still itself influential? Well, some of this is a question of ideas. I think sometimes Siege acts as a symbol. People can gesture that if they're neo-Nazis, there's a serious neo-Nazi 450-page tone. They didn't read it. they didn't all read it.

Starting point is 01:17:55 Yeah, I know read Siege. It's like, how many of you have read Seed? And I found out doing the work that there's like an edited 100-page version, and then there's like a little pocket version, and then someone even made the Tenants of Seedge. There's the Spark Notes murder called. Well, Adam Woffend Division apparently had a test on Siege to get in. And I'm like, I know these people didn't, right?

Starting point is 01:18:16 They're like a lot of very disturbed or, you know, people who aren't going to like, it's a boring text. I mean, I read it twice. I've read portions, but I'm not going to sit here and say I read the whole book. It's 450 pages. Man, I read every newsletter and the book, and it's, yes, no, no. So it acts as a symbol, be like, look, we have a serious intellectual thing. How many Christians have read the Bible?

Starting point is 01:18:38 Let's be really serious. I think that, yeah, I think that's the right analogy, right? That it is a foundational text, but they're not all sitting down and digesting or even understanding it. Yeah, I mean, how many communists have read Das Kapital, you know, even just volume one? which I have. I would like to say I have actually. Is it more or less boring than siege? It's more intellectual. And so there's that and there's also like the conclusions are there, right? The whole argument is developed in siege, but you really just need to take the conclusions,

Starting point is 01:19:08 which is you can't do any political work. It's hopeless. You need to go out and commit dramatic acts of violence to help inspire people. And then, you know, maybe afterwards there'll be some Arian, blah, blah, blah. Frankly, that's all you need to know about it, because that's what it advocates. You just need the praxis that it concludes. And most activists aren't intellectuals. Like I always say, like a movement can have three slogans. And what you need to do on the left, you need to make sure those are the right

Starting point is 01:19:39 slogans pointing in the right direction because somebody who flows into activism, who's young, who doesn't matter if they're young, doesn't have a background of politics, is going to take the thing seriously that you say. And you can only say so many things to people. political movements are stupid. I mean, this is why we are the 99% was great. It was great. It wasn't true. I mean, half of Americans are like it, you know, support the Republicans. But like, it's like one thing and then the person can think about those things. They're not going to have complicated ideas. So what is, what is the slogans that come out of something? What are the basic? What does it boil down to the things you're saying? And people have inherited that from siege or inherited it secondhand, you know, because Terragram is very well versed in what siege is about. I mean, Adam often had to read it. So they were more, I think, into it as a text.

Starting point is 01:20:25 And then as it's gone out, you know, Terragram people, the Teragram Collective certainly knew what was in it and stuff. And so people are being affected by it even if they don't know, even if they haven't read it or even if they don't know, that's the origin of those ideas. Right. So Terigram is directly downstream of Siege, right? So Siege was a newsletter that became a book.

Starting point is 01:20:45 People read the book. And then the people who read that book turned it back into a zine, right? So it's sort of... Oh, to some level. Right, it's moving through its phases and now it's regressing back into sort of memetic zine form. But people who join these movements

Starting point is 01:21:00 who want something more intellectual, because everyone who joins a religious or political movement, some people want a more rigorous. They're like, well, what's the reason for this? I have these questions. How do you answer them? Why are we doing this? Want more rigorous. Some people want a more rigorous background

Starting point is 01:21:15 can turn to siege. And as they get older, will turn two siege. Or move out of it. And they're like, what were the ideas behind this? Why, why did we have these ideas? And I think that's, it's normal. I mean, there are all kinds of weird intellectual groundings for white supremacists. A lot of it is theology, which is sort of curious. And I, I kind of concluded at some point that you just needed something complicated because they couldn't use race science anymore. And there weren't people who developed social science, other than someone like Alanda Benoist who's saying something much more complicated the most white supremacists are. And so, like, theology just allowed something

Starting point is 01:21:49 intellectual for people to chew on. You know what I mean? Like, like, people are real smart who are very analytical want something to chew on with the ideas, whether it really changes their practice or not. And I think there has to be something that serves that need. And so I guess, wrapping up, because this, we're supposed to keep these daily shows short, what is the takeaway that you want people to come away from this book with? I guess, especially in this political moment. I think there's two things. The book has two things. One, I just want to have people have a better understanding of neo-Nazism in the U.S. and how it developed. It's just one big blur. It's part of other things. And I see it as a distinct strain. And I want people to have just a better understanding of

Starting point is 01:22:30 political movement's origins, which is maybe a more scholarly thing. And I am, my next book, I hope, if I can get a contract, is to write a history of national socialism in America. Because again, there's not a single book that describes that, which is very strange, certainly not a history post-war, and there may be a pre-war one, but not one that puts it all together. So there's a lot of ignorance about this movement. And the second part about the cultural actors is about the danger of taking a radical cultural movement and to use impulses like transgression and turn them into the very toxic politics, into terrorist politics at the end of the day. I had a discussion on blue sky. It was amazing. You could see it wasn't Twitter. I had a use of

Starting point is 01:23:10 discussion on blue sky and where I learned something. It was just fabulous. And it was this woman posted that, she was like essentially in Madzao, I read it. In the 20th century, there was always this assumption that transgressive art, avant-garde art, was implicitly progressive. Sometimes it was ideological, but even when it wasn't, even when it had some dodgy elements, the impulse of it led to progressive left-leaning politics. And it's very, the transgressive, aggression was progressive. And, I mean, these guys I'm looking at are working in the 80s, and you see it now. We've all seen it with 4chan.

Starting point is 01:23:48 Like, that was never. That isn't true, and that was never true. It's never true. Right. I mean, those of us in the punk scene in the 80s and 90s, it could see this, even if we certainly didn't put it that way, with, like, skinheads in particular, it was contested terrain where people were trying to take this subculture and pull it to the left and right, right? There were so many Nazis, but there were anti-fascist skinheads, too.

Starting point is 01:24:07 Sharp's, yeah. sharps to some extent. Sharps were, a lot of them are rightly nationalists. They just weren't Nazis. This is a common. There was groups like rash, red anarchist skinheads who still exist, but there was a contested train where people trying to pull it in different directions.

Starting point is 01:24:22 This is still the case in neofolk and heathen religious circles. And that's sort of, there's an implication which I don't think I can only put it into words now that like the transgressive elements of these subcultures didn't necessarily go one way or the other. And it was something you'd have

Starting point is 01:24:38 a fight over. Like, they could go in any direction. And I think it was clear on 4chan early on. I once was mentioned very early on on on 4chan and someone chimed in and they're like, leave him alone. He's my friend. And I'm like, which of my friends are on 4chan? And defending me, but like, 4chan didn't have to end up the way it did, you know? The earlier internet culture wasn't like this. It was progressive or libertarian or a more decent libertarianism than we have now. So that's the second. part. I mean, other than these guys, if you ever were in the industrial or neo-folk scene and you heard the Bethers Nazis, I have all of the receipt in detail in the book. If that's of interest to you.

Starting point is 01:25:18 Yeah, Boyd-Rice will tell you he never meant it, but I've read some of the primary documents that lead me to believe otherwise. Yeah, and I even made a video of him creatively entitled Boyd-Rice Neo-Nazi collaborator. And I know you're like, Spencer, what are you really getting at here? And I show the letters and stuff. And just if you're not familiar with these figures, I know a lot of people. They were very obscure movements at the time. And, you know, people are not familiar with them, but I think are familiar enough with this idea of, like, a super radical cultural movement about step by step I show how it can move into fully politicized. A transgressive movement can move into a fully politicized, super toxic neo-Nazism that is espousing terrorism. And that this is something that we always have to watch

Starting point is 01:26:01 out for in our own religious movements and our own cultural movements in occult circles. I just did a podcast with some, you know, occult-style esoteric podcast. And I was talking about Satanists to become Nazis. Satanists are sort of, I would say split these days, but there's definitely a Nazi, you know, peace in there, a very visible one. And so some of it's just about these things. That's an important takeaway, too, that, you know, in any subculture, especially these sort of transgressive subcultures, like, you know, counterculture, music, and all art and, you know, occult spaces. If you, you know, have a magical practice that you engage in, people who engage in, you

Starting point is 01:26:37 practice pagan faiths. In all these subcultures, you need to call out these bad actors early and often. Push back. Don't let them bully you and push them out of your spaces. Absolutely. And Nazis ruin everything. They intentionally go into all these spaces. And sometimes don't intentionally.

Starting point is 01:26:55 Actually, this was a comment on Stormfront I learned from talking about Nazis in the animal rights movement. And they're like Spencer. doesn't understand, we're not infiltrating these movements. We're just vegans. We're just also Nazis. But we're not vegans because we're Nazis. We're not coming here from some other reason. Well, you can't let them sit with you either way. Well, this is a funny story. I don't if you have time, but I heard the story from a friend of mine that they were in a vegan group in Southern California, I think, and they had an unofficial party, like a barbecue, was people from the group,

Starting point is 01:27:30 you know, from the group doing it. People brought their partners. It wasn't an official group function, but this one member of the group brought her husband, who was Kevin McDonald. Oh. And they were vegetarians or vegans. And people were like, holy fuck.

Starting point is 01:27:43 And he was like, I mean, I feel a little sympathetic to him. He's like, hey, man, I don't know. I'm just, I'm a vegetarian or whatever. I'm here with my wife. She's going to a party. Like, no, you're not allowed to have friends. You're not allowed to have friends. You're not allowed to have hobbies.

Starting point is 01:27:56 You can't be here. Yeah. But he's like, I'm not here to, to, recruit anyone. I'm here. You know what I mean? The barbecue is over when the race scientist shows up. Well, this became a big discussion in the group about whether to push him out or not. But you have to do these things. And even if you don't want to, they're my friend or everyone's welcome or whatever. What is going to end up happening if you don't push the Nazi out is that more Nazis show up. Well, if it's a single person, people are going to start leaving, people of color are going to leave,

Starting point is 01:28:26 Jews are going to leave, LGBTQ plus people are going to leave. And you're going to end up. defending this one person, losing many more. So even just on your own, you know, enlightened self-interest, if you want to keep your group together, and I've seen this again and again and again. And then they're like, you're defending a Nazi, so you're one too. So yeah, you've got to kick these people out, even just for practical reasons. I have a very low bar for people these days, and I try to, I try to appeal, I try to appeal to the baser reasons sometimes with people. Well, if you would like to learn more about how a couple of guys in the counterculture movement in the 80s, are responsible for the publication of the book that serves as the Bible for modern Nazi terrorism.

Starting point is 01:29:06 You can pick up a copy of Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, the Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege by Spencer Sunshine from Rutledge Press. It's available, I think wherever books are sold. I bought my copy directly from the publisher, Rutledge Press. I think it was only $27, you know, a bargain and a steal. So pick up a copy of that. And where else can people find your work, Spence? Thank you. Now that you mentioned that, I am on all of the socials, usually at Transform 6, 7, 8, 9. Have a webpage if you have an RSS feed. If someone said this recently, they're like, it's actually one of the better ways to keep track of people. I was like, your follow a zillion people. Anyway, it's spencer sunshine.com. Also, if you'd like to support anti-fascist research and get a warm, fuzzy feeling, you should sign up for my Patreon for as little as $2 a month.

Starting point is 01:29:55 You can help me out with the rent and get some exclusive contact. So, yep. Well, hell yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's been great. Welcome to Dick Adapad here, a podcast where the singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening all of the time.

Starting point is 01:30:34 I'm your host, Mia Wong. And one of the many, many, many chaotic things that has been going on over the last two weeks since Trump's at power has been a bunch of funding freezes to the U.S. federal government grant system. And I think to a lot of people, that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal, but that is unbelievably catastrophic for, like, I would go so far to say as like the survival of the human species for reasons they will get to in a second, but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone on Earth. And to get to get a sense of exactly what this kind of stuff does, what these funding freezes do and what the sort of threat, particularly to the

Starting point is 01:31:17 future of American science is. I have brought in two people who are intimately familiar with this. Arivon Salas, who's a surgeon and professor of medicine and friend of the show. Yeah, come on. Yeah, definitely. I don't know why I had such a hesitant friend of the show because it wasn't in my notes. That was, ad-living it. But yeah, friend of the show, Kamehota, who is a gasho entorologist and the host of the podcast, House of Pod, and both of you too, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here for your most Persian episode ever. We may have done episodes of like that were like about Iran. Yeah. But this is as Persian as it gets. Two Persian doctors talking about Trump is about as Persian as a good. And you're not, you're not

Starting point is 01:32:08 overselling it. This is a large scale attack on the health care infrastructure of the United States on a massive level. So you're not lying. It is a serious, serious issue, not just for us, but for the whole world. Yeah. And one of, I mean, the place I want to start, I think, is with, because it was happening, I think, in NSF NIH a bit before this happened. But the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, sent out this memo last week that was a, it was nominally a response to this very weird Trump executive order that's him being like every single program that has to do with civil rights. rights, which is like, so my, my description is anything it has to do with civil rights at all, like, gone. His description of it is like DEI and woke. So like anything it has to do

Starting point is 01:32:53 with queer people, anything that has to do with like racial inequality. And they were supposed to like go through and review every single like government grant program for anything. But don't forget, he also included the gender ideology, which is a meaningless phrase. And the green new deal is all part of it too. Yep, yep, yep. You know, and, and, and this is part of the raft of executive orders, particularly the anti-trans executive orders. But OPM's response to this, again, awful as personnel management's response,

Starting point is 01:33:22 was who just freeze literally every single grant program in the country. And this was everything from Pell Grants and, like, work study for college students to, like, food aid for single mothers, to my personal favorite. And I don't know why this never made it into the press, because I'm apparently the only one who went through and read the list. But one of the things that he froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear weapons manufacturing sites.

Starting point is 01:33:45 So, like, we almost, like... Why? Yeah. Why is that included? It was because literally what happened was they found a list of every single grant that, like, anyone does, or any, like, any, like, program that gives out grants. And they froze all of them. And so, like, another one of them that when I said, this is, like, this is a threat

Starting point is 01:34:03 to all life on Earth. I was not, I was not joking here. One of the other ones was defunding one of the very important, like, international nuclear non-proliferation organizations, like, specifically the one that's air and make sure that like random people don't get like enriched uranium or like obtain nuclear weapons. So like we we dodged a like giant nuke sized bullet when when like most of these programs got their money back after a judge was like, well, you obviously can't do this. This is so unbelievably illegal that it's astounding.

Starting point is 01:34:33 Like the Constitution like very blatantly says that the power of the purse is Congress, not the president. Like stop. Yeah, but I would just want to clarify. for the people listening here that it wasn't just grant specifically. It was like all federal assistance. So one of the things that was very confusing and chaotic was this question of does this mean snap is gone?

Starting point is 01:34:56 Does this mean, WIC is gone? What about Head Start? What about Meals on Wheels? I mean, there are tons of federal assistance programs out there. And they had only made an exception for Social Security and Medicare. Yeah. In the memo, but not Medicaid. And what happened the next day, but the Medicare.

Starting point is 01:35:12 the portal went down, right? Yeah. And it's chaotic, too, because, like, all of the programs you just named were on the list of, like, programs that they were putting a freeze on, but then it wasn't clear what was going to happen with them and... Right. And it's still not clear. Right. Right. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:27 We just have a judge... We have... We found one judge with a backbone in the entire country so far, and, and he said, no, you cannot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I am surprised, actually, that Trump hasn't gone out on the attack. Maybe I just missed it, like, attacking that judge, you know? But it is, I mean, what's so confusing to me is, you know, I get it, at least in some part of their weird internal, terrible, logic, transphobic logic. I get why they're doing some of the things they're doing, but then some of them don't even make sense within their own whack internal logic.

Starting point is 01:36:01 Like when they scrub, for example, the CDC for all the terms that they didn't like, gender terms, transgender terms, things like that. they also scrub things like following maternal morbidity or opioid use, things that don't at least on the surface even fit with their attacks on woke ideology. So it seems like it's a complete mess to me what's happening. And what's terrifying about it is not just that it's a mess, but it is happening. I mean, they are doing it. They are pushing it, even though they clearly don't even seem to really know what they're doing or even have a great sense internally of what they're doing. I think that's the danger of this right now is that this is revenge, right? They're lashing out in sort of in pure anger and pure hatred and they have been given control of an apparatus that they

Starting point is 01:36:51 don't understand at all, right? Like that's how you get defunding a nuclear police. That's how you get them defunding like the Barry Goldwater Memorial Grant thing that gives money to kids for writing essays about Barry Goldwater. They don't understand what the state is and what it does. And they're just trying to take the whole thing apart. And they're just trying to sort of of rampaged their way through it and it means that we're in this situation now. We're like for a long time the line on like trans rights was like, well, you should defend trans rights because they're going to come for you next. And that's no longer true.

Starting point is 01:37:20 What is actually happening here is in order to kill us, they are willing to kill every, they are willing to let all of you die in nuclear fire. It's specifically in order to hurt us, right? That's the sort of line we're at where, you know, all of these, all of these sort of complicated systems and all of these sort of complicated funding mechanisms are just, you know, getting lit on fire by people who don't understand what they're doing and don't care. Right. Just out of spite or something. For sure, out of spite and hate. But I want to just take a step back and think about the fact that all of this is happening because of two versus three

Starting point is 01:37:54 executive orders depending how you think about it. But they're literally executive orders. They're not laws in the book. Congress does not pass anything. It's like this elderly man woke up and said, hey, let's get rid of D-E-I and D-E-I-A. For example, Those are the terms they use exactly without saying what the EI is or what DEIA is. And I feel that we need to pause for a moment on the A, D-EI-A, and they spell out, you know, A is for accessible. Wiping out everything related to accessibility is directly in violation of the ADA and makes no sense and it's cool and all of that. But also just like legally it makes no kind of sense unless they are going to go after the ADA, which I'm guessing is part of their plan to the extent that there is a plan. But the two key executive orders here are the sex and gender one that's like defending, quote

Starting point is 01:38:44 unquote, defending women that basically dictates that sex must be only male and female, thereby erasing intersex people completely. And that there's really, they're essentially saying there's no such thing as gender and that the only genders that they see are willing to recognize are male and female, thereby erasing trans folks, intersex people, non-binary folks, etc., gender, queer, gender. fluid, all of those people. So for them to go into like these CDC data sets, take them offline so that they can binaize whatever is there, eliminate, I'm assuming, I don't, I mean, I don't know that this was time, but I'm assuming that that's what they're doing, taking any sex that's not male or

Starting point is 01:39:24 female out of there and then removing gender as a variable, because they've said that no grant funding should go to any assessment of gender, period. Yeah. So that's when you're talking me about how they're willing to throw everyone under the bus just to pursue this transphobic agenda about what you're talking about. They're willing to take huge slots of information off of the internet so people can no longer research or physicians, anyone else can no longer access this information just to make sure that there is no hint or reference to anyone who is transgender. That seems to be like the key thing that they're trying to do with all of this. So they have thrown the entire government and take chaos and the lives of

Starting point is 01:40:04 millions of people into chaos, all to remove the teeth in LGBT. Yeah, and the stuff that they're doing, like the destruction of this research data, the way that it's been just like taken down and destroyed. Little parts of it are coming, have come back up after the sort of backlash. But, you know, what they're doing is staging a digital version of the Nazis burning all of the books at the Institute for Sexual Research. Like that's explicitly what they're doing. It's literally the same stuff.

Starting point is 01:40:31 Like, it is research on queerness and trans people. that they are lighting on fire. Yep. 100%. And you know who else lights research on queer and trans people on fire? It's the sponsors of this show. It's the products and services. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:40:47 That's the way you get those big bucks. That's how you do it. That's professional broadcasting. And we are back. So I want to move from that to kind of the next phase after we got out of the sort of OPM like suspending everything. phase, which has been this kind of this uncertainty around

Starting point is 01:41:17 a whole bunch of the other funding agencies for science, National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health. Can you talk a bit about what's been going on with grants there before we move into like how this whole process works? Yeah, so the first sign that something

Starting point is 01:41:33 was materially going to change after these executive orders, as I recall, I'm living with along with everyone else and what is time, But the first thing that I recall is the study section being canceled. The study sections are meeting where scientists come together. They each will have read various grant proposals and scored them on a number of different dimensions.

Starting point is 01:41:56 And then they come together and discuss, they don't discuss all of them, by the way. They only discuss the ones that seem to have the most merit. And then out of those, they make recommendations for which ones they believe should get funded. So these are a critical part of the process by which the government gives out funds for research. If these meetings do not happen, people's grants are not getting evaluated, assessed, and recommended for funding. That means they're not getting the funding. That means they're not hiring people or they're having to fire people they already had in their layoff people. They already had in their lab.

Starting point is 01:42:31 They're not able to continue the important work that they are doing. They may lose their job. Like really, truly, people can lose their job. because they were not able to secure enough funding to support themselves and their labs. So these are really, really important meetings, and those have been canceled for both the NSF and the NIH for at least the last couple of weeks. And as of yesterday, I saw Dr. Megan Rie said that her, or maybe not her, but that study sections were canceled yesterday that were due to happen today.

Starting point is 01:43:02 So there had been some communication around perhaps the freeze of those activities ending on February 1st today that we're recording at February 3rd, and those study sections for today were canceled. On the other hand, NSS, which is obviously a separate organization, has informally, I've heard, decided that they're going to resume from study sections, although they haven't resumed yet. And if I could add, just to be totally clear with your listeners, these are incredibly important organizations for discovery of new medical breakthroughs and for pushing science forward. For the NIH, for example, the NIH is a big part of the reason we have MRNA vaccines now.

Starting point is 01:43:43 They were the ones helping to promote that research for decades before we were able to turn them into vaccines. And it's because of a lot of what they did that were able to do that. When we're looking for new breakthroughs and we're looking for something where a patient comes to us and they're like, isn't there anything? We've tried everything. Isn't there anything that we could at least try or some trial that we could be involved in? that's where we find these things. These are the things that we're talking about, these really

Starting point is 01:44:09 important healthcare infrastructure that we're discussing. Yeah, and, you know, between NIH and National Science Foundation and, you know, Department of Energy is having a similar thing to this, because Department of Energy funds all, like, high energy physics research, so all of your sort of like particle accelerator or stuff like that. It's not just sort of like the national labs, for example, that they get funding from these places, although, you know, national labs are like, you know, you get your funding from grants like everyone else. But, you know, I mean, this is, this is all the way down to the level of like undergrads in college chemistry labs. Like, they're, they are getting paid out of these grants from National Science Foundation

Starting point is 01:44:48 from the National Institutes for Health. Like, all of these, all of these institutions pay out everything. And it's like, this is the basis of how all science, almost all science, like, there's some private sector stuff. But the thing is, like the giant, private, like Bell Labs, right? Like your old school giant private sector, here's our giant R&D thing. Like that's all kind of gone. So, you know, like the only people who are getting funded by this

Starting point is 01:45:13 are like weird startup guys. And it's like, okay, look, look, look what they've invented in the last like 15 years. It's like cryptocurrency NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again. Theranos. Don't forget. Yeah, Theranos, the metaverse,

Starting point is 01:45:29 Juicero, like, they're doing great. Ducero. And people will be like, oh, they Betty AI, it's like, no. National labs were using those AI algorithms like a decade and a half ago. It's like, yeah, the generative AI. Okay. We're not here to get it to me complaining about generative AI. Go, go, go listen to Edgitron's entire show. Like, yeah. I mean, I think the bottom line of what you're trying to communicate here is that a lot of scientific and medical breakthroughs have come from labs and from researchers who have been funded by the NSF and the NIH. we'll just say as an academic, these are certainly the kind of premier funding opportunities that we have. Like it also was really critical in the careers of researchers to be able to show that their work is worthy of this kind of funding. And that's part of why I would say people's jobs,

Starting point is 01:46:21 yes, the people we pay off of our grants, but also people like me, our job can be really dependent on whether we get this funding or not. And it's a generational thing too, because the students also need this funding. And so people, people who are undergrads, particularly people who are like doctoral students, like their research, right? Like the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school, like getting PhD so they can become scientists, that's all also like funded by these grants. And if that stuff goes away, like it's not just that you're obliterating this generation of science. Like you're kneecapping the next like three generations of scientists. Right. Because each one of down the line suddenly doesn't have the research experience that they're supposed to have.

Starting point is 01:47:00 Exactly. Yeah. Right. And also who would want to go in? into science if it's going to be like if there's just going to be like some random person who goes into the White House and says never mind we're not doing that anymore who wants to be exposed to those kinds of wins a lot of the smartest doctors and scientists I know they tend to be risk-averse people I mean there's a lot of people the CDC that could try to maybe sue for you know for not being able to use the terms that they want to use and study the things they want to study and They might even, I don't know, maybe they could win. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:47:34 You talk to a lawyer about that. It seems unlikely because they're not private sector. But to them, they're not going to because they're living paycheck to paycheck to some of these people that are the lower levels. People that aren't making a ton of money. They have livelihoods that they're trying to maintain. They're not going to try and rock the boat when it comes to these things. It's putting them in a really tenuous position already. They're already worried about their next grant or their next, however, they're going to fund their labs.

Starting point is 01:48:01 Yeah, and I just want to highlight that postdocs, I think, are particularly vulnerable because they are often, like, the NSF-free has actually demonstrated this very well. They aren't, as far as said, like, they're definitely often moving pay-to-pay-pack. And what the NSF-free did was that it made it so folks could not get their next paycheck. Because we were, this was happening at the end of the month, right? So it was delaying people getting their next paycheck. And in particular, I'm talking about postdoc. Yes, it can affect graduate students as well.

Starting point is 01:48:30 but a lot of postdoc funding, like one of the grants that I have actually, we work directly with postdoctoral and some pre-doctoral, but many postdoctoral training programs that fund postdoc. And to the extent that any of those grants are put on hold, that is threatening the income of people who really don't have buffer who cannot afford to not get paid. And also, you know, and this is another aspect of this too. I really doubt they understand this. but you know there's also a lot of postdocs who are not from the u.s right there who are you international students who are you know coming in from other countries and those people if you

Starting point is 01:49:11 suddenly don't have a grant you don't have a job and that is really really bad for your immigration status like that that is enough to get you kicked out of the u.s and this is the thing that's constantly leveraged in in sort of labor organizing right or like one of the threats that universities will make usually they do it implicitly sometimes they'll just go out and say it very legally will be like okay if if you this post doc or like you this grad student like tries to like join this union like your your legal status in the US is going to be compromised but that's but that's another sort of risk from this is like those people's ability to stay in the US and not get deported basically exactly yeah exactly

Starting point is 01:49:54 and then then we talk about bringing in you know I know there's a lot of the internal debate right now between the Republican Party on, you know, bringing in people to work, these jobs and bringing in these minds. But this is a clear example of where the United States has excelled in the past. We've been able to bring in great minds from all over the world to help us work on research and to help us come to work in these labs. I mean, you go to, like, UCSAF and Stanford and you see these people working these labs on important stuff. And that's another, like, that's something we're going to lose. And I hope we don't lose it permanently. I hope it's not

Starting point is 01:50:30 something like you say, well, last generations worth of damage, but it's hard to see how it won't at this point. Yeah, I was just looking up, I 100% agree, and to your point about how much of the science and even other amazing things that are done in this country are done by immigrants,

Starting point is 01:50:47 I think it's over, just over a third of Nobel laureates from the United States have been immigrants to the United States. You know, and it's sort of a nationalist thing, right? But like, for 99% of the time for better like the US has been very

Starting point is 01:51:02 very good at absorbing other country scientists when you know this like we we got to you know I okay so like it's hard to take too much credit for it because we also took a bunch of scientists from the Nazis like from the actual Nazis but we also like a bunch of very famous US scientists like were in the US because

Starting point is 01:51:18 they were fleeing the rise of the Nazis and you know like we are looking at a situation where we are going to be the opposite of this we're like our scientists are going to be fleeing everywhere else because our government is being run by these people. Yeah. And I wanted to highlight,

Starting point is 01:51:33 I think that we're all really great points about the effect of not getting the funding and who it trickles down to. But I also wanted to highlight that there's two different kind of ways that the funding can be withheld. The one is just that review process and not actually reviewing grants, right? So like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall. Who knows if when that will get discussed? There are people in that kind of position where they make. maybe we're dependent on or really hoping to get funding this around,

Starting point is 01:52:01 and now they don't know if or when that proposal will get reviewed. Of course, you never know if you're going to get funded, but to not even have a chance at review is an unanticipated barrier. Then on the other side, there's people who have been funded and are in the position that I'm in, which is not knowing whether I'm going to receive the next payment, because the NIH, so I have a five-year grant, and we are currently in year three.

Starting point is 01:52:28 Every year you have to submit a status update on your project, and then they determine, based on lots of different things, including what budget they are given from Congress, how much of the funds that they had originally projected, they'll be able to give to you. And there are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who are doing work that's related to health disparities, health equity, women's health, LGBTQ health, et cetera,

Starting point is 01:52:53 who now do not know if our work, falls under quote-unquote DEI or DEIA or gender ideology or all these vague terms that the administration is using. And so we actually don't know whether, like for me, I don't know if I'm going to get my next set of funds in July. So I was in the process of interviewing to hire someone to join my lab. And I genuinely don't know whether I should hire someone at knowing that I may lose funds in, you know, five months. Or do I just try to make do without? And then that's a job that no one gets. And if you play that out over the 300,000 people who are funded in various ways by the NIH, you start to understand the scope of damage that being done here.

Starting point is 01:53:35 Can you tell people what your current grant is in? Because I think that is pertinent to this conversation. Yes, yes. Yes, you're right. Okay. So my grant is called ending sexual harassment, teaching of principal investigators as a cute acronym E stop. So our goal is to try to help people intervene when there is sexual harassment with the ultimate goal decreasing the amount of sexual harassment that's happening in biomedical research. Oh, they don't want you do with that. Like, oh, no. Right, because one of the great, terrible ironies of this whole thing is that their argument is that they're doing a lot of this to protect women.

Starting point is 01:54:20 the sanctity of women or whatever. This is, you know, I am hopeful that I am wrong for you. I hope that this is not the case, but I could see them very easily saying that this somehow fits under woke ideology. And even though it's something clearly that is designed to help, not just women, but a lot of women could benefit from this, you know? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:54:45 Yeah. And to your point, like everyone is at risk or experiencing sexual harassment. It's just that the majority of folks who experience it are women or sexual and gender minorities. And so, yeah, I've really obviously, as you can imagine, been thinking a lot about how they are interpreting these words that they're using and whether sexual harassment, which, by the way, is a form of discrimination. Like, is that DEI is stopping discrimination? Probably. Who knows? Well, you know, quickly, if I may, I can go over this.

Starting point is 01:55:17 there was this email that was dispersed from the CDC about terms that were no longer going to be used that were going to be scrubbed from the CDC's databases. And they include words like gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, non-binary. They use both just different. Yeah, one with a hyphen and one without the hyphen. Assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male or biologically female. So anything that terms like that, they're going to scrub.

Starting point is 01:55:47 Wait, let me, can I just clarify that? Because actually, it's even worse, I think, than what you just described, because what they actually said in that email, as I understand it, is that there's all these researchers who work at the CDC. So they said, if you have submitted a manuscript for publication to any scientific or medical journal that has any of these words in it, you must retract that manuscript. So it's even much, much broader than just what's on the CDC's website. It's any work that any work that any. anyone employed by the CDC has done, any research, I just say that they've done, that they're in the process of publishing. They have been asked to rescind that work so that they can remove these god-awful words that are actually words that are used routinely in science, but they can no longer have them in their manuscripts. And how nonsensical would their manuscript be without these words? I mean, it's, yeah, it's terrible. The other thing that blows my mind about this is how incredibly inefficient. and maybe that's the point, is how ridiculous it's going to be, who's going to be doing this?

Starting point is 01:56:52 Who's going to be looking over this? To my knowledge, there's only been one political appointee in regards to this. And that's at the CDC. It's Susan Moneras is the acting director there at the CDC. And it's all going to go through that one person. Every study is going to go through that one person. It makes no sense. I don't even understand how it's going to be enforced.

Starting point is 01:57:13 It's a ridiculous thing. I'm sure they're going to try to make some examples out of people, but how would they even enforce this? We're going to find out with your grant, I guess. Yeah. I think the bleak thing about specifically the fact that it's these study retractions,

Starting point is 01:57:28 and it's just, you know, this attempt to ban anyone from doing any research, right? Is that like the problem for them with medical research about trans people is that everyone who's doing this who isn't a like, unbelievably rabid anti-trans person from the beginning,

Starting point is 01:57:42 you know, looks at everything that they want to do to trans people and goes, this is going to kill unbelievable numbers of us. And I think part of what they're doing here is they're trying to, before any of this stuff would come out, they're trying to stop scientific apparatus from revealing the fact that they are trying to wipe us out. And that's an unbelievably bleak thing to live through, I guess. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 01:58:15 I mean, I honestly, I wish I could say something more. It's really terrible. I will say this like genuinely, because it never happens. Obviously the best, the best thing you can do for trans people is like,

Starting point is 01:58:27 something that involves the fall of the regime. Like, the second best thing is like, hire us because no one does it and we can't, no one can get jobs. Right. And,

Starting point is 01:58:36 but like, the third minimum thing after like money or like housing is like, check in on the trans people in your life because nobody, actually ever does it and it means a lot and it's not going to like stop the wrath of the state but like I don't know all people feel less alone this this has been to be a trans public service announcement is now over I think that's great advice in in other friend of the show Margaret Kiljoy and she also

Starting point is 01:59:02 said you know when you hire people you hire trans people put them front of house make it visible and then when you go and you frequent these places let them know that's part of why you do it. I like that you guys are doing this. I'm here to support that. I mean, because we're talking about money. We're talking about people's livelihoods are at stake. And we have to show that these are people that are not only employable, but could benefit your business. Yeah, honestly, I don't know what to say about it either, aside from everything that they're doing is atrocious. It is a scientific. It is inhumane. It will, it will harm people. People are going to die.

Starting point is 01:59:44 People probably have already died. If you're trans and you're listening to this fucking, don't die, think about how good it's going to be to get a piss on these people's graves in like eight years. It's going to rule. But it is. It is. I agree. It is.

Starting point is 02:00:01 And dad, to Argabon's point, it is dumb on every metric. I can't think of a single metric and that these actions are not hurtful and going to harm us in the long run. To close this out, this is something that I think is very important because no one in the U.S. apparently seems to understand this at all. How does the grant process actually work and what is it? Because, you know, this process is the difference between you, like, having clean water to drink and, like, that study that was going to determine if your water is clean or not happening. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, first thing I will say is that the word grant applies to lots and lots of different opportunities.

Starting point is 02:00:50 and there are grants as small as like $1,000 or $5,000 and grants as large as multimillion dollars. And the processes actually are, I mean, they're analogous, but they can be pretty different. Because as you can imagine for a smaller grant, the amount of work that you have to do to earn that grant generally is a little bit less. But I can speak in the most detail to the NIH review process and specifically to these grants that they call R-O-1. These are like kind of their fanciest grants that go to individual researchers with their team, but it's led by an individual researcher often. And the way this works is, first of all, I want folks to understand.

Starting point is 02:01:25 It takes a year from the time that you apply until the time that you get money can take up to a full calendar year. And so you put in an immense amount of effort. So I'll use myself as an example. I apply for a grant in October. Huge amount of effort. I don't know how many hours leading up to that grant submission. And then I just sit and wait for months, months and months before there's even a study section,

Starting point is 02:01:52 if study section happens. And then after that, it's still a couple more months before I might get information. It depends. Of course, there's some variability there. But it's a long, long process is what I'm trying to say. And the way the process starts is often you will send what's called the letter of interest to the agency that you're applying to. So I've you said earlier, it's the National Institutes of Health.

Starting point is 02:02:13 So every institute has its own notice of funding opportunities or no-fos that are like, here's what we're actually asking people to submit for at this point in time. And then people will send a letter of interest to the program officer. Each grant mechanism will have its own program officer, and you will send a letter of interest. Maybe you get some feedback. And then you move forward to the actual grant itself. And I just want to say that it is more work than probably anything else I've ever done, except maybe my dissertation.

Starting point is 02:02:43 And so it's a huge amount of work. The R1 includes, for example, a one-page-specific aims page, which is you have the entirety of the study somehow magically summarized in one page with your three aims. And if that doesn't get the reviewers' attention, and if they don't think it's compelling and interesting and important, that may be the end. You may have done all the rest of the work, and they may only read that.

Starting point is 02:03:06 Yeah. And then you have a 12-page – these are single-space pages. Single-space pages, half-inch margin, 12-page research strategy. I don't know how many thousand words, thousands of words on it. I'm just telling you 12 single-space pages is a lot of text about your research. And it's like one of these puzzles where it has to be exactly right, and you have these figures and you have to get them exactly the right size and the exact right place on the page with the legend and everything

Starting point is 02:03:33 so that it all magically fits in these small pages. Because if you don't do it right, they will literally reject your grant for formatting problem. And so you may have spent months writing this grant and because you had the wrong size or the wrong margins, that they can literally choose not to even read it. And then you're then having to

Starting point is 02:03:52 wait until either six months later, if there's another opportunity, or sometimes a full year later before you can try again. Also, it's worth noting, you also have to like do a bunch of science. Like if it was just, you must do 12, you must write 12 pages of stuff and format it, it would probably be okay.

Starting point is 02:04:07 But like you also have to do science. Like, both for it and also while you're doing it? It's incredibly hard to get these. When someone gets a grant, we all celebrate it for them because we're all so excited because we know it's not easy. What's funny about that is the Republicans make it seem like all you have to do is put into a couple terms like, you know, non-binary and you automatically get a grant. They have like no idea how like challenging it is.

Starting point is 02:04:34 No, it's like the only thing that could even potentially work like that is to say whatever you're doing is cancer research. Like that's the actual thing, right? Like sometimes you could like defraud the DOD by telling them like whatever research you're doing is camouflage. But like it's not. It's even that is like it like one percent more likely that your endless hours of work. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:04:57 I wish I could just write woke ideology on the future 12 pages and they're like get a great but yeah. But yeah, to your point you have to, part of what's in those 12 pages is what is the work that you've done that builds up to the work that you're proposing to do. And that's the whole section called preliminary studies. And what's in there varies depending on like what kind of research you're doing. If you're doing animal research, it might be various animal models that you've tested different things on that demonstrate, for example, that you are able to work with the specific animal model that you're proposing to you in this study and that you have the specific methodological skills for whichever

Starting point is 02:05:31 type of, say, cellular analysis or whatever it is that you're doing, that you have those skills that you have the equipment, that you're able to actually carry out that research. Because part of what they're evaluating is, can the person who's proposing to do this work actually do the work? Last thing they want to do is give you millions of dollars and have you fall flat on your face because you don't have the skills that are needed. So you have these pages, part of those full pages, like often a page, two, three pages about what you have done to prepare for the work that you're proposing.

Starting point is 02:05:59 And a lot of times, to your point, that work may or may not be funded. You may have to, if you're like at an academic institution, you might be using your startup funds. You might be trying to get smaller foundation grants or something to be able to do that work so that you can prove to the funding agency that you're able to do it. And then in addition to this whole page thing, there are a bunch of additional documents that are required. Like there's currently this will probably change. But currently there's like a diversity plan. There is a, how are you going to treat participants who are women and minorities? There's like an age document.

Starting point is 02:06:32 There's a page about resources and facilities. There's all these additional documents, which, again, all have the own specific formatting requirements. There's a project narrative, which is shorter and then a project summary, which is longer. I think I could have those backwards. Anyway, the way, all these additional pages, it's not just the specific aims and just the research strategy. It's all of this plus the budget and the budget justification.

Starting point is 02:06:51 And, like, you could just go on. But I think you start to understand that there are many, many files that go into a single grant application and it represents often months of work for an individual. Joel and their collaborators. And if you have, for example, another institution you're collaborating with, they all have to do a bunch of this paperwork as well, and there's a contract between the two. And all of this is done just to have a chance at getting funded. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:07:16 And, you know, the disruptions to the funding system, the disruptions to the studies, the disruption to just the payout means that, like, all of this work that you're doing, you know, you have no idea whether, whether, like, again, all of this, in some cases, unpaid labor that you have been doing for months and months and months, like, could just not happen. Yeah. And also, like, it's worth noting to, like, you also have to, like, when you're figuring out what you're going to be doing next, like, working out whether or not your grant

Starting point is 02:07:44 even has a chance of getting approved, like, that is something that is a long-term decision that determines, like, what, like, you know, what colleges you go to, like, what institutions you end up at, like, all of that kind of stuff. And, like, that thing being, all the stuff being up in the air. And for people who run lab, trying to figure out, like, can you, so I don't personally work with graduate students, but a lot of people do. So can you afford to bring in and sponsor another support another graduate student? Can you afford to support another postdoc? These are all long-term decisions. These aren't just like, okay, I'm going to hire some for two

Starting point is 02:08:17 months until I find out the next thing. It's like you want to commit to people, especially trainees. So it makes it very difficult for people who run labs to make those decisions to bring people in because we don't want to let people down. And so I think the kind of intuitive and natural consequences that people will bring in fewer people because that's less risky than bringing in more people and then having to either cut their funding or let them go or whatever later on

Starting point is 02:08:46 when you don't get the resources that you need. And I want to just point out that institutions here have a major role to play. And not all institutions, and by that I mean higher education institutions and not all of them are equally resourced. obviously. But we all know that there are quite a few in this country that have massive endowment. And so what are, what is the plan there? And what is the support for the folks at their institutions? And I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to over simplify what is in fact a very

Starting point is 02:09:14 challenging issue. But it would be nice. It would be fantastic if some of these institutions came out and said, we understand that this is a very challenging time. We remain committed to supporting the work of our faculty, our graduate students, our postdoc, et cetera. And And we will fund anyone whose funding is withdrawn or withheld, let's just say. It would be nice if some of these very important, prestigious academic institutions showed maybe at least the same backbone as Costco. Yeah. It's all I ask.

Starting point is 02:09:46 Okay, too, I want to highlight two. It's very early in this game. But Brown did come out, I think it was yesterday or sometime over the weekend, stating clearly that they remain committed to their values. of academic freedom, right? So that's the way to say it, right? Like, we support our staff and employees and students, faculty, doing whatever work they think is important.

Starting point is 02:10:11 I think that that was their roundabout way of saying, we're not abandoning the principles of DEI. But who knows? But that's what they said. But Princeton actually put out their annual report on DEI at Princeton. And I forget the exact wording and I don't have it in front of me, but their president talked about how important it is to support people from different backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting point is 02:10:34 So that's two that are trying to do something. Yeah. I remain hopeful. I remain hopeful. Yeah. Also, I got to put in my word of Costco hate here, which is they're currently screwing over their unions. So I thought they resolved it.

Starting point is 02:10:46 I thought they actually gave them the, no, they didn't. They didn't the pay increase? Yeah, it's not resolved yet. I thought the hot dog was still 150, though. So that's important for me. read Jamie Loftus's book Raw Dog I'm a doctor

Starting point is 02:10:59 I can't do that by law yeah but even the NFL came out today and said that they're not going to end their DEI programs any size too NFL known for being

Starting point is 02:11:10 I know right that is a thing though right if you want to understand why the NFL is doing that like look at who the current heads of the NFL Players Association are and like who their past head for the last like decade have been

Starting point is 02:11:23 and that will give you an indication of like why it's like that. So. Yeah, Mia follows football pretty closely. I can tell. Unfortunately, it becomes football.

Starting point is 02:11:33 Also, I kind of owe the NFL players association because they did, they did put out a statement at support of our unionization drive. So, yeah, it was very sweet.

Starting point is 02:11:44 That's nice. Well, I do want to say one more thing about the grant process, which is that often people are submitting the same grant over and over and over. because the funding rates are so low. And so often they will submit it the first time, get feedback,

Starting point is 02:12:02 make changes, re-submit later. And again, as I pointed out, it's not like this is a rolling submission process where any day of the week you can submit. I think for most mechanism, again, there's going to be some variability from institute to institute, but it's at most twice a year. So like if they're, if they reject it,

Starting point is 02:12:19 hopefully they give you feedback. By the way, sometimes you don't even get feedback. Because if you weren't one of the top grant, applications you don't even get discussed, so you may not get feedback. But let's say you get feedback, then you try again, and then maybe you try again, and then maybe you try again. So sometimes it can take many cycles of this entire terrible process before you get funded, one. And to Kavis' point about efficiency or so you think about it, that way, it's an extremely inefficient system. But the point I just wanted to make is that people work really, really hard

Starting point is 02:12:50 to get these grants. And for some of the folks right now who are kind of, in limbo waiting for study section to review, this might be their third or fourth submission of something. And they were really hoping this was going to be the chance, because at some point, you can't keep pursuing, unless you have some other independent income, like often at some point, you cannot keep pursuing a specific line of research. So you have to think about what breakthrough is being put on hold or will never be identified because of all of this, because someone might have been waiting. And maybe they can't wait for however long it takes. to resolve this freeze, and maybe they end up switching their career path into something completely

Starting point is 02:13:29 different. And I'll just say, like, even on a smaller scale, I had a grant that a colleague and I submitted several years back that got funded. That was a very competitive grant. It was not a federal grant. It was a foundation. Very competitive. And we were delighted. We were, I mean, just thrilled to get funded. And then we could not in the end take the grant. We did not do the work of the grant because he ended up not being able to find an appointment that was going to work for him in academia, and so he went to industry. And so that work never got them. To this day, that work has not been done. Yeah. I would love for it to be done. But those are the, those are the types of consequences that we're talking about when we're looking at, like, what's happening with these funds and the delay

Starting point is 02:14:07 of distributing the funds and the chances that funds will be revoked from people. They really changed the course of not just individual lives, but of science. Yeah. And I mean, like, the most visual example I could think about this was I knew some people who wanted to work in a Coronavirus lab in 2019 and couldn't do it because they didn't, their PI didn't have funding for a coronavirus thing. It's like, oh, it would have been useful if they, if they'd gotten that grant. So I think this is a decent enough place to wrap up. I do have one thing that I want to plug, which is something you were talking about earlier, which is putting, which is these institutions like coming out and backing their scientists, right? And that's, that's a thing that you can do.

Starting point is 02:14:48 you can put pressure on these institutions to do the right thing. And so it might be over by now, but literally as we were recording this, there was a protest going on at NYU's hospital. Yeah, Langell. Because they've cut off care to trans youth. They cut off gender affirming care. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:15:08 And so, you know, you can do this. The people who actually run these systems and, you know, and the entire federal government, right? The people running the federal government are relying on everyone just sort of, sitting there being shocked, not knowing what to do and doing nothing. And you know, you can go show up to the administrators, the offices of the administrators of these places, and you can confront them and you can be like, okay, you're either right here right now, you're going to be a coward

Starting point is 02:15:32 and you're going to go along with this or you're going to go back your own people. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that you can do right now. And I just want to add, we didn't talk about this earlier, but when we talked about the CDC and everything that's been removed, one thing that's relevant to that is that there's an office for research on women's health. It's the only resource dedicated to women's health in the entire National Institutes of Health. We do have a National Institute of Children's Health. We do not have a National Institute of Women's Health. We have an office for research on women's health.

Starting point is 02:15:58 Great. We love the ESCOFRA. It gets worse. It gets worse. So the National Academy, the sciences engineering and medicine, which is, like, I would say, one of the most prestigious kind of academic organizations that existed, a review of funding for women's health research at the NIH. and they put out a report in December, it's pretty scathing if you read it.

Starting point is 02:16:19 And they shared that from 2013 to 2023, research for women's health was like 8.8% of the entire NIH budget. As a reminder, women are half of the population. And just as a reminder, and they called for almost $16 billion of additional funding to go to women's health research in the coming five years and the creation of an Institute for Women's Health. So what happened last week with almost everything on the website for the Office of Research for Women's Health was deleted. Jesus Christ. It's gone.

Starting point is 02:16:51 So their funding and opportunities page is gone. Their bios about their staff are gone. Their updates on advances in medicine for women over the last 25 years gone. Their pages on maternal morbidity and mortality gone. The importance of including women and minorities and clinical trial gone. Their page on health equity. Gone. You get the picture.

Starting point is 02:17:09 So all of that, except for just a very bare minimum. landing page and a link to the office of, I forget the official in the office, but that's an office that works on autoimmune diseases. Like, everything else is gone. And so I did create a script, if anybody wants to call their member of Congress. I have a script for that and the CDC pages that people can use in terms of actions. That's something I think that is about as real as it gets for us at this point. And I think that the more we are emphatic in our messaging, that none of this is okay, that we demand to have these resources back online, and that we demand to continue funding research on health disparities for all the different group affected. I think the better

Starting point is 02:17:53 the chance is that that actually happens. So that's out there if anybody wants that. Yeah, well, we'll put links to that in the description. Also, I'm going to put it a personal plug to call your congressperson to yell at them about all of the anti-trans stuff because they're, they are legitimately in a flux point right now where the party is flipping back and forward between just being like, yeah, whatever, we'll pass a defense bill that, like, ban trans people from the military and we're going to stop things from happening. And so this is the thing that can go either way and getting yelled at by their constituents legitimately does help with this. So, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, do that, do that too while you're calling with the CDC,

Starting point is 02:18:27 multiple things, different calls, even. Yeah, you probably just want to put them on speed dial and make it, you know, on your drive. If you go into work, maybe every day on the drive, you're just calling, Hi, here's the issue of the day because there is no shortage of issues that we need to be communicating about. Yep, yep, yeah. So speaking of things in bios, where can people find you to for stuff that you want to promote what you do, et cetera, et cetera? I mean, I'm on all the things, even the terrible thing, which is most of them are terrible, but I'm on TikTok. If you just put my first name, usually all come up. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, I know, I know.

Starting point is 02:19:04 And Blue Sky. and I'm not the only one I don't really do is Facebook. You're too cool for that. Oh, I have a substack. That's where the script is on my sub-sac. Now, I'm not too cool for Facebook. I'm just too lazy for Facebook. I mean, listen, if you're on these things, you're not too cool for anything.

Starting point is 02:19:23 That's the really cool kids are on any of these things. You can find me on Blue Sky at Kave, K-A-V-E-H-M-D. And more importantly, you can listen. to my podcast, The House of Pod. It's a relatively fun, informal look at medicine. We tried to make healthcare more relatable. You know, sometimes we'll take an aim at medical quackery or grifts and that sort of thing. I think your listeners will like it.

Starting point is 02:19:50 Yeah. Our guests range from doctors like Peter Hotez or Argyvon here to musicians like Portugal, The Man, or a lot of the Cool Zone family that you all know and love, Prop and Robert. And hopefully Mia soon. So find it anywhere you get your podcast, The House of Pod. Yeah. And you can find all of the, we've talked about like a staggering number of the other shows that we do in this one. But yeah, you can find our other shows where there are podcasts.

Starting point is 02:20:24 And, yeah, I'm so bad at plugging these things. You think it's my living, but no, can't do it. Zero out of ten. Absolutely failure. But yeah. thank you two both for coming on. And I hope you get your grant argument because fuck that like, Jesus Christ. Thank you.

Starting point is 02:20:45 Well, if I don't get my funding renewed this summer, I will let you know. Maybe we can talk about it. Yeah, yeah. I'm down. I'll start a podcast. Yeah, this is a big happen here. Go harass your legislatures, your local administrators for universities. your local police department, I make sure they do not bad stuff and do good things.

Starting point is 02:21:11 Hi, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen here. Today, it's me, James, and I'm joined by Nevdon Jamgothian. We're here to talk about Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the increasingly genocidal rhetoric from Azerbaijan. But I want to start off, Nevdon. We're talking about COP 2024, I guess. Can you explain? I think people will be somewhat familiar with these series of climate conferences, but this one was held in Azerbaijan, right? And can you explain a little bit about, you've specialized in like these greenwashing, sports washing, various other sort of forms of laundering legitimacy, right? I'd love for you to start off there and explain how this particular conference was used

Starting point is 02:22:14 as a means of laundering legitimacy for what is a, like a genocidal project. COP 29, which was just concluded on Azerbaijan, is the deadly serious and vital conversation about climate in the United Nations, which we absolutely need to have. But from the beginning, it was a clown show. And the way Azerbaijan, a petro dictatorship, was able to procure this for themselves, was at COP 28, which, was held in Dubai, another questionable location for the climate conference, where they had a pavilion, as reported by political EU, where they had a giant advertisement that said, Karabakh is the first place to achieve net zero emissions in Azerbaijan. And that was one part of them getting the bid for COP 29. And the way Azerbaijan was able to achieve net zero,

Starting point is 02:23:18 emissions in this particular location was they committed a genocide against all the people. If there's no people, there's no climate emissions. And that's probably not even true, that it's a net zero emissions because they've engaged in so much of the eradication of any trace of Armenians in this place that Armenians has been living for at least 2,500 years. Destruction of buildings, of course, is one of the huge, source of pollution. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:23:51 And they've raised something like four cemeteries, thousands of the monuments, four churches have been demolished. Entire neighborhoods have been raised. Historical neighborhoods. So it's probably not even net zero. But that was their advertising claim to get the bid. COP 29 was originally supposed to be in Europe,

Starting point is 02:24:11 but Russia was vetoing every European bid. And Armenia, who Azerbaijan is, currently occupying 215 kilometers of Armenian territory was blocking Azerbaijan, till Azerbaijan offered to give up 32 Armenian hostages. So we've got a claim of Shenzai. There we've got a gangster hostage situation, which they did. They gave up 32 members of the Armenian military, and they made Armenia give up two Azerbaijani's that were held by Armenia because they had gone into Armenia and killed.

Starting point is 02:24:48 a local security guard trying to steal his car. They probably were lost and they killed this guy and they were trying to escape, but then just one of them had been sent to life imprisonment. But that's what Armenia gave up in exchange. To allow this climate conference to happen? That's correct. So let's zoom back from this climate conference, right? Like in this, I think it's a really interesting place to start. This is like the site of our genocide is a net zero area. And it's a very bleak vision of the sort of greenwashing future. Let's expand a little bit of the history of the conflict between these two countries and also perhaps more broadly, I think people will probably be familiar with the Armenian genocide if they've listened to this show,

Starting point is 02:25:31 but of Armenian people as a subject of discrimination and hatred for centuries, right? Well, you know, I mean, Armenians are one of the ancient people of that area, Greeks, Jews, Persians, They're one of the people that have kind of stuck it out for a long time in that neighborhood. The Turkic people are more recent visitors to the neighborhood, and there's nothing wrong with migration of people. But there's something about populations that have been there for a long time that really strikes a nerve, if we want to be very mild about it, with the Turkic people, Turkey and Azerbaijan, in the sense that they've been engaged in a policy of disqualify. destroying any remnants of Armenians, including physical people. For at least in the 1880s, they've been making them second-class citizens since they came in in the Ottoman Empire. There's this myth of a multicultural society, which is interesting.

Starting point is 02:26:32 Azerbaijan is also trying to promote. But it really was a second-class situation where the minorities in the Ottoman Empire had a lot of extra taxes and duties. and persecution than other people in the area. Yeah. So let's talk about this area then, specifically this area, which would be called, depending on who you ask, Artzak or Nogonarabak, right? I think probably it's, I don't know if I haven't looked on Wikipedia,

Starting point is 02:27:03 but what were the more commonly used term for people wanting to look it up, right, in American English. But let's explain why there is a conflict in this area and then what has happened since, I guess, we can go from like the fall of the Soviet Union would be a place to start. Sure. I mean, we talked about earlier. That's the tough thing about talking to Armenians. Like where I would start would be the sixth century in the fall of the kingdom of Aratu. But I guess we don't have that much time. So basically, and I do have to put this in there

Starting point is 02:27:33 because there's this big Azerbaijani narrative that Armenians are effective people. They're effective presence. And I'll deal with that in a little bit. Yeah. But, you know, it's just been recorded by Greek. I mean, I don't know why I should have to prove our existence, but we do. Yeah. So anyway, it's recorded history of that. It's where the Armenian alphabet was invented.

Starting point is 02:27:54 These people have been indigenous to the region for thousands of years. They've got a deep connection with the land. But all the Soviet Union, fast forward. There it had been under the territory of the Azerbaijani SSR, as an autonomous Oblast, as they called it. It had been given to the Azerbaijan. SSR because of Stalin, who was the commissioner of minorities. Kadalin has this big project to divide the people, the minorities in the Soviet Union to fight each other, which is ramped up in the 1960s when the Soviets start inventing fake history to pit people against each other,

Starting point is 02:28:28 which is wild. But the Soviet Union is crumbling. The people of Artsakh, which is the Armenian indigenous name, Nagorno-Karabah is generally acceptable as well. That would be the colonial name or the name that the Azeris call the region. They are fed up with not being able to learn their language because of Azerbaijan. They're fed up with not being able to have any of the rights as Soviet citizens because the father of the current dictator of Azerbaijan was ruling Azerbaijan since 1969. And his policy was to try to get as many Armenians to move out of the region as possible.

Starting point is 02:29:08 So they're fed up with this and they're like, okay, enough. They legally secede from the Soviet Union. It's allowed in the Constitution, which, of course, infuriates the Azerbaijani SSR. So there's a bunch of conflicts. There's some pogroms that happen against Armenians in cities of Baku and Sungate, and at which point they secede fully from the Soviet Union, one of the first areas to do so. In 1991, they actually left the Soviet Union before Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan with the Soviet Union's troops invade.

Starting point is 02:29:42 There's this bloody mess. It's called Operation Ring, where they're killing Armenians in the area. There's a war that erupts when everybody secedes. Armenians in Artsakh get the upper hand due to they really cared about it. And also probably because of racism within the Soviet Union, where they trained Armenians a little bit better than they did Azaris. It's a humiliating defeat for Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is pushed back.

Starting point is 02:30:11 Armenian sees about 9% of Azerbaijani territory beyond Artsakh. And that was a stasis until 2020. Yeah. Really. Yeah, sort of 30 years of. Right. But it was always disputed, right? This area was that Azerbaijan continued to lay claim to the Artsakh region.

Starting point is 02:30:29 Is that correct? For some reason, it was never recognized by the UN as being a real country, similar to some other places. Why that is is confusing to me because they did leave earlier than anybody else. It is an ethnic minority that chose to leave the area, but they weren't considered legitimate by the UN, by Azerbaijan. And secondarily, we have this brutal dictatorship that's held together by ethnic hatred. And really, I cannot overstate how terrible the Aleyev regime is in as a

Starting point is 02:31:07 Azerbaijan, but, you know, Armenian forces committed at least one war crime that I'm aware of during that time in a place called Kuljali, where they killed 180 to 600 Azeri civilians. And they've used this event, and I think one other, to really hold their country together in this pit of brothing broth of hatred. So not until 2020, does that really coalesce? they become strong as a petro state to take back large portions of the country. Yeah. Talking of taking back, I'm going to have to take back 30 seconds to everyone's time for an advertising break here.

Starting point is 02:31:45 So let's do that and we'll come right back. All right, we're back. One thing I think that it might be illustrative to hear is that like in the first ATSAq War, Turkish, I guess, irregulars or mercenaries or what you want to call them, people associated with the gray wolves fought on the side of us. Sub-Bajan, right? And keen history understanders will know that there is some history of anti-Armenian sentiment among the grey wolves and then indeed in Turkey as a country. So perhaps this is a good point to talk about the international involvement here because

Starting point is 02:32:29 I think it's very misleading to do this as we're seeing in Syria right now. People want to divide the world into blocks, right? with like this sort of cold war narrative that we have of Russian interests and U.S. interests. And I think this is an excellent example of why that is not necessarily a great way to perceive the world. So can you explain the international involvement in ATSakh and in this ongoing conflict, which will get to it beginning again in 2020, I think, in a second? In addition to Turkish forces being used in that 2020 war, which I guess we'll have to get into a little bit,

Starting point is 02:33:03 Their Syrian mercenaries were used as well. They were acuted. They were put on the front lines as kind of candid fodder. They were given something like $100 bonus that they beheaded a civilian, a $200 bonus that they beheaded an Armenian soldier there. But of course, Israel is the primary supplier of Azeri weapons in weaponry, going so far to test some of their drones on manned Armenian outposts early on before the war started. It's fair to say that Azerbaijan could not have been so successful without the aid of their ally, Israel.

Starting point is 02:33:39 Israel has been deeply involved in Azerbaijan for a long time. They use Azerbaijan as a listening post against Iran. Israel stages raids from Azerbaijan on Iran. And that has to do with the ethnic minority on Iran. There's a lot of Azeris down there. Israel gets something like 40% of its oil from Azerbaijan. Right after the Palestinian Genocide. started, Israel awarded two contracts to the state oil company Socar in Azerbaijan that's right

Starting point is 02:34:12 adjacent to Palestinian gas field and the Lebanon oil field to Socar to explore. It cannot be overstated how complicit these two groups are with each other. They really, really need each other in the region. And the United States also like Azerbaijan as well. They see it as a friendly Muslim country, bulwark against Iran as well. Yeah. And I think they also have some Turkish drones. Is that right? The Bayakar drones, absolutely. So let's talk about that 2020 war, because that was a war that relied heavily on these drones, right? It's a major means of destroying Armenian armor and pushing that offensive. So what happened in 2020 along this disputed border? Well, you know, it's called Mountainous Karaba. It's an area that's great defensively if you're fighting in a pre-drown

Starting point is 02:35:03 world. But, you know, as you've discovered with your Kurdish friends, the drones are amazingly destructive against people hiding in caves, which is what the Armenian response had been. Armenians have been a bit lazy. They've been relying on Russian tanks and weaponry, where Azerbaijan's is buying from Israel, they're buying from all, you know, many, many just different sources, which reflects the wealth of Azerbaijan, of course. So in 2020, there's some indication that Aleyaf, the dictator of Azerbaijan, have been planning us for a while. He had this playbook called Operation Azari Smile 2020.

Starting point is 02:35:46 The troops move in. They encounter more resistance than they thought. And they get most of the Armenian held territory of Nagorno-Karoba back. They stopped at the last minute, probably by Russian intervention at this time. The Armenia was a member of the Russian alliance at that time, which they're leaving, just because Russia has failed to live up to its treaty obligations. Anyway, and it left a kind of a skeletal state of Artaq left, which was only supplied by this one road called,

Starting point is 02:36:22 the Lachin corridor. It was only one road from Armenia to supply the 120-some thousand Armenians who lived in Artsakh left, which brings us to 2024. Okay. 23. Yeah. So you have this situation where we now have this massive area that's, I guess, occupied. And a lot of people began leaving at that time, right, through that Lachian corridor.

Starting point is 02:36:51 or like people didn't feel like they could safely remain there? I mean, the indigenous people of Artsakh have this profound relationship with the land and the people. I am an icon painter. I was talking to my priest and he was comparing the people there to the elves and the Lord of the Ring. You know, they whistle to the birds. You know, they just been living with the land for a long time. So there was a drain, but it's not as big as you would have fought just because there's this

Starting point is 02:37:20 intense millennia old connection with the places of Artsakh. So what Azerbaijan did, and this is, I think, unprecedented is they had a fake ecological protest. Oh, wow. That stopped the Lachan corridor from supplying food in medicine to the people of Artsakh. So they starved those people. They denied the medicine. People had miscarriages.

Starting point is 02:37:49 Jesus. As areas were firing at farmers in the field that were trying to collect food. And that went on for nine months. And what stopped it was, other than John claimed it was a group of ecological protesters who were stopping trucks of food coming into Artsakh for any reason, which, you know, is enough of a smokescreen for the Western world to really throw up its hands. Yeah, fascinating. So they literally had a blockade of these protesters?

Starting point is 02:38:17 These protesters blocked it. The Russian troops that were the peacekeepers refused to disperse these protesters. They were these old apprachshnick kind of looking people wearing fur coats. They were identified on social media as actually being members of the Azerian military. And they had these printed signs that said things like protect nature, stop pollution. It's very generic. Wildly generic things. Ostensibly they were against the gold mining operations in Artsakh, which is nuts because

Starting point is 02:38:48 a protest is not allowed in Azerbaijan and B, there had been an actual protest against a real gold mine that was owned by the daughters of the dictator and they were brutally shut down before. So anybody who was paying any kind of attention to this knew that it was fictive, but I think the EU in particular needing enough of a smokescreen not to support these people. EU, of course, is getting its gas through Azerbaijan. Yeah. Because they've said they don't want it from Russia. but Russia is just feeding its gas to Azerbaijan,

Starting point is 02:39:19 and then Azerbaijan is selling its Azerbaijani gas to the EU. So they were just trying to do that. Yeah, we've just created a pass-through and like someone who can live off that rentier income. So let's go to 2023. Okay. What do we see happening in 2023? So the eco-protesters, they kind of run their course,

Starting point is 02:39:42 and then there's a lightning operation. Art Sox attacked. positions overrun. There's this massive exodus of people, people who have to leave their houses immediately. The road is blocked. People are dying on this road on the way out, fighting each other just to leave their houses. In 2020, Azerbaijan has said, sure, you know, Armenians can come back. We're just taking back a territory. You live here. You can do that. But when Armenians did, there's this one case of a 69-year-old farmer who went back to get his possessions. The dairy troops cut off his head.

Starting point is 02:40:20 Jesus. They put it on a dead pig. And they put all those images on social media. They raped and tortured anybody that they could find left behind. And they turned it in memes on telegrams, stickers that were, you know, something like down like 20,000 times in the five days they were being monitored for this. So there was absolutely no question that people could stay behind. Yeah. Zero years.

Starting point is 02:40:47 So there's no Armenians left. And so there's literally been daily ritual that's been gone on for 1,700 years that doesn't go on anymore. And there's a tragedy in that. Yeah. Yeah. It's been lost. Like, and it's hard to quantify the, like, you know, the meaning of that loss. I think especially for folks who aren't familiar with people in their country.

Starting point is 02:41:11 culture and their connection to these things. Talking of quantifying things, I need to look at the amount of time we got here and pivot again to advertisements. And we're back. So what we see in Arts, especially in 2023, is a product of ethnic cleansing, right? Genocidal violence, whatever you wish to phrase it. I mean, ethnic cleansing is not a term that has really a definition in international law, genocide does. It often very much, like in this instance, I'm using them to mean one and the same

Starting point is 02:41:54 thing. It's the removal of people either through killing them or forcing them to leave or starving them. The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the Lumpkin Institute, Luis Moreno Campo was the founding prosecutor of the ICC, Yuan Yeresto Mendez, his special advisor to the Secretary General on Genocide Prevention. They all call it genocide. So we can call it that. Yeah, we can call it. It'd be fairly safe. Yeah. there have been many denisider projects in history. Like, what is Azerbaijan's goal with this? Is it the removal of Armenian people with the areas such that Azeri people can occupy it?

Starting point is 02:42:29 Is it access to the resources that are there? Is it settling a historical score? If you look at a map, there's this idea of pan-terranism. Is that something you're familiar with? Yeah. Can you explain that to listen to and not? Panteranism is this Turkish idea of an ancient Turkish state that stretches from the Bosphorus all the way over to Mongolia.

Starting point is 02:42:58 And there's one little country in the way that is blocking this empire that should exist according to Panteranus. And this is an old idea. It's a 19th century idea. It's lump it in with every Nazi and race junk scientist idea that you, have. But that's the idea. And the secondary thing is, you know, again, Aliyah is raping his people. He's impressing every journalist. He's any scientist. It's really on a level with Turkmenistan or what was happening in Syria or North Korea. And he needs ethnic hate to keep his country together. He's made an

Starting point is 02:43:39 ethnic hate theme park. It's not called that, but that's what it is against Armenians. And So really, I see it as a consolidation of power. He needs an enemy. He needs to move forward, which is why he's threatening to invade Armenia proper next. Yeah. And, like, I think one of the things that, like, happened with the conflict in Arts Act, I'm just thinking about this, this pan-turkic stuff, because I see it every single day in the replies to my posts on social media, right?

Starting point is 02:44:10 In my case, it's with reference to my time in Kurdistan and in Rishaba. disinformation played a massive role in the, in the 2020 conflict, too, right? And I think people who are hearing about this for the first time are at massive risk for finding out some of that different information, right? They hear about this driving to work today on our podcast and they go to Google it. There's a lot of crap out there, right? So can we address that, the role that it's played and continues to play? The load of crap or the panteranism, or both? Well, the panteranism generates a lot of crap, right? I'm convinced that some of the accounts in my replies are not real human beings.

Starting point is 02:44:51 Oh, yeah, that's been a well-established phenomenon, the number of bots that Azerbaijan, to a lesser extent Turkey, because I think Turkey's more secure in its genocidal aspect, whereas Azerbaijan is really, really going for it. You know, so not only the bots in the replies, which is kind of, come up, no matter, you put in a keyword, there's going to be lots of mentions on your social media. Not to mention, there's a pretty vicious campaign out there to docks anybody who talks about this. That's happened to me before, and it's not pretty. But also, there's this thing called mirror propaganda. I don't know if you've heard of that, but the Azeris will take something

Starting point is 02:45:35 that Armenians say, like, oh, our Armenians should go be able to have a right to return. So they scrub this huge cloud of they'll take actual documents that have been produced by, I don't know, Freedom House, right? Yeah. And then they'll copy the entire document and format things of right of Azaries to return to Western Azerbaijan, which is their new concept. And Western Azerbaijan is the country of Armenia. So they have these maps where they renamed all the towns of Armenia with Azari names.

Starting point is 02:46:07 They claim Armenians only came to the region in 1828 with the Russians, that they're a fake people. Another tragedy of Arzac is they're taking these monasteries and places not only destroying them, but chisling off ancient inscriptions to prove that Armenians didn't exist there. They've already done this in this other place called Nachavon, which is they call it the largest cultural genocide of the 21st century where they destroy thousands of medieval monuments and stones with buljosa's and sledgehammers. So they're just wiping them out any record of Armenian, anything. And they're claiming Armenia is really, it should be called Western Azerbaijan. And anytime Armenians talk about Artsakh going back, they're like, well, we, they've made

Starting point is 02:46:48 cookbooks. They've got a television show about Western Azerbaijan. And it's just, it's what you're laughing. And I laugh too. But it's, it's so ugly, so scary, but it's funny, too. Yeah, well, these things are until it's your grandma or have you being beheaded. Like, yes, it does seem, it does seem obscene. And it's so obscene that it's funny, right?

Starting point is 02:47:10 But this is a concerted state project that like it's easy to get caught up in. And it's easy to get caught in this disinformation machine, not just from like a bot in your replies, but from news, like you say, news outlets or like doctored reports or things that look very convincing. Search results that go to the top. I mean, you know, and this course started with the Iranian genocide, which, of course, Turkey and Azerbaijan and Pakistan for some reason, say it was fake. If you search for that, the top results are going to be Armenians are lying. They committed to genocide with us. And then they'll throw these numbers like, oh, yeah, Armenians killed three million Turks.

Starting point is 02:47:49 Like, what are you talking about? This is just like words have meaning, you know. Increasingly less and less. Less and less. You know, there's that great Hannah Art line about constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. And that's what they want. We're an obscure part of the world.

Starting point is 02:48:09 This is say a bunch of shit. and people throw up their hands and walk away. Yeah, or it's too complicated. And so they sort of... Too complicated, right. Yeah. Or, you know, they say, oh, it's ancient hatreds. And like, that's bullshit.

Starting point is 02:48:21 It's not ancient hatreds. It's a very modern thing. These are real people who have real understandable issues. You know, like in Gaza, it's like, it's very clear what's going on. Yeah, yeah, and the difference there is. It has received a lot more coverage and long more attention. So where does this leave us? now, right? As of John

Starting point is 02:48:41 has just hosted this conference and like it's important to recognize that this conference is, it's a project of kind of global liberalism right, like the COP conference and like it conveys legitimacy and in this case it's a means of

Starting point is 02:48:57 kind of laundering legitimacy for this Karabak project in their case right through the lens of protecting the planet. Where do they go from there? Well, so what makes the dictatorship of Azerbaijan a little bit different from these other dictatorships I mentioned is I think they care about what people think a little bit. They bring in F1 racing, they have Eurovision.

Starting point is 02:49:24 They really do these projects because they want to be seen as a legitimate state, whereas I think those other than North Korea, they don't do that. Like, no one's going to like us no matter what we do. Yeah, they've given up. They want to play on the international stage. So that's one aspect. Another aspect, it legitimizes themselves to their internal critics. People, that's their bajana smart. They know what's going on.

Starting point is 02:49:49 But they say, oh, the world is coming to us. The world accepts us. They must, you know, accepts the brutal dictatorship that's cracking down anybody's gay, lesbian, anything. You know, torture is a feature of this regime. So it legitimized themselves. internally. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:08 And what they fear, I guess, is people would get angry that they invade Armenia. So I think it's that sheen. Now, we could argue whether that was effective because COP29 was an absolute train wreck for them. But I'm not sure that matters to them. Right. It matters for the environment. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:27 I think probably these COP conferences are not going to be the way we solve our issues with climate change. But that's another conversation. going forward, like what is the status of ATSA? What can those people, those people who are able to leave? Like, what does the future hold for them? Are they sort of refugees in Armenia now? They're refugees in Armenia.

Starting point is 02:50:51 Aminia is a poor state, doesn't have the oil reserves. The Azerbaijan just announced that they increased their military budget by 20%. It was already incredibly high. Last time I got statistics, the flights from Ovda, which is the Israeli military insulation for flying equipment to Azerbaijan has ramped up. It's higher than it was in 2020 before their invasion. It's on par for 2023. So that's a pretty clear sign that they're getting all their equipment from Israel. They stopped before cop. And so I haven't been able to get data on that since then.

Starting point is 02:51:31 Azerbaijan just issued a declaration that parents cannot visit their children in the military. Oh, well. And that's a bad, bad sign. Yeah. So the question is not if it's when. It is winter. Armenia is a lot of mountains. Those are pretty good to defend.

Starting point is 02:51:50 People are figured out, I'm sure you talk to your friends who are Java. They figured out drones a little bit, how to deal with them better. Armenia has reached out to France, who's been helping them a little bit. Azerbaijan says there's some conditions for peace that are insane. You know, like change your constitution is one. Oh, wow. Get rid of all EU observers is another. Don't get any new weapons.

Starting point is 02:52:16 And then give us what's called this Zangar corridor, which is like this road that goes to their exclave, Nachivan to the west there. And it's just like you can't stay. country's going to do that. Oh, and they've got another claim, which is they say allow the UNESCO to visit Armenia to check out erased Azerbaijani sites, which is just a mere propaganda insanity because UNESCO's already in Armenia. And Armenia asked that of UNESCO for Azerbaijan, but of course, they just copy that. Right. And say, well, why don't you do it? Yeah. Right. Which, you know, is not a real thing. But anyway, so those are the conditioning piece. So it seems

Starting point is 02:52:56 probable that Azerbaijan will invade, possibly in spring, because the snow will melt it away, possibly now, because Alia seems like he's very angry that the world kind of paid attention to COP 29 is figuring out that he's a dick. And he's ramped up arrest in his own country. He just arrested an entire television station of people that were, you know, again, it's one of the least press-free countries on Earth. But I guess people were doing something before. that. And they'll either take the southern half of Armenia, or they'll take all of it, because they say Yoravan, the capital of Armenia, is historically part of Azerbaijan. So that's the state where we're at there. And I really think any other perspectives are wishful thinking. And I'm sorry, he's so grim

Starting point is 02:53:50 about that, but it's, I think it's a very real possibility that this Armenian genocide, that it's killed literally, you know, countable millions of Armenians since the 1890s and ramped up through 1915 through 1923, and then subsided a little bit is ongoing, and their project will be completed in the next year. Yeah, that's pretty bleak. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:54:14 How can people, they want to be in Solidarity, if they want to support, like this is something that doesn't get reported on right in the U.S., even if they just want to learn more, how can they do that? Where can they go? There's a good site. This has learned for Artsakh. That's a good site. There's a bunch of Armenian web sites that people can go to. May I post some links on the show notes? Would that be good? Yeah, well, absolutely better as in the show notes. Yeah. I would be very happy to do that if people want to donate things. But it's similar to Gaza or other places. Like what does awareness do?

Starting point is 02:54:54 I guess it could slow things down. Yeah. But really, we just need state actors to respond to this. Armenians get very cynically used in France and in the United States by right-wing politicians who claim that they're protecting Christians, but I don't think that's something that will actually happen. Yeah, I mean, people did the same thing for Assad, right? That he protected Christians in Syria while he murdered, gassed his own people.

Starting point is 02:55:22 Exactly. that's a best of cynical thing and a worse of justification. I mean, what have you seen that's effective in terms of world action for these things with the Kurds or other people? I mean, look, when we talk about how the Kurds have defended themselves from, yeah, a state project to eliminate them, right? In some areas, they haven't been able to, right? And when they have, it's through their own armed initiative for the most part, right?

Starting point is 02:55:49 They were very fortunate to have the support of the United States, but that was only ever in the battle against ISIS. It wasn't when genocidal violence, right, this genocidal project in Afrin, where we're seeing it right now in Tower of Fat, the US didn't stand beside them there. And it's not in its nature too. And I think this is a really difficult situation

Starting point is 02:56:11 that we find ourselves in all around the world right now. We've seen this in Africa too, right? It's not really in the nature of the United States, done in this century, to intervene simply for human rights reasons, simply because genocide is wrong. We had a person, Samantha Power, who wrote a book on how genocide is wrong and we should intervene. And then what happens when she's in power with Obama and Biden? Does it intervene?

Starting point is 02:56:37 We draw red lines and then a sad walk over them. It happens all over the world. And I think, yeah, we're probably in a post-hagemonic era. But that doesn't mean that people deserve to die because we're in a post-Hodemonic era. I don't know. Look, if I look at the other genocide, which I've spent more time with than most genocide, which is a weird thing to say. It's the genocide in Myanmar of the Rohingya people. They are still facing genocidal violence now, even from anti-Hunter groups. But I also see Muslim people in the Karen National Liberation Army. I see them fighting with the KNDF. And the way that those, people liberated themselves was like from the bottom up. And I think that like I find some hope in what's happening in Kurdistan and what's happening in Myanmar. And I don't see very much from the community of states and much of the thing that even fucking exists. I don't really believe

Starting point is 02:57:35 that states have a conscience. And yes, I don't think it's in their nature to care about people because people are inherently valuable. But I do think people do. And I do think it is in the nature of people to care. So I guess we have to continue to hope. And there has been some positive statements by your Java regarding Armenians and there's some been a lot of solidarity there which is great. You know, Kurds helped commit the first Armenian genocide and they've apologized and so I'm seeing a little glimmers of hope in terms of the solidarity of people who see what's right and wrong who aren't state actors. That's absolutely right. Yeah, one of the things, there's another thing that will be deployed very often that Kurds are responsible for the Armenian genocide.

Starting point is 02:58:15 Kurdish people were part of the Armenian genocide and they will acknowledge that and they've tried to make amends for it. Yes. Exactly right. And that's all any peek. Yeah. It's great. You know. Like, we're here now. We're not prisoners of our history, but we have to acknowledge it so that we can move from it. Thank you for sharing all that. Yeah, thank you. Is there anything else that we've failed to address so you want to get in quickly before we, I mean, yes, there's thousands of years of stuff. But you know, visit Armenians still called one of the safest places on Earth. It's been rated as safer than Japan. Oh, wow. It's a beautiful place.

Starting point is 02:58:49 It's a struggling democracy, but it's the only democracy in the area. Try to pay attention to the news, you know, as hacky as it seems, right? Your senator, you know, like, I just feel wrong saying that, but what else can we do, right? If you're in Britain, the UK is an incredibly egregious supporter of Azerbaijan through British Petroleum. really you people probably can have the biggest effect because the UK is the biggest enabler of those dirt bags. And thank you for the time. I really appreciate it. And I don't feel like I've done justice to 2,500 years of history.

Starting point is 02:59:35 But thank you so much. No, I think that's great. Is there any where people can follow you online if they'd like to? Oh, absolutely not. I'm tired of getting docks. Excellent. Yeah, that's probably for the best. I have to say, you know, and that's why I paint icons.

Starting point is 02:59:48 This is because it's anonymous, you know. Yeah. Very offline. Yeah, but thank you so much. Great. Thank you. This is It Could Happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House,

Starting point is 03:00:30 the crumbling of our world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This week, we are covering the week of, January 29th to February 5th, and oh boy, has this week felt like a month? I am absolutely exhausted. And let's start, I guess, by talking about what Trump did Tuesday night. He had a press conference with both himself and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Njahou to announce that the United States would, quote, unquote, take over the Gaza Strip, resulting in, quote, unquote,

Starting point is 03:01:07 long-term ownership. Previously on that day, Trump also signed an order pulling out of the United Nations Human Rights Council and cutting off aid to UNRWA. Let's start with this topic. Hopefully we will have a later episode

Starting point is 03:01:21 maybe next week covering what's happening in Palestine. But, you know, this is, as of right now, the current most development. This is one of the more, like, crazy things that he's, like, like, you could see Netanyahu even, like in the room,

Starting point is 03:01:36 clearly finding out about this for the first time. Yeah, there was a real, oh shit, really? I'm not sure how long Trump and Netanyahu have actually had this like entire thing planned. That is a distinct possibility that like, this has been Netanyahu's goal for a while. And this was like impacted his negotiations with Biden, like knowing that he wanted this to be like the outcome where the US basically just takes and holds the territory of Gaza as a US territory like indefinitely. I think BB knew that Trump would give him a positive outcome in any number. of ways, right? Like, to include just saying, like, bomb it off the map.

Starting point is 03:02:09 Like, I think it's reasonable to assume that. Well, I mean, something like this was, I think, the obvious outcome as soon as Trump, I mean, from before Trump won, right? Yeah. Netanyahu never had any intention of letting things go back to the way they were before October 7th. And Trump has a vested interest in giving Netanyahu whatever he wants the most. Like, it's, I don't know.

Starting point is 03:02:32 I'm not surprised by it. I guess I'm a little bit like... Okay, at least now we know what they're going to do next. It's in line with the manifest destiny, territorial expansion. Trump has been talking about the past few weeks. I mean, Joe Biden laid the groundwork for this by giving, like, Israel the actual, like, bombs and materials to, like, do the demolition side of this project. And now Trump continues to discuss relocating Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan,

Starting point is 03:03:00 while promising to turn Gaza into, quote, unquote, the Riviera of the Middle East. level it out, create an economic development, unquote. He has also said that he's going to, again, said he's going to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, which would leave 2,000 people in CENTCOM to deploy to Gaza, I guess, if that's what they want to do. Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's no possible way this can go, quote, unquote, well, this is going to be a fucking catastrophe. The basic plan here is to do genocide and then... This is part of a genocidal operation. Yeah, this is like, what we're doing?

Starting point is 03:03:33 We're doing a second to larger genocide. This is like the finishing touch. Yeah, but, but, you know, like on a sort of practical level, it's like, okay, the U.S. couldn't hold Afghanistan, right? Like, and like obviously, like, this is, this is an, like, a quote-unquote easier occupation, but it's like, this is going to be a fucking shit, like a nightmare. Like, and it, I don't know, I mean, my, my assumption is that this is going to be just like, if he actually, like, you know, does a deployment of U.S. troops, this is going to be

Starting point is 03:03:59 hideously unpopular, people are going to be coming back in body bags and it's going to fucking, I don't know, it's going to be a night. nightmare for everyone involved. And yeah, it's a absolutely terrible idea. I'm more scared that they're going to get away with it. I'm more scared that things will go fine for them. And this just becomes like an actually stable U.S. territory in the Middle East. There will be significant.

Starting point is 03:04:23 Pushback's not the word, right? Like there will be guerrilla warfare, right? Like it's very hard to take and hold significantly large urban areas as the U.S. has found out for 20 years. Whether or not people will accept. that, I think they might. Like, I think Trump kind of needs an enemy, you know, and a war and like a quote unquote, you know, he can paint almost anything as a win. And I think people might be more willing than we'd like to think to accept people coming home in body bags from that.

Starting point is 03:04:51 I'm not really sure. I think we're actually going to see the kind of troop deployment that people think based on what Trump has said, as opposed to expanded support for what the Israelis have already been doing, which has done a significant job to depopulate the area as it stands. I think we have to be hesitant to draw too strong a line between the rhetoric and what Trump is actually going to do, which doesn't mean I don't think that it's not very likely that you're going to continue to see mass depopulation in Gaza. I think it's just that, like, I don't know that I think the only way that happens is something that looks like most of the occupations of the last century have looked like for my US point of

Starting point is 03:05:38 view. Yeah. And the new model is this Syria model, right? Yeah. It's a relatively small footprint and then in the local partner force at the IDF pulling security for US contracts and in US money like that. Right. The IDF and a lot of third party corporate PMCs.

Starting point is 03:05:54 Yeah, PMCs, you know? Yeah, for sure. We've got guys champing at the bit to do that. And like, that looks a lot. Likelier to me than the 10th Mountain Division, you know, occupying large chunks of Gaza. Agreed. Yeah. Eric Prince is ready to, uh, ready to get in there, sadly. All right. Let's, uh, let's transition to our new segment titled Stinky Musk, which I came up with last night, Delirious, and yes, it's bad. No, I'm not going to fix it.

Starting point is 03:06:22 South African gang does a hostile takeover of the United States. Yeah, you're hitting today, Garrison. Elon Musk and a gang of overly online Gen Z interns are doing an oligarchic cyber. coup of the federal government, starting with the Office of Management and Budget, then moving on to USAid, General Services Administration, the Treasury, and as of recording, NOAA, as well as many other agencies, smaller agencies, bigger agencies, that they are infiltrating both physically and digitally. Employees of these agencies have been locked out both physically and digitally,

Starting point is 03:06:55 as the Doge team ransacks various departments and accesses sensitive data with no oversight. And that's like government data about you, possibly in the hands of a literal Nick Fuentes-pilled Grooper intern. Security officials who tried to resist Musk's seizure of classified materials have been fired, and Doge personnel threatened to call the U.S. Marshals to be let into buildings. I have some more info on this as we will go on, but I guess this is this is an okay time just to discuss. Yeah, I think the response to this is one of the more hopeful things going on right now. And kind of what led me to think that is looking at 2020, looking at the fallout from 2020, and what worked and what didn't, largely what didn't work, and thinking like, okay, well,

Starting point is 03:07:42 if we're going to actually get any kind of functional resistance to what's happening, what does that look like? And it doesn't look like the same crews of people doing the same thing that they did four or five years ago, which is why I've got some hope in the fact that you've got a different crowd of people, who are radicalizing and taking to the streets. And, you know, we, we. Federal employees, right? And you've got a lot of, like, or former.

Starting point is 03:08:08 Yeah, most of them are still current, but, you know, it's a mix of former and current federal employees. And these are, these are the people who do a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff at the Office of Personnel Management, Office of Management Budget. Like, these are the people who, like, make, keep things functioning at, like, a ground level. And a lot of them are, are pissed off in a way that I don't think we have really. seen before. And I think there's a potential, and who's to say, like right now we just had a

Starting point is 03:08:36 big protest in front of Treasury about a full city block or so of people, many, if not the vast majority of whom were federal employees rallying alongside a lot of Democratic members of Congress. And, you know, that's not, that doesn't accomplish anything on its own, but it's a potential start to accomplishing something. You know, if you get those people out in the street, it provides, among other things, a lot of cover for everyone else. And it also is the start of, you know, what you might call a reverse January 6th, you know, if January 6 was a bunch of random people taking and occupying government buildings without any knowledge of like what they are or how things actually function inside of them, the kind of thing that we might be looking at in

Starting point is 03:09:23 the near future is the opposite of that. We're a bunch of people who absolutely do know how those organizations and buildings function trying to take and occupy them. And that's the feeling I got because I talked to some folks who are at the Treasury protest. One person that I talked to most extensively is a federal contractor who was present in 2017 at the travel ban protests, if you remember those, which is back when Trump announced his first Muslim bound and a bunch of people started occupying like airports and stuff. Like I was at LAX for that. This person was at some of those protests and it was out in front of Treasury. And the quote that I've got from there was, I was expecting it, it being this protest,

Starting point is 03:10:05 the Treasury protest, to feel like the travel ban protests. It didn't. It was a lot angrier than the travel ban protests. The travel ban protests were kind of an in defense of another person sort of anger. Yeah. And this was narrowly focused anger at a very specific group of people. There were a lot of people yelling and screaming outside of their congressmen's offices and the like.

Starting point is 03:10:25 And like, there hasn't been that much disruption compared to what we're. we're going to see, right? Social Security payments haven't stopped going out in Moss. So if we're seeing something like this at this early stage, I think there's a lot of potential there. And the thing this person brought up repeatedly is like, when we start seeing congressmen kicking in doors is when things are going to get interesting. If that happens, like, that's kind of the stage at which there's a lot of potential for this to turn into something that could actually, like, cause change. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:10:55 Like if you actually start getting government employees who are willing to do more than stand outside of their offices, like who are willing to take direct action to occupy those buildings or stop other people from. And you've seen little bits of that, right? One of the things we did see is as these Doge kids came along, federal employees refusing them entry, keeping doors locked. Now, that was not illegal because these were literally, as it's been described in me by multiple people, just kids showing up demanding entry without any kind of a badge or evidence of

Starting point is 03:11:25 who they are, right? Right. When you get people who are willing to escalate from that and refuse entry, that's when we might actually see some things start to seriously shift here. I mean, based on how much of what Musk is doing is just like bypassing Congress and doing like a very kind of like typical like oligarchic coup, like he's doing all those steps. And if you look at like what happened in South Korea a few months ago, we are not at the point where, congressmen are literally like, like, you know, climbing over, like, fences, barricading doors. We're not in South Korea territory yet, but, yeah. But, like, their lawmakers, like, were willing to do that.

Starting point is 03:12:00 And there is, like, I think, waiting from people to, like, wait and see if our lawmakers are going to be willing to do the same to, like, protect the actual, like, functional aspects of our government. Yeah. And, like, things are already happening. Like, we are in some ways kind of already at this point. Yeah. The USAID website is now, like, completely removed, leaving only a note that claims

Starting point is 03:12:20 all personnel have been put on administrative leave, including overseas personnel. And this essentially leaves a whole agency shut down, but all done without an act of Congress or even like an overstepping executive order from Trump. It was just the unelected Elon Musk who decided to and carried out the closure of a government agency, which like should be like, like should actually be like a criminal.

Starting point is 03:12:43 Like there is like statutes that are designed to stop this from happening. Just no one's enforcing them because they control almost every aspect of government. Musk has also closed the IRS direct file tax system, which is now forced taxpayers to use third party paid services. It's like he's doing this like one by one. I think the weakness that they have right now is that because they're causing so much chaos, because they're, like, you're talking about the FBI purge they're trying to do. Like, you know, the thing that they're relying on is everyone is just going to let them in and just let them get walked over. But it's like, okay, the thing about acting this mess outside the law is what guys with guns do you have who you can use to enforce? force this. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing where it's, it's legitimately, like, if there's serious

Starting point is 03:13:24 resistance to them, they might start to crumple because the, the, the reason you work inside of the legal order, or you have your own paramilitaries is so that you can have, like, the guy with the gun to make you open the door. Yeah. And the more people who are willing to just be, like, no, fuck you, like, and, like, force them to actually, like, find guys with guns who are willing to do this. The odds are lower that you get a positive shift because people engage directly and aggressively with the cops, then you have when some sort of like mid-level military functionary is asked to drive a tank over a school teacher, right? Like historically, if you look at when regimes fall, that happens more often than the

Starting point is 03:14:07 waving a flag on top of like a pile of corpses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? Like demands are ordered. Illegal orders are given to people with guns. And they're like, no, I'm not going to shoot at a bunch of teachers today. that's not the only way this kind of thing happens, but at least like for my money, that's the likeliest positive outcome right now. Yeah, and if you look at the last world historical empire run by incredibly unpopular genitocracy,

Starting point is 03:14:29 it was the Soviets and look at how they fell apart. That's more or less what happened, yeah. Yeah. And like, it's interesting that if we use a Vavarian definition of the state, like that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, right? They've dismantled their apparatus for state violence as well. And this could just be like the blunt instrument. of apparently offering every federal employee.

Starting point is 03:14:51 I know I've heard that they've tried to unretire wildland firefighters who accepted their offer of retirement. Which is extremely funny. But like it's very, yeah, if you're going to work, you're going to retire a bunch of FBI agents or fire them. Because like me as said, they are going to need hitters. They're going to need to use coercive force at some point, possibly very soon to get what they want to do done.

Starting point is 03:15:15 And I think when it comes to that, the question is like, witch hitters. Yeah. Because the FBI and the CIA, I mean, are getting are getting gutted at the moment right now. Like, so you're looking at like, and the NSA. You're looking at local police, federal protective services, Department of Homeland Security, you know? Yeah. And the marshals, right? Like, like, these are kind of like the shooters Trump has to play with and the military will remain an open question until the critical moment, right? Yeah. I mean, FPS, is infinitely expandable and is mostly

Starting point is 03:15:49 contracted throughout Robert and I've spoken about it before, but like that's the one that has a lot of potential to grow. And I think within local, especially sheriff's departments, you've got some people who won't bat an eyelid in some of those. Oh no, no,

Starting point is 03:16:02 no, absolutely not. And I do think that like, sheriff's departments are kind of what haunt me the most. But that's also, it's not purely a matter of like which agencies and organizations are going to back Trump in this. It's also a matter of like,

Starting point is 03:16:17 geographic location and in DC at least he can count on a lot less of those guys because like the capital police aren't thrilled right now you know essentially what Elon is doing right now is exactly what he did to Twitter except to the entire United States of America yeah and like yeah by the end of this process it still might function on some level right like Twitter still kind of functions but it's just worse in every way it it's worse it doesn't have the quote unquote good features it used to. It's, it's buggy. It's full of Nazis. It's just, it's, it sucks more. Like, the previous version was, was already bad and harmful, but the new one is just worse without the aspects that made it semi-worthwhile. And like, I'm going to do an episode like next week,

Starting point is 03:17:03 like, kind of about, about this like specifically and how Musk is Twitter-fying the entire government using like all of the same tactics, like refusing to pay leases on buildings, installing beds in agency headquarters to make employees sleep there overnight, having teenagers review code of long-standing employees. It's the exact same process. And if you didn't like what happened to Twitter, that process is now happening to the government itself. I can't wait for the IRS to send me a letter saying my pussy in bio.

Starting point is 03:17:35 Like that will be, hey. Now you've got me back on the Trump trained. You know what? I'm piecing out for the day. I'm on board now. Before we close this segment and pivot to ads, I do want to shout out the work that Wired is doing right now. Oh, man, yeah.

Starting point is 03:17:51 Wired magazine is doing some fantastic reporting on this. The D.C. attorney is currently promising to go after individuals who post about Doge employees. They might end up going after some of these Wired journalists who identified this Gen Z Doge team that is wreaking havoc throughout the government with no oversight. Wired provided what should be, you know, legally required and necessary. identification of the public workers who musk is trying to keep secret the dc attorney and like trump's doj is very mad about that they might they might end up like going after these people but uh uh fantastic work coming out of wired right now yeah if you want to keep up to date on musk's take

Starting point is 03:18:30 over i strongly recommend checking out their work i'll post some of those in the sources below let's go on a quick ad break and then come back to talk about uh the continuing uh kind of fake trade wars and immigration sick All right, we are back. I'm going to pivot towards James and Mia to discuss tariffs and immigration. Take it away. Yeah, so on Monday, Trump sort of averted the market collapse that he had set off with his declaration that there are going to be 25% tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico and also 10% tariff on China. So let's go into like what actually happened. So the tariffs on Mexico and Canada are on hold for a month. However, the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods did go into effect, and we'll get to more about what that's going to do in a second. But much more importantly, Trump eliminated the de minimis exception, which allowed people and companies to ship goods from China that were worth under $800 and not have to go through the formal customs process and, you know, pay tariffs on it and also have to spend all of that time paperwork and shit.

Starting point is 03:19:51 And before we get into the sort of devastating effect, this is going to have on businesses, I want to make it clear that, like, regular people in China use this to send things to people in the U.S. Like, that's a very normal thing. Yeah. That is now really, really difficult. And about a third of YouTube ads are supported by people who run companies that make use of this loophole. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:20:13 Yeah. Okay, so on the business side, this is actually really interesting because I think it's one of the, I mean, not the first, but I think it's going to be a very, very, very. early example of Trump completely fucking abased that's been very, very supportive of him, because this is going to liquidate huge portions of the drop shipping economy, right? Like all of

Starting point is 03:20:31 the stupid YouTube shirts, like all of that stuff is just going to be annihilated. Can you explain drop shipping if people aren't familiar, Mia? Just like 10 second version? Yeah, so drop shipping is a thing where you do an order and instead of having like an inventory,

Starting point is 03:20:47 normally you'd have a warehouse that has shirts in it. Drop shipping, you don't do that. you are now the intermediary and you have these manufacturers like print to consumption basically and you can you can do this very cheaply and then you can run the entire markup but it works because of how cheap it is to get these like sort of small scale chinese firms to like make stuff for you those people are screwed companies like temu and sheen are either going to have to just completely eat shit or they're going to have to figure out a way to move their entire supply line through countries like Vietnam, which is going to be very difficult.

Starting point is 03:21:22 I mean, because Temu even getting stuff to the U.S. has been kind of hard for them because of how the logistics network works. Yeah. And so obviously, like, I don't think most people who listen to this show are that sad about Shian and Temu eating shit, but... No, it is like a mixed bag because a whole lot of the MLM industry is going to take a header as a result of this. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:21:44 Yeah. There's some stuff to like, fuck them. But on the other hand, there are a lot of people who are going to eat shit. who are not those people. And this is, there is a huge, like, range of industries that are run by very, very small businesses. Like, it was even just, like, an individual person who, like, makes crafts and sells it. And those people are also screwed because they, they rely on getting the resources in from China. And there's a lot of sort of, you know, things like, like, people who build, like, retro handheld consoles.

Starting point is 03:22:12 Oh, yeah. And, like, I don't know, like, custom Airsoft rifles. I don't know JD talk about, like, there's a whole bunch of industries like that that are these, like, small-scale production. things that are, I just screwed, that rely on this stuff. And so the ripples of this specific part of it are going to keep playing out, basically no matter what else happens in this trade war. Yeah. It's also worth noting that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada aren't gone.

Starting point is 03:22:37 They've just been postponed for a month. So there is a real chance that we end up in exactly the same place that we were going into the weekend where no one knows where these tariffs are going to take effect and basically blow a smoking crater in the world economy. and we get another round of the negotiations that James is going to talk about. It's already setting off a really sort of staggering right wing, I mean, not even necessarily right wing,

Starting point is 03:22:58 but just like a nationalist backlash in Canada that's kind of been like tearing up this sort of international right wing alliance and nationalists because suddenly Trump's coming after them and now they're really mad about it. Well, and because Trudeau announced that he would be targeting, you know, like retaliatory tariffs specifically at red states,

Starting point is 03:23:16 we now have people calling him dark woke. or Dark Trudeau, you know, for very different reasons than they used to call him Dark Trudeau. Oh, Garrison. Oh, that's magnificent. All right. All right. Shrap up, my hack. All right.

Starting point is 03:23:31 You're going to get cancelled if you're not careful. No. Outstanding. Speaking of getting canceled. What hasn't gotten canceled is the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods, which is just now in effect. It's just happening. That's bad. It's going to increase inflation.

Starting point is 03:23:44 It's also, it's, you know, it's sort of the opening round of this. escalation to a trade war. China has retaliated with tariffs that are not a very big deal on U.S. goods and some product control stuff on expert control stuff on some rare earth minerals. Actually, I don't know the rare earth minerals, but like minerals you need for production stuff that isn't a big deal yet, but could be. And we were all expecting Chinese tariffs. Having 25% tariffs to Canada was not something I thought was like a looming. No, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I thought they'd do Mexico. I didn't know about it. very worried about the offshoring of Chinese labor and the impact that we're having places like

Starting point is 03:24:24 Myanmar, where China has these special economic zones. And it's something we will cover. We obviously have a lot of sources. Yeah, we're Monday. On Monday, we're covering this more. So I think something that's important to understand about these tariffs is that these tariffs are not economic policy. This is the mistake that all of the capitalist who back Trump made is that they assumed that just like every other's president who's made promises like this, like Obama's promise to re-negotiate NAFTA. They all assumed that because of this economic policy, they'd be able to just like get Trump to be pro-business and he wouldn't do it. The miscalation they made is that these are not economic tariffs. These are directly foreign policy geopolitical

Starting point is 03:24:58 tariffs, right? Their international relations are to the deal bullshit. And the goal of it, and he's been deploying this against like, I mean, Colombia, Denmark, he's threatening the EU now. He's going to keep doing this with China. The goal of this is to directly use American consumer power as a weapon of imperialism to make these countries fall into line. Yeah, and now we'll pass at the Jane to talk about what he was specifically trying to get out of Mexico and Canada in this round.

Starting point is 03:25:25 Yeah, so like me as spoke about falling into line there, I think it's probably a good place to start. Like this kind of Trump brinksmanship is very typical of his style, right? Nearly every media outlet, I think, fell for it this time, just like it did in his first term. Like, we got this, like, this is going to cause a crisis.

Starting point is 03:25:41 Trump was very nebulous in his goals for these tariffs. and as almost always, he talked a lot about America being treated unfairly, right? He talked about the border and he talked specifically about fentanyl. So I want to begin by talking about fentanyl, just to be clear, it is true that some fentanyl comes into the USA from Mexico and to a lesser degree or so from Canada. The vast majority of the fentanyl that enters the USA from Mexico, about 80% of the convictions made as a result of that fentanyl entering the USA are made.

Starting point is 03:26:14 on US citizens, right? And 90% of the fentanyl that is seized is seized at ports of entry. So this idea that there are like Mexican nationals backpacking fentanyl through the desert that exists, but it is not what is bringing the bulk of the fentanyl that is killing the people in this country into this country. There are multiple cases of CBP agents taking bribes to allow the drug into the country. I will link to two of them in the show notes, but know that there are more of them. And given the relatively high bar for CBP agent, anyone in DHS to be investigated, right, we can assume that there's something that happens on at least a semi-regular basis.

Starting point is 03:26:49 So what did Trump do to stop this fence and all coming into the country? What did he get? He got this promise that Mexico would deploy 10,000 troops to its border. In reality, this isn't much of a concession at all. The Mexican National Guard has been deployed to the border for years. Specifically, it's been deployed at gaps in the U.S. border wall for more than a year. So people will remember our coverage of the open-air detention sites in Hacumba in East County, San Diego. All of those open-air detention sites correspond to gaps in the border wall where migrants would enter,

Starting point is 03:27:21 surrender to border patrol, and then be detained in open air. Each of those gaps now has a Mexican National Guard checkpoint in front of it. They're there in conjunction with the INM, the National Institute of Migration in English. The INM has camps for the migrants who do come there, right? This is something that Biden obtained in, I think, late 23, early 24. And that's why we aren't seeing open-air detention. One of the reasons, the other reason being Biden's asylum ban, we aren't seeing as many people crossing the border, right? Mexican border towns also tend to be areas where the Mexican military deploys its troops, because often

Starting point is 03:27:54 there are places who are organized crime occurs due to their proximity to the border and the market for drugs and the fact that weapons from the U.S. tend to flow into Mexico, and that that's where large numbers of weapons for organized crime come from, right? For more than a year, I've received press releases from Tijuana, constantly talking about new unit arrives, special forces arrives, army arrive, and then they'll have pictures of a parade, right? Now, they never tell us when those units are leaving. They just keep telling us they're coming. So it's very hard to get a sense of actually how many troops are there. But the idea that Mexico is suddenly militarizing its border is kind of farcical. Yeah, and I want to, there's been a lot of sort of cheerleading

Starting point is 03:28:31 of shine bomb sort of like standing up to the US. And I don't think people in the US really understands the securitization on the Mexican border. And so something that I'm realizing that I don't think, I just assumed people knew about this, but I don't think ever made it into the Western press much is that. So, like, a few months ago in October, the Mexican army just, like, opened fire on a convoy of, like, on a convoy of immigrants.

Starting point is 03:28:53 And this was, this was on the border of Guatemala and just, like, killed six of them, shot 12 other people. So, like, and, like, there are basickers like that, like, not infrequently, right? Like, this is not a, this is not a Mexico is pro-immigrant, like the U.S. is anti-immigrant thing. Like, part of the, part of the reason why Trump can, like, you know, sort of declare victory without getting any concessions or whatever is because of how murderous the Mexican army's, like, border policy is already. Yeah, and the Mexican leaders have successfully been able to paint themselves as leftists, exclusively being two inches to the left of a further and further right regime in Washington, D.C. people can listen to the last episode of my Daddy and Gap series

Starting point is 03:29:35 for an idea of how Mexico is constantly deporting migrants to its own southern states. I want to talk a little bit about the Canadian concessions very briefly. Again, 10,000 agents and a border spending that really doesn't change much in terms of what was already becoming a more militarized border. There has actually been a significant flow of migrants from the US to Canada in the last couple of years,

Starting point is 03:29:57 specifically of francophone African people who would take that route. I'm aware of several TikTok influence, There's one guy who following Chad, who, or he's in Canada now, but he's from Chad, and he makes these videos explaining to Chalian people how to go from Mexico into the US and then move up to Canada, obviously, where they can speak French and that makes their lives much easier, right? It makes it much easier to not have to learn a language. Trudeau did agree to list cartels as terrorist organizations. Yeah, that seems to be, from what I can tell, the big move that he made.

Starting point is 03:30:30 Yeah, yeah. So it does allow for some economic sanctions, right, if they attempt to use that Canadian border and sort of get around the United States. It's much less significant than a U.S. listing, which we believe is coming. Canada's not going to use it to do covert operations inside Mexico. I don't think. Canada's not going to be drone striking anyone. But when Trump listed the Kurds force, he then struck its leader, right, with a drone. I don't think Trudeau is going to be.

Starting point is 03:30:57 I don't think Canada's going to be doing that. But nonetheless, that is a concession. And perhaps there is some plan for that. It certainly allows for, and I've said this before, the economic sanctioning of people who provide material benefit to those organizations or potentially the arrest of people who provide material benefit to those organizations, which is a large number of businesses in Mexico, which end up being extorted or paying protection money.

Starting point is 03:31:21 So we don't know what it's going to happen with that. But it's one of the tools that Trump now has to use as another cudgel against us. against Mexico. Yeah. The last and perhaps most sinister of all development is this deal that Marco Rubio struck with Buckele and El Salvador, right? El Salvador has said it will host U.S. citizen criminals and deportees from any nation in its jail system.

Starting point is 03:31:46 So I'll just read Buckele's tweet. It's very short. We are willing to take in only convicted criminals, parentheses, including convicted U.S. citizens, into our mega prison, secod, in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the US, but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable. If you're not familiar, it means counterterrorism confinement center in Spanish. For people who haven't heard about this, it's the largest prison in the world that Buckeli opened in 2023. And it's a terrible place.

Starting point is 03:32:17 There are cells of 100 people. In that cell, there are 80 bunks, two toilets, and two basins. They are extremely confined. I think they get 6.5 feet of space per person. They get 30 minutes outside a day. They're forced to shave their heads. Their ankles and wrists are chained. People are arbitrarily detained there.

Starting point is 03:32:36 Sometimes for things like looking like they might be in a gang. Multiple human rights organizations, including that, well, the State Department is not a human rights organization. Sometimes it's the opposite of that. The State Department itself has raised concerns about human rights abuse due to the quote-unquote state of exception, which exists in El Salvador, which allows the government to do these things without really any. human rights oversight. The US has already seemingly moved some migrants to Guantanamo Bay, to the Guantanamo Bay detention center, and satellite imagery has shown tents going up there. Very few at the current time. And they seem to come from Fort Lewis McCord, which I couldn't work out.

Starting point is 03:33:15 But there are tents, I guess, I think it was Washington Post, had these satellite images of tents being constructed there. I'm trying to keep an eye on that satellite imagery. Of course, Biden opened the door to outdoor detention. It's not impossible that we will see that again. But this Buckele plan, this plan to send people to El Salvador, especially U.S. citizens, evidently, this is unconstitutional. The courts get to decide how much that matters, right? We don't. But this is deeply concerning. We're all, we're all waiting on the courts, and we're all deeply concerned. Yeah. Well, there you go. One final break, and then we'll come back to end and discuss Trump's targeting of teachers. in relation to gender ideology.

Starting point is 03:34:08 Welcome back. So last week, Trump signed an executive order titled Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling. And part of its focus was to prevent teachers from calling trans students by their names and preferred pronouns, even promising to inflict legal punishment for doing so, basically like mandating deadnaming, misgendering, and forcibly detransitioning students.

Starting point is 03:34:30 This order specifically took aim at quote-unquote social transition. Right? This is like the non-medical, social aspects of transitioning, like changing gender names, pronouns, you know, what facilities you use, socialization. And like this stuff has historically been, you know, the most common form of transition for minors. It's the easiest to do. You don't even like need your parents' help. But this order, you know, blames schools for indoctrinating children in, quote, radical anti-American ideologies, unquote, which they include gender ideology as a part of. The order tries to mandate a

Starting point is 03:35:04 national school bathroom ban, restrict participation in school sports, and states that within 90 days, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Attorney General shall provide Trump with a quote-unquote ending indoctrination strategy to protect parental rights and eliminate all federal funding that directly or indirectly supports gender ideology indoctrination in K-12 schools, including curriculums, teacher education, certification, licensing, employment, and training. To quote from the order, quote, the attorney general shall coordinate with state attorneys general and local district

Starting point is 03:35:39 attorneys in their efforts to enforce the law and file appropriate actions against K through 12 teachers who violate the law by, one, sexually exploiting minors, two, unlawfully practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license, and three, otherwise unlawfully facilitating in the social transition of a minor, unquote. So basically, the goal is to try to make calling a student by their name and pronouns illegal and wrapping this in either with some form of like sexual exploitation, practicing medicine without a license, and using those as justifications for making this practice illegal. Now, in response, school districts in Columbus, Ohio, Harrisburg, Virginia,

Starting point is 03:36:22 and Montgomery County, Maryland announced that they would not comply with the order and continue to defend their trans students, according to journalists to Aaron Reed. Seattle, public schools published a statement reaffirming their commitment to protecting LGBTQ students and staff, and later, the California Department of Education pushed back on the legality of Trump's order. Other blue cities and states have stayed quiet in the week since the order, with teachers and parents calling on places like the New York City public school system to take a stance on if they will stand up for their trans students. So this is one side of the coin right now. The other side is healthcare, which we will close on.

Starting point is 03:37:00 in relation to Trump's executive order from his first week entitled, defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government, some hospitals have begun complying in advance by canceling patient appointments for gender-affirming care. Denver Health and University of Colorado Health sacrificed the care of their patients for Trump's promise of continued funding by announcing that they would no longer be offering care, including blockers and hormone replacement therapy for patients 18 and under. the Virginia Commonwealth University and Children's Hospital of Richmond have also ceased providing gender affirming care to those under 19.

Starting point is 03:37:37 This past Monday, thousands of people gathered outside at the NYU Langan Hospital in protest of the hospital's choice to proactively comply with Trump's order to restrict health care after the cancellation of two appointments for trans patients under the age of 19. Now, after these protests, which saw thousands of people protesting out in the streets, after this, the New York Attorney General sent a letter to the state health care systems saying that the state law requires that hospitals provide gender-affirming care and claimed that the federal funding would not be impacted by an executive order. And like, this really hammers down the point that, like,

Starting point is 03:38:12 none of these executive orders are self-enforcing. These all require proactive implementation by local actors. Dr. Jeremy Burnbaum was quoted in the New York Times. He's a pediatrician at the state-run University Hospital of Brooklyn. He was quoted as saying, quote, I am willing to go to jail to continue to provide your care, unquote. And you really can, like protest hospitals that comply in advance. Same thing with schools.

Starting point is 03:38:38 These are targets that can provide actual pressure. And there's probably people on staff who are very sympathetic, and they just might be too scared to take a stance right now. And we have some breaking news as of this morning. State Attorney General from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Nevada. Vermont and Wisconsin, released a statement saying that Trump's executive order banning trans health care is unlawful and the hospitals have a duty to provide care. So this is like the most optimistic thing that we've seen so far. Now obviously these are blue states. This is not going to impact red states who already have these types of bans either in process or are going to have them down the line.

Starting point is 03:39:21 Georgia just put out a trans health care ban this morning for a bill that'll reach our Senate in the next few weeks. But this is the current situation. Protests seem to have applied a degree of pressure that has gotten states' attorney general to actually make a statement on this issue. Yeah. I will say like, so I still teach, right, a teacher to community college. Sometimes through that we also teach high school students. If you are an educator or someone in health care, now is the time to be talking to your union. about like how you meet this because like the stronger we are the better we can confront this

Starting point is 03:39:58 and the only way to confront this is we all need to do it together and like you these are conversations who we need to be having right now like we do not have time and and our unions are a very valuable tool for preserving our rights yeah that's actually part of what I was going to say um I've talked to a few union teachers who are like yeah we're going to we're going to go do this we're going to go fight so I I expect in the next couple of weeks we're going to see more movement from the teachers unions. And I think there's, you know, there's an under, I mean, there's, on the one hand, there is the threat that, you know, these people do want to privatize the education system, right?

Starting point is 03:40:33 So there is a chance that this is, you know, trying to draw a backlash out of this is something that they're going to try to use to just completely eliminate, like, national federal education. But also, you know, this is something we've, I want to close this episode on that we've been talking about this whole time, right? is that this whole coup is being carried out by a bunch of people with laptops and pieces of paper walking up to bureaucrats and the bureaucrats doing what they're being told, right? This is not a coup that's working with like an army that is showing up on your street. And you can go, like, find the local bureaucrats who are the people who are supposed to enforce this stuff and you can protest them and you can put some steel in their spine and make them and make the administration actually try to do this.

Starting point is 03:41:16 It's not that hard and they'll fucking cave. Yes, yes. That's entirely what I was trying to get at earlier. And, you know, it ties into what James was saying is like, this is the time to be making connections across as wide a swath of the country as you can, including like everyone you can get in touch with who is not someone you would normally organize with. Like, this is a moment of potential. And it's during moments of potential that you should be widening the swath of people that you connect to. too, because otherwise there's just no getting through this sort of shit. Yeah. We will be covering all these topics more in depth in our regular daily episodes. I have a mind-boggling, very frustrating episode on Musk and the Trump campaign's promises of abolishing different departments of government, as well as a deep dive on like affirmative action and DEI and wokeness in the coming weeks. And I'm sure we will all be focusing on different parts of this in our continuing episodes. But that does it for us today. See you on the other side.

Starting point is 03:42:18 We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. A decade ago, I was a lot of it. on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers,

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Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 168

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