Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 20

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm Scott Rank, host of the podcast History Unplugged. Now it really is a dream come true to get paid to talk about history without all the stress while still being able to make a living. And I did it with Spreaker from iHeart. Not only did they make it super easy to monetize my podcast, but ad revenue is three to four times higher with Spreaker than with any other host I've worked with. So if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try, visit Spreaker.com. That's S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love.

I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to our show. I'm Zoey Deschanel and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates Hannah Simone and Lamorne Morris to recap our hit television series, New Girl. Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast, where we'll share behind the

scenes stories of your favorite New Girl episodes. Each week we answer all your burning questions like, is there really a bear in every episode of New Girl? Plus you'll hear hilarious stories like this. That was one of your things you brought back from Latvia. Yeah, I brought back it's all professional basketball players. Yeah, it's like a little seven foot poop. Yeah, listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. What up? All right, the show started, Garrison. Hey, we're going to be talking about Canada again. So, yeah. And to discuss Canada and politics and the happenings here, we have another journalist who writes for, I believe, Anti-Hate Canada and like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and also Vice, I believe, right? Yeah, I've written for Vice. I'm currently researching full time. I'm an extremism researcher for, it's a new initiative called the Online Hate Research and Education Project. It's actually partnered with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and it's under the New

Berger Holocaust Education Center, which might be renaming very soon. I'm very excited for you guys to get into a Twitter fight with James Lindsay. Can't wait. So, yes, Dan here has joined us to talk about Canada because I've gotten a few messages about this thing that's happening. My mother, who's in Alberta, called me a few days ago to talk about this thing that's happening. So, I'm getting a lot of things and it's definitely worth discussing, specifically on some of the rhetoric that people are using around this. So, I'm going to hand it to Dan to talk about what is it and how did it kind of get started? Yeah. Well, so, Garrison's not alone, by the way, for anyone not in Canada. Every single person's

mother in the entire country is called and asked them about it. I just got another message literally right now. Like literally this second, it's got another one. The moms of Canada have been activated. The moms of Canada have been activated, but not in exactly the same way that they're being perceived to be. Yeah, not all the ways. So, the quote-unquote trucker convoy, which I might get into a little bit later, but I'm kind of like against even calling it a trucker convoy. Yeah. It was started on January 14th and by a former wigsit party now called the Mav reportee member Tamara Litch and a group of like very active far-right grassroots protesters who do a lot of organizing like this. And most of their activities kind of go back to like 2018. Yeah, they go back a decent

amount. Yeah, like this, I mean, there's links to people that have been doing it in the 90s in Canada's movement right now, but a non-binding motion against, I think it's a M183 a few years ago, really mobilized people. And it's kind of been more consistent since then of the same groups of people. Yeah, that's what we talked about in our first Canada episodes about kind of how we got to that point. And now like those same people are still kind of behind what's going on right now. So yeah, there's this alleged caravan of truckers, of all the truckers in Canada going to Ottawa. Statistically all the truckers in Canada. All the truckers. And so this thing was kind of originally organized by some like known far-right figures and the people associated with like the

Canadian yellow vests, which kind of died down. But it didn't die down, it just morphed, right? Morphed into a very strong anti-vax presence in Canada right now. The anti-vax movement's getting a lot of popularity in Canada. And it's run by these guys who were doing WEGZIT, which is like West Exit. But for like, it's like for Alberta and BC to go away from Canada because the rest of Canada is too liberal. So WEGZIT and the yellow vests have really changed all their focus into this anti-vax thing as a way to do recruiting. And they've prompted this kind of movement of truckers going to Ottawa for a few specific reasons, which I think Dan probably knows a little bit more about than I do. Like I know the gist of it, but you've been focused on

this slightly more than I have. Yeah, I guess the main reason is it works. Like just from the perspective of getting attention and being able to get a message out. So there's been a lot of traction on this that these groups don't normally get. I think the last trucker convoy that was done under this sort of umbrella, it had like nine, I think, was the total amount of trucks that made it to Ottawa. The last time this was tried to be done, it was basically the same demands and the same reason. So this one was started on January 14th, and it didn't get that much buzz the first couple of days. The original goal was set at $100,000. I don't remember the exact time, but once it hit that pretty fast and it hit the first million

pretty fast in ways that like these fundraisers really, really don't. Like the last big one we saw in Canada that was quite alarming in that fast, capped out at under $400,000 and that was for a barbecue, for a barbecue that got defied protests last year and ended up getting like all its pad doors shut down. So there's a lot more money now in this one. Yeah, because this fundraiser, which was supposed to go hand in hand with these truckers protesting the vaccine mandates, because they're upset that they're not allowed to truck into these states because they're not vaccinated. So they have decided to all truck into Ottawa as like a pseudo-strike slash like blockade type thing, because they're saying that we're not

going to do our jobs and we're going to kind of block off access to these roads until this mandate is removed. Now, of course, the funny thing here is that the mandate that to enter, not being allowed to enter the states to do your trucking orders, that's not a mandate by Canada. That's done by that. Like that's the rule in the United States because you're entering the United States there. The states is actually the ones doing the blockage. The Canadian government has no control over this. It's not actually the thing. The way to get the message out and support is incredibly effective because something I think like 28 percent, there was a survey recently of Canadians, are against the mandate, which is like really huge for like Canada's anti-vax movement to

kind of get that like support. And like a lot of people are mobilized to by there's a trend of posting. It starts from 14 in 2018, but it's getting revived a lot again now of people posting like empty grocery stores. Even a conservative member of parliament recently posted an empty grocery store and asked for people's emails to try to like change the laws. It turned out to be from the UK. It was a stock photo. And there's been like, even like the stores themselves have to kind of like come out and make statements, being like, no, we're not we're not empty. We have things. We are in the process of restocking. That's happened in the US too, where it's like, we're literally emptying that shelf to move stuff to another shelf. We've also had so many snowstorms.

We've had really bad snowstorms in Ontario for a lot of the real photos of like empty shelves. And it's just like, oh no, the salad's half out and the storage just make a statement. And it's like, yeah, we had two snowstorms a day in a row in our truck. But like the narrative that they're trying to push is like, these mandates are causing these shortages. And the propaganda is working, even though it's all on a false premise, because first of all, it's not like that. That's not causing that. And second of all, complaining to Canada, that's not Canada's not the one who's making the restrictions. The States is the one that's that lucky from doing this. But it's not actually about these issues. That's not the reason why you're getting all these people driving to

Ottawa. Because there is a lot of people, there's not many trucks, but there is a decent amount of people that are going this because it's not actually about these specific issues. It's this general seething hatred of Trudeau and like a generalized grievance that has gotten this broad support, it's gotten enough financial backing, the fundraiser is over $6 million now. And it's just what it actually is, is an incoherent kind of intention just to go to the capital and cause problems, right? Yeah, that's what they're actually that that's what like the underlying thing is a lot of a lot of the like explaining why it's gotten so picked up. Some some official demands like have been put out. And they would be even more confusing,

like to read than like some of them are a couple of the most recent ones are just very general, like, stop this divisive nature that our government is imposing kind of thing like I'm paraphrasing, but it's really quite bland. Some demands from tangential groups involved one, they say they won't leave until Trudeau steps down. Others say at one point said until every politician stopped down, stepped down. I think that was when before someone kind of pushed in more realistic goals into the movement. But like in terms of like what they're talking about for like the rhetoric surrounding it, we're seeing a lot of rhetoric around the the sentence being like we this can be our version of January 6. But like they're saying that like in a good way. Like

that's that's the thing that at least some of the organizers and then it's being carried out into like the generalized rhetoric is that this this should be our own version of this which is which is interesting on a few ways. But like also like this would not have been said like seven months ago. But it's being said now, which means like there's been a shift in how January 6 is being viewed. There was this initial like really distancing. And now it's like it's becoming almost like more acceptable to acknowledge that it was maybe a good thing in your eyes. And so like that's an interesting rhetorical shift that that's been going on. But then it's also concerning on just like a regular level to be like, yeah, these people want to these people

are saying they want to do their own January 6 that has obvious like physical implications for all these people trying to drive to Ottawa, do either blocking off roads or just like making the government inoperable. Yeah, a co-streamer or well a streamer in what's called the Platt Army and now that's sometimes kind of just being rebranded as like Diagonal Network, quote unquote, which we can get into more but it's it's going to be sillier. Yeah, they're kind of their own that's their own issue for later. Yeah, they're their own issue. But it was one of their streamers who is very tangentially connected to like a lot of the the far right people that are involved in this protest movement leading up to in fact, Pat King, who is officially one of the organizers

of the convoy until he wasn't and then he was again, that was a whole dramatic thing for a day, like he's streamed alongside Platt Army guys before. So someone in Platt Army said, and I would quote, I would like to see our own January 6 event, see some of those truckers plow right through that 16 foot wall. And on January 24th, that was put up on CTV News made alive. And it's kind of scare a lot of people. I think at that point, former conservative leader Andrew Scheer had already voiced support for the convoy. There've been a lot of other like members of parliament start voicing support for the convoy. Some of them really didn't seem to know like what was involved and really just kind of her tenant like in passing. Oh, it's against these mandates. And I oppose

these mandates too. And it's like, if it's against Trudeau, you may as well sign on because it's going to help you. You're going to help your political career. Yeah, it's completely true. So have they actually started like blocking roads or is it just a bunch of random people driving down this like driving? So there's, there's a few different like converging points of the convoy. I think I would say probably the biggest one, but it's hard to kind of keep track of what started in British Columbia. And it's going so I'm sure not everyone knows like Mapricana. So like British Columbia is like our West Coast. That's our California. And Ottawa is it's close to the West and it's in Ontario, but it's on the border of Quebec and

Ontario. And that's where our problem is that's our capital city. So it's coming from every which way, but I think the largest contingent comes from British Columbia. And it just basically goes eastward to Ottawa, picking up people along the way. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's heading in that direction. How do we know about I know some people have kind of already some people have kind of already sort of arrived in Ottawa, but most mostly people are expected to more arrive in the next like, well, we're recording this Thursday night. So this episode will probably come out on Monday. People are expected to arrive on Saturday is the day that except people expecting like everybody to be there. At least that's my understanding of it.

The convoy itself arrived Saturday. There are people like coming from further east, like staying overnight in town and kind of just showing up the parliament event. So like by all accounts, the parliament show will probably be a lot bigger than the so far. I guess we haven't mentioned numbers yet. Sorry, numbers nor like what what they actually really plan on doing once they get there because it's been so much talking about like why this got started and what's the like driving motivational factors. But yeah, like their goal is to get to a place and do a thing. And that's the that's yeah, the thing is unclear. That's the thing is mostly unclear. I have seen discussions about like blocking off like doing like a bait and trying to assemble like a trucking

strike and then like blocking off access so that the government's forced to obey their demands or else like the country will shut down. Then some people maybe are just kind of doing it as a one day protest. It's it's it again, it is it is it is pretty unclear, but people are headed to there. What what is the what is the numbers at least from where we can see like online and stuff? So their numbers have been the number of 50,000 people 50,000 trucks 50,000 people became 50,000 trucks very quickly. And that same number, I think Rogan repeated it. I know Joe Rogan said it. Yeah. Yeah, Joe Rogan said it. Theo Flurry went on Laura Ingram and repeated the 50,000 number. He said 50,000 truckers not trucks specifically. As far as I know, Theo Flurry has no official

involvement with the convoy and is just a fan and is just repeating some numbers that like organizes themselves have kind of echoed. This is also complicated for me because this is very troubling in a lot of ways. But also, I'm a huge fan of the song convoy. So this is really devastating. Please continue. It's all right. Yeah. So Canada's for a protest movement has kind of a habit of doing this in February of 2021. Kellyanne Farkas, who's like a mainstay of the anti-mask anti-vax movement. And in between what I'm talking about and right now, I actually dated Pat King for a while, who's kind of the most outspoken person organizing the current convoy, claimed that 100,000 people were coming to Parliament for what was then

like an anti-mask demonstration. Before the event that it looked changed to 50,000. And I was actually there. It looked closer to like 200 people. I had friends that had counted like 170 people. So not quite 50,000. For all intents and purposes, the current one will be longer. Reporters doing great journalism along the way have estimated up to like 400 people so far, including I think 15 trucks outside the Bass Pro Shop in Toronto this afternoon was counted. Side note, if nothing else, gotta give them points for stopping at Bass Pro and Toronto is a pretty sweet Bass Pro. I do love a good Bass Pro Shop. My favorite is the one they built into the giant pyramid. Yeah. Obvious Nashville, baby. So the Bass Pro in Toronto,

if you're ever in town, Robert, it's the only place around that I've been told that sells subsonic 22 rounds. So if you're like in the woods, so if you're like in the woods, but like you don't want to like scare your neighbors because the woods aren't that big. Yeah, I used to have some friends and I used to go shooting in a suburban neighborhood with a 22 because it's technically, well, don't, don't do the part. You come definitely. It was, wait, there was a was legal. Oh, right. Canada doesn't. I do not. I don't endorse the might have to cut this part out for regional sharing. No, leave this all in. Just a bunch of words. Make it nonsense with bleeping. Please continue. Yeah. So only 15 trucks were counted by

CBC at that point. And like videos and stuff have been. Yeah. Yeah. There might be a couple dozen. Slightly short. But I think by the time by Saturday, I think there's a decent chance that there might be maybe around 50 trucks to 100 trucks. If there's anything more than like 500, all of the media footage will look like there's 50,000. That's enough trucks. Absolutely. Nobody's camera is going to be able to show the extent of them realistically. And then, yeah, once they're there, it's unclear what they want to do. Some people just want to do the fucked up thing. Some people want to carry on the tradition of like what the most of the anti like Vax anti mask protests in Canada have been, which have been pretty big, but it's been it's been mostly

standing with signs. So it is, it is, it is really unclear because again, most of the truckers in Canada probably are not going to be there nor to necessarily endorse this idea. Nor is like, right? Because they're pressing the, their initial issue is not even based on an actual like thing. So it's, it is, I'm not sure how many people are really going to show up because I don't know even how specific it is to an issue. One, one just really interesting, funny, interesting thing that I thought about is like with, with some of these people, you know, talking about, you know, going to Ottawa and not leaving until the mandates are dropped or the entire government resigns, like these people who are talking about this like blockage and shortage and stuff

are also like the same people who get very angry at Indigenous people for blocking off roads and trails for like oil and like pipeline protests. A lot of them. Yeah. Some of them, some of them are indulged in pretending and stuff like Pat King back in September kind of went on like a kick where he just let a lot of people believe he was Indigenous and claimed so and not correct them. That is, that is weird. And a family member of him went on Facebook and like bombarded people with information that he was not, in fact, Indigenous and it was all very weird. And then a lot of people held him to comments in the past where he talked about Anglo-Saxons having the strongest bloodlines. Yeah, that is, I think Pat, Pat King probably deserves his own little

deep dive on one of the pods. But, but yeah, like it is like with all the people talking about blockades and stuff, all you most of them coming from like the western side of Canada. It is, it is, yeah, like you're, you're talking about all these things and like there's really big pro-oil sentiments in all of the, in all of this crowd. Yeah, because a lot of it is connected to financial and political stuff, not necessarily even this vaccine issue. It's been more like a symbol to represent their general kind of upsetedness at the way, at the way things are going for them. It is interesting to me, so when I first heard about this, my, I was, I was like, oh, okay,

so this is going to be like the Chilean truckers. And I was like, okay, well, this is really bad. But it's like, it's interesting to me, like how few people they've been able to mobilize. Like that's like not a large number of truckers. Like it's, it's tough because they actually get. Yeah, it looks like a lot of like vehicles when you, when you see like footage, photos and videos of like in, I'm going to like a lot of like telegram and Facebook groups of just people just like sharing pictures and photos of the rally, of the convoy passing through their town. And like it's like what Robert said, like it's, when it fills up both sides of the camera and you have a wide depth of field, it looks huge and it's, it's really hard to count.

The money is preposterous, also sidenote on the money. The funds were frozen a few days ago on the 25th, but today $1 million was released back to them because they, they gave GoFundMe a pretty clear plan, allegedly, according to GoFundMe for, for how they're going to distribute it. The rest of the, it's, I think it's like 6.7 million now. So the rest of the 5.7 million I think is still frozen. Okay. It is, it is so, it is so much money. Yeah, we should do something like that. And they could, they could actually buy truck nuts for 150,000 truckers, which is the most

I've seen them guess truckers are coming. They could buy $20 truck nuts off Amazon for all of them and still have the vast majority of their funds left over. Yeah. But see, that would be an act of actual heroism and, and they're not going to do that. The reason why I wanted to talk about this is one to like acknowledge that it's happening, right? Acknowledge the tactics that they're using in terms of trying to go into an urban area and block off like trade routes, essentially. Yeah. And then I wanted to talk about like, first of all, it doesn't matter that like, the fact that this is happening is divorced from any kind of direct cause, right? Because

their, their actual grievance is false. And the grievance doesn't really actually matter. It just need, they just, there needed to be some kind of cultural or propaganda push in order for this physical action to happen. And that's been done. It doesn't even need to be like coherent. And then escalation, people driving here doing this thing. And then I know there was this one interview, I forgot on what news channel, but they interviewed this one trucker guy, part of a part of this con part of this convey in my hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And he's, he said, I advocate civil war. If people don't want to step up, we have guns, we'll have some, we'll stand up and we'll bring them out. But like, so that's the quote. So like,

in the fact that you're just openly saying, I advocate civil war in relation to this movement is like, my goals, my goal here is being like, people fantasize about Canada as being a place to escape, you know, family, like Canada is like the other from the States. And like, no, it's the same like, we are like, you cannot escape away from fascism. There is no really, there's no real away right now in terms of like, there's no safe ground. Yeah, there's no safe ground. It can spread to where you are for people living in Canada. When you have people on the news on like global news saying, I advocate civil war within the context of this, of this like, you know, convoy movement, it is, it is an actual thing worth paying attention to it is an actual problem.

It's, it's huge. And earlier today, and I might pronounce his name wrong, but Del Manukdak from CBC Toronto tweeted a story because he on behalf of CBC contacted an actual organizer of the convoy. They have different regional organizers and their website lists them all. And it had Pad King, funny side note, it had Pad King listed as an organizer while their GoFundMe had a statement saying they had no connection to him, which was very funny. But yeah, so CBC Toronto contacted them and the guy responded, enough lies, you quote, slave blooded trader, evil will get its due in the end. And after a little, yeah, after, yeah, after a back, yeah, after a back and forth, a very brief back and forth. And just like a couple of questions the organizer ended with,

you know, you toe the line for the global corporate coup taking place under the guise of public health. You can't be that dumb. Traders will swing in time. Oh boy. Yeah. I do think Americans don't fully understand how much the anti-vax movement is tied to far right politics within Canada. And it's like been like the driving force of far right politics for the past two years. And it's gotten so much larger. It is like it is, it is, it is a thing. Like when you have, when you have people on camera saying we want to January 6th, I advocate a civil war talking about not leaving until the government either resigns or mandates are dropped and then threatening physical violence on top of that. Yeah, like it's, it is, it is a thing that could

happen there. And that's kind of why I wanted to talk about it is like, yeah, when I have my mother calling me dozens of messages from random people, like worried about this, then yeah, it is an issue. It's, it's, it's not, it's not, not a thing. No, it is. And the, the rhetoric is so universal against anyone they perceive to be leftist to that it is really dangerous. Like there's been a little bit of talk of like counters in Ottawa. When the numbers are this big, like there's no safe way for people to stop that sort of thing, especially when all the vehicles are on that side, like it's, it's dangerous. There's a lot of violent stuff. Even like I was looking today, the People's Party of Canada, they got like 5% of votes in our last election. They had a little bit of a scandal

during our election, which is the end of last year, where a writing director for, I think it's a, it's the Greater Area of London. It is Elgin Middle Six London. So they're, they're writing directors and not their member of parliament writing was revealed to post like Sculpt Maskenautsy memes and memes comparing Bernier, the leader of his own party to Hitler. So like, probably not a negative comparison. And he was not fired for it. But he was fired after it came out that he was being charged for throwing rocks at our prime minister. Oh, good. Okay. That's, that's fine. Yeah. He actually, he recently sat on a live stream. He was asked, he was currently on trial

and he said, yeah, I mean, as far as I know, like he's been posting images of like trucks running people over. And that's just like one connection to, to the legitimacy of it all. Well, like, I mean, the, the Platt Army guys, the ones who talked about driving the truck, 16 feet, they're also connected with Bernier. They've had Randy Hillier on their podcast before, who's a sitting politician of a member of provincial parliament, which is kind of like our state Senate equivalent over here. They've had him on and like there's some like legitimacy to it getting on. And when you just talk about the broad movement in general, a former conservative party of Canada leader Andrew Scheer, who had kind of a rocky departure from the party, because he

allegedly used campaign funds to pay for his kids private school side note, like he'd already signed on an endorsed and been interviewed. Aaron O'Toole, the current leader of the of the conservative party just today actually said he was going to engage with them. Earlier this evening, Sergeant and arms package McDonald's sent an email to our parliamentarians ahead of Saturday's trucker convoy protest and quoting Justin Link's Twitter here. There have been attempts to collect MP's home addresses. As such, the Sergeant at arms is advising to avoid the rally and go somewhere safe. That apparently wasn't listened to Aaron O'Toole, who said, I'm going to do it anyways. And Justin Link tweeted later tomorrow, I will be meeting

with truckers. O'Toole announces right after parliamentary security warned MPs to avoid the protest entirely. So it's not great. Yeah. I mean, again, this will probably come out after Saturday. So if we don't talk about this again, then that means it's good. I mean, they showed up, they protest and they kind of dissipated. If we're following this up in a few days with another episode, then that means something bad happens. But again, even at this point, it is still worth talking about in terms of like generally, like this is the kind of like the nut of why this is so important for everybody is what you were saying about like, when you've got this many people, this many trucks coming from an outside and moving into a city, there's

very little that can be done against them. Like there's not really much of an effective counter other than trying to get another mass of people in cars to confront them. And that's, you know, a potentially dicey situation. So this remains a very powerful tactic. We've seen it used all over the United States too. Like, and it's this idea of like blockading a city, even though this is kind of the earliest step in taking that is, is this is going to be the last time people try to extend this logic. Yeah. So that's kind of the surrounding cultural reasons and shifts and rhetoric and like, applicableness as like an act of like an act of like protest or like, like revolt or insurgency, whatever, whatever treatment I use is just interesting because like a lot of

these other interesting thing about the states, compared to Canada is like states, we have like, we have like an actual like far right movement, like we have like, we have like conservatives, when then we have like the far right movement in Canada, that distinction is not much of a thing. A lot of, a lot of there is, there is some far right figures who try to push stuff forward. Absolutely. But a lot of like the, the space in between conservative and far right is kind of a little bit more fluid. A lot of these people who are showing up are not like far right protesters. They are kind of regular conservatives, but they're still getting sucked into saying, I advocate a civil war. Like that is just a regular conservative dude. He's not a member of

any kind of political thing. He's like, it's, that is just, that is just kind of what this culture on the western side of Canada really, really like a kind of defaults to almost when you start going into this kind of like anti Trudeau territory, because that's the, their main, their main politics is anti Trudeau. Like that is, that is what they are. So anything that gets to that point is allowed, whether that is conservative or that is like more far right, as long as it's anti Trudeau, then it's, it is a valid politic. And that's a distinction in the state that there's a thing in the Canada that I don't really see as much in the States. It's very familiar to me when you talk about how anti Clintonism fed into Trumpism, like that, that is I think a worthwhile comparison

to make because there were a lot of American conservatives who could get in bed with anybody if they were staying against Hillary or Bill. Cool stuff. Well, this is all fun. I hope to not talk with you about this again, Dan. But there is a chance, there is a chance people have conversations. If you wouldn't want to, after this episode airs, if people want to see what happened, right, because this airs probably Monday, and the convo is set to arrive on Saturday, where can they find work talking about this, whether that be like your Twitter feed, or if you know, if any, you know, articles are planned? Yeah. So I'm planning on live tweeting. I can't make any promises because safety is always a thing.

And I won't know what it looks like until Saturday happens. But I'm planning on live tweeting. My Twitter is at spineless L. That's the word spineless. And then just the letter L. So yeah, you can check in on his account to see if he has a thread by the time this episode's out. And yeah, that's how you can kind of figure out what happened if you're just listening to this now. And then in the meantime, there'll be a lot of auto media covering it. If you just want to see the fallout, I imagine the Canadian idea network might talk about it more. They put an article today on it that covers more of the kind of problems that the far right that we talked about today than the most other media will go into. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that

the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was

trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. That was a very good article. And then also today, Elon Musk tweeted in support of the Canadian truckers. So just in terms of let's just as a good example, I think this situation is a really great way to start thinking about politics and culture and how they relate to each other and how this type of thing succeeds and how it succeeds and why this rhetoric is so successful in bringing in so many people in Canada and raising $6 million, almost $7 million. But anyway, that is that is the show.

One more plug, Dan, so people know where to find you. I only really am active on Twitter. So again, it's at spineless L, the word spineless, as in I don't have a spine. And then the letter L on Twitter. Thank you, Dan. Plug your Gitter account. You're Gitter. Wow. Yeah, real, real Gitter user vibes coming off of Dan. The only social media platform that Joe Rogan looked at and said, Robert's just trying to get me to plug my sock puppet accounts.

Yeah, yeah. Everyone follows his socks. This is a fucking off. You could follow all my sock puppets at fascistwizard.ca. Anyway, that is that that does it for our show. Thank you for listening. And yeah, convoys Canada can't can't escape. What grows in the forest? Trees? Sure. Know what else grows in the forest? Our imagination, our sense of wonder, and our family bonds grow too. Because when we disconnect from this

and connect with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. Hi, my name is Cassidy Zachary. And I am April Callahan. And we are fashion historians. Yep. And co-hosts and the creators of the podcast Dressed,

The History of Fashion, which is dedicated to investigating the significance of dress from throughout history and around the world. And we are so excited to bring you a brand new season celebrating groundbreaking fashion figures and exploring the history of everything from corsets to blue jeans. Dressed, The History of Fashion is available on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever else you listen to your favorite shows. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday.

After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Fit. On the podcast 90210MG, join Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a re-watch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning. We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen. So they know what happened on camera, obviously. But we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades. As 90210 Superfan and radio host Cissony sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce,

reflect, and relive each moment from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting, Donna Martin graduates. You have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show. And you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the New Year's again! Yeah, welcome to the Year of the Tiger.

This is a special Lunar New Year's edition of It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is today just about... Well, it's still about sort of things falling apart and things being rebuilt. But I wanted to specifically do a special Lunar New Year's episode and spend some time, I think, talking about Chinese-ness and what sort of being a part of the Chinese diaspora in the US and Canada is like. And how that influences how we organize, what we're afraid of, what we're sort of proud of.

And with me to talk about this, we have JN, who I think first time ever returning guest. Yeah, who is it? Works with Laosan. Hello, JN. Oh, what an honor. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me back. Yeah, thank you for coming.

And we also have Jane Shi, who is a queer Chinese settler living in unceded traditional and ancestral territories in the Musquean, Sasquimish, and Slewa-tooth nations in what is falsely and fakely considered Canada. She is a poet, writer, editor, and an organizer and does many other cool things. Hello, Jane. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Hello.

Thank you for having me. Just wanted to share that it's Musqueam, Squamish, and Slewa-tooth. Yeah, sorry. I, fortunately, I do not live up north, and so my pronunciations of tribal names are even worse than they are for the tribal names that are around me. So my apologies. No worries, no worries. Yeah.

So before we get into a bunch of extremely grim stuff, I wanted to, because this is the this, if you will be listening to, well, okay, unless you're listening to this on Monday night, in which case, congratulations on beating time. But most of you are probably going to be listening to this on Lunar New Year's. And so I wanted to, before, yeah, before everything gets completely dark, I wanted to know what you choose favorite Chinese New Year's food is, because this is like maybe my favorite holiday, and it's basically my favorite holiday because in grand Chinese tradition, it's just an excuse to eat a lot.

So, yeah, open the floor up. Yeah, I think you're the expert here, Jane. So feel free to lay down the knowledge. I am not an expert just because I fold dumplings does not mean I'm an expert. But I mean, I haven't spent like Lunar New Year's with really that many other people in a very long time, so my sense of like, breath of food has really, really narrowed to what is available to me. And I also have been really struggling with the dumplings that I've been making because

of like carpal tunnel issues. But I've been thinking a lot about jellyfish lately, like I keep thinking about jellyfish. And I keep thinking about like the sesame, anything with sesame in it. Yeah. And like just boiled dumplings, I feel like are really great for me at this particular moment. Yeah. Yeah, my favorite is in Cantonese, it's called ningo, which is it's a homonym. You stole mine.

Oh, really? Yeah, it's amazing, right? And the way my mom used to make it all the time was like dipping it in an egg first. And so it has this kind of like eggy crust on it, which is really, really awesome. And I've been making that for the past couple of years myself, where I am. And I can't wait to go to the grocery store and grab some because it's only available around this time, I guess they don't really produce it any other time. And last time I went to visit my mom, she like loaded my suitcase full of them and I wasn't able to eat them fast enough

unfortunately and some of them went fast. Oh, no. We have one in our refrigerator. Well, I think it's, I think it's, it was in the freezer and it's now I think in the refrigerator. And we're all incredibly excited to cut into it on New Year's. Yeah, do you guys do the, because I know, so we normally have red bean ones. I know there's like brown sugar ones or something that are like plain. Wait, I just wanted to check, like, is it nangal?

Yeah, or at least. Yeah, so like the, the sort of like flower thing that is like shaped like a semicircle. Yeah, wait. Oh, yeah, I feel like there's different. Or in like an entire circle. Yeah, we usually cut them into like, like square strips, but I think that's just like a cooking, ease of cooking thing. Yeah, and it usually comes with like a date or something on top. Yeah.

Yeah, when it's packaged. That is so interesting because I feel like the nangal that I grew up with doesn't usually have a lot of things on it. It's kind of like sticky and kind of plain. And I'm just, this is, this is a new thing for me. Yeah. Yeah, the one we usually get just has red beans in it. And then there's like the one date on the top. Oh, I don't know if you're thinking of like tau ningo, which is like a different type of dish, where it's like white rice cakes, and then you, you can like, it's like saucy.

And then you put like different ingredients in it. Yeah, I think it's a different ours are just that they're like, they're pretty close to the Yeah, I think, I think I'm just talking about the just regular nangal, like they're just like, like they're, they're, they're basically plain, but there's some red bean, like sir into the dough, and then it's just like the flat brown thing that you like fry. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about. Yeah. Yeah. All right, this is this we've now done dessert chat.

Honestly, honestly, much, much less grim time than most of the stuff that happens on here. And you have all been now subjected to it. I'd go eat Chinese New Year's food. It's great. Yeah. So onto things that are somewhat more grim. Um, I think there's, there's two big things I wanted to talk about that sort of related to like, I guess, Chinese diaspora-ness, um, I guess we can start with talking a bit about anti-Asian violence and police violence, because I mean, it's not like so my sort of into this is that my, my someone, uh, okay, so one of the things that's happened in the

past about two years was the huge sort of spike in anti-Asian violence. But then, you know, part of what happens politically around that was there was this huge attempt to essentially turn anti-Asian violence into, I guess, like the anti-BLM, like especially in the U.S. But I think, I think this happened elsewhere too, where it didn't, I don't know, it worked in some places and didn't work in other places. So I went to the University of Chicago and a few, is it a few months ago now? Maybe just a couple, like a month or two ago, a Asian, a Chinese international student like got shot on campus. And this turned into a huge sort of like, bring more cops on campus. There was this huge petition that got signed. It was the people were like asking for

more security cameras and asking for more cops. And like the UCPD, like a couple weeks later, just like shot a dude. And so that there's been, I've been seeing this tension a lot. I was wondering if you two had also sort of run into similar stuff and what your thoughts were on it? I mean, I feel like, unfortunately, with Canada, there's like this dynamic where we look to the States for news and validation in this weird way that I find really delegitimizes the unique struggles that are here that are different. There are, there's a different kind of police system. There's like the local police like Vancouver Police Department. But then there's also the RCMP, the Royal Mount Canadian Police, which are in other municipalities. And the RCMP

was created specifically as a tool of settler colonialism to enforce the Indian Act, which is I guess the most succinctly way I can put it is segregation of Indigenous peoples from settlers. And there is a lot of displacement of Black communities across Canada, but and there was also slavery in Canada, even though we like to pretend that there wasn't. And so against this background, I guess, and ongoing like police brutality, whether it's in Watsuitan territories or just the police killing people, there's a lot of mainstream Asian Canadian and Chinese Canadian institutions that are very, very much complicit in the system. Like there is an organization, an immigrant Chinese Canadian organization in Vancouver, who one of the board members is

a cop who is married to a city counsellor. And a lot of the discourse that institutions, not people themselves necessarily, but institutions create around, for example, the revitalization of Chinatown or the preservation of culture is around, oh, there's graffiti in the neighborhood. Chinatown and Vancouver is in the downtown east side, which is considered the poorest post, is considered the poorest post-so-cold in Canada. And it's like a tight-knit community with a lot of Indigenous peoples, Black people, people in poverty struggling against the poisoning massacre, wherein the government is not providing safe supply and where the police just kind of like are everywhere,

pointing guns at everyone, displacing the tent cities. And so when there is an easy, not an easy, but just like a demonized group of people that the general public doesn't know enough about, you know, if you walk through the downtown east side and talk to people, you would talk to people about their experiences with residential school, their experiences with missing family members, experiences with poverty. And in the broadest terms, it's like the way that Chinatown is being gentrified, people tend to blame the poor. And there's like this divide and conquer mentality within the Asian diaspora, when in the Chinese diaspora specifically. And so similar to what happened with Michelle Go, similar to her, there was a South Asian elderly woman who

a group of people who lived in the tent city had killed pretending to be cops when they knocked on her door. And one of the city counselors in Vancouver was like, we need to stop indulging in these tent cities. Meanwhile, there's a lot of like marginalized people in these tent cities who cats who need to live there because it's COVID times and society has abandoned them. So it's like anti Asian racism and violence has also the hate, the so-called hate crime thing has so apparently increased. And I don't think that it hasn't increased, it's just that like the way that the media, the way that the institutions within Canada is also jumping on to the police wagon, the police, the hate crime angle,

rather than learn from abolitionists. Yeah, this is a long way of putting it. It's like similar, it's similar. And I know a lot of details. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, I think that tracks, I mean, the targets are slightly different just based on sort of snares, but on the sort of local context. But I think that does, yeah, that tracks a lot with what we've been seeing here as, I think there's another thing that, I don't know, so I really don't like the term like, because the Twitter hashtag is stop Asian hate, like I hate that framing of it as sort of hatred, not racism. But even the sort of the anti Asian violence framing, which I've been used a lot, I think has problems because, you know, I mean, this is one of the

things you were talking about, one of the things that I've seen a lot is just, you know, any time, like, you know, there are genuine sort of racism attacks, right? But then there's also just like, I mean, one of the sort of scare things that happened here was it was like a bunch of people's, like a bunch of Chinese restaurants got broken into and robbed. And everyone was like, well, this is anti Asian violence. And it's like, well, no, like this is just theft. And there's been this sort of like collapsing of something bad happens to an Asian person with specifically sort of like targeted racist attacks. And I think that's been, well, I mean, that's been a problem. And there's also the secondary problem of, you know, who even gets included in this in the first

place? Like one of the biggest things I've been frustrated about is, you know, the sort of the selective inclusion of South Asian people, like I, there was there was a shooting at a FedEx facility last year by a guy who was like, very, very far right, kind of, like, pilled online guy. And it killed a bunch of Sikh workers. And there was never, there was just nothing, like, no one talked about his anti Asian violence. But then, you know, selectively, you get inclusion to Southeast Asian people when it's like, it's like, people get folded into being Asian, when it's like useful to call it from war police. But then when it's, you know, not useful for that, or when it's, you know, especially when it's working

class people getting killed, there's just sort of nothing. And I've been, I don't know, I've been really frustrated by this dynamic a lot. Yeah, and Jane, I want to know what you think about this too, because I have no talks long enough about this. Yeah, I mean, you know, wasn't there, there was a hate crime bill that was passed in Congress, right? And it was supposedly, quote unquote, supposed to be addressing all this, quote unquote, anti Asian hate stuff. And, you know, the only thing it accomplished was it created like some, some government organ to like, oversee these efforts to address hate crimes and then more funding for the police, right? So I think it was, it was a very kind of direct impact, we could just see how this

discourse transformed into exactly what a lot of, you know, organizers had said would happen, which is more funding for the police and not making communities safer, right? So I think the real conundrum for me, and I think that really kind of, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I get, I get kind of frustrated is, you know, whenever these, these attacks happen on, you know, Asian heritage or Asian identified people, the response, I mean, it's, it's a good nature and it's well-meaning and I agree with it. But, you know, the response is always like the, the telling folks who have been victimized or those who know them, that more police is not the answer, right? And, you know, I think that's true,

but then I think what I'm struggling with is how to make this message resonate with those folks, right? Because I think there's a way that in some ways that can alienate them even more and make them even more reaction, right? Because that's, you know, the media has often spun that argument, they use further instances of violence to spin that argument of like, when, when people say the answer is not more cause it doesn't make it safer. The media is able to spin that to say, look, this isn't working, right? It's, things are actually getting more dangerous. All the kind of like scaremongering tactics with crime statistics and all that stuff, which are usually false anyway. So I think that's what I'm trying to figure out now is like,

you know, because in Chinatown, LA, where, you know, where I've done some work, there was community meetings with CCD, the Chinatown Committee for Equitable. Oh, what's the D stand for? I always forget. Develop. They had some meetings with community folks to kind of like, you know, hear what, hear what they wanted to do to address this. And they kind of like, a lot of those organizers had, you know, they're coming from that viewpoint that calling for more cops is not the answer. And so some of the mail, they're from the community, but they're not, they weren't part of the kind of like senior population of Chinatown, which is, you know, it's like low income seniors is kind of like, are the folks that are being pushed out and by developers and all the gentrification

happening as well. Some of some men were kind of like, okay, well, we should start kind of like orange neighborhood watch. And, you know, I think in some way that taps into this kind of like, we protect us type of ethos, right? It's not relying on a state or government or whatever, police paramilitary force. But then I think the question that some folks had, I heard the second hand was that, you know, are these people actually from the community? And are they actually doing this to address the needs of the folks who are most affected by it? Right. And so I think some folks were uncomfortable with the idea that there should be these kind of like street patrols. And so there's, there's just so many different ways to approach this. And I haven't, you know,

I'm not laying blame on anyone, but I just haven't seen an effective way to counteract that call for more police yet. That's a really good point, because I feel like in, when especially Asian women, people who experience like various forms of sexual violence or street harassment, that sense of unsafety is amplified when we witness other people getting murdered in public spaces. And so I think in a way, it's like understandable why people want to grasp for any kind of solution. And, and also why that kind of trauma can be weaponized or like taken advantage of immediately, like just because I'm like, who asked for you to be street patrols of Chinatown? Who decided that you make the community safer? Have you consulted the seniors? Have you, have you talked with all of

the seniors, all of the elders to ask them, like, how would you feel if I did that? Like, where is that suggestion coming from? And I think that like, the other argument is that like, mental health resources is an alternative to policing, even though policing and mental health systems are very, very, very connected. Edward Wong has an article about that in Upping the Aunty. And I don't know, I just think that like, there has to be like a way to talk about this without invalidating each other's trauma and invalidating people's survival instincts as well, because I feel like for years, as someone who's done work in the anti-violence sector, it's not that I wanted there to be more policing, it's just that like, a lot of survivors might be like, hey, actually

do want to use the court system because this person is dangerous. Like, that's, like, as somebody supporting a survivor, I can't just go, no, you're wrong. Less cops, right? Like, that's, that's not a compassionate response. And it's also not a compassionate response to go, hey, you're making this like, all about yourself. And you should like be talking about like, black and indigenous people, like, like, like, that's, that's also really insensitive. So it's like, I feel like there's a way that there is like a way to talk about abolition that really needs to respect every survivor or every, like, communities like trauma. And it's not an easy thing because it's not like, our communities have our communities have had a good way to respond to trauma. Like, we haven't really, like, we're

still breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma. Yeah. And I think this, this kind of comes back to another sort of difficulty of this whole project, because, you know, a lot of the sort of the abolitionist framework is about how, like, trans transitioning things towards community solutions. But like, what is that, you know, like, what, what does that even mean when you're dealing with, you know, this is, this is part of the problem with, well, okay, you have armed self defense groups. But, you know, what happens when inevitably, and this is, this is just something that happens. Just, you know, this is, this is, this is the nature of security forces, right, is eventually

you're going to get abuses in it. And it's like, okay, well, what happens then and what happens when, you know, like the abuses are people inside the community. And this is compounded, I think, by this problem of, like, what, like, what even, you know, the, I think, I think there's, there's, there's, there's a broader problem of like, what Asian this is, and there's a broader, and this is, this is also sort of localized problem of like, what even, like, is the Chinese community at all, because you're dealing with something that's incredibly fragmented, you're dealing with people who speak different languages, you're dealing with people who've been in these places for, you know, some people who've been here for centuries, some people who've been here,

like, two months. And I think that makes it really difficult in a lot of ways to sort of, like, even, even just bring together something that could be a community. And I know, I know what happens, and I know, you know, there's, there's, there's lots of different sort of, like, fragmented communities. But, but I think it makes this harder, because there isn't a sort of, like, ready made thing you can turn to and go, okay, well, this is how we're going, like, this is the group of people, and this is the sort of, like, social sphere, and this is the community that we're going to turn to to sort of deal with this stuff. There's just this kind of a bunch of amorphous, different groups. And then also you have the problem that,

like, you know, if you're going to talk about, like, political forces, nation communities, like, the business associations are extremely powerful. And, you know, we have different objectives than they do. But they're also, like, extremely well organized in a way that most others sort of, like, Chinese groups aren't. I don't know, that's, that's, that's been where my thinking has been going on this. Yeah, I think this, there's some resonance with what you're saying and the kind of dynamics that you're identifying and what I've kind of witnessed and experienced in, like, Hong Kong diaspora organizing, which I think, you know, there's a lot of overlap with that same type of, like, you know, small business organization type of thing

that usually dominates Chinatowns across North America, which is the case in LA. And actually CCD spends a lot of time fighting the small business organizations, because they are very friendly with developers. And they're usually pro, you know, pro securitization and anti poor folks and all that kind of stuff. So there is that that element, right, where a lot of the times, you know, you are fighting against people who might have the same heritage, for example. And, you know, for me personally, that's very much the case with Hong Kong diaspora groups, right, because, you know, many of them are very conservative, are right wing and not only just kind of held personal beliefs, but advocate a lot for these kind of, you know, these policies and

politicians and all these different things that I really can't stand. And I'm aligned against. And, you know, I think it's a lot of folks want to take the kind of pragmatist route of like, we'll work with you on things that we, where we have points of unity. Otherwise, we don't. Whereas, you know, I guess some people see me as a little bit more rigid in the sense that like, I don't want to work with these folks at all, because I see them as kind of themselves as a force that is causing more harm than good, especially if with these Hong Kong diaspora groups, the usual mantra is like Hong Kong first, like everything that we do is serving Hong Kong. And that you in the diaspora that usually means kind of like non partisanship, lobbying, Congress, all those different

things. And then kind of like completely ignoring or being agnostic of local and domestic issues. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way.

And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country,

the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. To oversimplify a little bit. So, you know, I think that's been on my mind a lot. I know your question was about Chineseness, but I guess for me, that kind of filters a little bit further down to like what is being a Hong Konger, right? Yeah. It's really difficult to organize with your specific quote unquote, ethnic or diaspora community when the the meaning of diaspora is not a cohesive community, but people's memories of home.

It's like a difficult thing to kind of butt your head against because it's like you have your diversity, equity, inclusion framework of organizing, and then you have the everyday like what these frameworks can't simplify, which is the tensions between your communities. Like I didn't grow up experiencing overt racist violence when I grew up in Richmond. Richmond is an extremely East Asian and Chinese suburb that saw first, not first, but just like at some point a wave of Hong Kong diaspora because of 1997, and then afterwards more like mainlanders. And so on the playground somebody was like, are you from Taiwan, mainland or Hong Kong? And that was when I was like seven and that was my

introduction to what it means to be in diaspora in this particular kind of way. And being like just right like in that and figuring yourself out within that and seeing how there is just an absence of community because of how these different geopolitical experiences have separated us and made it more difficult when we filter our parents' political beliefs onto each other. It's kind of like this awkward thing, but I think that like in trying to contend with that in the present, it's sort of like we have these older institutions that other people, that the older generations have built. What new things can we build? What things can we, because I feel like I'm really rigid too.

I'm really not great at talking across the aisle. And when I do, it's not really about anything substantive. It's like, hey, hi, it's good to see. When you live in a place you don't want to make enemies, but it's a really hard thing. And it's even more heartbreaking when you find out slowly that people are just taking advantage of you. And I don't know, it's a really difficult thing to organize against when you're like, you all hate me. Great, love it. On the podcast, Lady of the Road, join comedian Arden Marine and Emmy-nominated director Julian Robinson for inspiring conversations with influential women about self-help and life. We're talking about health, we've been talking about money, we've been talking about standing

up for yourself like things that we don't, I don't talk about that much. So this has been really wonderful for me. Each week, Arden and Julie speak with motivating, uplifting women who do things their way. Let's just say I don't have any resentment now, but there was one year where I set $9,000 in coins and a check for 30 cents. Here relay lessons from risk takers like Joan Jett, Nicole Beyer, Lauren Lapkus, and more. But if I'm Christine Baranski, I will ask how much number one is making. If there's such a huge difference, I will probably pass on it. I respect that. Listen to Lady of the Road starting February 10th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to our show. I'm Zoey Deschanel, and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates, Hannah Simone and Lamorne Morris to recap our hit television series, New Girl. Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast, where we'll share behind-the-scenes stories of your favorite New Girl episodes, reveal the truth behind the legendary game True American, and discuss how this show got made with the writers, guest stars, and directors who made the show so special. Fans have been begging us to do a New Girl recap for years, and we finally made a podcast where we answer all your burning questions like, is there really a bear in every episode of New Girl? Plus, each week you'll hear hilarious stories like this. At the end, when he says, you

got some Schmidt on your face, I feel like I pitched that joke. I believe that. I feel like I did. I'm not a thousand percent. I want to say that was, I tossed that one out. Listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that recognizes that Lunar New Year's is not in fact just one day. And in that spirit, a special New Year's episode is going on for a second day. So here's the rest of our conversation with Jane and Jan. You know, the other thing I wanted to describe, touch on, like, this is, I think, kind of diverting off the topic, but I think it's also something that I've been running into a lot, which is that, like, you know, you have this kind of,

like, you know, you have this kind of bind, right? Because on the one hand, you're stuck between, you know, like a lot of the organizing in sort of in Asian communities has all of these problems. And then, you know, okay, well, you know, the other thing that's happening is the sort of mainstream American left. And the mainstream American left, I think the Canadian left has problems, similar problems with this is that, like, it's a bunch of just, like, it's a bunch of tankies, it's a bunch of people who love the CCP, it's a bunch of just weird genocide deniers, and, like, people who think that every Asian person who, like, doesn't like the government is a CIA psi op. And I don't know, this is something that I've, like, I mean, I ran into a lot trying to, I mean,

help people doing Hong Kong organizing is something I've run into just in, like, every organized, like, I've run into this in anarchist spaces too, like, it's just, I don't know, it feels really bad because it's like, like, you're, you're just sort of caught between, and I guess this is sort of this is three-way triangulation, right? Because on the one hand, you have this sort of, like, you have the local dynamics with, you know, the sort of view sentence of these sort of reactionary small business owners, you have this, you know, the Chinese community also being sort of split in between, like, pro and anti-CCP factions, both of whom have, like, are absolutely chock full of just fanatical right-wingers. It's like, well,

okay, it's like the CCP versus the Epoch Times, and it's like, I don't want any of them to win. And then you zoom out and you're caught in the middle of this sort of, you're caught in the middle of this sort of, I don't know, I think it's sort of like a Fox geopolitical struggle, but like, one of the big sort of ideological conflicts being between both the CCP and the US sort of, like, using the specter of each other to sort of, like, disrupt their bases. And I don't know, I'm incredibly frustrated by it, I'm incredibly frustrated by the way that these groups have, like the anti-CCP, like the pro-CCP groups have sort of selectively been using, like, selectively been using anti-Asian violence as, you know, they,

to basically making the argument that the importance of anti-Asian violence is that, while this only happens because people say many things about the CCP, and if no one didn't like the CCP, then there wouldn't be any violence, even though, like, anti-Asian violence here predates the existence of a Communist Party in China by centuries, like, we, like, we invaded, we'd invaded China, like, how many times, at least twice, maybe three, I think at least twice, and maybe three times, like, before there was a Communist Party. And so, I don't know, I feel trapped a lot between these dynamics in ways that are very frustrating. And yeah, I guess I want to open the floor to talk about that. I guess I see it as, like, co-optation, partly,

but I guess I also see it as how power works. Like, there is, like, this local paper, and I was researching, sort of, the history of Chinese diaspora organizing locally. And there was a spat in the paper between two people who, one of whom is from a newer Hong Kong diaspora. There was, like, a whole spat in the paper about history, and there's, the history of, like, those tensions are, like, written in the community itself. Like, it's, it's, it's not a new thing that people argue about what happened on June 4th. It's not new that people are really mistrustful of each other and that there are actual, like, like, government forces that infiltrate and create a, like, basically deny other people's

struggles, like, when that government is themselves perpetuating it. And I guess it just is really hard when fellow organizers that you otherwise really, like, want to get along with are, are, like, uncritical of the state that has oppressed your family. Because you're just kind of like, you're kind of like, wait, so are we, have we had a conversation about this? Like, we clearly haven't talked enough if this is what you believe in. And it's just a little bit hard because it's, like, community building is not assuming that we're in solidarity. Community building is actually, like, doing that hard work. Like, what is your community experiencing? And what is my community experiencing? How are we being, like, weaponized against each other? Like, yeah, how are these

governments, like, manipulating, like, communities? But that's, like, really hard when trust has been probably broken, like, immediately. Yeah, I think you're so right that it's, it's really about cooptation. And a lot of it, like, what I've witnessed is really so much about. And this is, like, like you're saying, Jane, this is a much older dynamic than, you know, just the past couple years is like states being able to use this kind of home and diaspora framework to demand loyalty through, like, targeting diaspora people's guilt. And so there's so many, like, guilty diaspora people I know who are, like, you know, usually from, usually from a class perspective, right, because they had the, their family had the resources to leave or they were not born in the

home country or whatever, because of their family background, that type of thing. And they want to subsume that by taking this radical, you know, anti US, anti Canada stance, which is fine. Like, obviously being anti US and anti Canada is a good thing. But the thing that's really kind of frustrated me the most is seeing these kind of like radical folks in North America, especially queer folks who are like, they'll take the most reactionary positions against women and queer and, you know, LGBT folks in China, for example, by supporting a state that is repressing them, right. So it's, it's such cognitive dissonance to me, like, I don't understand why these folks can't see that they're kind of perpetuating this violence in the service of this kind of overarching imperative

of not ever saying anything bad about China, because it'll help, it'll, it'll bolster the US propaganda war machine, which is like, there's absolutely a way that I mean, that absolutely happens if you do that uncarefully, right. If you just kind of repeat US media narratives and stuff like that. But I think there's absolutely a way to do both, right. And to me, the way to do that is to not support the state discourses that demand loyalty from the diaspora, but to actually, you know, it's the grassroots thing, right, it's just kind of like we support queer folks around the world who are struggling under repression from their governments and that type of thing. And being able to very carefully say that it's nuance,

and to be against both at the same time, for example. That's really, really difficult, right. And people have very kind of vitriolic reactions when you try and do that. As you know, she set up top, Chris, so I don't know, this is still the conundrum for me, because I tend to take the more rigid stance against, against these folks. But I know people who are very kind of, they take a more compassionate stance, which is like these, these are newly plus politicized youth. They're just coming to a lot of these politics and positions. And, you know, being anti US is better than not being anti US is what a lot of folks say. And, you know, I agree to a certain extent, but then it's also like, if they're being

miseducated in these histories, that that's okay to a certain point when you're exploring and discovering these things and becoming radicalized. But, you know, like Jane said, there's also these kind of material direct impacts that you have on people that you work with, that you organize with, but that are your friends or loved ones, that, you know, that kind of explanation of like, oh, they're just learning is like, it's insufficient in that kind of individual way, because you're still hurting people and threatening people around you. So I think there has to be a balance in like being able to steer folks in, into these like non Stalinist, non-statist directions, even while they're discovering. I hate how we're even having to be like steering people into a

non Stalinist perspective. I'm just like, I, I'm not horny for Stalin. I like to think that pisses me off about this. This is like, like they're not even Stalinists. Like this is the thing that's frustrating. Like if, if, if they were merely 20th century Stalinists, we wouldn't be having this argument because, you know, 20th century Stalinism is like, well, yeah, okay, like 20th century Stalinist or anti-market economy. And it's like, no, they've somehow found a way to take literally the worst aspects of Stalinism and then be like, okay, but what is, what if, what if Stalinism, but also capitalism good at the same time? And it's just like, how, how did you do this? Like how, how did you come up with an ideology that like, I don't know. I mean, I think, I think

also, I think that's been frustrating to me about this is like, it's a way of sort of, of, of, it becomes this way of channeling, you know, you have the diaspora guilt on the one hand that you have just random sort of like white leftists sort of white guilt and it becomes this way of like channeling that into this sort of fall anti-racism where, you know, you get, you get people who are like actual professional like hacks, right? Like Roderick Day, for example, being like, you know, doing things like, well, if you, if you, if you, if you criticize the Stalinist state at all, it's xenophobia and like you're directly leading to people getting killed and it's like, no, that's not how this works. And there's this kind of, it's, it's, it's, it's this problem of

they have this, this fundamental inability to see Chinese people as people and not a sort of undifferentiated mass that can be sort of rallied behind an ideology. And I don't know, that's been, I think, weird to deal with because, you know, like, yeah, like you, you're always just in, in Chinese communities, like you're always, you're just, you're just gonna have like, you know, there's gonna be a few people who are just sort of like pro-CCP right-wingers, right? That's just a sort of default political position. But there's, there's this way in which you, you get this, you know, people adopting, I mean, just things that like, if you said this about any like white American, for example, if you, if you argued that any, like a white American making

a thousand dollars a year wasn't in poverty, like you just couldn't do it. You, like, you know, it's, it's, it's literally impossible. Like you'd be laughed out of the room or, you know, like you're, you would, you would, you'd be like ratioed until the cows come home. But you can just, but everyone, and people just say this constantly. Like this is just a thing that was like, well, if you look at poverty reductions, like, well, Chinese is, China has eliminated absolute poverty. It's like, yeah, okay, a thousand dollars a year is outside of this now. And I, I think that there's these ways in which it becomes hard to, to intervene in this stuff because like every, every Asian person, specifically Chinese person just becomes a sort of token

that like, you know, you just sort of like throw at each other as this like, oh, well, yeah, here's a Chinese person who says the CCP is good. It's like, well, here's another Chinese person who says that it's bad. And it's like, you never, it's like, on both sides, whether, whether the pro-CCP people realize it or not, it's their agencies being sort of stripped by them. And they've been turned into the sort of instrumentalized, like, you know, in the same thing that they're also doing to us is that they're turning the sort of these instruments that you can use to like back your own sort of writing political agenda. And this, I don't know, I like, this has gotten me to just, I just don't work with these people anymore. Like we tried it, it was a disaster,

they screwed us over. And so I don't know. But, but, but I think that's, that's, that's a lonely stance in a lot of ways. Like, you know, if you take this kind of like hard line position, you're not gonna, most people, even other people who don't support it, probably won't follow you there. Oh, no, it's weird because I find a lot of organizing is really lonely. It's like, it's, it's not like, like, I want to boast around being like, why aren't you all donating to this? But that's not, that's also guilt, right? That's like projecting guilt onto other people. And that's not an effective tool. And I think that like, like, are so right in addressing both the white guilt, but also the diaspora guilt, and also just how frustrating it is to organize against the state

when it's like two people, like three people doing it in a little group project, for lack of a better word. But it's sort of like, how do we make this sustainable when it's so lonely? And how do we use the resources that are available to us to not replicate these systems yet again? And I guess when it comes to the left, or progressives in Canada, it's like so frustrating because it's like, there isn't actually a lot of community outreach to, like, racialized communities. There's no translation. There's a lot of like nonprofit work that is, frankly, very draining and co-optive themselves. Like, it's a bunch of social service organizations in a trench code and a bunch of political organizations that don't work together or talk to each other in a trench

code. And so I understand why youth would join, like, leftist, like radical organizing. But it's just really heartbreaking when it's your, they end up reading in reading groups where they're reading historical, or so-called historical texts that erase your histories. Like, it is just such a, like, reading is great. Like, political education is incredible. But I'm like, it's hard not to grow resentful when the guy at the top is a university educator, like dude, and they're reading texts that literally erase your entire family. And it's, like, yeah, for me, it's just really personal that way. It's like, there are people who are suffering in the present, and you're reading a text by a white sociologist from the 80s? Like, it's not that I don't think that we should do

that political education. It's just that, like, at a reading group, will you listen to me when I call you out? Yeah, I definitely, you know, both of you saying that this work is really lonely, especially if you take, if you stand up for yourself or you, you really kind of stand by your principles. It's, I think that's so true. And, you know, not to speak for everyone in Laosan, but just my experience has been like, you know, every just everyone hates us. Yeah, like, it's, you know, we got hate from the right, we got hate from the left. And from Hong Kong to Asper from Hong Kong locals, like, it's, it's just sometimes it's really hard to see, you know, because we're trying to stay true to our principles, but it's hard to see sometimes,

whether there's an impact or whether we're just kind of like, in a little echo chamber with 20 other people, you know what I mean? And it's hard to find that balance, because I don't want to become more and more pragmatist where I'm just like, all right, well, you know, I'll work with these people, but I don't agree with them on these fundamental issues just on this one campaign or whatever happens to be, I don't know, I know that's a part of like building power, quote unquote, like that a lot of certain socialist groups like to do or they're really focused on that kind of thing. But I don't know if it's too much of an academic view to be like, if you're going to do it that way, you're changing the outcome already, right, because you're not addressing these kind

of fundamental issues from the start. And I think that view can sometimes lead to like a lot of non starters where you're just like, things don't ever get off the ground because you insist on whatever fundamental principle that you that you want to stick to, like anti nationalism, for example. So yeah, just just kind of reiterating and commiserating with you all in the loneliness of that. People think that like, not working in these sort of united front things is is this like sort of pure ideological position. But like, you know, I mean, so when Occupy Ice was happening, right, Occupy Ice wound up being a kind of big friend thing. And one of the groups involved with it was the was the party for socialism liberation, who are this sort of like

very much sort of like the basic the tanky cult, like they've there's not a lot of other horrible stuff that we'll talk about at some point. But I mean, one of the things that happens in Occupy Ice is that they, you know, in Philadelphia, they they destroy the encampment, like they they convince enough people to just leave and do this completely pointless, like march, they can do a photo op of like people in front of the mayor's office, and they do it and the camp collapses, because suddenly there's not enough people, you know, they don't even get a majority of the people, but it doesn't matter, because they've pulled enough people out that, you know, that the camp couldn't be held against the cops anymore. And I think that in some sense

is this kind of microcosm of what they have, what these people actually do, which is that, you know, these people will never have any actual institutional power, right? You know, they're never going to create their like Salinas State or whatever, like they're never going to get this, they're never going to hold any power. What they can do is there are enough of them, they can they can siphon off enough people from actual leftist movements into this sort of just like white room pro capitalist stuff that they can, they can cause movements to collapse. And I mean, they've done this, they did a lot of this during the uprising in 2020, there is a lot of them, you know, intentionally leading people on pointless marches, there's a lot of cooperating

with the police and stuff like that. And I think that, you know, it's, it's, it's like having seen that like multiple times, right? I, you know, I'm, you know, for me, like not working with them was a practice, is an incredibly pragmatic position because we tried it and they, they blew it up. But it's this problem, especially, you know, you have people who were radicalized in like 2020 and it's like, well, yeah, I mean, I don't know, like a lot of them never saw this stuff, right? Don't know who these people are. And their first introduction to the left is this like incredibly well financed, like media blitz. And I think that has, you know, I think that has consequences both for us as sort of like people on the left doing, like Chinese people on the

left doing our own diaspora organizing and it has consequences for the broader left. And like, you can see other sort of versions of this right where, you know, you have a sort of right wing movement if you're trading left to spaces and destroying them, like they're there, like there was the thing, like deep cream resistance basically blew up a like an anti lithium protest in the US by just like going there and just hammering transphobia constantly. And so, I don't know, I think there's, there's this sort of dilemma because fundamentally, they will say a lot of the same things we do, but we have fundamentally different goals. And that manifests itself at, you know, on the level of organizing individual campaigns,

but it's something that's really hard to get people to see. I think we've lost a lot of movements because of it. Yeah, not to be, you know, not to pile on the cynicism or anything, but I think I honestly do think, you know, as all this new Cold War stuff ramps up, which is like completely independent of what a lot of folks like grassroots folks are even thinking or advocating, it's all just kind of up to the two, you know, Chinese and US governments as they ramp up their own tensions. I think it's really going to start like people are going to start these people who are, you know, tankies or whatever are going to start narrowing our choices further and further, right? Like, you know, soon it's going to be anathema to not, you know, take the

anti-US position and that's it, you know what I mean? And I think that's really scary. To me, I don't, I, last year I thought there was still room for intervention, but things are closing so quickly. And, you know, my personal opinion is that a lot of these kind of bigger groups like No Cold War and others like Code Pink are definitely being, you know, they have much more funding than a lot of other groups who are boarding more nuanced positions. And so, like you're saying, it's just like these media blitzes, these shiny events and all those different things are very appealing to newly radicalized folks, right? Because they think that this is where the power is and this is where we can actually make a difference. And yeah, things, to me, things

look pretty bleak in the near future. It just takes one, yeah. Yeah, I will say, I think they made one major decision mistake, which is that they tried to push the giant like New Cold War or China thing at the exact moment that the US and Russia were like heating up an action. And this left them like kind of off balance because they'd been, for the last two years, the whole thing's when the US is going to accelerate tensions with China, US is going to accelerate tensions with China. And then it turns out that they're not doing that. And in fact, like they're gearing up for just more proxy, more stuff with Russia, which is the thing they've been doing for the past decade. So I think like, I don't know, like I think their problem, essentially,

is that they run into reality. And there are certain points at which, like, you know, you can lie a lot, right? But when the lie that you're pushing is about what the mainstream media is going to say, and the mainstream media just pivots, and is just completely about something that's entirely unrelated. Like, I think that hurts. And I think everything that the other problem they have that makes me hopeful is that the way their base is getting split by just the anti-vax grifters, because so many of their media people just, you know, are just full on grifters. And, you know, and you're seeing splits right now in gray zone about like, basically between pro and anti-vax factions. And I think that also will help us in the long

run because, you know, say what you want about most leftists and even most tankies, like, anti-vax is like a bit far even for them. And because, you know, and the other things like it's hard to do anti-vax without beginning to take positions that just, like, it's been baked into just sort of anti-Chinese racism in so many ways that, like, you can't really, like, you know, like, you can't simultaneously be pro-incredibly CCP, and then also be talking about how the US is trying to implement social credit, right? You know, these positions are just contradictory. And I think that's something that plays to our advantage. And I think is weakening them to some extent, because

they've, they've tried to have their cake and eat it too. And now they're sort of, I don't know, their conspiracy theory base is interfering with their, like, left base in ways I think are helpful for us. It's just so interesting how, like, the anti-vax position is literally rooted in racism and ableism. Like, there's an article in the conversation called The Inherent Racism of the Anti-vax Movement that has, like, really good history around white settlers being afraid of African medicine. And then there's also just the ableism of assuming that your kid will get autism. If you get vaccinated, that was, that's been a huge thing before the pandemic. And that was part of

how this was effective in the first place. And, yeah, obviously the anti-Chinese, like anti-Asian, like scapegoating as well. But I guess that also ties into, like, just how broadly ableist the left is. And how, like, disability justice is not something that a lot of people know about or care about. And it's, yeah, I don't know. It's a huge problem for me as a disabled person. Yeah, I wanted to add really quickly too. I mean, I totally agree with you. And, you know, I think one of the pernicious things that I've noticed, though, is, like, these kind of big, you know, quote unquote, anti-imperialist accounts, like on Instagram, for example, they take this anti-vax position precisely by saying that it's anti-racist to take that position,

which is like, that sounds very counterintuitive. That does not reflect reality, but they will point to instances of anti-black US medicine, for example, like the Tuskegee experiments, and then say, this is why we shouldn't trust the US government on any of this, right, because look what they've done in the past. And it's like, that logic makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways, right? But, you know, they obviously ignore the impacts that anti-vax and COVID has had on, you know, black and other POC populations, right? So I think, I don't know if it's exact, like, I don't know if it is appearing as hypocrisy to those people and then their audiences too, right? Because I think they're able to spin it in this way. Yeah, but I think my argument here is,

I don't think those are the same, I don't think those are the same bases. Like, I don't think that the majority of the tanky base are people who are anti-vaxxers. And, you know, you can see a line of this, right, of, you know, like, one of the big things that, like, they're obsessed with sort of, like, with the Cuban healthcare system, right? And like, Cuba's, Cuba's vaccines, you see this stuff from them a lot. And, you know, and they'll also talk about, like, yeah, like China is doing really well, good hitting COVID. And I don't think those positions are, like, I don't think those people are the same people who are also turning around and then talking about how, like, you know, talk, doing the xixiki experiments, the vaccines are actually, like, racism thing. I think,

I think there's some overlap between them. But, but I don't think that those bases line up enough for it to, you know, not have the effect of just kind of, like, tearing them apart as their media people flip into, into one of the sort of camps. And I think the other thing, like, you know, if you look at what's happening with, like, like, Max Blumenthal right now is that he's just, like, full on, like, like, he's just full on touring with, like, just straight up right-wingers to an extent that even, like, even people who've been habituated by the sort of, like, Syria false flags stuff into sort of working with right-wingers, like, you can't look at these people that, you know, it's just these actually just, like, Republican operatives and be like, well, okay,

we're on the side of these people and also, like, support Cuba. I just, I don't know. I have, I have some faith in these groups being separate and they're being, they're being a point of cognitive dissonance where the system breaks down. Because I guess I've seen people who have gotten out of tankyism by having to interact with the actual CCP. And that gives me hope that there's a point of cognitive dissonance at which it falls apart. And I don't know, maybe I'm just sort of, like, hope yimming here, but. I feel like it's so interesting how, like, there are a lot of people for whom politics is a parlor game. Yeah. And not their everyday, like, lived experience. Like, I would not be so, like, like, if I see my communities struggling

and when people are dying or people are really, like, struggling with intergenerational trauma, I'm not going to sit here and pontificate and theorize about, like, things that don't impact my communities. And yeah, like, the angle about class is so important here because it's like a lot of people. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard

some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can't insulate themselves from

the broader communities around them. If you're going around saying untruths in the media and your communities are like, hey, that makes no sense. If you're actually connected to people, you would hopefully, unless you're just a big asshole, you would hopefully take some accountability for what you're saying. And yeah, I just worry because this pandemic has also really isolated people. People are not talking to each other and that makes it more easy for people to be like, oh, I'm just right. This is my perspective. And I just, yeah, I think about that, the conditions in which we come to certain conclusions, the conditions under which we become more vulnerable to culty type things or oversimplified understandings of history. Because I feel like the anti-vax,

not taking the vaccine, being anti-racist is a very manipulative argument because it ignores the fact that these experiments on black and indigenous people in North America and beyond are about neglect and are about deliberate ongoing genocide. And it's completely understandable for people to not trust the government. But when the vaccine is actually a tool of protecting people, there's not a lot of campaigns other than people who are rooted in disability justice saying, hey, vaccines are here to protect us. And how can we make, how can we resist the medical industrial complex enough such that we can make people feel safer taking the vaccine? How can we bring people in as opposed to fear mongering? Because I think that fear is so powerful. It's like,

once you're afraid, you're not going to even look into the research, right? So I don't know. For me, I just think of all of this as manipulation and human psychology on a broad social basis because it's like, the stage is a big cult and these little groups are little cults. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any other things you want to say before we head out? Happy New Year. Yeah. You're the tiger. I'm looking forward to retweeting art, like, actually, not January 1st. Yeah. I think my, okay, closing less depressing question. Yeah. What do you

think is the etiquette on retweeting, like, yeah, retweeting, like you're the tiger art before the actual, before, like, Lunar New Years? I've been torn on it because I just, I like the art, but also I'm like, it's not the years yet. I haven't seen any. I guess I'm lucky. I have been either guilty or just not guilty, depending on how you see it. Like, I have retweeted all of the tiger art on January 1st because I did not care. I wanted to see the tigers. But I hope that I see more tigers, like, in the coming days, because if the tigers aren't coming or if we aren't retweeting it, that, that is an issue. Like, there needs to be like a second, like a, like a, like a, like, like an, like a second wave of the tiger art. No pressure to all

of the artists. Well, all right. So if people want to find you or work that you have, that you want people to find, where, where, where can they do that? Or if you also do not want them to find you, that is completely also valid. The internet is terrible and a mistake. Yeah, I'm mostly in Do Not Perceive Me mode. Completely valid. If you want to check out Louson stuff, feel free, LousonCollective.com. It's good work. My social media is Kipakal poetry. On Instagram, I, I am, I have this graphic that I've turned into a sticker and it's, it raises funds for families who were affected by the fires and floods. It's a sticker that says immunocompromised, people are worth protecting. And it went viral multiple times. So I guess I cannot help but

be perceived. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah, Kipakal poetry. Yeah, this, this is what happens when you create things that are both incredibly politically powerful and also gorgeous. So yeah, be, be, be cursed with the reward for good work, which is also being perceived. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can find, you can find us at Happen Here Pod on Twitter and Instagram. There's the cool zone. You can find it. Yeah, go, go, go, go retweet Tiger Arts. Go throw a brick at your sheriff. Non-actionable. And yeah, destroy the American and Chinese states. Happy New Year's. Oh boy, prop. You know what's fun is, is live shows, live podcast shows. Live podcasts are incredible. You know what isn't incredible is the plague, which is why we've decided to find a way

to give you all a live show that won't spread the plague. A virtual live show. We had to pivot. And one could say you could really watch it from anywhere. You could watch it from anywhere. You could watch it if you're on the ISS in space right now. You could watch it if you're, if you're in a trench in Eastern Ukraine. You could watch it if you're driving and, and don't care about paying attention to the road. You could watch it. All of these are options with the virtual show. Totally eliminated the problems of living in a three-dimensional plane. We have. It's, it's groundbreaking. You could call it the metaverse. Anyway, it's going to be February 17th at 6 p.m. PST. Prop is going to be the guest. Sophie is going to be there too. And you can buy tickets at

momenthouse.com. Slash behind the bastards. Slash behind the bastards. Momenthouse.com slash behind the bastards. You watch it later. You don't have to watch it live. This is so bad. You guys, we got to do this one more time. What are you talking about? This is great. I thought it was good. I thought everybody was going to be on board with this shit. We're all just saying the same shit over each other all at once. No, it's really bad. That's so that they, they notice it. It's called chemistry. Yeah. It's called, this was really bad. Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about and we're here to change that. I'm April Dinwoody, host of the new podcast, Navigating Adoption presented by AdoptUS Kids.

Each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts. Visit adoptuskids.org slash podcast or subscribe to Navigating Adoption presented by AdoptUS Kids. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the Ad Council. Look to your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasure in pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure and they see you. Their fearless guide through this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring

at discovertheforest.org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. It could happen here is the podcast that this is about things falling apart and how to maybe unfollow apart. I'm Robert Evans, your host and your other hosts are Christopher and Garrison and our producer Sophie. How's everybody doing today? Great. Has everybody feel about war? Yeah. Now, if you were to guess, based on your knowledge of history, what generation of war we're in right now, what would you all guess? I feel like war isn't, it's newer in relation to human beings. The idea of war, I'm guessing. There's been battles, but the idea of war, I feel like, isn't super old compared to how long

there's been humans walking around? I don't know. This is maybe, I mean, I know the answer, but we definitely passed through at least a couple of stages. At least a couple, Chris? Like, gotta be at least 12. At least 12. Wow. You are way ahead of William S. Lind, who spoilers is the guy who came up with the concept of fourth generation war, which is what this episode is about, right? One of the things when we talk about things falling apart is the unsettling growth of a number of different hybrid conflicts. Ukraine being the most blatant modern example, Syria being the deadliest example in our lifetimes, but these weird hybrid conflicts that are a mix of shit happening on the internet and disinformation

going out all over the world. You could even think to what was happening in Bolivia a year or so back and all those weird accounts that were based around Langley, Virginia claiming to support the military coup. You can look at from the same disinformation brought out by the Russian state that is usually as part of a conflict, either they have disinfo operations in Syria, disinfo operations around the conflict in Ukraine that are designed to muddy the issues and to detract international support and also to drum up support within, in the case of Ukraine, you had this media blitz against the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state in favor of a more traditionally Russian style of government in the east. That led to this breakaway republic that was supported by

the Russian government. These are hybrid conflicts is how these are referred to. There was a guy named William S. Lind, who in 1989 wrote a book with a couple of U.S. military analysts. He was an analyst for the military. He was not serving in the military. The other guys who wrote this thing were serving at the time. They wrote this book trying to... Basically, what Lind was doing, he was very influenced by our loss in Vietnam, when I say our here, the loss of the American state in Vietnam. He was trying to determine, number one, find a way to codify and explain the changes that were happening to warfare in this period. He was also influenced by what was happening in Afghanistan, what the Russians were experiencing, and find a way to

move forward and allow the United States to win wars again. That was William S. Lind's goal. He came up with this concept of... He and some other guys came up with what they called fourth generation warfare. First generation warfare is like Napoleonic era warfare. As Garrison was saying, you may note that he starts his... That's pretty late. That's pretty late. We had a lot of wars before the 1600s. There's a lot of stuff that leads up to... If I was going to try to categorize different types of warfare, that would not be the one I start with. The reality, of course, as we'll talk about, when you start looking at different kinds of warfare, there's wars that look remarkably like the shit going on in Afghanistan and Ukraine that are occurring

like several thousand years ago. In the same places, too. Yeah. Just like if you wanted to talk about the modern style of wars that we've seen really in the last 150 years, they're not all that dissimilar in a lot of ways from the kind of conflict you saw between Rome and Carthage, which are these really big nation-state-style conflicts and have a lot of similarities. But William S. Lind described the first generation of warfare as beginning after the peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War. It's the kind of warfare where you have these big, tightly-ordered groups of men marching towards each other and firing very inaccurate weapons and mass together. This is ended by the era of the machine gun and

the semi-automatic rifle or the bolt-reaction rifle, I should say, and that leads us to second generation warfare, which is linear fire and movement with heavy reliance on indirect fire. So that's still huge groups of guys charging, but they're not marching in close order. They're not like firing in volleys, and they're supported by heavy artillery like World War I kind of shit. Right? Really, we start to see this in like 1870, and then World War I is kind of the height of this kind of warfare. And over the course of World War I, we merge, and again, this is William S. Lind's way. We merge from second generation to third generation warfare, which is where you've got infiltration tactics to bypass enemy defensive lines and collapse it, which is kind of the Germans

and their Aufdrags taktik and stormtrooper tactics are really kind of pioneering that. You've got the idea of defense in depth, and so this need to bypass the enemy, and like, this leads to Blitzkrieg and leads to all sorts of shit. And then that kind of starts to collapse in Lind's estimation around Vietnam, and you get what's called fourth generation warfare. I'm actually just going to read a quote from a military history wiki that I thought had a pretty good description of all of this. Fourth generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non-state actor fighting a state. This fighting can be physically done, such as by modern examples, Hezbollah, or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil-Ilam. In this realm, the VNSA, these violent non-state

actors, use all three levels of fourth generation warfare. These are the physical actual combat, which is considered the least important, mental, the will to fight, belief in victory, etc., and the moral, which is the most important, Lind says, and includes cultural norms, etc. So obviously, I think that this is kind of nonsense. There's a lot of people, so there's a lot of folks, the people who buy into this, and it's very popular on the right, we'll look at like what's happening in Ukraine. It's a perfect example of fourth generation warfare, because you have Russia flooding the zone using Sputnik and a bunch of other kind of media organizations to drum up discord and like anger between east and west in Ukraine,

and support for potential Russian action at the same time as you have them backing this dictator, and then you have like the west sort of supporting the people protesting against those dictators and like, so you've got like this digital conflict, this information conflict that eventually leads to fighting on the ground. One of the areas in which I think Lind is really off is talking about like the physical as the least important, especially if you're going to consider Ukraine an example of fourth generation warfare, because if the Russian military had not intervened, there would not still be a conflict in Ukraine. The separatists would not still hold land, and in fact the separatists were on the edge of getting

completely wiped out by the Ukrainian military, because they were a bunch of non-state actors with minimal support and minimal weaponry, before the Russians moved in brigades of active duty combat troops and armor, including like gigantic fucking missile launchers, which they used to shoot down that Malaysian Airlines flight, like it's just not, I don't think that what Lind is saying is very well describes what's actually going on in the world, but it is important to understand the concept of fourth generation warfare and fifth generation warfare, which we'll talk about in a bit, because it is so useful in the way in which particularly guys like Steve Bannon conceive of conflict, because you will hear the term fourth generation warfare constantly,

and it's also something that is used a lot within our military establishment. Now a lot of people hate it, and within you can find a lot of papers by dudes writing like analysts who are working for the Defense Department, for the army actively, like shitting on Lind and talking about how he's at best is kind of like reinvented ideas that have existed in warfare for thousands of years, and he's kind of summarized things in a way that is needlessly flattening, and like some people will say you basically like added the internet to Klauswitz and pretended that you'd invented a new style of conflict, or that you'd defined a new style of conflict. Anyway, that's like an introduction to the idea of fourth generation warfare, right? And there's a lot of things that

he gets again, like if you're a military history wonk, which Lind pretends to be a lot of shit that he gets wrong. So one of the things that he says, like one of his famous phrases, that every military eventually craps in its own mess kit, the idea that like every military that is great eventually like has a gigantic fuck up, because they get too used to doing the same thing, which is true. And he describes it as like, the Prussians did it in 1806, after which they designed and put into service a much more improved model mesh kit, a mess kit through the Scharnhorst military reforms. The French did it in 1870, after which they took down from the shelf an old model mess kit, the mass draft army of the First Republic, and put it back into service. The Japanese did it in

1945, after which they threw their mess kit away, swearing they would never eat again. And we did it in Korea in Vietnam. And now in four new wars, so far we've only we've had the only military that's just kept on eating. And that's a really dumb statement. That's all really historically inaccurate. So for example, it's true that like the Prussians had a great military, which then got its butt kicked by Napoleon, and they had to completely redesign it. And by the time 1870 came around, they were extremely dominant in the battlefield against the French. Number one, he's crediting the military reforms of like tactics and strategy and ignoring things like Krupp inventing an entirely new kind of cannon that was utterly dominant on the battlefield.

He's also ignoring the fact that this Prussian army, he's saying like the US is the only army that does the same thing over and over again and fails and keeps on eating. Well, the Prussian army is the army the Germans took into battle in World War One and two, and spoilers, they didn't learn enough from either of those wars. He also talks about how like the French had their, you know, crapping in the mess kit moment in 1870 after the Franco-Prussian war and they changed their army. It was much better. It was like, well, they didn't win World War One. Like they were on the side that won, but if it had been them against Germany, they would have gotten fucking steamrolled. Like it was not going well for them for quite a while and they lost a whole generation of young men.

So maybe, and again, this is like what he's saying is basically we, because we're losing so constantly, the reason that we're losing is not because we are picking bad conflicts. It's not because we're picking to engage in conflicts when we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. It's not because we use military force in like a fundamentally venal and corrupt way in order to benefit a small cabal of military industrial corporations. It's because we, we don't have good battle doctrine and that's why we're not winning in these conflicts, which ignores everything about the reality of the conflicts that like he's talking about. Like the problem is not a lack of combat dominance, which is what you were seeing with like the Prussians fighting Napoleon. It's

what you were seeing with the French fighting the Germans in 1870, right? Like in those cases, the Prussians had a massive failure of combat dominance against the French and the French had a massive failure in combat against the Germans. Their doctrine was just worse. US soldiers are great at getting into gunfights and great at winning gunfights. The problem is not a lack of combat ability. The problem is that there's no way to win the conflicts that we're getting into. They are unwinnable wars that were never things that like, no amount of change in doctrine would have made Afghanistan a success because it was a stupid war. Yeah, like if, like, if, if, if that were true, like coin would have worked and coin, yeah, no, like a coin. Yeah, yeah, just

complete total and utter failure, like enormous numbers of people dead, enormous numbers of like people traumatized for generations and the US still just lost both wars. Yeah, and if you really dig into Lind and others like him, what they're actually saying when they say that like, we need to reform like the way the military works with new battle doctrine stuff, we need to be killing even more people. We just didn't kill enough in Vietnam, like the five million we bombed or so. That wasn't enough people like that. That's the reform that he's really talking about. Is Lind one of those people who like rants about the like the El Salvadorian option? I'm sure he does. I don't know exactly what he said about El Salvador. He's a fascinating kind

of fascist. He is absolutely a fascist. He was the director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. He wrote a or he helped to popularize a declaration of cultural independence by cultural conservatives, which is like these. There's a lot of the seeds of the shit that we're seeing today, right? That like American culture institutions are being collapsed because of like liberal decadence and conservatives, cultural conservatives should separate themselves and like set up parallel institutions. Oh, so that is where Bannon comes in and that's where Bannon comes in. That's where like fucking Andrew Torba and Gab come in. They all advocate this shit. Yeah, because they all adhere to that kind of like politics as culture.

Downstream thing. Yeah, and there's some weird differences with Lind. He's a huge mass transit and urban rail advocate, which I guess I agree with him on like fine. Every once in a while, a bad person does have a good opinion. He loves him some fucking city trains and stuff, but he's also he was a major factor. He was one of the earliest like prominent conservatives who was yelling about cultural Marxism and kind of the modern political period. I mean, that makes sense because he sounds like he's real into metapolitics. Yes, he's super into metapolitics. Yeah, so like all of this stuff makes a whole lot of sense. If you know what metapolitics are, it also kind of explains how he developed the different generations of warfare,

using it through a framework of metapolitics actually really makes that fit. If you believe like Breitbart famously stated that like politics is downstream from culture. And if you also believe what Klaus, I think it was Klaus Witz that said that like war is politics by other means, then like you can make cultural changes that can cause wars. And like, yeah, like that's a lot like kind of I think the thought process behind Lind. Yeah, because this really defines what he means by fourth generation warfare of war being handed out specifically by the culture instead of having it be abstracted to be like people marching towards each other with guns because he's putting the culture kind of back into it. Yeah, and obviously, culture was never not a factor in

warfare. Of course not. Every single war has been a major factor. Like all of this shit he talks about as being characters to go fourth generation warfare has been happening in one way or another for thousands of years. Yeah, it's not that these things are done in like temporal succession. It's like because like a lot of the stuff that makes up fourth generation warfare, like the more like guerrilla warfare aspects come way before people with guns marching towards each other. They were fucking Afghans doing that to Alexander the goddamn great before the birth of Christ. A lot of a lot of this fourth gen stuff is actually like kind of more similar to what original warfare probably would have been like. Yeah. Which I think he I think

to his credit, I think he does actually recognize that at some point in his writing. No, and the thing about this is while we can pick at it, and I think there is a lot that's ridiculous in his attitude, it's close enough to the way that reality works that if you're going if you're thinking about conflict in this framework, you can be very successful. It's not like an it's inaccurate in some ways because he's he is wrongly describing why certain things work, I think is a lot of what he's doing. And he's wrong about winning wars. I'll say that. If the American military were to make the fucking lend the Secretary of Defense and give him total power, like he would keep on losing wars as hard as we've been losing wars for everyone listening

to this is lifetime. But in a cultural sense, the kind of culture jamming, which is a term we'll talk about more in the future, but the kind of like the propaganda arms and stuff in order to the the the media warfare in order to either incite or justify real conflict or or and this is one of the areas in which they have been really effective to alter the dimension to alter how internationally a conflict is responded to. So one of the big successes of people like this has been effectively eliminating any kind of left wing support for liberatory movements in the Middle East for liberatory movements or for like just like what's happening in Ukraine, this kind of like reflexive. Well, if there's if there's a a movement for liberation among the people of a

country, it's probably the CIA like like carrying out some sort of op. That's Lyndon, his people and people influenced by him have been a big part of pushing that. It's why Steve Bannon is in and fuck is so friendly with like some guys on like chunks of they call themselves the left and whatnot. It's because there's there's a lot of there's a lot of ties there and that is an area in which they've been successful because international support really matters. You know, it's it's it's and I think like the death of internationalism is one of the bigger successes that like these these thinkers have kind of had. But yeah, I don't know that's that's that's that's a chunk of what I had to say. You guys want to know more about William S. Lind because he's I'm I'm I certainly

want to learn more about William S. Lind. William S. Lind cultural conservative, right? Big on the the traditional Christian values of America. You want to guess who he considers his ideal leader? JFK? No, the House of Hohenzollern. He's a Prussian monarchist. Wait, no, he's a Hagel guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if we said to me that politics, he's certainly into Hagel and he thinks that the Prussian the Prussian monarchy was the best government there ever was and was like unfairly crushed by the rest of the world and like should have won World War One and everything would and like he's he's and so he's he's very much like a conservative monarchist and a weird kind because like my god, dude, if you're looking at like monarchs who were like the the Hohenzollerns

had like in the modern era, like the first Kaiser Wilhelm was broadly competent. But like it went to shit as soon as yeah, the second and he blames all of World War One on the fucking czars like it's yeah, it's very silly. Like his ideas of history are like very stupid. I have an incredibly silly theory of history based on Hagel, which is that like every every Hagel for the listeners. I know do not. Okay, this is this is this is my crank theory of history based on Hagel, which is that every about 40 years, someone attempts to apply Hagel, someone like takes charge of an incredibly large state and tries to use Hagel to run it. And every single time, they don't understand the dialectic, it doesn't work. So this, for example, like if you take this

as a very sort of granular level, right, you have Mao Mao has no idea what a dialectic is, you can read Mao's work. He has no clue. Like he just doesn't he doesn't he doesn't get it. He thinks that a dialectic is when one person with a bat hits the other hits the other side, and then when you destroy the other side, the dialectic is resolved, right? Like that's not what it is, right? Mao, like because of this, the entire Chinese revolution just implodes, everyone dies, it returns to capitalism is a complete failure, right? And like a lot of the Nazis are very much into Hagel, they have again, incredibly similar failures. The other group of people like Linda think is as part of this is that all of the people who

planned the Iraq war were like enormous Sigeleans, right? But they they'd gotten to Hagel through this weird, like they they'd been doing this, they've been doing these counterinsurgency stuff. And so but their counterinsurgency stuff was they read Mao. And, you know, so they're reading Hagel, but then they're also reading Hagel through Mao, and Mao doesn't understand what's going on either. And so when they tried to apply the Hegelian dialectic, and they're like, okay, well, the end of the end of the end of history, the end of the Hegelian dialectic is the United States, we were we're just gonna impose this on Iraq, and it catastrophic failure. So the moral of this is do not attempt to apply Hagel, you will completely annihilate your entire political

movement, like every everything everything you love and dream of everything like every ideology you've ever had. It will it will crumble beneath you. And yeah, you will watch your cities and you watch your cities and armies burn. That's that's fine. Because when I start my resistance movement, we're just gonna be post-canty and object oriented on ontologists. You guys, you guys are just going through a bunch of names, and I'm gonna get like 80% of people are just by the fuck am I hearing about these dead people. The thing I actually wanted to bring up on this is like how fourth and fifth gen ideas of fourth and fifth gen get applied onto like more insurrection based like revolts or groups, right? You can see like groups like the

Earth Liberation Fund and Animal Liberation Front kind of pick and choose elements of the fourth and fifth generation warfare to kind of to see how their groups formed or were operated. And even you could argue that like Ted Kaczynski was like a fifth generation warfare because he was completely autonomous and the actions. Okay, let's introduce the idea of fifth generation because we just talked about fourth generation warfare, which was Lynn's idea. Fifth generation warfare is a concept that's come up. I believe Daniel Abbott is his name. And the idea was that like it's a new type of warfare that like characterizes a lot of conflicts in the modern era, where almost everything is non-kinetic, but it is still military action. So military,

social engineering, misinformation, cyber attacks, not just like decentralized, but like states actually using organized and often fighting non-state actors who are using kind of the same means. We're doing the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. And this and a lot of this would involve artificial intelligence, fully autonomous systems, systems, not just botnets, but like algorithms that can like handle a lot of the quote unquote fighting. William S. Lind hates the idea of fourth generation, a fifth generation warfare because he's a narcissist and he doesn't like anyone using other ideas that it's own. See, he misapprehended the dialectic. It keeps going. So what I was thinking is like a lot of, you can apply fifth generation warfare to like these

types of groups who are mostly like, they do some fourth gen tactics in terms of like terrorism, right? Like they try to make political statements through terrorism and have terrorism being an influential thing. But they're, like you rarely, like fifth generation stuff has not been around a long enough and no one's really been super successful at it in the past enough time for us like to like recognize that, right? Because you can look at a lot of like an insurrectionary type stuff around like the, again, I'm just going to use the earth liberation front as an example of like a group that attempted kind of these types of tactics. And they may have succeeded in the physical sense, but they did not succeed in like the cultural sense really.

So trying to like look at these types of things and how they relate to like specific, you know, if you're going to use like the Tchaikovsky example, same thing, except he's not a group, he's just one person, which is kind of more of a fifth gen thing. So he is like fully autonomous, whereas I think, you know, stuff like the ELF tried to have that kind of militant group dynamic that is more similar to fourth generation warfare. So it's like this picking and choosing of like trying to do physical action, then trying to do cultural action. And it's not like the things that have succeeded. Let's take for instance, the defend the Cascadian forest thing, who just got just got the specific action they were working on to protect a specific chunk of the forest,

the judge approved their, approved their motion because they were, they actually were successful because they did not form this militant thing right now. They were just doing the cultural and it actually really succeeded, as opposed to just, you know, burning down buildings and stuff to try to get your action forward. So just trying to look at like examples of when, when like the goal is kind of the same and certain types exceed certain, certain types don't, how that may influence like organizing and how to selectively use it like insurrection, but have it not be like a default mode for like always your group is better if it's insurectuary. Yeah. And I, I, one of the things that does characterize that I think is useful for, because

again, I have my crit, criticisms of, of the value of any of these like phrases as kind of discrete concepts, but one of the things that I think is useful about the concept of fifth generation warfare that does talk about something that is legitimately new to conflict that has not really existed before, before the internet is omnipresence, that, that the conflicts are not limited in geographical space or in time and in fact is like a constant factor all around you at all times because of the way the information sphere kind of actually functions. You know, you can look at kind of like the, the, the mix of street fights and information warfare doxing and, and whatnot between fascists and anti-fascists for the last few years. It's omnipresent. It's

always going on and the battle space is kind of potentially everywhere, even though it's fairly rarely kinetic or physical. And I do think that that's an area in which it is really worth having a new term and kind of defining a new term because that's one of the few things I think that has legitimately changed. The internet's made all of this stuff that's been happening for thousands of years faster, but the thing that it's really created that was not present before is this, this omnipresence. So I do think that that's really useful when we're kind of focused on how conflict is different. We'd like to kind of like think about like January 6th within these frameworks, right? Of how, of how disinformation and information was used relatively successfully to get a lot

of people to actually move towards the more, you know, kind of backed by half the state, backed, you know, not backed by well, the larger majority. And yeah, how like, it's a, it's like a synthesis of the fourth generation of fifth generation ideas, which is why, you know, there's a lot of overlap with these terms specifically. But seeing how like one leads to another and it's not, they're not necessarily exclusionary. Yeah. I mean, it's like the result is whether they win or lose, right? Yeah. That's like, that's what makes it a war is the, is the, is like, you decide afterwards based on the result. Yeah, I mean, it kind of, yeah, that's certainly like how more modern wars happen. Like with Afghanistan, it wasn't so much like a clear like World War

I, there's an armistice and like a negotiated end of the war and at a certain date, it all ends. It was a lot messier. We haven't done that since we haven't done that for the state. Like, you know, I've never known the states to do that for my life. No, because if you don't do that, you don't have to admit you lost. Yeah, exactly. Like, right? If you just kind of like leave and shit gets real fucked up, you can just be like, for one thing you can say like, ah, if we'd stayed and spent more money on that war, we could have pulled it out, which is one of my, like, there's a lot of great criticisms of how the Biden administration handled things in Afghanistan last year, a thousand of them. But at the end of the day, it's like, it was never going to be good.

Like, it was always, it was this horrible war. We were killing way too many people. We weren't achieving anything. And that fact was made really clear by the fact that as soon as we pulled out our guns, everything collapsed. And that was always going to happen. And you can needle around the edges of how we could have, you know, better taken care of people who we'd made promises to or whatever. But at the end of the day, it was always going to be fucked because it was a thing we never should have done. And that's like this idea that Lind has that like, no, if we fix our doctrine, we have better tactical doctrine, we have better, like, we have that one of his big ideas is, he came up with this concept called movement warfare that's

been hugely influential in the way the Marine Corps functions. And the idea behind movement warfare is like, you should always have a bias towards action. And Lind is very consciously trying to make this basically the evolution of a German tactic called alfastrug's taktik, which is like individual unit tactics, basically. So it like midway through World War One, the Germans start to realize like all these mass wave human charges aren't working great. And we should probably like figure out a way to get around these defenses. So they start training what are kind of the prototype of special forces, these like stormtroopers whose job is to like sneak in and not be seen and jump into the trenches and like, you know, with fucking axes and clubs

and automatic handguns and fight in a way that like, soldiers had not really fought in a long time. A lot of it was like melee was this really, and there were a lot of technical things had to get around barbed wire, how to not be seen, how to like deal with machine gun nests. And one of the keys to it was like the German started to retrain their soldiers to where like, you have to have like these individual units of five and 10 men have to have like total autonomy. And then unit commanders have to have autonomy and they need to be able to like, we'll tell them we need you to be in this place at this point in time. But it's up to you to figure out how to do that, because if you're if you've got this one guy who's three miles back, giving the commands,

everyone's just going to get mowed down by machine gun fire, it needs to be more nimble. And that's part of why in World War one and in World War two, because the rest of the people fighting the Germans, like even the US had not caught up to this kind of battle doctrine by the time World War two was over, to the extent that the Germans had, and it's part of why there's such a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of the Germans in that war is they had what is very close to because all modern combat tactics are based on what the Germans started doing at the end of World War one, and had really like nailed down to a science in World War two. And Linda's saying that like we need to extend that. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that

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forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's the thing we've gotten too far away from, and we need to have this bias towards movement. Officers need to be super aggressive and always pursuing these kind of kinetic options. And again, as the Marine Corps' battle record will show, this is very effective when you're getting into gunfights, but when was the last time the Marine Corps was on the side of a winning war? Again, we can all needle about how to make our troops

better at killing people, but at the end of the day, we're losing wars because we're getting into wars that are not winnable. And that's not something you're going to fix with battle doctrine. And Liam doesn't understand that because he's a fascist. I think it's just like this. This is the real weakness of their politics, which is that they can't tell the difference between war they don't think there's a difference between war and politics. And that means that they think that there's a military solution to every political problem. And it's like, no, there's not. And this is how they keep destroying themselves. This is what happened to the neocons. I mean, the neocons are sort of held on in this kind of rump shell, but it's like neoconservatism. Yeah, and how

they're Lincoln project. Yeah, but it's like, you know, like they don't they don't have like like even the people who used to be their base, like aren't their base anymore. No, like those people are all moved on Trump. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like maybe they could have maintained it if they hadn't just like literally blown it apart, like trying to conquer a rock. And it's like they all do this, they all eventually are like, well, okay, we'll find a military solution to this. And it blows up in their face because it turns out that no, you can't actually do this. I mean, I think all this indicates a general progression into the more metapolitics idea and and culture as pox ideas that we're trying to solve all these political problems, at least at least like locally

within us, you know, we're trying to try to do them culturally and choose for them and selectively in other countries, right? Because the more kind of the idea of like, let's just keep entering wars, which we're also doing at the same time, only for very, very, very like specific, like very specific regions. But I mean, the trend of like first, you know, like Trump's not necessarily in like Trump's not really a neocon, he preferred the cultural jamming, like that was that was his preferred method. And it got him relatively far in four years. And there's an argument that Lind is a big person who that he learned a lot from Lind, even though I don't think he ever read his books, all the people he surrounded him with were fans of Lind, there's a picture of Trump

and Lind together in like a copy of or at least Trump together with a copy of his book, which is titled The Next Conservatism. And I'm going to read a quote at this point from the American conservative, which Lind has written for that describes this book, because it's useful. The next conservatism offers a comprehensive agenda of what Lyndon way rich, who's his co author on this call a cultural call cultural conservatism, while the book aims higher than mere policy, the specifics mentioned are Trumpian reductions in legal and illegal immigration and America first trade policy and robust investments in domestic infrastructure, particularly street cars and trains. In a less Trumpian vein, it also promotes homeschooling

and incorporates some ideas from the new urbanism as part of a broader program called retro culture. Of its connection with Trump, Lind says the book runs parallel to what he has been saying, but he doubts the billionaire's familiarity with its more philosophical ideas. Now, here's the part that is going to be really unsettling. And this I think is what Lind may actually be going for rather than any kind of reform in the military to improve its ability to win foreign wars. Quote, in 1994, an article appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette by Lind and two of the authors of the 1989 piece where he introduced the concept of fourth generation warfare. It ended on a dire note. The point is not merely that America's armed forces will find themselves facing non nation

state conflicts and forces overseas. The point is that the same conflicts are coming here. The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil. So that's what's going on here. Yep. Like, and that's the thing where bias towards action and increased killing power, if all you're really trying to do is murder everyone who disagrees with you using the military very quickly, well, that might work for you. People should know about this. He has a fucking fiction book called Victoria, which actually, if you go to like TV tropes, the there's a TV, it's not just TV tropes anymore, but like, there's a trope page for my book after the revolution. And it's directly compared to Victoria as like they're the opposites of each other. Because Victoria is like a book about a

civil war in the US that these like weird, fascist, like monarchists win. And like, it's, it's pretty fucked up. Like the problem is that like, like all of these, like the Northwest is controlled by like environmentalist like leaders who get like eaten by these animals, like wolves that they reintroduce to the to the society. And like California is so feminist that it's illegal to have sex and make babies. Oh my God. And the South fails because it's too multicultural. And yeah, like it's, it's all, yeah. This is so crunchy. So the person who wins the war is like the governor of Maine, who's a retro culture practitioner and considers himself a subject of the Kaiser. I may be getting a couple of details wrong, but not that part. I know, like it's a

fucking nuts, nuts. So I've only read like little bits of it. Maybe one day I'll get through the whole thing, but what a, what a sad. Fuck. That's the thing with all, with all of these like cultural jammers, like they try to put on like war aesthetics, but all of them are the nerdiest fuckers he'll ever meet. He's so stupid. And I like, he's so stupid. It's something to be actual wizards. All of these guys are so, they're so nerdy, all of them. Yeah. And like Lynn, everything about him makes sense when you understand that his primary guiding directive is anger over the fact that there's no longer a Kaiser. He's, he's aloof, but also like, again, he was not lying about, there's a picture of like Trump of this fucking book. He's not lying that like fucking everybody

who was like, pilled in that White House knew about Lynn's ideas and have been, he's been hugely influential and not just among like the American right. His books have been found in like al-Qaeda hideouts and shit. That makes sense though. All of that really tracks because yeah, like the barrier between like terrorist action as a part of fourth generation and in some ways fifth generation warfare and then the type of like culture jamming, those things go hand in hand. Like that is, that is the goal of it is to make it work that way. So that doesn't surprise me that those types of terrorist groups would be reading his books for advice or for like to like figure out how the other side thinks. Yeah. All right. Well, that's probably enough talking about

William S. Lind for today and cultural and the fourth generation. We'll talk, there's a lot to dig into about how these ideas have influenced chunks of the right and how they're currently still being used for like these omnipresent conflicts that are going on right now. And again, I do think particularly the idea of omnipresence is really useful for understanding modern conflict. I would go so far as to say like crucial. So this is necessary background information for people to have for like some of the other shit we're going to be continuing to talk in this about in this series as we talk more about kind of kinetic conflicts or at least building towards kinetic conflicts. But yeah, I think this is a useful kind of grounding. And now I'm going to send

Chris and Garrison off to write an episode explaining who Hegel is and everything he believed. I yeah, it's gonna be great. You're gonna you're gonna you you will watch me go mad in real time. It's gonna be great. Yeah, the other option is I can just read the Wikipedia page for Hegel with like a really offensive German accent. That's better than Hegel. That actually sounds better. I'm gonna go to I will I promise you one thing which is that I will wind up either Russian or Australian by the end. I can't stop that drift when I whenever I start doing, you know, oh, I am a good German. Yeah, my name is Mr. Hegel. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Happen Here pod and follow at Koolzone Media. We're gonna stop that right now. Yeah, I probably should.

Look the your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasuring pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure. And they see you. Their fearless guide through this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the ad council. Hi, I'm Joe Piazza, the host of Under the Influence. On season two of our podcast, we're exploring what it means to be a woman on social media. We're going into different pockets of influencing to talk about how Instagram is a reflection of all the ways

that women are mistreated in our society. And we might just have a plan to shut it all the hell down. Listen to season two of Under the Influence with Joe Piazza on February 10th on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, McCron. Great timing. I love. Oh, McCron. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about Greek numbering schemas. Garrison, how do you feel about it, McCron? This has nothing to do with the topic we're talking about. So this is an update. Earlier this week, we discussed the trucker convoy. We scheduled our episode recorded before the truck convoy, for after the truck convoy had already done a bunch of things, which was really good.

So we recorded to talk about the 50,000 trucks that were that we're going to show up at Ottawa. And things did happen. Maybe not that. They did not because I've been listening. Some of their claims are like, and Alex Jones is parodying them now, that it was like 800,000 to a million truckers, and there's 300,000 truckers in all of Canada. But it was a lot of people, like not to downplay what happened. So we're going to give an update on what happened there, and kind of discuss maybe any ramifications that stuff like this could have going forward. But to help with that, we have Dan, who came on last time to help discuss. Hello. Thank you for coming on again to talk about the same thing.

Thank you for having me. We last left off with you saying that you hope I don't come back on again, because that would be a good thing. And it would mean that the bad things did not happen. So sorry to be here under such circumstances. Yeah, you want to go over the bad? Yeah, so let's let's briefly do like a recap of like what this thing was like, like why why was it happening? And like, what was the idea? When we last left Canada, a bunch of truckers were angry that they had to present evidences evidence of vaccination. This spiraled into as I'm understanding it at some point, them rejecting all public health measures. Yes, actually, the exact demands are for the

federal and provincial governments to quote, terminate the vaccine passports and all other obligatory obligatory vaccine contact tracing programs to terminate COVID vaccine mandates. And quote, respect the rights of those who wish to remain unvaccinated. And here's where it gets weird. Seize the divisive rhetoric attacking Canadians who disagree with government mandates. Kind of hard to say when that one's fulfilled. And finally, cease to limit debate through coercive measures with the goal of censoring those who have varying or incorrect opinions. That's what the convoy is for. I mean, do y'all know what a government is? Evidently. I was at some debates in 2020 with the state that went a lot uglier than it looks

like this one went. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we can talk about that. The standoff has been well, there's been just that. It's been a standoff in that regard. So it seems like they've kind of hooliganed around a bunch of towns and threatened a homeless shelter if they didn't give them food and left trash everywhere and set up a checkpoint on the border or just a blockade on the border. I think it's probably more accurate. There's been blockades going on and off the border. I think the most noteworthy is Alberta and Coot right now, but I might be pronouncing that wrong. And what was the police, was something along the lines of we don't think there's a policing solution to this problem? Oh, yeah. So you're totally up to date. That happened today.

Yeah, so a little after 2.30 p.m. today, the Ottawa police chief Peter slowly said in a press conference that, quote, there may not be a policing solution to this demonstration. Is it really that easy? It's evidently, it's that easy if you wait till kind of like the media has had a few days and most of the coverage is just like breaking. Bad things still happening. So it's not great. So what was the lead up on Saturday? Because they were all the trucks and caravans and stuff were supposed to arrive on Saturday. What was the lead up on Saturday like and what happened on the actual first day? Yeah. So Saturday was technically the first day. Actually, Friday throughout the day,

a lot of people started arriving. So the occupations been, we're recording now Wednesday. It started on Friday. And the main, like the largest contingent of the convoy was staying overnight Friday night in a nearby town called Armpire, west of Ottawa. And they moved in from Armpire to Ottawa on Saturday morning. At the same time, people converged from other parts of Canada. To Ottawa's east is Quebec and to Quebec's east are the maritime provinces. And 3,000 people at least came from Quebec and met with the convoy to on Saturday, kind of coming in from different parts of the day between Friday night and Saturday afternoon. And Saturday was kind of the big day, the big party. The main point of contention and the main thing

that happened was some major streets of gridlocked by vehicles moving into the city, into the very crowded core of Ottawa, my hometown and staying stationary on busy roads. Both commercial and residential roads are part of this driveways for both businesses and residences were blocked off. Fire roads were blocked off, ambulance roads are blocked off. Local businesses that stayed open had to close throughout the day, Saturday, largely. Some managed to not and many would just stay closed already because they knew what was going to happen. And this happened, closures that happened on Saturday are mostly still going on today as I'm speaking to you Wednesday night. Closures followed patterns of harassment and some alleged assaults, which Robert mentioned

before also happened at a homeless shelter in downtown Ottawa. And pretty much everyone I've spoken to, I've been in Ottawa, visiting it's my hometown. And pretty much everyone I've spoken to lives in the downtown core is that a slew of stories since Saturday of either harassment at work or just harassment walking through the streets. And the worst part of it all is that right now there's not a clear ending in sight. What is it like on the ground there in terms of, you know, there's like kind of like a blockade around the border, but like, what else is like around Ottawa? What's like, what is, what's it like to walk around in these places? And like, how big is the area that these people are staying at? Like, where are they staying at? Are they all

sleeping in their trucks or staying at hotels? What's it like? What's like the... It's an excellent question. There's a mix. So hotels were booked up the week leading up to the weekend as the news cycle kind of exploded. More and more people called into hotels in Ottawa. A lot of people actually brought tractors. People are also sleeping in their trucks. Of course, people have like family and stuff staying in Ottawa. Sometimes they're staying with them. It's a mix of everything. Actually, I know a guy who even his car was like blocked off in the parking lot. He has to park in because he's downtown. He doesn't have street parking or driveway parking. Like it's in a public lot and he couldn't get his car out for over a full day because an RV camper set up near him and

just blocked him off. So it's a mix of everything. Starting on Saturday, there's like a lot of partying, a lot of music, a lot of kids. It's gotten a little bit more chaotic and less condensed since then. And also the area is hard to gauge because streets are actually constantly as vehicles move out for one reason or another. Streets are kind of being retaken back organically by the city. But then sometimes they're at the day getting retaken again back by the convoy. So the occupation has been a little fluid on some of the outside streets. Wellington Street, which is the street outside of Parliament in Ottawa, has been consistently occupied to my knowledge, blocking off, not actually blocking off, but you have to walk past them as a pedestrian

to get onto Parliament Hill. So that's where the core of the action is and everything else spreads out from that. And near hotels, there's a little more action because that's where people are staying. How has members of Parliament and local politicians been reacting since Saturday? I know there was some videos of, I think, one of the MPs from Alberta was giving an interview that gained some traction online. But yeah, just kind of curious how the different government officials are talking about this. I'm actually so glad you asked that because as of today, the divide in members of Parliament has actually led to some pretty incredible political ramifications. So last time we spoke, I think Aaron O'Toole had just earlier in the day endorsed the convoy,

instead he'd be coming down. Aaron O'Toole, for those unaware, is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. He's a real O'Toole. Wow. Whoa. Whoa. Mind blown. No one could have seen that joke coming. Every Canadian listener just like collectively pulled their eyes. Yeah, so Aaron O'Toole just endorsed the convoy. He'd been getting some tough questions about it. Following everything we just talked about and more, Aaron O'Toole walked that back and said he didn't approve of the way that the convoy was acting in Ottawa. This led to a swift referendum on his leadership. And earlier today, Aaron O'Toole was voted out as the Conservative Party leader in Canada. And that does have pretty big ramifications. I know I talked about Aaron O'Toole,

a decent amount in my previous Canada episodes for Cadap in here. So yeah, that'll be really interesting to see. Do we have any idea of when the new person's going to try to get voted in? When do you think that process is going to happen to fill that spot? I'm actually not sure. I haven't looked up when it's going to happen. It feels like there's been months before where there's been leaders of the Conservative Party. The main concern right now for those outside of Conservative politics is because Aaron O'Toole was considered relatively moderate. You talked about in the Fascist in Canada episode how Aaron O'Toole kicked out Aaron Sloan from the party for being pretty coy on donations from neo-Nazi

Paul Frahm on his campaign. Overall, that's a pretty great thing that Aaron O'Toole kicked him out of the caucus, regardless of other elements of that leadership. There's worrying that that kind of thought won't be continued forward, especially because Sloan was also in the leadership race and Sloan has only gotten further right since then. Despite Aaron O'Toole's not great aspects, which there are lots of, he did hold back some of the more problematic Conservative elements, whether that be people from his own party like Derek, and then also keeping the people's party stuff at bay. That will be an interesting power struggle now that that will be something to observe. I think the thing that concerns me most about all of this

is the implication. The implications for this is a tactic. We saw a version of this that was more limited in scope and time in Portland in 2020 when this huge Trump caravan rolled through downtown, blocked off big chunks of downtown, and like just maced and shot people with paintball guns at random. It was kind of like, I think everyone there was surprised at how many folks they got for it. This is a much more evolved version of the same tactic. It's kind of stuff we talked about in the season, one of it could happen here, this idea of people coming from these Conservative majority areas in a place where the vast majority of people are liberal but centralized in the cities, and blocking those cities off or otherwise disrupting their ability to

transit, potentially their ability to get things shipped in like food, their ability to use free movement. We've seen pieces of this again in a bunch of places in Oregon during the wildfires. You had these rural communities setting up checkpoints and stuff, looking for people from the cities that they could bill as Antifa. It's this world-worrying trend for a couple of reasons. Number one, when you get 10,000-20,000 people to do something like this, even if the city has hundreds of thousands of people, that's effectively too large a group to police, and the police don't want to police it anyway. There's not even really an attempt to stop them. It's a way in which the vast majority of Canada, at least based on the polling I'm aware of, is not in support of the

causes these guys are backing. Was it like 76% of the country supports some level of like vaccine mandates? If I'm remembering correctly the last one I read, so this is not a popular movement. It's not even super popular among the truckers. It's like the most truckers in Canada. It doesn't matter how many people in the city. If you can get 50-60,000 people to do something like this, the police will not take action and you can negatively impact the lives of a huge number of millions of people before it gets radical. That's when these guys are not coming in with guns with the express plan to eliminate people or trying to specifically block up food. They're just kind of fucking around now. But it's this thing we've talked about where you have, this is a thing in

Canada and the United States, you had liberals outsourcing the protection of society to this group of increasingly heavily armed and radicalized people who are now, in a lot of cases, fascists. That means that when there's a problem with a large chunk of people who hate everything you stand for, the people that you have completely outsourced protection to are all in favor of fucking with you because they hate you. It's a problem in Oregon. It's going to be a problem in fucking New York City or whatever at some point. It's a problem in Ottawa. I don't know. Am I off base here? You're not off base at all. There isn't anything to really elaborate on past what you said. The last time we spoke, I think Robert, you said there's not a whole lot was what you said

that could really, really be done with the vehicle occupation tactic. Unless a lot of people are willing to meet them with an equal force, which unfortunately, Ottawa didn't have. Ottawa is a relatively large city in Canada. There's over a million people that live here. It's also by landmass. I think the largest city in Canada, east to west, it's very spread out. It's a low population density. Even the affected area downtown is actually pretty small in relation to the city itself, which is pretty unfortunate. It's not a particularly packed downtown for a large city downtown. I am curious on the violence aspect. I know there's been an increase in death threats to members of parliament, specifically liberal members of parliament, specifically

liberal members of parliament who are women, who are maybe not white. I'm curious if you have any more kind of information on that side of things and then how violence has popped up in a few places throughout the past week, basically. Yeah, there's been a lot. Even if you're going by what's reported, right now, there is by most estimates under 1,000, maybe at most a few thousand very far spread out people as part of the convoy. As of yesterday, there's 13 active police investigations. The city of Ottawa said in a presser, we obviously know when there's like 13 active investigations in anything this big, there's way more that's not being reported, not being investigated. These things are going to, 13 is going to be resultful,

something bad. Some of the things that happened, Robert mentioned before, the alleged assault on a houses person inside of Shepherd's of Good Hope, in which a security guard was also called a racial slur. There was a house that displayed a rainbow flag outside of it that had harassment and poop thrown at it. We need to get 100,000 people together to throw their own poop back at these people. It's the only way they'll learn. Yeah, fighting fire with fire is that expression, I'm sure, just emerged from just tossing poop at each other's strategy. It's meant for this. There've been suggestions all over social media channels on like, here's how you can poop in snow banks without getting caught. Businesses have been harassed, they've been violent. I think

maybe some context that isn't always known. In Ottawa on Saturday and until recently, dining in in restaurants wasn't allowed. We were actually in a relatively strict lockdown following Robert Cronwaith. A lot of people even coming didn't know that. I spoke to people on Saturday who were like, hey, do you know when the restaurants around here are open so we can sit down for a meal? And I was like, there's no sitting down in Ottawa. So what people were doing, they were going inside cafes, like Timorans and stuff. And they were just refusing to leave and eating their food there anyways. And if there was no seats, they were just eating in line. It was also minus 28 degrees in Ottawa on Saturday and very, very cold on Sunday. There was an extreme

cold weather warning. So especially when people brought their kids, there wasn't a lot of other options other than like swarm the malls and swarm restaurants and even then the mall, the main mall downtown. Rideau Center was closed partway throughout the day because it was not a safe place. So I already talked before about routes getting blocked. Also not physical violence, but honking has been keeping people awake. There's been endless honking. If you watch video footage from it, and even in the background right now, I'm coming from Ottawa, like I can hear honking in my background. Some people allegedly parked and then urinated on the tomb of an unknown soldier, which is, yeah. I mean, a lot of this isn't political is even the wrong way to describe a lot of the

what's fun about this for these people. It's that they suck. Yeah, it's fucking hooliganism. And that's, yeah, it's fucking hooliganism. There's going to be a lot more stories coming out for sure. As things progress up stories of harassment, like I've talked to people who have gotten a cat called in the night, people getting violent altercations, street fights, I'm sure are going to break out. It's kind of at a very tense point right now in Ottawa. We're at that point, we're like, okay, we're seeing some signs, like it's getting thrown at the houses. What's going to happen next? Because the police are saying they don't have a plan and the truckers are saying they're not leaving. What's it like outside of Ottawa, across all the other places where there's

like similar activity happening? They're all looking to us and being concerned from what I'm talking to. Anti fascists in Alberta are particularly concerned right now. With the coup protest, there's ongoing to keep seeing popping up like US, Canada border activities in the same. There's a few attempted convoys by Americans. And even before in Europe, there was a few attempted convoys. Some got turned away, some Americans got turned away at the Canadian border because they weren't vaccinated. Yeah, which is like, you think because that's the reason they're saying they're protesting, they would have remembered that and thought maybe that's going to like come into play. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there is a certain point where

if you get enough people going, it would be interesting to see people really do just try to like drive through the border. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's been people like you look at social media channels, a lot of them saying like the borders are blocked right now with thousands of truckers supporting our cause. So if you saw that and you believed it and then you went to the border and you're turned away for getting vaccinated, you might have thought, well, I thought I had, you know, 900 people with the same causes being we're ready to use force. Yeah, which begs the question. Well, what happens when you do exactly don't want to find out. Yeah, that's yeah, that's the thing is like, if they do, if they did have what they say they had, would they just start

doing those things and not even think about it and not even think about like the politics of it, they're just doing it to do it. Yeah, I should also mention too, we talked last time about a plaid army slash diagonal on members comments that were broadcast on the news about doing another quote, January 6th. And it came on the news today was first reported by Frank magazine, and I think by the Canadian Indian network that he was arrested on fire. I'm sure I just know a scholarship before coming here. Worth noting, he was reporting live on infowars on the Alex Jones zones Saturday before this came out and Derek coverage. Yeah, Derek Sloan and Israel event were also on the same program. So I mentioned infowars before that's, that's great. That's

what's going on there. Can you see any like beyond the conservative leadership, what other kind of political implications are people thinking about in Canada? It's really tense seeing what's going to come for other cities. Also auto is expecting a second wave, some other people in other places that kind of didn't think the first one was going to be huge excess or saying well now that it's an occupation we're coming in police are even saying there's a second wave. It's a very tense place right now. We don't really know what to do. Community places are taking direct community members are talking about taking direct action because it's been so long. This isn't something that the city of Ottawa is particularly used to unfortunately in my lifetime. And so the ramifications

of the future are pretty jarring, but what's alarming is how successful this occupation was with a relatively small number. I think the highest estimate it was 18,000 people into a city of over a million, which isn't really that many. When you think about it, but the strategy was very, very effective. You think about how many fighters it took for Dosh to take control of Mosul. If there's not resistance, like there's only really a few areas of a city that you need to occupy in order to have a great deal of control over what can be done. Yeah, and that's the top part is they have a lot of control over that small area in residents' lives. They don't have a lot of control over parliament, which is what they're protesting for.

Yeah. I'm also interested to see, has the Canadian military said anything about these protests and the situation? So the Ottawa police chief in his presser day was asked a lot about that, and he's still shying away. He's still saying he doesn't think military is the only option, which if you're an activist on the other side of things and worried about police escalation hurting you in the future, that might be a good thing to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I see shitty news. I'm not convinced that the military would fix the problem. I'm not either. And also, Ottawa had other police forces coming too. They said they're

spending $800,000 a day initially to just on cost of policing. You're getting your money's worth, yeah. Yeah, they also said they've only like bylaws only had 150 tickets since this whole thing started in the occupied zone. So it's unclear what a lot of them did other than, you know, keep up appearances. Like I was walking around, I saw your region police officers walking around with their patches. That's hundreds of kilometers away from Ottawa. So police presence, especially on the weekend was not low. We had plenty. They either didn't know what to do, thought it would die later, or a mixture of all the above. And there's been talk to a mixtures of some police

officers have not been happy with it, but there hasn't been really anything in the news yet, because no one's come forward a lot of like tweets of like, from reporters saying I have an anonymous source in the auto police that says they wish more actions were taken. Some saying otherwise, it's not really united right now. And yeah, it's scary. Is there any counter protests being planned for Ottawa? If I knew I'd say so, because by the time this air is, it would have happened. So I think it'd be safe to talk about. But fortunately, I'm not really insured. I'm not actually sure about it. I might not be the best person to ask. Okay. Yeah. We're keeping an eye out.

Well, the good news is that all men die. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish, right? That's good. It's an upside. That is an upside. It's a positive shot. All right. Well, well, that's going to do it for us. We'll keep an eye on this and what results from it, because it's all pretty concerning and worth having an eye. And I'm particularly curious as to just like, what kind of direct community responses to this develop? Because I think that's going to wind up being the only long term solution. You know, it's kind of what people saw in Portland that there's a degree to which like the only thing that really works as a response is is outnumbering them. Yeah. On that note, it might be maybe not the smoothest transition,

but there are actually some auto-immutual aid funds and then advocacy that are doing some cool stuff. And there's too many to list for everyone. But others have compiled lists and I'm going to point to you there. So Rose Ottawa, which stands for Rainbow Ottawa Student Experience as serves two SLGBTQIA plus post-secondary students on unceded.gonquin Anishinaabe territory. No, they have closed off donations for themselves following a wonderful spike recently. They have a list of Black led and Black empowering organizations on their website with donation links. And you can reach that at roseautowa.org slash donations. There's a cool little Instagram account called Trans is Beautiful OTT. OTT stands for Ottawa. And that's all one word.

It's been plugging small fundraisers for queer folk affected by the convoy, including housing support on their Instagram. Again, that's Trans is Beautiful OTT on Instagram. Something we didn't get to talk about, which is Ram Ranch. Ram Ranch dot C A R A M dash ranch dot C A. A website was set up in the name of trolling the convoy Zelo chats and has been doing a fantastic job about it. There's a whole army of trolls in the trucker Zelo chats. And it's been really entertaining to tune into. They've compiled a list of charities on their website. And you can check that out at Ram dash ranch dot C A and clicking on the ranchers donation zone. And yeah, where can people find you on the internet? People can find me on the internet.

Some super active on Twitter at at spineless L word spineless letter L fantastic. Well, hopefully hopefully this gets all resolved. And I don't need to fly up to Canada to go to a protest. And if yeah, if we do that'll be fun. I've been wanting to go to Canada for a minute. Yeah, I can we can we can take drugs at Tim Hortons. That would be fun. Yeah. Oh God, you know, I haven't vomited in a Tim Hortons bathroom in a long time. Our local McDonald's that got famous on the internet for fist fight that someone pulled a raccoon out of their backpack during had to actually stop being 24 hours after the mayor pleaded with them because it was using up too many police resources. That is that is the best kind of place they think.

Over 191 what calls in a year. That's so dope. Oh God, yeah. I want to I want to set up somewhere on the border in the east coast to Tim Hortons directly across the street from a waffle house and just let them fight. Well, yeah, we do we do this that here. That's that's something you have to bring that you have to bring that over bring the waffle house vibes over. All you need to do is watch a man get stabbed and then spiritually you're at a waffle house. And that and that and that ties back to the future of the convoy. You're right. Well, that that that does it for us today, everybody. We will see you later. 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 podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls, you know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world. I just walked in and saw this bright red painting presuming to be a Rothko. Of course, art forgeries only happen

because there's money to be made, a lot of money. I'm listening to how what they're paying for these things. It was an incredible amount of money. You knew the painting was fake. Listen to Artfraud on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Boland. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you

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