Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 22

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? 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 iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Oregon, you don't get to consent.

And that's how you open up the podcast. That's right, baby. Look up one-party consent laws for recording. For recording phone calls. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about when you can legally record people without their consent. Hint, always in the state of Oregon. I'm Robert Evans. We're talking about bad things, good things, things that are good and bad, all that stuff.

You know what we should talk about? You know what no one has talked about ever on the internet lately? Josephine Robinette Rogan. Oh, I've never heard of him. What does he do? Well, he has a podcast. Have you heard of podcast, Garrison? I'm unfamiliar, but I'll just go with it.

Yeah, well, it's like the radio, but easier to spread disinformation. And also sexier for reasons that are hard to explain. And Joe Rogan gets on his podcast and he says a lot of stuff that people think is bad. And then everybody gets angry at him and then he makes more money. And today we're going to talk about how maybe we could handle this problem differently. Maybe we could not do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Yeah. And up front, obviously, we're talking about him.

We're trying to talk less about specifically what he said and more about kind of the problem he represents and the ways in which the responses people have aren't having the results they desire. We're going to avoid using his name and the title of the episode or the description, because that doesn't feed into the algorithm kind of in the same way. But yeah, Garrison, you want to kick us off here? Yeah, I've been watching the Rogan thing online beginning kind of frustrated because of the way the discourse is going. And it's just repeating the same loops that we see every few months. And nothing really changes and just gets more popular.

So earlier this month or like a middle of, I guess it was closer to like January. There was like a group of like 270 doctors, healthcare workers and scientists who were campaigning for Spotify to adopt a misinformation policy. This was prompted by a few episodes of the Joe Rogan podcast that we've already actually talked about about Dr. Robert Malone and someone else who said some stupid things about the pandemic. So when we talk about these episodes this last time, I tried to actually talk about what these doctors were doing and not focus on Rogan himself, but specifically what these doctors were doing and their ideology. Because I didn't want to add to the whole Rogan side of the discourse. And for this like a letter that these doctors sent to Spotify, if they were not really advocating for Rogan to be removed from the platform

or even for episodes to be removed just to have Spotify clarify their guidelines regarding medical misinformation. Because it's important to note that Joe Rogan has a exclusivity contract with Spotify. He does not work for them, but Rogan gets paid a lot of money to get his podcast only published on Spotify's feed. So it's a weird kind of setup and it can give a lot of gray area for like, does Spotify count as his publisher or not? You're like, well, not really because he could also just end that contract and post his podcast everywhere. I mean, I think it would take, there's probably some sort of time limit on the exclusivity agreement, etc. Because it is mixed because they did recently, when it came out that he said the N-word a whole bunch of times, Spotify removed those episodes. So there's a degree to which they have acted as a publisher.

Yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff to kind of talk about this on this. So the letter went kind of viral and it prompted this whole kind of thing in the middle of January, but like deleting your Spotify subscription. And then we had musicians most popularly, Neil Young, decided to remove all their music from the Spotify platform. As like a performative thing being like, OK, if Spotify is going to host all this medical misinformation, we're going to remove this as protest. Now, of course, Neil Young then just signed an exclusivity deal with Amazon. So, oh, great, cool. We, yes, Amazon, the bastion of moral purity. Yeah, and they're not, I mean, I think they are probably pay a better rate because Spotify is pretty much at the bottom to musicians, but I don't think it's good. I think Napster actually has the best rate.

Which is very funny if you want to be actually a moral just just just use Bandcamp. But I mean, I use Spotify because it's really easy. And that's why Spotify works. It's because it's super. It is. It is a well made product that does not mean it's an ethical product, but it does it does the thing that it's supposed to do quite well. So so yeah, it basically we've had endless discourse since then about Joe Rogan about Spotify as a platform talking about how bad Spotify is, which, yes, it is bad, talking about how, you know, how bad Joe Rogan is. And, you know, the thing is Joe Rogan already had the most popular podcast in the world. His exclusivity deal with Spotify and he's currently estimated to bring in 11 million listeners per episode of his podcast. Yeah, for some reference, behind the bastards is one of the largest podcasts out there.

And he's on average something like 10 times our traffic. Like it's and it's not he's not he's not just the most popular podcast. He helped invent what podcasting podcasting is one of the first and like he had a foundational role in how the entire industry works. Since this letter and since these episodes, there's been a whole lot of discourse around if Spotify should remove Joe Rogan from the platform. If they should cancel his deal, you know, a lot of people calling on Spotify to do that. A lot of people calling on Spotify to remove certain episodes and Spotify has not been keen to. So like, but let's and I know Joe Rogan himself did actually authorize the removal of a certain amount of episodes, which for reasons we'll talk about later. But what's all this discourse and outrage and articles and tweets actually doing to Spotify and Joe Rogan?

Okay. Yeah, in my opinion, kind of the end result is actually very similar to all of the free advertising that companies get whenever they make a woke statement that infer that infuriates the reactionary right, you know, resulting in throwing your kelle got your window flushing or Gillette blade down the toilet and burning your nikes. And it's even widely speculated and kind of like a known fact that companies will use progressive statements and policies to drum up this outrage to give their company and product tons of free advertising and just to get the brand name itself in the side consumers heads. And this is definitely happening was was broken and Spotify in terms of outrage being used as advertising. It may not be intentional, but that is what the result is. Yeah. And I mean, it's very it's it's both sides like to make fun of the other for doing this. Like folks on the left like to make fun of the right when they're when they're breaking their Keurigs or whatever. But, you know, it happens.

It's equally profitable for both sides. You just do the opposite. You know, you have someone come on and talk about how they're a truth teller being canceled and they get a bunch of attention money. And it works equally well both ways pretty much. Yeah. So with Spotify and Rogan in the news every day for the past like three weeks, the the end is that like the fact that it's just that people are hearing these names in their head more often. And they're probably subconsciously going to use Spotify more often because, you know, despite a few people that might cancel their subscriptions, the net effect will be more listeners who seem to Spotify because they're because the name is in my subconscious. It's it's in there. And all the effect it's going to have on Rogan is giving him a way more publicity to attract new listeners. And it's listeners who themselves are like attracted to unconventional ideas outside the mainstream.

And his more passive listeners are going to like double down on him because there's going to be like the backfire effect. So they will like feel defensive and then become more of a fan of his because he's seen as a cultural outsider. Even though he's not an outsider, he is the mainstream. He's the biggest podcaster in the world, but he's seen as a cultural outsider. So, you know, he like brings on guests who say things that they're not supposed to say, you know. So who's actually going to be convinced by all this outrage to not listen to Rogan via pointing out all the wrong things he's said and all the slurs he's used? Like, is that really going to stop fans from listening to Joe Rogan? No, it's not really pointing out that Donald Trump illegally took classified documents.

It's like, yeah, I mean, that's fucked up and shit. But like, he's never going to get charged with crimes and none of his supporters care. You're the only people who are angry about this and it doesn't matter because the people you vote for aren't going to punish him. So like, just, you know, chill out a little bit. It's like all of the outrage is simply inflating the importance of Joe Rogan on like an entire cultural level. It's that he's becoming, he's becoming more important to his fans, more important to his haters and more important to himself and Spotify as an asset because he generates a lot of exclusive listeners and news coverage and buzz around the Spotify brand. And it's important to talk about like, so you have, broadly speaking, within the field of entertainment, like digital entertainment in particular, you have like two ways that you can grow your audience. One of them is organic growth, which is, you know, I listen to Garrison's podcast.

I like it. I tell a friend about Garrison's podcast. They like it. They tell a friend about Garrison. That's like organic, you know, it's very natural. That's purely the kind of quality of the content reaching people. And then there is an organic growth, which is that can be the result of like ad campaigns can be the result of an algorithm. Often in today we're talking about like, oh, Twitter or Facebook prioritizes this kind of content.

So like something article on Breitbart about black on white crime that would have been read 10,000 times 10 years ago gets read a million times because it spreads well on this platform for reasons that aren't organic. And with Joe Rogan, one of the reasons why, because we can talk about like de-platforming, if you want to talk about like Alex Jones, for example, or Milo Yiannopoulos. Good case that de-platforming really reduced both of their reaches. Now Milo pretty much wiped out as a person who mattered in terms of the discourse. Thank Christ. Alex Jones less so. It definitely hurt his business and it reduced his reach. But by the time Facebook and Twitter and whatnot started throttling him, he had already inorganically increased his reach enough that like he's able to he had he had a large enough audience to say somewhat relevant and keep going.

The thing about Joe Rogan is he did not get famous and popular in organically. I'm sure there was some degree of that on like social media, but most of his growth was organic before that. Like people like him, like whatever you think of him, he's a good broadcaster. That's the thing, even though like, you know, for all this research, I don't like him. He says horrible things, but I know I was watching, I watched all of like Rogan's like Instagram videos. He made like a few 10 minute things talking about the outrage and it sucks because when you listen to him, he's like a really good talker. He's very good at what he does. He's very good at like generating sympathy and generating like good, like it sucks because yeah, I want to like hate this person, but I'm like listening to him talk about this issue.

Like, oh, wow, yeah, like you actually have a decent grasp on what's going on here. And that's that's horrible. He is not part of he gets some of his money from playing like a dumb chill stoner dude, but he's not dumb. He's definitely stoner. He's not a dumb man. He's very intelligent. He's very good at what he does. One of the things we don't kind of talk about enough when we talk about media that I think is important to note is that being likeable in a professional sense

is a skill and it's a skill like any technical skill. It's like knowing how to how to how to farm or weld. It is a thing that you build on over time. It is a thing that takes a lot of trial and error and a lot of education to get right. It is a thing that Joe Rogan has been doing for longer than a significant chunk of the people on the show, including Garrison have been alive. It's like like I've been like this is this is more or less been my job for like 13 or 14 years and it is like a skill that you build. And the thing that he is really good at is making people want to listen to him. And so if you were to say kick him out of Spotify tomorrow, it's entirely possible that his that that would increase the number of people who listen to this podcast.

There's a case to be made that Spotify has limited his maximum audience by limiting him to Spotify as opposed to if he was just any app. He wanted to be on maybe it'd be 20 million, you know, listening to every exactly. Yes, even if did even a Spotify did drop him because of all these, you know, outrage, you know, and all the tweets and all of the petitions. Even if they did drop him, he would probably not only gain more listeners due to like the outrage porn and free speech advocates, but also with his exclusivity ending help his podcast will just be available and more platforms and more people will to listen to him like really easily. So yeah, he's only going to grow if people get what they want. And like that makes you think like this this outrage isn't actually meant to get the Joe Rogan Joe Rogan problem taken care of. Like it's this this actually isn't about stopping misinformation.

It's this isn't actually about having there being less fans of Joe Rogan. All those outrageous about making you feel better because you feel like you're doing something. Right. It's like a bad thing is happening in the world and it's easier to pretend like your actions are hurting it than it is to accept that like maybe there's nothing I can do about this right now. Yeah, it would be a really nice world if the Joe Rogan problem could be solved so easily by Spotify dropping his exclusivity deal. Right. That would that would be great. But that's not the world we live in and tricking yourself into thinking that is just kind of delusional. And like, yeah, it makes you feel better, but like that's not actually helping because like, yeah, we can obviously compare this to other like D platforming campaigns with people for like Alex Jones. But you know, Jones was way more niche and way more extreme around the time of his like D platforming campaign.

And his campaign wasn't about ending exclusivity deals. It was about getting him off of popular platforms altogether. And that's not happening with Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan isn't saying the things that are going to get him booted from platforms. He's smart. He knows what he can and cannot say. Yeah, he's not he's not dumb enough to get banned from these platforms. Right. And also, you know, he's a giant financial asset, so they wouldn't ban him anyway. But like he's he's what he's doing is bringing on people who say horrible things to continue a cultural conversation, which gets him in the headlines and gives a platform like Spotify a whole bunch of room to cry free speech and get away with it. Yep. Removing Alex Jones could be seen as like a monetary decision in and of itself because it is actually removing liability. But this isn't really the case for Rogan.

Yeah. And he's it's just not one of the problems is that this kind of does fly in the face of a lot of what people want to think. And I don't want to make you the case that it's as black and white as it is. Because, for example, I'm not saying that it was bad for someone to go through the effort of finding and pointing out, hey, there's like 70 episodes where Joe Rogan drops the inward and getting those pulled. I don't think that I think that that was broadly speaking a productive thing. Yes. But keeping Joe Rogan at the forefront of the outrage cycle is doing nothing but printing money for the guy. And that that's not an easy thing to deal with because it's like, do you want me to just like stay quiet in the face of injustice? And it's like, no, that's not what I want you to do. But I do want you to recognize that there are times and ways of speaking up that are just putting putting gasoline on an injustice fire. It's important to remember that D platforming is just a tactic and single tactics aren't always effective in every situation.

That's what makes them a tactic, right? In order for a tactic to work, you need to understand the scenario that you're applying the tactic to and seeing if that tactic achieves the goal. And if it does, then great. But if it doesn't, you need to choose another tactic and stop doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a new result. And this is one of those situations where like when you bring up, hey, maybe nothing might be the best thing, at least for most people specifically to do. Like the thing that gets brought up is like, well, do you not want me to or like, well, what do you suggest I do? Like, you know, you're saying I shouldn't do this, but you're not telling me what to do. And it's like, well, it's like if somebody gets shot in the leg and one person has a tourniquet and the other person has a bunch of razor blades that they want to throw in their eyes. And it's like, well, what do you want me to do? All I have is these razor blades. This is the only other thing I can do than just stand by and do nothing.

And it's like, well, in this case, doing nothing is the best thing to do because it's it's not that's not going to help the problem. Boycotts of this scale kind of only tend to benefit brands and businesses, right? Because like if if the brand or business is a person is smaller and more niche, like say like Alex Jones or Richard Spencer, right? Then yes, these tactics and boycotts can really work to push things out of the cultural like market and also in some cases in terms of businesses like the literal market. But when you're dealing with things like Target, Nike and Joe Rogan, that's not the case because those brands are way too big. Any conservative boycott against Target isn't going to have that effect and will probably make weird liberals be like, oh, I'm going to go to Target now because the conservatives don't want me to. It's like it's it's I don't it's not it's it's like it's the promise is like Joe Rogan himself isn't really the problem either. You know, a lot of the problem can be seen more as like content algorithms that boost and reward misinformation and disinformation and conspiracism. And that's more of like an actual issue at hand here. Joe Rogan is just because that's how he hears about a lot of these people. Yeah, they go viral somewhere else.

And in a lot of cases, it's an inorganic thing that brings them in front of them. It's some fucking algorithm that and that is a case where you can target and work on deep forming it can be more productive. That that was that was what that was what I was getting at is like Joe Joe Rogan himself is just a visible outgrowth of the core problem. And the core problem is these things getting onto his show in the first place. So yeah, we can't stop his show, but maybe we should do more work to prevent to like figure out ways to do, you know, start using these tactics to prevent algorithms from boosting these things so that Joe Rogan sees them and then and then invites them on. And yeah, that's a lot more work than just being angry at Spotify. Maybe it'll actually do something. And one thing that can do something is with spot it won't work if it's just Spotify. But I am one of those people who thinks that maybe it's not the worst thing if things like Spotify are seen as publishers. And thus when they spread misinformation that leads to disastrous health consequences, they can be held liable, right?

That's not the worst possible change, although it is a problematic one. I don't want to like boil that down to a simple question. But I think that's an avenue that should be explored because I don't see that there's a lot of difference in Spotify choosing to let something go to air or the New York Times printing misinformation. And in fact, Spotify is going to reach more people because nobody cares what the New York Times says anymore. Yeah. So Spotify, the Spotify CEO did kind of address the ongoing controversy around the, you know, internal publishing stuff and how they view medical misinformation. They did adopt a clarified policy that prohibits content that promotes dangerous, false or dangerous, deceptive medical information, which may cause offline harm or pose a direct threat to public health. And then the Post also announced that Spotify would add content advisories to any content related to COVID on the platform. That's not a Twitter and Instagram have nothing. No, it's not. It's not actually. It's not actually. But if you have the opera, if you can, again, if there is like an actual dollar consequence to companies that aired massive disinformation, then you're not without sort of making Joe Rogan the focus.

You can make it so that the people that he actually is accountable to, which is the people who make him give him the money that he gets have a vested interest in tamping down on the worst excesses that he's responsible for. Like that might have an impact. I don't know. Like part of the problem is that and one thing we should acknowledge here when we're talking about like what would work better than what's being done. This is a pretty new problem. Versions of it have existed before, but without the Internet and without podcasts being what they are, this is a pretty new thing to be dealing with. And I'm not I don't I'm not saying like this is here's the obvious solution to this, but I think we are trying to point out like what folks are doing doesn't work. The tactics being applied are not effective and we should be exploring other opportunities to mitigate this harm that are not. Well, I guess it's time to delete another app and post about it on Twitter. Yeah, I think I think this is especially a thing with like is like one of the other things that that's been popping up is Rogan's like weapons grade transphobia. Yeah. Oh yeah. Jesus. Yeah. And that's the stuff that is is horrifying.

Like the racism is also like really bad. He's extremely sexist, but it's like I think misogynist racist. He's he sucks. Yes. Yeah. There's a lot of money in being that dude. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this is sort of, you know, this is, you know, this is an inherent problem for the left because fighting it like this this kind of sort of like shock truck information stuff works better. Like that rage economy works better for the right that it does for the left. And I think in some ways that means like you have to fight them in other spaces. You know, you can't just like keep throwing yourself. It's the same thing with like, so why why why you don't have just like one line where you just run into a bunch of cops over and over again in one spot. Yeah. But we certainly try. Yeah. Yeah. Some folks gave that one the old college, the old college. Yeah. Like, you know, it's like in some sense, yeah, like it's it's it's it's hard to be too hard on these on people who doing this. And I know they think they're doing the right thing, but it's like you have to you have to pick your battles. And you know, if you're taking a fight, that's fair. That's a that's a bad fight. That is a bad fight for you. You need you need to be fighting them in different spheres. You need to be, you know, I mean, working, for example, on stuff like tech regulation, like you like working on, you know, unionizing these

places, right? Like fighting like purely finding them in information space, we will lose every time. The advantage that we have is that we also do other things. And it's, it's, you know, we're going to keep losing hearing if you know if we keep fighting them in exactly the same way here, we're going to keep losing. So we have to, you know, like we have to fight in other places. And that's hard. And it sucks because, you know, this is such an enormous part of just what reality is now is, you know, getting people online, like, you have to stop doing that. And yeah, because it's not the problem is that we've all gotten fucking caught for quite some time in this escalating culture war. And it's a not it's not a battleground that can be entirely ignored, because when you kind of seed ground to them, they create conspiracy theories about trans people attacking kids that lead to them murdering people in the streets, or they spread conspiracy theories about masks that lead to them occupying Ottawa. So it can't the culture war battleground cannot be ignored. But at the end of the day, what we should rather than just like seeking new ways to engage with it, because the more you engage with it, and it is sometime necessary to engage with but the more you engage with it, the stronger you make this whole thing. And the heavier it lies on all of us like a cloud. And in the only real way to actually win in the long run is to find a way to get off of that to get out of this like this fucking treadmill of bullshit that has become everything all consuming and it's it's in a lot of people's best interest for it to stay all consuming. And I, there's a there's a lot that's going on here because it's not. I think sometimes when you criticize people for the actions they take in situations like this, they kind of interpreted as you saying Well, like, you're stupid and you fucked up and you never should have like done this. And the way I think of it is more like this is a we have found ourselves trapped in a really messy situation, and no one has figured out how to get out.

So it's not a situation of like people are are dumb for having done something that's not effective. It's a situation of we are all trying to figure out what works in this new world. We have kind of somewhat accidentally somewhat purposefully built for ourselves. And it is important to have humility and be willing to accept it like you know what that's not working and we have to stop doing the thing that's not working rather than, you know, treat it as if it's sort of a moral failing that something we we we tried was not effective. And the last thing is is like really it's not just the non effectiveness but also the the idea that the fact that this outrage is that just a constant is just a constant free banner ad for Spotify, every everywhere online is like also not great so it's not even not even just not effective, but you're just giving a corporation tons of free press. And maybe we can reframe the way we approach these things so that we don't do that. Because in the end that's just kind of adding to promoting the misinformation. It's kind of really doing. And it's not it's not nearly as you know, impactful as you know, just rogue and doing it himself. But it still is it still is a contributing factor and it does contribute to the backfire effect of people who listen to his podcast, maybe don't even, but they're still going to get defensive over him, because they're seeing this attack on him and even though he's even though he is a huge figure, he's seen as an outsider. So that that really does contribute to that backfire effect thing of getting people more and more vested in him as a content creator. Yeah, yeah, it's really dumb. But it's the thing we need to deal with. It's a version of the lesson people still didn't learn with Trump, which is that like, you can't you can't beat these people by dunking on them. It doesn't matter that Joe Rogan said something dumb. It doesn't matter that Joe Rogan's inconsistent. It doesn't matter that like Joe Rogan has tells lies or whatever.

That's not going to change anybody's mind about the dude, because it's not about Joe Rogan. They don't support him because they love they support him as much as anything the people who are at least engaging primarily online about it. Most of his fans are just don't think about any of this because they're not as online as the rest of us. But the people who are kind of engaging with this and helping to fuel the culture war side of this thing, they don't care. This isn't about his inherent characteristics. This is about it's a chance to dunk on the enemy. So like you're not going to convince them of anything ever. That's all I had to say on this. Yeah, I don't know. Yep, because again, I really I really resisted writing this episode for a long time because I didn't want to add to the Rogan discourse. But after a while, the Rogan discourse itself became worth talking about. Yeah, how we talk is so because it is more of a meta angle like OK, that is actually worth talking about. But yeah, I am so tired of hearing, watching and seeing the words Joe Rogan. Yeah, I'm exhausted by it. I hate that like it's a bigger story in the United States than the gigantic war that might break out in Eastern Europe. It's it's just just a very frustrating time. And the only way to win this particular game is not to play.

So that's that's why we're doing this. We're not going to stick his name in the description or the episode title. Yeah, it is, you know, the title we were working with this under that we're not going to use so as to not feed into the algorithm was Joe Rogan, the egregore. And that is really how I think about it. If you if you haven't listened to our episode on the book about the Flat Earth book on behind the bastards that talks about egregores and egregores. It's basically a God that is made up by the kind of directed thoughts of a population of people. Yeah, it's like it's all deity that exists. It's like this thought form that if people put energy into it, it almost gains its own. It's its own like independence from the people that that like burst it, even though it is just a thought form. And it because it was just an idea or presence. And now it basically is its own God that's self sustaining and it can impact the world. Yeah, global capital is an egregore. And the more that people kind of feed into the discourse around Joe Rogan, the more he turns into one kind of outside of his own actions.

This idea of him has an influence on everything around us. And boy, we don't need that, do we? Certainly do not. You just said we just put that one down, right? Try something else. Throw a brick at your sheriff instead. This will go better for you. Sure, sure, Chris. Chris said it, not me. Yeah, I mean, obviously in Minecraft, he said bricks, it's fine. No, Robert, Robert, Robert, Robert, it's not Minecraft anymore. It's a Roblox. The feds cracked in Minecraft. Yeah, you're right. It's going to take weeks for them to their computers to realize what Roblox is. The gym was a story, I think I saw on Twitter about some kids who actually legitimately got arrested in Russia for blowing up a building in Minecraft.

So like literally in the... Excellent. Awesome. And instead, again, it's Roblox where nothing bad happens. Nothing bad happens. Alright everybody, get on Roblox and don't talk about Joe Rogan. Hundreds of truckers continue to roll east, and with more joining the movement with each passing city, feelings towards vaccine mandates have heightened. And I advocate civil war, if people don't want to stand up, we got guns, we'll stand

up and we'll bring them out. Fuckin' A guys, let's get pumped for this, let's go to fuckin' Ottawa. I want to see one of those truckers, I wouldn't prize none of our guys obviously, but I would like to see our own January 6th event. See some of those truckers plow right through that 16 foot wall. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, or in this case it did happen here, slash is still happening here, and the here in this case being Canada in recent weeks. The idea of only a few thousand people totally choking a major city, holding it hostage to

bargain for political demands, while overwhelming and getting a foot up on law enforcement, taking over and shutting down a size old portion of a popular metropolitan area, and simultaneously blocking off supply lines, trade routes, and multiple international border crossings, is exactly the kind of thing this podcast has been talking about for years as a potential anti-government resistance tactic that could become more common as political tensions rise in North America specifically. A few weeks ago, when the so-called trucker convoy was still in its planning stages, I wasn't super eager to cover it on the pod actually, I assumed it would be a flop and

just another dumb anti-COVID protest in a long line of anti-COVID protests happening in Canada. Flash forward to me at the end of January, and I became apparent that I was sorely mistaken, and this thing was shaping up to be a significant factor in Canada's political ecosystem going forward. In my haste to catch up to the moment, I recorded two episodes with the wonderful journalist Dan Cullen, explaining the situation as it was at the prospective times of recording. But as the tensions in Ottawa and all across Canada arose, and the situation gained more

and more complexity, I decided that the convoy and subsequent blockades required a more researched and scripted deep dive. The more I dug into the situation, the more it seemed to embody the exact thing I was warning about in my two previous scripted episodes about Canada and the far-right, titled Canadian Fascism A, apologies for the title, but you can find those if you scroll through that it could happen here in feed, I think they came out around November-ish of 2021. What I wanted to get across in those episodes is that Canada is often seen as an escape from the more divisive, violent, and fascist elements of US politics and culture.

But just like climate change, capitalism, or any other enveloping force, fascism and the slide towards it can never be truly escaped, right? There is no other, there is no away, and it's especially hard to see it when it's growing on the back of your own head. Simply through Islamophobia, far-right ethno-nationalist tendencies have been bubbling under the surface of Canada for a long while. And since Trudeau is taken office in 2015, there has been a perfectly politically allowed boogeyman to blame every problem onto.

That can include everything from Trudeau is taking away our oil and gas jobs, or Trudeau is bringing in Muslim terrorists to Canada, or Trudeau is starving your children through health mandates. That right-wing protest has been steadily growing the past five years. There's been multiple flare-ups of far-right rhetoric with the Canadian Yellow Vests, the Western Separatist Wegzit or Western exit movement, and the pseudo-fascist People's Party of Canada. The incorporation of pandemic conspiracies and anti-vaccine sentiments into the already

disaffected rural Canadian right-wingers starting in 2020 and continuing to the present has accelerated not only the conspiratorial far-right rhetoric among conservative voters, but also what is seen as a valid political action in those people's eyes. But before we get into how the convoy started, with anger concerning COVID-19 health mandates and misinformation concerning empty store shelves, we have to first go back in time to even before the COVID-19 virus was a blip on anyone's radar. In February 2019, the Canadian Yellow Vests organized something called the United We Roll Convoy.

The result was around 170 trucks driving cross-country through the more liberal east to Ottawa. The result was around 170 trucks driving from the west cross-country to the more liberal east and eventually to Ottawa. The goal was to represent the concerns of disenfranchised oil and gas workers in the western provinces and their opposition to proposed environmental and new energy policies. Yellow Vests Canada was largely founded by individuals already associated with Canada's far-right, which at the time was primarily united through anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia. Inspired by the French Yellow Vests movement, they copied their aesthetics and adopted new

grievances and reactionary rhetoric that would get them a much larger audience. By the time United We Roll arrived in Ottawa, the media started to catch on to the more problematic elements about their organization. Neo-Nazi Faith Goldy spoke on a stage, many members of hate groups were spotted in attendance, and with numbers so low, it made their more extreme participants stick out. Instead of focusing the message on oil and gas as they claimed to represent Western alienation from a distant liberal Ottawa, some of its participants seemed more interested in protesting Ottawa's immigration policies, then arguing for specific fixes for Alberta's oil patch.

Plus, if you peaked inside any Canadian Yellow Vests Facebook group, you would be flooded with hundreds of examples of explicit anti-Muslim racism and calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's arrest and execution, a theme that remains common among COVID conspiracy demonstrations today. But, at the end of it, United We Roll was wildly considered a bust, with only a few hundred participants in Ottawa, and despite raising almost $150,000, the organizers failed to disclose how much of that money was actually spent on convoy expenses like gas and food. Afterwards, the Yellow Vests Canada movement started to kind of die out, though some holdouts

kept smaller demonstrations going for months, particularly in the conservative oil province of Alberta. Not to us now, United We Roll can be seen as a small test run for the current situation in 2022. In fact, it shares many of the same organizers and even the same promotional materials, except this time they have the added weight of many more people radicalized into conspiracism throughout the pandemic and much more funding. So with that in mind, let's dive into the components of the initial organizing effort.

On January 14, 2022, a GoFundMe account was set up for a so-called Trucker Convoy, ahead of the January 15 adoption of the mandate requiring all cross-border transportation drivers to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Vaccine mandates in Canada have been in effect since October 30 for ship crews, railways, and airline workers. But effective January 15, the federal government expanded the requirement to truck drivers returning from the states, and those who will remain unvaccinated will not be able to enter Canada without quarantine.

One week later, a reciprocal policy went into effect in the United States for Canadian truckers crossing into their border, which means going forward, you cannot really cross the border at all while remaining unvaccinated. At this point in mid-January, a majority of Canadians still broadly supported health mandates aimed at limiting the spread of COVID. But a big part of the early propaganda push for the convoy was photos alleged to have been from current Canadian grocery stores, which they were not, with barren, empty shelves. The idea was that COVID restrictions were already severely impacting the supply line,

and any additional mandates would begin to starve the population and effectively shut down international trade. Put a note in this idea, by the way, it will come up later. Ideas for another truck convoy like Unidw Roll have been tossed around for a while online. And with this new mandate on truckers and vaccines, a time presented itself to give the convoy idea another go. In the early truck convoy organizing, there were primarily four familiar far-right faces working together to set things up, none of whom are truck drivers, by the way.

The originally listed organizers on the GoFundMe page were Tamara Litch and BJ Ditcher. Both have notable experience with far-right organizing. Tamara Litch was born in my home province of Saskatchewan, but now hails from the town of Medicine Hat, Alberta, where she served as an organizer for Yellow Vests Canada, a regional coordinator for the Separatist Western Exit or WEGZIT movement in Alberta, and now the secretary for the Maverick Party, another far-right extremist separatist movement and fringe political party. Litch started attending and boosting Yellow Vest events starting in 2018, and her social

media posts from around the time show in one moment, calling out some hateful rhetoric from within the movement, while also posting Islamophobic articles of her own and conspiracies about the Muslim Brotherhood operating in Canada. A few days after the GoFundMe was created, Benjamin B.J. Ditcher, one-time conservative party of Canada candidate, People's Party of Canada booster, and co-founder of a Canadian far-right podcast network, appeared as a co-organizer on the GoFundMe page. 2019, he claimed that Islamist entryism is rotting away our society like syphilis. Benjamin Ditcher was also one of the first people to give a speech at the first proto-fascist

People's Party of Canada conference in Quebec, saying that the conservative party of Canada is suffering from the stench of cultural relativism and political Islam and a whole bunch of stuff in that general vein. And James Botter was another one of the four key organizers of the trucker convoy to Ottawa. Botter is an admitted conspiracy theorist who has endorsed QAnon and called COVID the biggest political scam in history. He's also a former activist with the L of S's Canada and United We Roll. Botter's main project, however, is running the Canada Unity website, which is one of

the original nexus points for organizing and spreading word about this convoy. The group contends that vaccine mandates and passports are illegal under Canada's constitution, the Nuremberg Code, and a host of other international conventions. Botter has long been a fringe figure, but his movements started picking up steam and support as announcements and continuations of restrictions aimed at curbing COVID-19 spread have continued. The supposed plight of the truckers proved to be a sympathetic cause on Facebook and attracted an array of fellow travelers.

The last big major player is Patrick King, another former Yellow Vester, one-time major figure in the WEGZIT movement as well as United We Roll. On January 18, 2022, Pat King hosted a livestream for James Botter to promote the Canada Unity website and to announce it as the official page for the Freedom Trucker Convoy, or as they called it, Operation Bear Hug. King is a conspiracy theorist and popular streamer that attracts the audience farther right than Canada's usual conservatives. King's made headlines for jumping up fear and then following through with his supporters

with violence at rallies put on by BLM and ANTIFA. King's also known for spreading what are basically neo-nazi talking points, and I'm just going to quote from an article by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network here, because they did a great job tracking his past extremism. Quote, in the past, King has gone on record about his feelings on the Anglo-Saxon replacement that plans to, quote, flood Canada with refugees and subvert the education system, which is a thin rebranding of the Great Replacement Theory touted by ethno-nationalists. At other points, King has expressed overtly racist and anti-Semitic statements in a 2019

stream about the then-upcoming federal election. King complained that he had to leave the movement due to their lack of success, saying, quote, the election won't matter unless you want to change your national language to Chinese or Mandarin or Hebrew. He then went on to compare Chinese names to the sound of change falling downstairs. He is publicly distorted facts with the form of Holocaust denial, saying, I do know that the Holocaust was reduced to 1.5 million and not the 6 million that it was said to be. He then invoked the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people are secretly in control

of world governance, media, and finances, saying, quote, the questions that have been asked several times to the ADL and to the Jewish government and communities. We have Jewish world bankers who are dictating our government policies and controlling our politicians, unquote. So yeah, considering King's history of saying blatantly fascist things, some organizers and convoy supporters tried to distance King from the freedom convoy movement to not damage the initial fundraising effort. The controversy around King resulted in a statement being released onto the fundraising

page saying, King has not and has never been affiliated with our movement, nor has he been a part of our great team of volunteers. The update was afterwards deleted, and then King claimed in a video that the statement was a public relations move because he was being attacked online. For a while, King was still listed as the Northern Alberta contact for the western portion of the convoy. So those are the four people that laid the organizing groundwork that spawned this entire thing and put it into motion.

But what made this convoy different from the United We Roll 1.0 is the almost two years of COVID isolation, which has given ample time for groups like the Gala Vests and extreme far right groups to completely fold into the rapidly growing anti-vax and COVID conspiracy movement in Canada. And along with that, using people's seething hatred of Justin Trudeau to radicalize thousands of thousands of people online to getting them more comfortable with the idea of participating in political protest. It's really important to mention that the protests are not organized by Canadian trucking

unions or really Canadian truckers. The largest trucking unions have come out against the protests, and they do not appear to reflect the values of most Canadians or most Canadian truckers. More than 80% of the Canadian public is vaccinated, including almost 90% of truckers, according to Canada's Minister of Transport. The Canadian trucking alliance issued a statement saying it does not support and strongly disapproves of any protests on public roads, highways, or bridges. The Canadian trucking alliance president said in the joint statement with the ministers

of labour and transport that the government of Canada and the Canadian trucking alliance both agree that vaccination used in combination with preventative health measures is the most effective tool to reduce the risk of COVID-19 for Canadians and to protect public health. According to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, the mandate could impact around 12,000-16,000 Canadian commercial drivers, which is just about 10-15% of the industry's cross-border drivers. During the pandemic, repeated polls have shown that a majority of Canadians support public health measures to contain the pandemic, but the number of Canadians who would like to

see restrictions end has risen in recent weeks. With Omnicron cases on the decline, some provinces are starting to remove restrictions and requirements. The public sentiment appears to be moving in the direction of opening up communities. Throughout the last two weeks of January, the number of Canadians saying that they would like to see restrictions end has risen by 15 percentage points, to a majority of 54%. Canadians have found a way to tap into pandemic fatigue among conservatives across the country after months of lockdown. More than two-thirds of Canadians have said they have very little in common with how the

Ottawa protesters see things, but 32% say that they have a lot in common, according to a recent survey conducted by a Canadian research firm. Though the idea of vaccine mandates for Canadian truckers kind of prompted what turned into this convoy, very quickly it became a general battle cry against pandemic restrictions as a whole and the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Unlike 2019's United We Roll, the Freedom Convoy Against Health mandates was able to successfully capitalize on Western feelings of neglect and isolation from the ruling liberal elite in the East and in the capital of Ottawa.

The right ingredients at the right time flung the trucker Freedom Convoy into the conservative zeitgeist. The original GoFundMe page set up on January 14th to financially support convoy participants was able to raise $10 million in just under three weeks. As the truck convoy idea picked up steam, the first expected wave of attendees were planned to arrive in Ottawa on Saturday, January 29th. Vehicles started rolling in a few days prior, throughout Thursday and the Friday night before, the big day on the 29th.

And as Saturday the 29th came, the numbers of trucks and protest participants greatly exceeded the initial expected numbers that I and many other people had figured, while obviously falling short of the heavily mocked 50,000 trucker's prediction made by some convoy supporters. While writing these episodes, I talked with Paul, a citizen of Ottawa who's been living inside the occupied zone since the 29th of January, and this is what he had to say about expectations leading up to the convoy's arrival. There was at least a week of lead up where it was about all we heard about.

So from when they sort of declared their intention to come down to when they started rallying in BC and in the West and coming across, there was an anticipation that something was going to happen. And people around here, because where I'm sitting right now is less than a kilometer from Parliament Hill and directly in between two of the streets that they've blocked off sort of on the way into town. We were nervous, but we kind of were just sort of assuming it was going to be a one-day affair or it was going to be small at first, but then you heard, I mean, nobody believed

the 50,000 trucks and that was, I mean, to put it in perspective, the numbers that they were claiming were on their way here are larger than the entire population of the city by like a couple hundred thousand people. So that didn't seem likely, but when we were hearing the 30,000 to 40,000, when we heard about multiple convoys with a hundred to 200 trucks, that was when it was like, okay, this isn't going to be great. So people started arriving on what? Fridays?

Saturday? The first group started rolling to town on Thursday night. They were small in numbers. They didn't really start blocking anything off because there just weren't enough of them. But you could hear the horns starting on Thursday night. And I think some of them were going into hotels. They were smaller groups too, mostly from sort of local groups. And then around 10 or 11 in the morning on Friday, we started hearing reports at a Kingston,

which is about an hour-ish away, an hour and a half, that there was a group moving out of there. So around one o'clock in the afternoon Friday, the first group started to arrive and started to congregate downtown. And one of the things about Ottawa is it's a lot, like a lot of big downtowns, it's a lot of one-way streets. So the moment you get the trucks starting to get in the intersections or near intersections, you're blocking off all passage in certain directions.

So they started blocking off the northbound really quickly just because that's how they were coming in. And there's only like three gas stations downtown as well, which kind of plays a big factor in the routes that they took. So they all passed by, especially the passenger cars that were running low, passed by it through that way. And yeah, by about two or three o'clock in the afternoon. Starting south of Somerset, which is about a kilometer and a half from Parliament, was

pretty much jammed at that point. As Saturday night came, much of the group, supporters and truckers alike, spent that time partying late into the night as heavily backed up traffic continued to effectively shut down roads and large areas of the city around Parliament. Throughout the weekend, businesses in the surrounding areas that did not close ahead of the protest were swarmed by customers, many refusing to wear masks. A local homeless shelter and soup kitchen was harassed by convoy participants who were turned away from restaurants after refusing to wear a mask.

A large number of the convoy attendees surrounded the shelter, demanding to be fed by the facility staff. According to the shelter's president, convoy participants assaulted a client of the shelter and hurled racial slurs at a security guard who attempted to intervene. Officers and volunteers at the shelter noted that parked vehicles blocked the shelter, making it difficult for ambulances to reach the facility and for staff to assist community members in need. A home in the downtown area was pelted with rocks and snow, as well as vandalized with

human feces, all for showing a pride flag in their window. The operations commander for the Ottawa Paramedic Service said that an ambulance was pelted with rocks and paramedics checking the damage were called racial slurs by convoy participants. The paramedics have since requested police escorts citing safety concerns. More public backlash was prompted after reports surfaced of a monument dedicated to commemorating Terry Fox being covered in protest signs and being staged to hold an upside-down Canadian flag. No arrests remained Saturday night related to the convoy, but as the convoy stuck around

even past the weekend, there was this growing feeling of downtown residents that they had been abandoned by the city and law enforcement. But the whole situation and response to the situation making them afraid to leave their homes. I asked Paul what his experience on the first weekend of the occupation was and the general feeling in the area of downtown Ottawa. And you're living right in the middle of this, how much has this affected your day-to-day life and all your neighbors and stuff?

What are you able to do and not do at this point? Well, the weekend was especially bad, and we're all kind of bracing for what this weekend's going to be because that's when you had just, you know, there were between somewhere between 10 and 15 to 18,000 people was the estimates I've heard all crowding downtown in the streets. So at that point, I mean, that was when the police were telling people not to wear a mask out because, you know, you're kind of putting yourself at risk because it'll be targeted for violence. Yeah.

So I mean, I was like basically anytime I've left the house, so we have a mask mandate still in effect in Ottawa. So you have to wear them indoors pretty much everywhere. So I have to wear it in my building. I have to wear it at the convenience store if I'm going to go buy, say, you know, a pack of cigarettes. I'm not going to take it off. It's a 30-second walk.

And so the harassment around that started on Friday, and then it just became anyone who was out and about that didn't look like they were part of it, started getting hassled. Other people I know who live in the area, especially women, have been targeted a great deal, anyone who's part of, you know, the LGBTQ community has been, it's not really just, it's just not safe to be out on the streets, and it's not really safe to show that you don't support what they're doing at points. Since the convoy started arriving in Ottawa, the extreme elements of the protest have been pretty visible.

Among the thousands of attendees were recognizable members of white nationalist hate groups, neo-Nazi and Confederate flags were seen flying, two-in-on logos were blazoned on trucks, and science and stickers were pasted on telephone poles around the occupied area, burying Trudeau's face, reading, Wanted for Crimes Against Humanity. The official line from original convoy organizers, minus Pat King, of course, however, has tried to remain focused. In a Facebook live broadcast, James Potter of Canada Unity instructed his supporters to stop talking about the vaccine and instead stick to messages of freedom.

The goal of adopting a more restricted and relatable protest cause is to hopefully jump up more widespread support and validity. And it initially worked in some ways and not in others. Numerous members of the Conservative Party have come out to meet protesters, especially throughout the first few days. Now former Conservative Party leader, Aaron O'Toole, met with convoy participants, albeit away from the main protest site. Both People's Party of Canada leader, Maxine Bernere, and Ontario member of Provincial

Parliament and leader of the de facto Ontario arm of the PPC, Randy Heeler, who has made many recent anti-Semitic comments, both gave speeches on Saturday the 29th in front of the Parliament building. People like Elon Musk and Donald Trump have both endorsed the convoy, and Fox News has been endlessly broadcasting glowing updates of the convoy since its arrival in Ottawa. According to the convoy participants and organizers, they are vowing to camp out in front of the Parliament until their demands of dropping all COVID-19 health measures are met. While stated grievances can be broader and more vast on the ground, the current Memorandum

of Understanding, hosted on the Canada Unity website, which collected over 30,000 signatures, served as a sort of bargaining pitch between the convoy and the Canadian government. The Memorandum of Understanding, or the MOU, calls on Canada's appointed Senators and Canada's Governor General, the representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Canada's constitutional monarchy, to abolish all COVID-19-related restrictions and to allow all unvaccinated workers whose employment was terminated because of vaccine mandates to get their jobs back. James Potter, the guy who runs Canada Unity, insisted to his followers that the MOU would force the government's hand and possibly even trigger fresh elections, if enough people

signed. Another Canada Unity organizer went further, saying it would require the Senate to go after the Prime Minister for corruption and fascism, which of course there's no legal basis for any of these claims around the MOU, but that doesn't really matter in the end, because people still believe it, so it's going to have an impact on what they do. The more controversial Pat King laid out an alternative, however, a more direct plan of action to the occupiers. In a January Facebook livestream, King said that, what we want to focus on is our politicians,

their houses, their locations. If political pressure doesn't work, blocking major supply chains will be later on. So more on that idea later. After the first weekend of protests kind of turned occupations, GoFundMe released a reported $1 million of the total $10 million raised for the convoy. As the end of the weekend approached, many convoy participants who rolled into the nation's cell began heading home, and the highways on Sunday night saw no shortage of vehicles heading away from Ottawa, with their protest signs and flags still in tow.

But plenty of people stuck around to continue the fight. Thousands and thousands of people, and hundreds of vehicles, including a fleet of semi-trucks, commercial vehicles, RV campers, and regular cars, were more than enough to keep the roads in a large portion of Ottawa around Parliament effectively shut down. I can't help but draw comparisons to the fear-mongering narrative of bustfuls of Antifa! Protesters coming from out of town, into places they don't live, terrorizing locals, shutting down cities. The other comparison is to the chop or the chas in Seattle, with taking over a large

portion of the city, and how that was so vilified. Except, this is so much bigger and impactful than anything so-called Antifa or the Black Lives Matter protests have ever done, especially in Canada. In terms of actually impacting the functionality of a city, and restricting the local, national, and international capitalist trade, the Freedom Convoy has done everything and more its proponents warned that Antifa was going to do to Canada. Obviously, part of the reason the Convoy protest was able to get to this point is not just because of its large size, but also the initial hands-off approach by police that

allowed the convoy participants the opportunity to get a strong foothold within the city. The difference in initial law enforcement reaction to the protest convoy, made up of largely conservative middle-class white Canadians, compared to other protests like the Black Lives Matter protests, or say the RCMP's typical response to First Nations protests and blockades defending their land, comparisons cannot be over-analyzed. The latter two forms of protest I mentioned actually do challenge societal power structures that prop up white Canada, while as this convoy protest does not and instead plays into those very power structures.

That dynamic played a major role in how the police handled, or didn't handle, the first few days of the protest, in which during those early days, the convoy attendees were free to build infrastructure that resulted in the protest escalating into a full-scale occupation. The Monday after the first initial weekend, the city's mayor Jim Watson declared a state of emergency, but at that point, Ottawa police thought it was already too late for the protest to be ended by sheer force, without vastly increasing the likelihood of severe damage and life-threatening outcomes to the convoy participants, police officers, and regular citizens of Ottawa.

On February 2, Ottawa police chief Peter Sololi explicitly said that there may not be a police solution to ending the convoy and occupation. There are similar demonstrations taking place in many other parts of this country, indeed many other parts around this continent and the world. What happens here affects there, what happens there affects here. We have seen in the last 24 hours attempts by other police and other jurisdictions to do just what you have suggested. They were not effective and they created additional safety issues, potential life-threatening

safety issues. I have great compassion for those that have been significantly affected if not traumatized and we know, criminally victimized, we will do everything we can to hold those who have done that to account. We will continue arresting and charging people as we have been, but any action taken without understanding the totality of the context, the totality of the risk, will be irresponsible. We are trying to be responsible, lawful, ethical, and measured. My last comment when I wrapped up, I will share again now.

The longer this goes on, the more I am convinced there may not be a police solution to this demonstration. There are police chiefs, commissioners across this country that are dealing with demonstrations that are starting, underway, and significantly advanced. This is a national issue, not an Ottawa issue. From the start, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been playing down the notion of a military response to the ongoing Ottawa protest. During the first week, he said that sending in troops is not in the cards right now.

On February 2, the Ottawa police chief said that all options are on the table, including eventually calling in the military, but one must be very, very cautious about deploying troops in Canadian soil in such cases. Trudeau said that a news conference on early February that it's not something that anyone should enter into lightly. With police basically leaving the Ottawa residents who live near and within the convoy occupation to fend for themselves, I was curious what sorts of things the local community might be doing to live around this massive conspiracy-filled group of reactionary out-of-town campers.

What sort of things has the community been doing to kind of help survive this, like, has there been, like, mutual aid projects in the neighborhood to help support other neighbors, you know, that sort of thing? There have. It's actually been kind of wonderful the way the community's been coming together, especially after two years of pandemic where we've all been kind of, like, Ottawa and Ontario have been one of the more restricted jurisdictions in North America. I mean, and I say this as a restaurant manager, like, in my opinion, rightly so, like, it's

about keeping people safe. We've done a fairly good job of that by and large. But the thing is that, you know, our community hasn't felt a lot like a community in a while, and this week, I mean, one of the few positives has been both individuals and organizations. So, I mean, Rose and some of the other organizations that were mentioned on Friday have done a great job. They've done some really, really great organic organizing coming out of some activists as well as just people in the community.

So there's a few discord servers set up right now. So there's been a huge issue with people with disabilities and the elderly getting groceries because deliveries aren't possible downtown. So it started on Twitter, but there's been an organization set up to help people get those groceries, whether it's a cost issue or just a physical delivery issue where people are ensuring that that's happening. As of today, there's going to be a safe walks program. There's, well, there's two, there's one on discord where it's people offering to, you

know, make sure you can get through the space safe. Today, though, in a positive and more passive sense, we kind of started taking the streets back. So we had about four or five groups of people ranging from 10 to 50, just walking the streets and not confronting anybody, not getting into any direct engagement, just going out to show that we can still walk on our streets and letting our, you know, our, our neighbors know that we can actually be together and, you know, stand up just to be together, which is something that I think a lot of people lost over the last week.

I mean, like the fact that that's even a big step is showing how tired the situation is. The fact that just getting to that point for walking around in a group where you feel safe is like a big thing that, yeah, that's like a really interesting and horrible indicator of what the mood has been like there for people like living in this area. That is, yeah, that is a big part of it. And it's something that was actually talked about a lot today, which was how refreshing it was to be able to do it, but also that it shouldn't feel radical to take a safe walk in your community, but it somehow did.

And it speaks a lot to the feelings, the lack of safety or the loss of, you know, safety in this community and has been pretty immense. I should mention that another community led effort to deal with the occupation is the Ram Ranch Resistance, a loose, the organized counter movement to the trucker convoy that started with people joining the convoy's online communications channels and blasting the homoerotic country song, Ram Ranch. The song is by a Canadian artist and features some flawless lyrics like 18 naked cowboys wanting to be fucked, cowboys in the showers at Ram Ranch, on their knees wanting to suck

cowboy cocks, Ram Ranch really rocks. The result is not only making the convoy folks uncomfortable because gay, but also it is hijacking and making their online communications channels kind of useless for any non-cowboy cocksucking political organizing efforts. Disruptive resistance to the convoy's online communications is not just limited to the Ram Ranch song, however, other vulgar songs have also been introduced into the chats as well. I'm going to just kind of give you a brief look at what it's like inside these chats.

Right? Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to role play it. The Ram Ranch guys are finally gone. It's about freaking time. I've had to shut that stuff off. One person has heard saying in a, in a clip from a chat, immediately followed by a robotic voice saying, welcome to the cum zone. Only come inside anime girls, quivering, clit, double jointed pussy, fresh balls.

Since then, the movement has taken on something of a life of its own. The Ram Ranch resistance hashtag has been used as a way for people to share information regarding the convoy and welcome to the Ram Ranch signs had been popping up at convoy counter protests around the country. Another Ram Rancher created the website Ram Ranch.ca linking to downtown organizations that have been impacted by the trucker convoy as well as charities aiding indigenous peoples. As the convoy settled in, it appeared that the demonstrators and the government had reached a sort of stalemate.

Currently, there are more than 400 trucks parked downtown and auto police say that they can't move them because the tow operators with city contracts are refusing to help. Being matters only more difficult, police say that families with children are sleeping in approximately a quarter of those trucks. To get an idea of what some Ottawa residents who live within the occupied zone see in terms of a potential end in sight, I posed Paul this question. How do you even see the situation resolving at this point? Like, do you think they're like the truckers and the people who are in the city are gonna

are gonna back down and leave eventually or like, or do you think they're gonna have to be forced out? Do you see kind of an end to this at this point? Well, it's at this point, probably one of the hardest things to admit is that I don't. The hardest core that are here are committed and they have a significant amount of funding behind them. And the thing is that, you know, with an occupation protests, they, if you don't nip it in the bud, it snowballs and gathers momentum for a while.

And I mean, eventually they either Peter out or they have to be removed. And this one is still snowballing. We've seen some more extreme elements come into the city this week. Yesterday, Romana de Dulo, the QAnon Queen of Canada arrived in Berth, Brent, the Canadian flag on Parliament Hill, which whatever you think about the Canadian flag and its symbol as a symbol of oppression, you know, that's not a great look for them. But the other side of it is, is that this is a woman with 70,000 followers who, you know, has called for the mass execution of her enemies and, you know, is currently parked

in her Winnebago two and a half blocks from my house right now. So and with a bunch of her followers down with her. And so they're committed. They know they don't know that I did occupy a lot of years ago. And the question that people asked us, and sometimes it was the police, was what gets you out of the park? And in a weird way, there's a parallel here, which is that the hardest answer with occupy was always kind of like everything is kind of fucked.

So how do we fix everything? That's the discussion we should be having. So in this case, to these people in their worldview, everything is kind of fucked. And there's no answer that you can give those kind of people in negotiations. The police right now are not looking at removal as a serious option, I don't think, or if they are, they haven't figured out how to get to that place yet. And one of the weird things about Ottawa is, is that technically in various spaces, because the way it's designated, there is a whole mishmash of jurisdictions between the various

police agencies. So like, again, with occupy that we picked the park, like the park that was occupied was partially picked, because it was on like this weird jurisdictional black hole where it was hard to figure out who the cops were, who should police it were. So and they've ended up in the same park where they now have like 55 cylinders of propane sitting about 500 yards from the Department of National Defense. So it's, it's tricky to figure out how you, how you get, get out of that, because all it's going to take is one of them with something in their cab and it's done.

Yep. Yep. Well, do you have any hope for anything? Do you have any like indicators for how it can turn out well? I mean, in terms of the occupation, I mean, we'll see how it goes. Maybe there can become some kind of modus vivendi between them and the rest of the city. I don't know how that happens, but maybe there can be, but I don't know.

It's the only silver lining I see right now is, you know, the walk that I was on earlier today and the chats that I was having with other people in the community and the discord server and everywhere else. Like, this is a really strong community that cares a great deal about itself and sometimes needed to be, needs to be reminded of that. And I think this is an opportunity for that to happen. And I think that that's the positive that can come out is that we will take care of ourselves and we'll take care of each other.

And that's, you know, what, what more can you ask for, I guess, out of this? Reports of assaults perpetrated by members of the convoy protest have been steadily ruling in the past few weeks, not to mention the seemingly constant presence of honking in the downtown area that's been affecting residents every day and even into the night. I will offer you this short sample to help complete the picture of what it's like both indoors and outdoors in downtown Ottawa. So apologies about that, yeah, that was pretty bad. And as annoying and frustrating as it may be, before I close out part one, I'm going

to play some audio from one of the truckers or, you know, just convoy participants as he addresses fellow convoyers on why it's good and in fact revolutionary to honk horns late into the night. I think it gives you some valuable insight into how these people frame their actions in their own heads. And, you know, it'll give you an opportunity to hear some of these convoy people directly. So here we go. What's going on?

It was quiet when I got here, but now they're starting to beat, they're starting to make some noise. Now, I get it. I saw some comments saying that you want to go from nine to five and you want to turn your horns off and you want to, you know, be respectful and play the optics war and you've done, you've done all the math, man, I get it. We've done everything. Every piece of garbage has been picked up statistically.

There is no crime. And when I mean statistically, if you have some drunk guy acted, you know, silly on one street quickly gets, you know, talked to and then the Patriots take him back to his car and maybe there was some incident of mischief. I've heard reports of Antifa throwing rocks and trucks, tagging stuff. They're the ones committing the crime. But other than that, this has been the most well-behaved revolution on earth. And now the big complaint is, can you get them to only blow their horns between nine

and five? I'm sorry. What has complying got you guys so far? That is just little by little, oh, just do this. Yeah. Just, just don't beat your horns between nine and five. That's all we're going to ask. Then we're two masks.

Then just go right back to square one. How about you put your blame right where it belongs, right in the eye of Sauron. And that's who we handle this with and every mandate, we're not allowed to exist in society. I'm not allowed to go to a movie. I'm not allowed to go to a restaurant. I'm not allowed to leave the country. You can't even leave. You can't travel on planes.

You can't do anything that Trudeau can get his fingers on to discriminate against us in society. Meanwhile, he'll blame us for side effects of his guinea pigs. It's an insane world and you've complied long enough guys and the madness in the horn stop. But I am in no place to go tell these guys, oh, excuse me, can you turn your horn off? Can you get used to complying again? We want freedom. We're not asking for anything unreasonable and we're doing it on your behalf.

The least you can do is turn off your televisions and stop letting their horrible objections to this revolution and their horrible false flags and whatever else they bring. I'm sorry about the noise complaints. Now, are you sorry about banishing me from society and treating me like I'm some sort of leper because I want to keep my immune system intact? Sorry guys, the horns are stand. Stuff it up your ass. Anyone that has a problem with loud noises, we have a problem being banished from society.

Thanks for that, but now I hope you have a better understanding of the type of conspiratorial thinking among the people in this convoy and the importance this whole thing means to them. So with this, that wraps up my part one of my deep dive into the Canadian Freedom Convoy. In the next episode, we'll get into the border blockades, both in Alberta and the Ambassador Bridge, which is preventing some international trade. We'll get into some of the smaller protests and attempted occupations in other cities across Canada and how the situation is evolving in Ottawa and what types of long-term political ramifications this protest and any attempt to suppress it will have.

So with that, see you on the other side. Welcome to It Could Happen Here and the second part of my little mini-series going into the occupation and blockade protests all across Canada that's been happening the past three weeks. For part two, we'll be starting off with a changes scenery. Instead of the loud cramped streets of downtown Ottawa and the Castle Lake Parliament building, we'll be taking a detour to the snow-covered prairies and oil fields of rural Alberta. Since the convoy officially arrived in Ottawa on January 29th, smaller protests against

health mandates were also happening across the entire country. One of these mini-protests was happening in the small city of Lethbridge in southern Alberta. But unlike the majority of other non-Ottawa protests, the one based around Lethbridge didn't turn out to be a simple weekend affair. As hundreds of vehicles, including some semi-trucks, RVs, and farm tractors all gathered together, it was decided to take part in a little mini-convoy of their own. But instead of going to a capital building, they rolled towards the international border crossing used by truckers in the area.

I was able to interview Jen, a Lethbridge local who also happens to work near the area of the Alberta border blockade. They kind of gathered in Lethbridge here and took off about 4.30 in the morning. And so they made it down to the village of Coots, which is essentially right on the border. The last stop before you hit the border at Coots, Alberta, Sweetgrass, Montana. And they blocked off the highway completely, heading both northbound and southbound. And they've been camped out since. So it's my understanding that at that point in time throughout day one, two, and three

of their protest, there was no getting in or out of the village of Coots, which it is a small village, about 250 residents. And it was so bad that not even emergency services could get through, again, blocking both lanes of the highway in either direction in the ditches. And just weren't letting up. And so are they even driving anywhere? Or are they just like camped there? Just camped out.

They're parked. And of course, you know, there's people that will drive down to the border and participate for a couple hours and, you know, turn around and go home kind of thing. But there is that core group, the majority of which are actually farmers bringing down like their tractors. And of course, there is some semi-truck drivers who are all a part of it and just not allowing anyone to get through on either side. So, you know, holding up a lot of, a lot of our supplies, a lot of our food and things

like that. At first, local police and RCMP just waited out the blockade, I guess hoping to see if the people would just get tired of camping out in the cold and then, you know, go home. But after a few days, that possibility seemed less and less likely than when the RCMP did start to get more actively involved with kind of managing the blockade, albeit, you know, with a very gentle hand in extremely stark contrast to how RCMP handles blockades, you know, defending indigenous land. But at that point, it was already kind of too late and the pacified police action only

spread the protests efforts. On day four of the blockade at the border, the RCMP had kind of moved in a little bit, tried to break it up. So, some of the protestors had kind of broken off and decided to blockade some other areas. So there was a blockade that happened on Highway 3, just outside of the town of Fort McLeod, on the way to the town of Brockett, which would be on the blood reserve here in Alberta. They blockaded the highway and wouldn't let anyone through. And then they set up another blockade on Highway 23, which of course would be the next north-south

route, given that Highway 3 was now blocked off, Highway 3 going to Highway 2. So they blocked off Highway 23. There's a traffic circle or a roundabout kind of in the middle of nowhere in the highway at the village of Noblesford, the town of Noblesford, and they set up a blockade at the roundabout as well, wouldn't let anyone come in north-south, east-west, didn't matter. So that was Tuesday. So they were blocking off like highways 2, 4, 23, and 3. So effectively shutting down and they kind of like travel for like food and supplies

for like all four directions. Pretty much, exactly. Like, there was a lot of chatter on social media. We have a local Facebook group for road conditions and there was a lot of chatter, you know, where do we go? How do we get around this? What back roads should I take? Secondary highways, that sort of thing.

And thankfully, you know, there was still, I suppose, some ways to get around it. The RCMP were kind of setting up detours and things like that. But those main routes were blockaded on Tuesday. Which would have been, I guess, what days at February 1st. The static highway blockades preventing traffic in all four directions were mostly a one-day affair. The next Wednesday morning, more effort was put back into the main blockade at the border near Cootes, with some folks still participating in the rolling blockades of sorts, you know,

on the surrounding highways. So instead of just blocking the roads by staying parked, people in vehicles kept a slow loop of traffic moving through the highway system to clog up travel. And then like the contingent closer to the border has been more consistent, you would say. Yeah, definitely the contingent at the border on Highway 4, like I said at Cootes, Alberta, they've been set up all the way through since the 29th. There has been days where the tensions are definitely very high, where those protesters

are saying we will not leave until or we won't even come to the negotiating table until these restrictions are gone. We won't even attempt. And so the RCMP have been kind of in negotiations with them over the last few days. There's been a couple of times where they thought they had resolution to open up lanes of travel to get some of these trucks with goods through. And of course, there's been people stuck in their cars as well for quite a few days without food at that point.

The protesters originally had come to an agreement with the RCMP to let people through and then turn around and decided, well, we don't really want to. So that was kind of ongoing from, I'm going to suggest the 30th up until about the second. On the second, the RCMP had set up a roadblock at the town of Milk River to, I guess, dissuade the locals from coming out and adding to the congestion and adding to the problems. And at one point, there was a group of people and videos are on TikTok, they're on Facebook, they're on Twitter, where people are blasting through the barricades, going through the ditch, going through media and just bypassing it completely to get down to the convoy protest.

As I record this, the border crossing port of entry near the town of Coots has been largely impassable for over two weeks. It's a major trade hub where millions of dollars worth of agricultural products like meat and feed trade hands each day. The first day had hundreds of vehicles participating in blocking access to the trade route along Highway 4. But after a week of blockading the Alberta-Montana border crossing, around 80 big rigs continued to remain along the highway.

For a majority of the time since the 29th of January, vehicle access has been either completely stopped to and from the border or at least substantially slowed down. The occasional day where vehicles are being let through on one lane of traffic has an estimated seven hours of stall time in order to get through just that tiny area of road. The blockade of that international port of entry at Coots, and the only 24-7 commercial lane crossing in Alberta, is a direct threat to the economic well-being of growers, producers, manufacturers, and many other businesses that rely on the movement of both raw materials and finished goods in and out along the Can-Am-X corridor.

Region has warned that manufacturing plants in the region will be forced to either reduce or cancel production as their supplies run out and they're unable to get their goods to international markets. This is something farmers and food producers are dealing with as well, as agricultural exports are one of the region's main economic drivers. In 2020, the Lethbridge metropolitan area exported nearly $1.8 billion worth of goods, around 80% of which went to the United States. A vast majority of these exports went through this Coots border crossing.

That means for the city of Lethbridge alone, they're facing a roughly $3 million a day impact on the economic damage based on the road and rail travel that must move through that port of entry. The impact is of course four or five times larger than if you consider the movement of other Alberta goods in and out of that same North-South corridor. It's only more ironic and frustrating considering that the idea of shutting down international capitalist trade costing millions of dollars in losses each and every day is exactly the sort of thing that these same conservatives would complain that BLM or Antifa would do.

In terms of anti-capitalist action, this is actually more successful in causing damage to capital than really anything I've seen the Canadian left do in recent memory. Obviously police response to a left-wing protest doing similar tactics would probably greatly differ, you know, plus the fact that these people participating in these blockades are the same types of people that talk about their desire to run down protesters in trucks, you know, whenever there's marching in the street or an indigenous road blockade to a new oil pipeline. Nevertheless, on top of the police inability, whether by choice or imagination, to handle

the situation and considering both the conspiracy-fuelled political issues around masks, vaccines and health mandates, and the growing economic problems the blockade is causing, it's not super surprising that the conservative government of Alberta began the process of removing health mandates as the protests striked on. And unfortunately it seems like the province is listening and they're taking it seriously. I know last night our Premier had gone on Facebook Live and had announced that come Monday the caucus will vote as to whether or not to scrap it, which would mean that, like I said now, there's no longer that requirement to access some of these services from private

businesses. And then ultimately that would lead us back into our letter-rip model that we had last summer. The Monday vote came in the next day, February 8th, Alberta Premier, and Premier's are like the equivalent of governors for the states, but Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced that the province's so-called COVID-19 vaccine passport program would end immediately, explaining that the restriction program had served its purpose but is no longer needed since Alberta has passed the peak of Omnicon infections about three weeks ago.

Capacity limits were also next Tuesday night for venues with capacity limits under 500, including libraries and places of worship, and effective this past Sunday, February 13th, the province will also no longer require masking for children and youth in schools and for any Albertans aged 12 and under in any setting. There is a second phase for Alberta's COVID restriction removal plan. On March 1st, the province is set to remove any remaining restrictions, including the indoor mask mandate, work from home requirements, any remaining capacity limits, and limits on social gatherings and screenings for youth activities.

Jason Kenney did deny that the move has anything to do with the protests from those demanding the repeal of vaccine mandates of all types across the country, including the blockade that the government had condemned as illegal at the Coots border crossing, saying, quote, none of that has anything to do with a few trucks participating at the Coots border crossing, who added that keeping previous rules in place would invite widespread non-compliance for no purpose, saying, why keep this going on for a few days when we know that in many areas we're already having non-compliance problems. So yeah, of course, the demonstrations have continued despite Alberta dropping multiple

health measures and agreeing to a demand made by a lot of the anti-mandate protesters, which implies that this protest is about much more than simple COVID health measures, right? It points to the movement being more about taking political power and forcing everyone to comply with their own conspiratorial and alienated understanding of the world. As someone who's like living in Alberta, which is, you know, one of the more conservative provinces of Canada, how much do you see this kind of, this kind of, you know, spontaneous revolt and resistance to be actually tied to the health mandates and how much do you see it as more like a revolt around like Trudeau and Canada's like, and Canada's like veneer

of liberalism, like how much do you see it as more of like a urban rule divide thing that's now just getting pushed into the spotlight because of COVID, or do you think it really is way more about COVID itself? I think that the pandemic has definitely had a role to play in sparking a lot of this furor and this disconnect, but the seeds have been sown for many years through many success of provincial governments and much rhetoric that the West has always been ignored by the East, by our political institutions in the East, namely Ottawa, our federal government, the seat of our federal government in favor of, you know, Ontario and Quebec and what

they want to Albertans have always seen themselves with a bit of a martyr complex where we are the economic powerhouse of the country, but we are the ugly stepchild and we are ignored in favor of the wonderful children in the East. And so that that disconnect and that divide has always been there, and the pandemic has been the catalyst. And of course, you know, whenever there is a federal liberal party that's in in power, the conservatives feel the conservatives in Alberta, and in the West, they feel even more disenfranchised, they feel that this this government doesn't hear them, they don't

listen to them, they don't, you know, follow the whims of, you know, the the died in the wool conservatives. And so that rhetoric has built and built and built over the years. And it's all tied into other things as well as tied into the economic policies and the policies of the liberal government with in regards to climate change and carbon tax and how how that's been hitting Albertans, you know, they our province is very heavily dependent upon the oil and gas sector, and it always has been for the last, I'm going to suggest 50, 60 years.

And so when they see things like in autumn, well, where they're talking about climate change, they're talking about, you know, green energy, it makes these conservatives angry because this has been our bread butter for years. This is what's fed our families. They don't recognize that, you know, this is this is the path forward. All they hear is, we don't want you, we don't want your jobs, we don't want your products, and they're angry, and this has been the catalyst now where they're just fed up, they're fed up with, with not being heard.

Unfortunately, all that's built up anger and resentment towards the government and its leadership is ending up being taken out against just any symbol of liberalism, not really the government directly, you know, within this worldview, homophobic attacks can be then thought up as this weird form of punching up because gayness is associated with liberalism. So it's seen as almost this system of power, even though it's that's obviously backwards. It's this kind of weird backwards thing where you can view like attacking progressive things as an attack on the system. So that means like being racist or being homophobic is this rebellion against, you know, the system

itself, even though it just ties into all those same systemic issues. Just the other day in Edmonton, there was a business owner, a hair salon owner who's been very outspoken about this freedom convoy and about how she doesn't agree with their messaging and their, their ideas. And she was actually hunted down on social media, hunted down in person. They found her, someone found her, her business, went to her business and confronted her and assaulted her at her business, all because she does not support the convoy. And apparently this individual did, you know, we definitely, we definitely see here that

the feeling is, is that if you are a liberal in Alberta, this is not the place for you. You know, if you, if you believe in, you know, equal rights for everyone, this is not the place for you. If you believe in the rights of marginalized and minority communities, this is not the place for you. And we, I've seen that, you know, in taking part in various protests, I suppose that could be branded as liberal protests, like the Black Lives Matter protests and the protests and, and rallies that were held in support of the Indigenous communities last summer upon, you

know, the, the news that kind of shook the world regarding graves at residential schools. And you know, you see it with the Indigenous communities that protest pipelines on their traditional lands and they block, you know, railways and the same people that are screaming for jail time and for violence and, and police intervention on these various protests are the same people that are taking part in this convoy. Protesters at the Coutts border crossing will now be charged or fined according to the province and the RCMP. RCMP Deputy Chief Curtis Zablocki said in a news conference during the start of the second

week of the Alberta border blockade that police are actually working to diffuse the situation at the most important border crossing in Alberta, but are trying to do so peacefully, saying, make no mistake, there are criminal activities taking place at these protest sites that violate both criminal code and provincial laws. We've seen activities that are both dangerous and reckless and are having a very negative effect on Albertans who live in the area. He then pointed to, you know, dwindling numbers involving the blockade from a high of around 250 vehicles to begin with to around 50 vehicles last Tuesday afternoon as a success of their

efforts to this point. But you know, this isn't convinced to everyone since the blockade is still happening. So acting Justice Minister and Solicitor General Sonia Savage called the blockade intolerable and said that those taking part in the demonstration can be charged under several different federal and provincial laws, including the federal criminal code, the provincial traffic safety act and the new critical infrastructure defense act, which was enacted right in the middle of 2020 during the international George Floyd uprising and the certain rail blockades in Canada.

Now I'm going to go into many tangent here just because of how terrible this bill is. The bill gives law enforcement and the judicial system extra power to dish out significant monetary fines and extra jail time for actions deemed to interfere with so-called essential infrastructure, quote unquote. The stated goal of the bill is harsher penalties and charges for, quote, damage or interference caused by blockades, protests or similar activities that can cause significant public safety, social, economic and environmental consequences. The act builds on existing trespassing laws to create offenses for trespassing on, destroying,

damaging and obstructing the use or operation of any essential infrastructure, also under the banner of essential infrastructure that includes public and private property, by the way. The bill was obviously aimed at left-wing protests and specifically equal defense and environmental protest and or sabotage as the first two things defined as essential infrastructure in the bill are, quote, pipelines and related infrastructure and oil and gas production and refinery sites. So yeah, there's also been pressure from government officials to include forfeiture

property in the commission of crime through the Civil Forfeiture Act. RCMP deputy chief Zablocki said that charges will be coming for those taking part in the protest and could be as simple as the way they are illegally parked on the highway. He did note that the RCMP has attempted to hire local towing companies to move the trucks and other equipment off the road, but have been unable to do so, with the companies citing concerns over damage to their business long term or just safety issues in general. This has also been a huge factor in attempts to deal with the Ottawa occupation. Zablocki said that there are concerns over safety and violence in response to the more

aggressive approaches to breaking up the blockade. So far the main action law enforcement has taken to dissuade people from blocking the border is just giving out tickets and fines for illegal parking. Premier Jason Kenny said that he is supportive of RCMP handling this as they see fit through the means that they already have, and has been supportive of using the pretty horribly authoritarian Critical Infrastructure Defense Act, saying, quote, last year we passed the Defense of Critical Infrastructure Act, which gives police enormous powers and various defines the penalties, including the power of imprisonment.

We have made it clear to the RCMP, who is our provincial policing service, that they can and should use all of these powers. They're dealing with a very fluid situation, and I have respect for their judgment. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the ongoing blockades and protests across the country this past Friday, encouraging demonstrators to leave while also passing the buck on any blame, saying, quote, I want to remind everybody that politicians don't direct police departments to enforce the law. Instead, Trudeau made vague threats around revoking licenses and criminal records for

those continuing to protest, saying, everything is on the table because this unlawful blockade has to end and will end. The blockade at the Coutts border crossing is not the only convoy-aligned protest in Alberta. There have been many demonstrations in basically every major city. In Calgary, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees says that frontline health care workers, patients, and people living around the Sheldon-Kamir Health Centre have dealt with protests for weeks.

But things have only gotten worse since the truck convoy hit the news. The vice president of the Alberta Union for Provincial Employees said that protesters have blocked the Ambulance Bay, they have harassed workers and patients as they come to and from the centre, they've banged on the windows of the facility and upset people inside, and they have blocked the roads around the centre. Moving on to the province of British Columbia, as the second weekend of protest was set to descend on Vancouver the weekend of February 5th. In preparation, fearing attacks would be carried out against health care workers like they

have in the past, Vancouver's two health authorities issued internal MOs telling health workers to hide indoors as the convoy passed through the city and to quote, refrain from wearing scrubs and or your ID badge outside the hospital during the demonstration. If you do encounter any protesters, please do not engage with them or respond to their questions, and please do not ask protesters to put on a face mask. Similarly, ahead of a protest in Toronto, the Toronto police sent letters to hospitals advising their workers to not wear any clothing or markings that identify them as working in health care, fearing attacks by protesters.

As the second wave of the convoy arrived during the second weekend of the occupation in Ottawa, some of the on-the-ground organizational structure started to morph and evolve. The police estimated around this time that 5,000 people were still protesting in Ottawa and around 1,000 vehicles were clogging the streets. During the second week of protests, in an effort to improve optics considering the four original organiser's explicit connections to the far right, a new lead organizational public relations and bargaining team was assembled for the group calling themselves the Freedom Convoy.

The new pseudo-leadership team consists of Daniel Bulford, a former RCMP officer who was on the Prime Minister's security detail. He quit last year after refusing to get the vaccine and is now the convoy's head of security. Tom Quiggan, a former military intelligence officer who also worked with the RCMP and was considered one of the country's top counterterrorism experts, and Tom Marazzo, an ex-military officer who, according to his LinkedIn profile, served in the Canadian Armed Forces for 25 years and now works as a freelance software developer. And just a side note, in terms of police and former military participating in the protests,

there was an organization full of retired police that endorsed the convoy a few weeks ago and said that they have people on the ground there and just got announced, as I'm recording this, that two members of Canada's military counterterrorism unit is under investigation for allegedly taking part in the Ottawa convoy protests. So yeah, that's fun. The occupation has been getting more and more organized on the ground the past two weeks and has been able to keep one step ahead of any action taken against police against the occupation.

Even just what the convoy participants have physically built is impressive. In less than a week after the convoy arrived, you started to see wooden structures being built around the roads and a growing stockpile of propane and diesel fuel. There is an impressive amount of tents and wooden structures used for kitchens that local organizers have set up, and a whole supply chain has sprung up across the city to keep these people fed, working, and protesting. I'm now going to quote a good article in the CBC by Judy Trenn. Quote, the group is set up not only near the parliament in Ottawa, but they have also built

two encampment areas where they carry out logistical and supply work. Recent reporting has painted a picture that these areas are far more organized than widely thought. The group is also trying out new tactics, such as attempting to clog up traffic at the Ottawa airport. Other tactics like swatting have been reported as well. Local police say they're aware of a concerted effort to flood our 911 and non-emergency police reporting lines, tweeting that this endangers lives and is completely unacceptable.

Determines do not be outdone by their fellow protesters in the West. After the second wave arrived, the members of the Ottawa convoy organized away for the convoy occupation to stay, but also put up a border crossing blockade of their own. During Sunday, February 6, scores of truckers blocked the Ambassador Bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario to Detroit, Michigan, disrupting the flow of auto parts and other products between the two countries. While this protest has been conducted more by pickup trucks than big rigs, it has been holding up the lanes.

The bridge is the busiest U.S.-Canada border crossing and a key cog in both the U.S. and Canadian economies, as it carries around 25% of trade between the two countries. The effects of the blockade there were felt rapidly. The bridge regularly carries around $360 million a day in two-way cargoes. But traffic is limited by its 1929 physical footprint, there's just two lanes each way with no shoulders and antiquated customs boots, with the northern side just emptying out into the city streets. The bumper-to-bumper demonstration forced auto plants on both sides of the border to

shut down or scale back production. The halting of trade has bottlenecked automaker Ford's ability to get parts from the U.S. to its Canadian plants in Windsor and Oaksville. Ford has shut down the doors of its Windsor plant and reduced the work schedule in Oakville. Ford said in a statement, the interruption on the Detroit-Windsor bridge hurts customers, auto workers, suppliers, communities, and companies on both sides of the border. We hope the situation is resolved quickly because it could have widespread impact on all automakers in the U.S. and Canada.

Automaker Toyota said that its three plants in Ontario closed for the rest of the week because of parts shortages, and production has also been curtailed in Georgetown, Kentucky. More on the U.S. side of things, GM, Jeep, and Honda all had hours cut and assembly lines shut down at their factories across Michigan and Ohio. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmore urged Canadian authorities to quickly resolve the standoff, saying it's hitting paychecks and production lines, and that is unacceptable. The Federal Public Safety Minister has said that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police reinforcements are being sent to Windsor, Ottawa, and to Coots, Alberta, where the other border blockade

is happening. With political and economic pressure mounting, Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkins announced that the city would seek a court injunction to end the occupation, saying that the economic harm is just not sustainable and it must come to an end. On Thursday, February 10th, the Biden administration urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government on Thursday to use its federal powers to end the truck blockade at the other side of the Detroit border. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of products have been held back for days as 50-60

vehicles and around 100 anti-band-aid protesters camp out on the main road that leads on and off the bridge. And yes, it is ironic that the same people who are trying to sell Canadians fake stories about failing supply lines at empty shelves are now causing those supply lines to fail and causing those shelves to go empty. The irony is not lost on me, but it may be lost on the convoy participants. Throughout writing these episodes, I was fortunate enough to get to talk to multiple people who have been on the ground in downtown Ottawa.

One such of these peoples is Peter Smith, an investigative journalist for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. We recorded our conversation, and I'm going to include some audio clips throughout the rest of the episode. We started off by discussing what made this protest movement pop off in this specific time and place. I do think it was maybe capitalizing on a moment, but also a fair amount of luck. Since 2019, the same organizers have attempted to put together other convoys, generally never

rising to the amount of attention that they had in 2019. This convoy was also planned long before they specifically started focusing on truckers, and then it was a galvanizing issue. It resonated with people who were frustrated with the Trudeau government and just their handling of health measures, as well as just became a vehicle for expressing their general dissatisfaction with their own provinces. Most of our health mandates are provincial, like the Alberta government is handing down what's happening in Alberta.

It's not just a federal issue, but coming down here and occupying the streets of Ottawa, and then now we're seeing occupying most of our major cities. Ones like Winnipeg get significantly less attention, but are incredibly disruptive locally. In some cases, more incendiary than the one that we have out here, where participants and organizers are desperately trying to clamp down on any individuals who's engaging in harassment or is more common blaming it on liberal plants, it became this kind of expression of all of the frustration and very quickly drew attention, even from people who had been dismissive of it very early on because of some of the organizers.

Once it really started to galvanize attention and, of course, money, people couldn't stay away. I mean, to the point that we even have mainstream conservative politicians now getting on board with it, including the man who's very likely to be the future leader of the conservative party here. I mean, we're in a very unique moment. Our far-right and kind of conspiracy culture in Canada has also been getting better at organizing over the course of the pandemic.

That's to get all major cities and many small towns continue to have anti-mandate, anti-lockdown protests. We usually refer to them as the COVID conspiracy movement, just because of how heavily informed it is by conspiratorial thinking. So it's like you had a large amount of people kind of spending the past two years on the ground boot camp of how to organize within these cities and how to get people's attention. And of course, like a lot of the far-right here, it had fragmented. There was a lot of infighting.

And then once there became a central point that was galvanizing a lot of attention, it started receiving international attention. There's been some questions about the source of some of the money, but certainly the initial totals seem to be organically Canadian. It just became too big to follow the parties, actually, at least at this point. There has been some spats of infighting, but mostly the most polarizing figures are either just keeping their head down or in some cases even choosing to stay away from the main events, so as not to be a distraction.

One of the lines I see a lot is like, this is the moment. This is for all the marvels. So there's a huge amount of importance being placed on that. What actually happens, whether they're able to paint the actual rolling back of mandates that we were already starting to see before the convoy began, as some type of victory for them, or if this leads to further disillusionment, we don't really know at this point, but I think this moment is going to be a propaganda tool and kind of a point of, I think it's going to be a propaganda tool and a point of motivation for a long time.

From your both on the ground stuff and just from monitoring stuff online, what do you think the actual actionable intention was once they arrived in Ottawa? Do you think they had a clear plan on what to do, or was it more like, let's go here and then we'll figure things out? Well, initially, there was a memorandum of understanding, which laid out kind of the points of what the initial organizers were hoping to accomplish, something they call the Operation Bear Hug, which includes having the governor general and our Senate, both of whom are unelected, dissolve parliament, and reform the government immediately after

we had a federal election. Since then, the message has evolved, like they're trying to stay very like on script with this just being about freedom, this just being about mandates, you know, initially there was a lot of attempts to even get people to stop mentioning the vaccine, though those seem to kind of fallen by the wayside, especially when you start looking at the speakers. It is interesting to kind of wonder what the actual goal is there, they've started meeting with public officials, you know, there is some type of negotiation going on. Obstensibly, the goal is just to have these border restrictions lifted on people on truckers

who are unvaccinated returning from the US. You know, the obvious thing is the point out that the US still has a very similar policy in reverse, you can hear would have no impact on their ability to avoid this quarantine, but it seems like the goals are fairly murky, and that's almost deliberate because they've been making declare victory kind of when it suits them. Ambiguity around protest goals, demands, and purpose itself can be a useful tactic. The crime think zine slash article titled Why We Don't Make Demands makes such a case. I don't have time to summarize it here, but I recommend you give the article a look if

you're interested in this train of thought as an intentional tactic. But on the flip side, you know, vague and directionless protests without much of a focus on a specific goal can also cause protests to peter out without having any lasting impact on the world. A discussion worth having is how the individual people that make up the convoy participants have been convinced to take part in an occupation protest and how what is considered valid political action has broadened in their own heads. If they are the ones doing the action, of course, because from their point of view,

since they are doing it, the cause must be valid. And therefore the action is justified. In 2020, we had the the wetsuit and rail blockades that was put on by various members of our First Nations and then people who supported them, you know, the same politicians that are meeting with the truckers, embracing them, saying that our current prime minister is demonizing them by kind of casting them as undesirables, we're, you know, we're actively calling people sitting on train tracks as terrorists who are disrupting our economy. Obviously, in the context of the pandemic, that's very different because there has been

kind of mass disruption to our economy, but this kind of picking and choosing of of suiting the narrative to court far right voters seems to be popular. You know how conservatives typically aren't seen as the protesting type, right? Conservatives are supposed to be the type of people who drive by the protest and yell get a job. They're not the ones who are out in the streets picketing. But first of all, that's not really true. Historically, in just the past 100 years, there's always been conservative protests

for, you know, regressive and reactionary goals. Also conservatives have been much better at organizing off the street for their political policies, specifically around like abortion or Christian dominionism, anti queer legislation or recent stuff around anti CRT and just the mainstream racism denial that's been propagated through media. But even if there is historical precedent for conservative protest, bridging the gap of what is seen as valid political action in the minds of these convoy attendees did still take place over just the past few years.

Just the past two years specifically, there's been so much conservative protests around COVID, a whole bunch of the people at the Ottawa protest probably five years ago would have never seen themselves going to protest in the Canadian capital, right? Like if you told them a few years ago that in 2022, you're going to drive all these kilometers to the parliament to camp out in the cold for weeks to protest against the government and its rules for helping not spread the deadliest pandemic in a century. They would have probably laughed you out of the room. So what is the logical progression of conservative people who generally, you know, look down

on any type of protest, especially occupy style protests to the point where they are driving all the way to the capital to camp outside the building to honk horns day and night. A lot of that political change the past few years correlates to the pandemic, to the social isolation and the great opportunity for the fast spread of conspiratorial politics that it offered. Over the course of the pandemic, there's been this huge blending of rhetoric online and especially in Canada, this kind of villainization of the other side, increasingly less and less criticism against the current government is less based on its policy and more based

on its finger head and the image of Trudeau as a globalist politics as opposition to whatever Trudeau and the liberals are doing. The result of that is just a whole bunch of escalation because you have to keep always being antagonistic and always being contrarian no matter what the opposition actually does. The thing is, a lot of people who used to just be kind of more general conservatives, as they get radicalized online and get caught up with far the right extremist elements, most of them still view themselves as like the norm. They don't think they've politically changed the past five years, but if you look at their

rhetoric and actions, they definitely have kind of substantially, but they still view themselves the same way they would when they were voting for Stephen Harper. Unless you're a self-described extremist, you typically view everything that you do and say as normal and reasonable, like you, you are the actual normal. Everyone else is shifted either way relative to you. During our talk, I asked investigative journalist Peter Smith on his opinions about what sorts of political and social factors have allowed the occupation in blockades to have enough numbers to last and continue on so long.

Kind of having spent a lot of time on the ground at the Ottawa convoy, just talking to people as like a, as a normal guy without my press hat on. It does seem like when there's a lot of owner operators there, like when it comes to the trucks themselves, these people are the business owners or like very close, like they're kind of independent contractors. Exactly. I think there was a sort of a report that came out showing a survey that done that like roughly half of the people there were unemployed.

So like the financial promise of all the money raised may have been a big draw, like not to say that these people don't legitimately believe the reasons. No, absolutely. But it created an incentive. But then having roughly half of them, you know, still having jobs, you know, it comes down to a little bit more than just money, like it's about actual belief, actual ideology. So it is interesting for a large amount of people who are extremely worried about supply lines, about people having enough food initially to kind of creating this self-fulfilling prophecy

where, where that seems to be the main tactic is just to grind as much to a halt as they can using as much as many people as they can muster. And then just the kind of general hands-off approach that law enforcement is taking with them has allowed them to organize better, to evolve their tactics, to be more effective. Like I certainly don't think a policing solution is, is what's going to solve this. And you know, there's a lot of calls for that, which is I think just going to result in a lot of people getting hurt in the street. But but yeah, like it is interesting that how it kind of, it came from the West mostly

and then landed in Ottawa and then kind of spread out from there. Once people realized it was effective, once people realized, you know, there was, there was safety in these numbers, it's, it's drawn, it's drawn so many people to it, it's, it's honestly, it's, it has been shocking, like truly how quickly it is spread and how effective it has been. It's not January 6th in the sense that like people are running around Parliament and like trying to find, you know, every level of politician, but in the sense that it's a large amount of people motivated by conspiracy.

Yeah. And that's where I view the parallel. And because they, and honestly, the, the actual sincerity of it poses more of a political threat than the animosity of January 6th. In terms of like long term, like actual social change and using this type of like occupation as a tactic, the more sincere you are, the more of an actual political threat you can be in the long term. Because yeah, if they start, if they storm Parliament, then it'll get shut down in a

day and then they'll be demonized and then the problem is over. Right. At least, at least in the short term, right? But if you actually like do this sincerely and actually get people to buckle under pressure, then that's like actual successful politics. Like that is, you're actually doing politics objectively well. And that's more interesting to point out. The problem isn't protesting.

Like protesting as a concept isn't the issue. The problem isn't even blockade. No, the problem is not blockade either. Yeah. All these things are just tactics and tactics are value neutral. Usually, you know, it's until you get to the genocide when it's usually that's a kind of kind of a kind of a downer generally. But in general, I kind of view protest tactics as more value neutral.

It's about kind of what the underlying cultural motivation is and what they want the results to be. And even still, you know, some of the points they have are not completely invalid. But once they get caught up in a cultural war kind of mindset, it's like you have to oppose it just because they're on the other side. So I kind of want to talk about like the reasons why they are actually kind of bad, like for like on like a very sincere way, but then also kind of point out some things that are like, yeah, maybe to see these are things we should consider and it shouldn't take this

type of occupation to have us reconsider some of these rules and regulations. Yeah. Like completely. Like I think there's no issue with having being uncomfortable with mandates, like even if you feel they're necessary, like being uncomfortable with the amount of state power that is being accumulated, you know, in in Canada, you know, there have been sweeping changes to the way that we live our lives. Like I know that that's been universal.

But there there is not a province that hasn't really suffered, like hasn't really impacted people's lives dealing with COVID. And you know, this is this is one of the biggest issues when trying to point out disparate responses in policing. Well, it's like, oh, it's like, so we should treat the convoy participants like they treated everybody else. And it's like, no, like, like, you know, the, the police chief of Ottawa got a lot of shit for saying he doesn't think there's a policing solution.

And it's like, I do agree with the criticism of him because he has attempted to kick responsibility to just about every other level of government available. But dragging people out, like towing their vehicles and taking away their livelihood and dragging a lot of people out into the street and then into jail is not going to resolve these issues. No. And if anything, it could could bring more support. Like, again, there was another report today that I think it's 25% of people who have camped

out have children with them. Like, you know, this is going to be an incredibly traumatic experience is going to help radicalize more people and it's going to lend credence to their cause if they just go in and bust heads. And it's like, if the main focus of this convoy had been in Toronto, where we have an incredibly aggressive police force when it comes to like homeless encampments, for instance, you know, I think the result could have been very different. Yeah.

And then because a lot of stuff around the question of governments and stuff, you know, the type of things I can agree with with like right wing libertarians is, yeah, you do have a lot of points I can sympathize with around the state and around control. But the way you address them don't actually address the underlying power structures, which give the state legitimacy in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. And the world that you kind of want in the end is still a world full of hierarchies, just hierarchies that make your life easier.

Right, skewing your favor, just like asking for two unelected bodies to replace your democratically elected government. It's like, yeah, we had 10 years of Stephen Harper, like people were unhappy and extremely critical of that government from the center and from the left, but you know, there wasn't this kind of broad support for the idea that that government was illegitimate, which is I think what we see mostly today, which is the most disturbing and kind of anti-democratic part of the whole pot. Yeah, and that's the kind of what elastic don't want to talk about is like, what do

you see, like, eventually people will go home either out of exhaustion, it'll maybe fizzle away, like the protests in Portland did, maybe they'll eventually police will kind of clear out small sections of like who knows, but like, this is not going. This isn't going to last like a year, right? It's not going to, like, I don't think they're going to have thousands of people camped out in front of the government forever. So what are the actual long-term political ramifications of this? Because we already saw the leader of the conservative party step down.

So like, I want to talk about like, specifically with a guy who's probably most likely to take his place, how this does kind of play into the more negative aspects of the convoy is like how they're going to use this as a political symbol and a political tool to push for policies and forms of government and actions that will end up hurting a lot of, will end up hurting a lot of people in terms of, you know, how, how it's going to be used in propaganda and rhetoric. Yeah, well, certainly if we have, you know, strong legal ramifications put in place that make it easier for provinces, the federal government, whatever to crack down on, on protests

in general, which I think is something that might be very attractive to our current government. You know, that's going to have obviously very far reaching effects. You know, one of our opposition parties, which is, you know, generally further to the left than, than the liberals, the NDP, their leader was proposing ways to stop foreign funding from coming in to supply to the protests. You know, once again, we, we had protests a couple of years ago by indigenous people and people who support indigenous movements, you know, that, that raised money using the same platforms and the same methods, you know, so I worry about like one, the legal ramifications

like to just this, this idea, like if the government does crack down very hard, this idea of real grievance and alienation that the West has already been struggling with. Like we've had a real renewed separatist movement, not from Quebec, where it's generally been the most successful, but from the Western provinces, you know, not, not really getting close to obtaining any real political power, but, you know, kind of steadily gaining support. Polling has shown that, you know, there is a real feeling of Western alienation. They don't feel represented and, you know, a lot of the ways our government are set up actually makes that true.

Yeah, ultimately, these people, I think, become more and more disenfranchised when government action begins to kind of justify imagined ideas of oppression. You're going to have a real hardening and since the government in power is a progressive one is, or at least one that espouses, you know, tries, tries to reach for progressive values, you know, there's a good chance that those issues are going to get caught up with what is just like a quote unquote leftist agenda. Whereas up until probably a decade ago, those things were very much seen as kind of inherent Canadian values that were embraced by both sides.

The current candidate for leadership, he hasn't won the seat in the Conservative Party yet, but Pierre Polyver has kind of always flirted to some degree with far-right talking points. Like I don't, I specialize in hate groups, I don't want to make too many pronouncements about mainstream conservatism, but even by kind of members of the very far-right who often have turned against the Conservative Party over the course of the pandemic, he's often referred to as the adult in the room. And while still a politician, kind of their best bet for getting someone in office that they would actually like to see in power, which could, I mean, could be interesting

to see how they, if there will be continued support for the PPC in two to four years. But yeah, I just think there is a real hardening of the right and it's not like the Overton window is shifting, it's just like it's getting wider, like more and more is being incorporated as opposed to just going one direction or another. That disenfranchisement is a driving factor, like they view this populist kind of uprising or up swelling that they're seeing now as a function of democracy or like part of how democracy is supposed to function. So again, like if you talk to them, they will quite earnestly say, many of them anyway,

they will quite earnestly say like, this is about freedom, this is about having my voice hurt. Yeah. But without a lot of thought about how that will actually function on a broader scale. I mean, that just plays into like alienation as like a general concept, right? Like we're so disconnected from everything about our lives, disconnected from, you know, the way we work, disconnected from our interactions with other people, we're disconnected from like, you know, money or food, you know, it's all this stuff.

And like disconnected from like politics is that the only way that you can actually, something that feels real, the only thing that actually feels like a reality is going to do this thing in person because everything else is so disjointed. There is so much of that space in between the phenomenon and the actual thing that leaves you wanting something, but you don't know quite what. So yeah, you're going to drive to Ottawa because that feels so much more real. That feels like actual politics. And it kind of is.

Like that's always when it feels like when you're protesting, it's like, yeah, I'm actually doing politics now because that's how everything gets set up is by that type of like, you know, getting people on the ground. Yeah. And it's such a more personal way to engage than, you know, putting a note into a box every two to four years. Like, yeah, I imagine it does feel substantive and then, I mean, voting power is centered in our urban centers as well.

So there is a real disconnect with the representation that rural people, again, the western provinces receive. I now want to specifically talk about police response and the ways this occupation and blockades being handled will affect the political organizing in the future. I think initially the majority of police concerns and what they were actually focused on responding to was fears around the convoy storming parliament or if they know the convoys were going to do something exceedingly violent, which I don't think was necessarily the convoys actionable objective from the beginning.

If you listen to what they were actually saying, it will it was more about choking up the city and applying pressure on government officials. But the initial nonviolence coupled with the shield of being conservative white and middle class, whom they know the police are less likely to react as brutally to, allowed time for the infrastructure to rise that let the protest turn into a full scale occupation of a North American city. The first real action police took against the occupation was on the evening of Sunday, February 6th.

Demonstrators were gathering for dinner, then dozens of officers in riot gear carrying munitions launchers raided a camp after footage of stockpiles and gas cans went viral days previous. In an attempt to cut the supply route, police say they seized around 3700 liters of fuel and two vehicles, including a diesel tank. But within hours of the raid, protesters from the camp broadcast reassurance to their supporters and continued to organize, just utilizing smarter tactics. The day after the police raid, protesters continued to deliver fuel to downtown truckers as they executed a coordinated effort to exhaust police resources.

And the demonstrators carried fuel cans, some empty, some not, just right past officers who mostly stood and watched as hundreds of people trolled them with decoy cans while others smuggled in more fuel within the safety of the large crowd right in the middle of the day. Ottawa police deputy chief Steve Bell said the demonstrators were filling cast cans with water to distract officers attempting to subvert their efforts and that one officer was swarmed by the crowd while trying to confiscate fuel. To date, police have made around 30 arrests and issued thousands of tickets, launched

more than 80 criminal investigations, and 400-plus hate incidents are also being investigated. Earlier this week, Peter Soli said that the force would turn up the heat as police started to crack down on anyone bringing material aid, such as fuel, to protesters. Police dismantled a protest camp near the Redew Canal downtown and a fuel operation on the Coventry Road, east of the core, but some trucks and demonstrators continued to occupy downtown streets and the staging area on Coventry. Police say that they need an additional 1800 more reinforcements from federal and provincial governments to help end the crisis.

The entire Ottawa police force numbers only 1200, but it's been supplemented with several hundred officers from the Ontario Provisional Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as local police forces elsewhere in Ontario over the past few weeks. Near the end of the second week of occupation, Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, declared a state of emergency for the entire province, warning protesters demanding an end to pandemic restrictions that if they do not disband, there will be consequences and they will be severe. He said that those who continue to impede the movement of people and goods could face fines

of up to $100,000 CAD up to a year in prison and the revocation of their driver's license. During the cold morning of Sunday, February 13, police largely cleared the portion of the self-styled freedom convoy blocking the Ambassador Bridge, US-Canada border crossing, on the road between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit. The clearing marked a week since the border blockade had begun. Police made several arrests and towed vehicles in connection to the demonstration that had disrupted traffic and the flow of goods. After law enforcement enforced the injunction, enacted two days prior, ordering truckers

and their supporters to leave, and ticketed in towed vehicles, a defined core of some two dozen protesters had remained on foot as temperatures dropped below freezing. At around 9.30 local time, police had mostly cleared the street to the bridge and were deployed around the area. It was unclear, however, how large police presence would remain to prevent vehicles and demonstrators from returning there. Meanwhile, in the capital of Ottawa, police grappled with an influx of anti-government and anti-vaccine mandate demonstrators for a third straight weekend, despite both local

and provincial officials declaring states of emergency. Police then appeared to be unsuccessful in attempts to get the Freedom Convoy protesters to leave by threatening them with fines, prison time, and the loss of their licenses. Police have not made any large effort to disrupt the convoys in Ottawa, similar to what they did on Sunday in Windsor, Ontario. Ottawa police say that over 4,000 demonstrators were in the city throughout the day. However, on Monday, February 14, police action was taken against the blockade at the Coutts border crossing that had shut down cross-border travel for almost three weeks.

The RCMP said in a press release early Monday morning that they became aware of a small organized group within the larger protest at Coutts, which led to 11 arrests. They say that they had information that the group had access to a cache of firearms and ammunition in three trailers. During the raid, officers seized long guns, handguns, multiple sets of body armor, a machete, and a large quantity of ammunition and some high-capacity magazines. Later that day, two other arrests were made in connection to the blockade. Following the police raid and the 13 arrests, some other organizers of the protest said

a decision was reached voluntarily to leave the Coutts area around Tuesday morning. The organizers made a statement saying, quote, We were infiltrated by an extreme element. Our objective was to be here peacefully. To keep that message going, we want to peacefully leave Coutts and return to our families. As of Tuesday the 15th, both the border crossing at the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit and the Coutts Port of Entry to Montana are open once again. As the border opened back up in Coutts, the previous blockade protesters and police embraced

each other with hugs and handshakes. Meanwhile, on Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history to give the federal government and police extra powers to handle the ongoing blockades and protests against pandemic restrictions. Here's how the measures we're taking today will help get the situation under control. The police will be given more tools to restore order in places where public assemblies can constitute illegal and dangerous activities such as blockades and occupations as seen in Ottawa, Ambassador Bridge, and elsewhere.

These tools include strengthening their ability to impose fines or imprisonment. The government will designate, secure, and protect places and infrastructure that are critical to our economy and people's jobs, including border crossings and airports. We cannot and will not allow illegal and dangerous activities to continue. The Emergencies Act will also allow the government to make sure essential services are rendered, for example in order to tow vehicles blocking roads. In addition, financial institutions will be authorized or directed to render essential services to help address the situation, including by regulating and prohibiting the use of property

to fund or support illegal blockades. And finally, will enable the RCMP to enforce municipal bylaws and provincial offences where required. This is what the Emergencies Act does. The Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act in the 1980s, defines a national emergency as a temporary, urgent, and critical situation that seriously endangers the lives, health, or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to extend the capacity of authority of a province to deal with it.

The unprecedented deployment of the Emergencies Act gives police, quote, more tools to restore order in places where public assembly is constitute illegal and dangerous activities such as blockades and occupations, according to Trudeau. But the thing is, police already had all the tools they needed. The illegal occupations and blockades were already illegal. They just didn't want to enforce it. You can look at how the Coots protesters and the police are hugging, right? This isn't a matter of having not enough tools.

All this does is set a terrible precedent for using this type of extra power in the future to respond to protests, because the cops are still going to take a very gentle approach if they ever are forced to take physical action against the Ottawa occupation. While using the extra powers of the Emergencies Act, the Finance Minister of Canada also announced on Monday a broadening of the laws regarding financing of crime and terrorism to now include crowdfunding, and also extra surveillance measures against people who donate and use crowdfunds for criminal acts, including illegal protests. As part of invoking the Emergencies Act, we are announcing the following immediate actions.

First, we are broadening the scope of Canada's anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use. These changes cover all forms of transactions, including digital assets, such as cryptocurrencies. The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms and some of the payment service providers they use are not fully captured under the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act. Our banks and financial institutions are already obligated to report to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC.

As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with FINTRAC and they must report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC. This will help mitigate the risk that these platforms receive illicit funds, increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by FINTRAC, and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement into these illegal blockades. That's kind of all the information I have at the time of recording, so now I'm going to talk more about the potential political effects that this protest could have, not just on Canada, but also in how we view protests in general.

So the actual result of liberal media framing this type of protest as scary terrorism is laying the groundwork for brutal police actions against massive, mostly nonviolent and tactically smart protests to be more normalized across Canada. An extremely brutal police response and harsh charges are unlikely to be leveled against a protest made up of these conservatives, but will absolutely happen to any future progressive social justice cause, especially if they use Occupy-style tactics. The more powers police obtain and the legal precedents that are set will have long-lasting implications with legal consequences that will always come down harder on the left than

they do on the right. Police will do a bare minimum to resolve this conservative so-called freedom protest, but then will use it as a justification to grab greater resources and power and use this movement to justify severe preventative protest suppression in the future. If liberals can wildly celebrate and thirst for harsh crackdowns of a protest made up of white conservatives and their families, calling the entire movement a criminal enterprise and cheering on as police steal property of the protesters, despite what the majority of these protesters are doing, just being camping on the side of a street, think of

all of the ways that consent can be manufactured to clamp down on any future large-scale protests, especially when the movement isn't made up of a bunch of regular white people and their kids and instead actually challenges the underlying power structures that prop up white Canada instead of just reinforcing it like the convoy does. I have a similar issue around all of the hubbub around the fundraisers, right? Restricting where crowd-funded resources can come from will only result in future political social justice causes to be negatively impacted, whether that be bail funds or supporting indigenous blockades from out of country.

On February 10th, the Canadian federal government effectively shut down the freedom convoys Give Send Go fundraiser, making it illegal for the funds to be used in any way. Governments setting the precedent for shutting down protest crowdfunding is not a good thing. Now any future protest bail funds and crowdfunding for the resetting blockade will always be in jeopardy. I'm by no means saying that action against a generally hateful, anti-democratic, and dangerously conspiratorial protest isn't justified, but just when governments start using it as a reason for more power and creating new precedents for years in jail and hundreds

of thousands of dollars in fines for an occupation protest, that shouldn't be cheered on, because those things will only come back to bite progressive causes a lot harder than they will be used against the conservative convoyers. There has increasingly been attempts at counter-protesting the Ottawa convoy and the various convoy-inspired protests around the country, many of which faced harsher police response than any of the convoy protests have up until this point. But those community-led counter-protesting efforts are vital. The Ram Ranch resistance actions are still ongoing.

On Sunday night, the URL for the Give Send Go fundraiser was hacked by activists who redirected the page to a video of the frozen song Let It Go, accompanying a manifesto condemning the fundraiser and the convoy. That's great. That is wonderful counter-protesting. In terms of effective ways to shut down fundraising efforts for basically pseudo-vastious, anti-democratic conspiracy-led movement, that's great. This was hours after it was officially confirmed via data leaks that around 56% of Give Send

Go donations for the convoy came from the United States. Around 30% came from Canada, and then 2% came from the UK. Although I think it's worth mentioning that for the initial $10 million Go fund me, we only have confirmation that around $33,000 came from the United States. To understand how the convoy-slash-blockade is working, it's useful to get away from painting all of the participants themselves as extremists, because the fact that regular Canadian right-wingers are what's making this possible has a whole bunch of other implications that people aren't really talking about.

I'm seeing a lot of Canadians who are just really upset about how this convoy is affecting cities and the country as a whole, which, you know, reasonable, I am, it is a thing to be upset about, but then just jumping to insist that it must be inorganic, I think is kind of faulty, focusing instead on theories around foreign influences and ash or turf organizing, events of which have been present, sure, but also the impact of which has, I think, kind of been overblown. But even if those things are completely true and major factors, that still overlooks the fact that there are thousands of real Canadians from around the country camped up in Ottawa.

And the majority of those Canadians sitting in the streets are not Nazis, right, or really even extremists, and most of those people are not receiving personal funding from dark money billionaires. They consider themselves regular working class freedom loving Canadians. It's much harder to reconcile a homegrown movement full of participants that have slid further to the right over the past two years due to rampant online misinformation coupled with ineffectual government support during the pandemic. It's easy to point to so-called organizers who are definitely more flashy, large scale

sketchy donations and far right media figures who are trying to drum up support for the convoy, but those things alone don't get many of thousands and thousands of people and their kids to drive cross country for a cause that they earnestly believe in. The years of political alienation and disenfranchisement that cause that to happen is a lot harder to solve than just cracking down on organizers and donations. Watching homegrown reactionary street politics that one day can grow into an actual far right populist and fascist movement is a lot more frightening than the idea of over seized aster trift organizing.

Not that those things are mutually exclusive always, but I'm just trying to make a good point here. Despite cries to make this Canada's January 6th, in a way the convoy is more effective than January 6th in terms of the evolution of valid political action. It's pushed the boundary on what is deemed as acceptable and even possible for large scale occupations and supply line blockades in a major North American urban setting. People who would never consider themselves militant are now involved in multiple border crossing blockades that's cost hundreds of millions of dollars and to get to this point

so many things need to happen. COVID isolation offered fertile ground for people's politics to unknowingly slide more to the extreme. The many in person connections that help prevent people from falling prey to conspiratorial thinking cease to exist. General frustration at Trudeau and the perceived notion of liberalism and elitism has been steadily growing since 2015 and all that mounted up frustration is now being released and as a result the invisible overton window of acceptable political action has shifted right in regular

conservatives minds. And a movement like this is hard to dissolve. These actions have the chance of escalating the situation and elongating people's willingness to protest. And even if more mandates get removed, that doesn't mean the protest will stop either. Removing the Alberta mandates didn't stop the Coutts border blockade for instance. Because even if all the mandates in Canada get rescinded, which they won't and which they shouldn't, but even if they did, that would still leave the US's vaccine border

requirements which are preventing unvaccinated truckers from entering the states anyway. Similar tactics and protests inspired by the Canadian convoy have broken out overseas in recent weeks. The convoy and blockade inspired protests in New Zealand have led to frequent clashes with police outside New Zealand's parliament building for the past two weeks. French protesters formed their own freedom convoy against the government's vaccine mandates. The convoy converged on the Champs-Elysees in Paris on February 2nd, where protesters were met by 7,000 police members and tear gas.

Unlike Canada, where the government failed to stop a blockade at the US border, French authorities got way ahead of this protest by stopping at least 500 vehicles before they even got to Paris. Only a few decent cars made it to the Champs-Elysees, and the police ticketed 300 protesters who are present at the demonstration. Protests against government coronavirus restrictions have cut on in Europe and other parts of the world in recent days, but they remained more subdued than the Canadian demonstrations. A convoy of about 500 vehicles, mostly from France, were barred from entering Brussels

of just a few days ago, leaving several hundred protesters to gather on foot at a city square instead. Another convoy of several hundred vehicles blocked access to the seat of the Netherlands government in The Hague on February 12th. And of course, many political figures in the US are really trying to get a convoy-esque protest kicked off here in the United States. Tucker Carlson and Fox News General has covered the convoy non-stop, giving it tons and tons of support.

Tucker has said that the Canadian Trucker Convoy is the single most successful human rights protest in a generation. Senator Rand Paul said that he hopes the truckers come to America, and specifically two clog-up cities. At least nine members of Congress, all Republicans, have all publicized their support for the convoy participants on Twitter. Self-appointed organizers for a US-based convoy have found quick support from conservative outlets.

US convoy organizer Brian Brace has been making the rounds on Fox News, sitting down with Carlson, as well as the network's Fox and Friends morning show. Brace says that he hopes to organize a cross-country convoy from California to Washington, DC, rolling around March 4. Roots to converge on DC from across the country are being planned, while the group's telegram channel is actively soliciting volunteers and donations of items like tents, generators, and PA systems. I kind of hope people on the left can look at the tactics being used in Canada, some

that have worked and some that have faltered, but in terms of anti-capitalist action, you can't do much better than causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to international trade between two of the biggest countries in the world, right? Now no protest movement can be replicated, but any movement can be analyzed, and that can inform how folks approach future movements as they spontaneously arise. And I, at the very least, hope you have a better idea now of how only a few thousand people can totally choke out a major city. Because we've talked about this possibility before, you know, a group of people overwhelming

local law enforcement and taking over and shutting down a sizable portion of a popular metropolitan area, not to mention simultaneously blocking off supply lines, trade routes, and international border crossings. The evolution of these medium scale anti-government resistance tactics is something we all should be paying attention to as the political tensions continue to rise right outside our doorstep. Because it's always too late when you realize the call is coming from inside the house. Can't do it to Canada. Can't do it to Canada.

Or the French? This could happen here. Yeah. The French? We can be racist against the French. It's true. Yeah. Speaking of...

Speaking of... That makes Quebec angrier. But like speaking of racism, Chris, what's our topic today? Yeah, today's episode is about why I hate the cops. Hell yeah. Specifically, it is about Chicago Police Department and the many, many, many, many, many crimes they have committed. We're going to talk about...

Well okay, to lead us in to explain what we're doing here today, I'm going to read a quote from the late anthropologist David Graber from this book, The Democracy Project. Mmm. For my own part, I find what I call the rape, torture, and murder test very useful. It's quite simple. When presented with a political entity of some kind or another, whether a government, a social movement, a guerrilla army, or really any other organized group, and trying to decide whether they deserve condemnation or support, first ask, do they commit, or do they order

others to commit, acts of rape, torture, or murder? It seems a self-evident question, but again, it's surprising how rarely, or better, how selectively it is applied. Or perhaps it might seem surprising until one starts applying it and discovers conventional wisdom when many world political issues instantly turned upside down. In 2006, for example, most people in the United States read about the Mexican government sending federal troops to quell a popular revolt initiated by a teacher's union against a notoriously corrupt governor in the southern state of Oaxaca.

In the US media, this was universally presented as a good thing. A restoration of order. The rebels, after all, were violent, having thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails, even if they only threw them at heavily armed police, causing no serious injuries. No one to my knowledge has ever suggested that the rebels raped, tortured, or murdered anyone. Neither has anyone who knows anything about the events in question seriously contested the fact that forces loyal to the Mexican government had raped, tortured, and murdered

quite a number of people in suppressing their rebellion. Yet somehow such acts, unlike the rebels' stone-throwing, cannot be described as violent at all, let alone as rape, torture, or murder, but only appear, if at all, as accusations of human rights violations, or in some similarly bloodless legalistic language. Yeah, and that's the framework that I want to take to the Chicago Police Department, so people can understand why and how, and just sort of, people can get a taste of the sheer horror that anti-police organizers and just like regular people in Chicago are fighting every day because the Chicago Police Department fails the rape, torture, murder, test again

and again and again and again. And so we are going to tell four stories of torture, rape, and murder by the Chicago Police Department. Oh, good. That seems fun. It's going to be great. Get your happy pants on, kids, go for a cruise, you know, take the top down. It's time for a good ol' fun fest.

So our first story of torture, rape, and murder by the CPD is the story of Chicago's infamous torture ring, led by a man named John Burge. Yeah. Now, John Burge had been a military police sergeant working at a POW camp in Vietnam. So immediately you have a guy who's not only a troop cop, but he's a troop cop while he was a troop and then he becomes a cop. And you know, nothing good can possibly come from that. And the other thing that nothing good can possibly come from is the fact that while Burge

was in Vietnam, the US was doing some just really sick shit to Vietnamese prisoners, including rape, gang rape, rape with heart objects, and rape followed by murder. The electric shock, called the bell telephone hour, rendered by attaching wire to the genitals and keep that one in mind. We have not seen the last of that. And rape using eels and snakes, as we have talked about on Bastards a bit before. They're also huge waterboarding fans. So this is the environment that Burge is sort of being trained as a cop in, right?

He's in one of these POW camps, and he gets a purple heart for his service. Now when he comes back to the US in 1969, he becomes a cop. And within about three years, Burge and his white cop buddies start just absolutely beating the crap out of black suspects. One of these prisoners, a man named Anthony Holmes, was repeatedly tortured with electric shocks and almost suffocated to death with a bag put over his head. Holmes was tortured so badly he literally thought he was going to die. So he confessed to a crime he didn't commit and spent 30 years in prison.

Yeah. I actually interviewed one of the people tortured by Burge who was, yeah, had his testicles electrocuted. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to get into that. Yeah. Yeah.

It's horrible. Yeah. It's pretty bad stuff. It's one of the worst things I've ever read. Yeah. And Holmes' case is particularly grim because he tells his lawyers that he's been tortured and his lawyers don't believe him. And so, you know, he, yeah, he wanted to spend 30 years in prison for what he didn't do.

Those shocks, yeah, Robert, yeah, so, okay, so they have this box, right? His box is a hand crate generator. Burge calls it the N-word box and he just attaches people's, like, it just attaches to the people. Oh, I wonder why he calls it that. Oh, yeah. He's, all of these people are so indescribably racist. It's like, yeah, he just, like, he keeps this box, like, on his desk at the Chicago Police

Department. Like, it's just on his desk at work. Now, the other thing that's notable about this is that he and the people around him would call just electrocuting people by attaching alligator clamps to them and putting 9,200 volts into them. They called it the Vietnamese treatment because, guess what, he learned this in Vietnam. Now, Burge's so-called midnight crew had had an incredibly high rate of solving crimes and he has an incredibly high rate of quote-unquote solving crimes because he's just torturing

random black people until they confess. And you know, it's not like people don't know he's doing this. There's a detective in the 70s who, like, walks in on Burge torturing a guy and he goes to his superiors and is like, Burge is torturing his people. And that detective gets reprimanded and we're reprimanded for, like, reporting the torture and transfer to another area. So Burge gets promoted to sergeant in 1977 and then again to lieutenant in 1980 and he gets put in charge of the newly formed violent crimes unit.

And from this position, his rate of terror intensifies. And so in 1982, someone shoots two white cops and, you know, this is one of the sort of classic police things. Any time a cop dies, the police department just goes fucking ballistic. They kind of lose it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And in this case with Burge in charge, he basically turns the entire south side into

what can only be described as a fascist police state. This is from the Chicago Police Torture Scandal, a legal and political history in Cooney's Law Review. Police kick down doors and terrorize scores of African-Americans and what Jesse Jackson of Operation Push and Reinalt Robinson of the Afro-American Police League condemned as, quote, martial law that smacked of Nazi Germany. Thirteen witnesses were smothered with bags and threatened with bolt cutters. And Burge and his detectives took several young men, who they were only suspected to

be the killers, to police headquarters and tortured them. And I mean, they're just like, you know, they're busting down people's doors or dragging people away out in the middle of the night. They do this for about five days before they arrest two brothers and who again had nothing to do with this. They just decided that these two were the guys and tortured just the absolute shit out of them. One of the brothers, Angie Wilson, before Burge even gets there, because this is the

other thing about Burge is it's not just Burge, right? Everyone he's like around him is also a torturer. It's just Burge sort of, you know, Burge is the guy like directing a lot of it. So even before he gets there, yeah, like Wilson gets like he's burned with a cigarette lighter, he gets strangled with a bag over his head again, and they just like beat him a bunch of times. And then it gets even worse. They're just like, you know, Burge has a thing where he like he straps him to the electric

box, right? But he also straps him against a radiator. And you know, these are like old Chicago steam radiators, right? If you touch, if you like touch them even briefly, you get burned. And so yeah, he straps into a radiator and every time he like gets shocked, he jerks back into the radiator and gets burned. Yeah, I have a friend who got a second degree burn, just from like briefly touching one of those things.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's basically it's basically tying someone to an oven that's turned on. Yeah. I mean, it's it is breathtaking in humanity on a scale that is yeah, um, Pop Esk. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's real it's real cop shit. Um, it's for sure real cop shit.

Yeah. So here's an interview with Wilson, just as an excerpt of one from from the book. Partings from the world of policing. Wilson said that Berg cranked the generator, sending 9,200 volts of electricity into his body. He put it on my fingers. Wilson explained one of the clamps on one finger and one on the other finger. And then he kept cranking it and cranking it.

And I was hollering and screaming. I was calling for help. My teeth was grinding, flickering in my head pain. It hurts Wilson continued, but it stays in your head. Okay. It stays in your head and it grinds your teeth. It grinds constantly grinds constantly. The pain just stays in your head and your teeth constantly grinds and grinds and grinds

and grinds and grinds and grinds. Now Wilson, they do this to Wilson for like a day and he doesn't confess, but he refuses to confess because he didn't do it. And so he goes to like they bring him in front of a felony prosecutor and Wilson tells the prosecutor that he's being tortured and you know, it's incredibly obvious he's being tortured like there's just there's marks all over his body, like his his face is destroyed. And the prosecutor sends him back to Burge who tortures him more. And by the time Burge is done with him, Wilson is so visibly fucked up that the police lock

up keeper like takes a look at it, like takes one look at him and goes, I'm not going to be a part of this and refuses to put him in lock up. Many jails like director of medical services sends a letter going like this man was tortured to the police. Hey, we found a human being. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's like every once once every like, I don't know, maybe like a hundred

pages of reading about this, you find one person who is a normal human being. Unfortunately, the state's attorney instead of prosecuting Burge for again, attaching attaching a man's balls to a hand crate generator and then electrocuting him, the state prosecutor and the police superintendent both publicly congratulate Burge for his work. Yeah. And you will send me while died in prison in 2007 because this world is just the worst. Oh, yeah, that too. Yeah.

Now, you might be asking yourself, how does he get away with this? And the answer is that the CPD is complicit in Burge's torture at literally every level on every attempt to stop Burge is derailed directly by the departments and not only is he not stopped, he's repeatedly praised and promoted for his actions. And yeah, I mean, that's the that's how it goes. Yep. It's it's great. It's it's it's an institutionalized system of torture, rape and murder that doesn't

Chicago. It's like we have us a little Abu Ghraib. Yeah. Right in home. But yeah. Don't worry. I guess we won't actually get to Abu Ghraib specifically, but I can I can do I can do an Abu Ghraib tie in at the end of this part.

Yeah. So the CPD has something they call the code of silence. And we'll talk about this more later. But basically the core of the code of silence is that just no matter what crimes, what atrocities, what just inhuman pig horrors you see cops committing, you stay silent. Now this code, you know, it's a code that everyone sort of knows right in the police, but it's also directly enforced and it's enforced by the stuff Burge would do to like just to other cops.

Like he would do things like if there was a cop who was like unhappy with him, he would like walk up behind them when they're opening a file cabinet and point a gun at their head and then go like bang and then do this like a thing that I can really only describe as a supervillain monologue about how like the projects are a dangerous place. Maybe you're going to turn up dead. It's he also he has these street files that he keeps on like other cops families so that if if another cop like goes after him, he can have their family arrested and then plant evidence on them.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, like in a certain way, like he's doing this to other cops and it's like, well, okay, like, you know, what like what what possible like system of accountability quote unquote or police reform is like ever going to do anything to a guy who will just do this to cops like, you know, with the CPD actively backing up that there's there's

nothing that can stop Burge. And I should mention here that there's persistent rumors that Burge is a Klansman. I couldn't find like firm confirmation of it. He certainly racist enough, but but I think yeah, but like why would he why would he spend like that's that feels like almost he would be like, why would I waste my time doing that? Like talking about being racist when I can go out and torture people because I'm a racist every day like fuck the clan already got shit going on. Yeah.

And I think it's sometimes like, yeah, the question is immaterial. He is a member of the Chicago Police Department, an organization of systematic racial terror, the likes of which the modern clan can only dream of. Yeah. It's whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, who cares?

He's he's he's jumpers. Honestly, if he were spending time at clan meetings, at least he wouldn't be torturing people during the time. Yeah. Yeah. Love love love your police when if he was a Klansman that might have been slightly better. I mean, that's the big thing with like this type of like liberal response to this type of extremism.

It's like they only view it as a problem if you're like explicitly part of this, you know, like it's like very obvious to everyone, white nationalist group, right? They can watch a cop do all these horrible things that's fine because that's just a cop. If he's a clan member, then that's a problem. Yeah. Like they can excuse all this horrible torture and not really be concerned about it. But if but if he had a robinous closet, then it's suddenly this big issue.

It's like, no, like the issue is that he was doing all this torture anyway. And he doesn't like this. You don't need to focus on like just the like just that identity, like that weird identity aspect of it. Yeah. So the clan is old enough and wears a uniform that is distinct enough that everybody recognizes this as racist, even though the Chicago Police Department is actually much more of a threat in terms of racism than the clan today and was at that point in time.

But you know, they're the cops. And if you're a suburban white liberal, they're there to, you know, help help keep your lawn safe or whatever. Yeah. So you don't you don't see them as the same inherently racial organization. Exactly. Even though they are. Yeah.

And even though, I mean, they're dragging people out of their homes and like just electrocuting them. Like this is, you know, this is something also that I was very annoyed about when I was reading this was like, you read a lot of this stuff and then you'll get descriptions of it that are like, this is something that like only happens in repression regimes like Kazakhstan. It's like, have you read anything about the issue of the U.S. like this is like, yeah, like we have one of officers over to other countries that often teach their police how to do shit like this.

That happens. But like, yeah. When you were describing a whole bunch of stuff in the past, like, you know, 20 minutes, I was thinking in my head, I'm like, oh yeah, this is just like stormtrooper shit. But the thing is, it isn't like this just is cop shit. Yeah. Like the thing, like the fact of like elevating it in my brain to it being like something other than cops is incorrect.

No, like this just is police stuff. It's not necessarily stormtrooper shit. It's just is police shit. And the fact that those things are so synonymous, that should be the part that's actually like upsetting is that, yeah, it's actually, there is really no difference and you shouldn't necessarily resort to calling it stormtrooper stuff because it is just what the police do all the time. Is this whole model you see people talking about it where they talk about like, like,

oh, the police are using unnecessary force and like there's like a certain threshold where if you go past it, like, you know, sort of like, like even, you know, like I'm gonna read like the birch has a lot of like when he winds up in court, like the judges look at this and are like, oh, my God, this is unacceptable. How could this have happened? And you know, you get some good descriptions of it, I'm gonna, this is a district judge court describing what Berge is doing in the early 80s. There existed in 1982 in the city of Chicago, a de facto policy practice and or custom of

Chicago police officers exacting unconstitutional revenge and punishment against persons who they alleged had killed or injured a fellow officer. This revenge and punishment included beating, kicking, torturing, shooting, and or executing such a person for the purpose of inflicting pain, injury and punishment on that person and also for the purpose of forcing that person to make an inculpatory statement. Exculpatory. Yeah. Exculpatory.

Yeah. Or inculpatory. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. You know, and you get stuff like there's there's there's an FBI report then from the FBI. He left one bullet in the in the cylinder and spun it. A report quoted the inmate is saying about Berge and the 1985 incident. He then said, you talk will blow your black.

Explicit of presumably the N word brains out. Berge then got up from his desk, walked over to the inmate, put the muzzle of the revolver against the center of the inmates forehead and pulled the trigger. He spun the cylinder and placed it back against his forehead and pulled the trigger again. So yeah, he's just playing Russian roulette with people like he's playing it. I don't I don't think you can say they're playing. Yeah. Well, he's pulling a one in six chance of murdering them.

They are in terror. There's also a lot of like he does like he sexually abuses people. He like he loves going after testicles. Yeah. He he like he electrocuted like, well, I mean, he's also like is like like. Basically like raping people. He like electrocutes a 13 year old child and you know, this is like it's it's it's just so bleak that like, I mean, so there's a very famous article about this by Chicago Journalists

called the House of Screams. But you know, like like Berge isn't the only guy doing this. Like he one of his loyalists is his lieutenant like is a guy named Byron who's like in charge of the midnight shift at the area to violent crimes. And they become known internally as Burgess ass kickers of the A team because this is just who these people are and yeah, sure, sure. These guys start like putting like guns in prisoners mouths. They have one thing where they stick a shotgun in a guy's mouth and they pull the trigger

and it's not loaded. But they just like they keep doing this mock excuse thing. Yeah, it's it's. That is by the way illegal in international law like internationally that is a war crime. If you're military to specifically fake executions are a type of torture and a war crime under international law based on trees, the United States aside. Yeah, and and Byron also so he does that a lot and then that same guy, the same guy who put the shotgun thing to he apparently didn't have the box.

So he stripped the dude and shocked his balls with a cattle prod and this is the guy who lowered lightfoot sent her number two lawyer to defend in court in 2020 by arguing the torture never happened. Yeah, that's that's that's accountability. Yep. That's the mayor of my city. Now, life, life foot in blue life, what he's on the record as saying that birds tortured over a hundred people.

But once it came to, you know, actually putting up or shutting up, she just goes to bat for the cops. And this happens in Chicago just so many times with people who used to be like, you know, who in the moment are like, oh, birds did torture, we need to reform the police. And as you know, the moment they get into power, they do this stuff. I mean, there's there's there's much of like incredibly weird stuff that happens here. Like so. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, at one point, saw a like they saw a case over whether a

$1,000 settlement with a torture victim was fair and as Christ, yeah, in court, it's like you read the transcript of it and it's like it's it's the most brutal demolishing of like a state's argument I've ever seen. Like they're just like in court, asking them like, OK, like where were were this person's judges supposed to have like known in court that he was also torturing other people? And it's you know, the courts just like, you know, they're tearing apart. And then when it comes time to decide the case, the court tosses the case out in size with the state. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what's going on there. It's awful. That's the judicial system. Yep. This this this happens this happens just all the time. I mean, that that is the thing about the way the whole system works, which is that, you know, the police do horrific things in Chicago. They torture in Los Angeles.

They have Nazi gangs. You know, there's a bunch of different horrible shit the police do. And then at some point, the FBI and the Justice Department come in and they provide incredibly they they send in very talented investigators who produce incredibly detailed lists of all of the things that are being done. And then a court says, well, but nobody's going to get punished. Or maybe this one guy will get punished and then we'll go on back to doing things. And although the system is supposed to work, although we're going to read a story about

the FBI not doing that in the next episode. So yeah, I mean, they don't we don't always get a report. Yeah. I have become increased like it's very frustrating because having these FBI reports on police abuses is useful again for talking to liberals because they tend to trust the FBI. But it's also like, boy, I've read a lot of detailed FBI reports about how bad police departments are. And it seems like nothing ever gets done.

No, it seems like they just write a thing saying, yeah, it's bad. And then everything continues forever. Yeah. And it's, you know, in this case, like the reason we even know any of this is through what I will say, like a genuinely heroic decades long campaign run by the People's Law Office on behalf of Burge victims. And these people, like they say people's lives, like there are people who Burge tortured, who ended up on death row for it.

And yeah, you know, like this stuff is so bad that when it comes out, the Supreme Court does a ruling on it and it like establishes new precedents for like how people can prove they've been tortured. And like, you know, it's so bad that like Illinois stops running the death, like we had the death penalty and like we still tend to get I think have it, but like we just stopped doing it. Like we stopped, we stopped executing people because like a Republican governor, like on air gave a giant thing about how the justice system was broken.

And like this is, this is John Ryan, right? Like this is a man who like he is like this is a man who was corrupt by the standards of an Illinois politician, and even he like on the air is like, yeah, this is like, you know, this is this is broken, he he pardoned some Burge victims. And in 1993, faced with just irrefutable evidence of torture and rulings from multiple higher courts, the police board finally released a report, although the report also doesn't call it torture and is a disaster that they finally have Burge fired. And some of his colleagues who were also torturing people get suspended for 15 months.

But Burge isn't prosecuted for, you know, the crimes that we have multiple reports of him doing until 2010. After the victims literally go to the United Nations with a campaign and go in front of the United Nations and talk about how they are being systemically tortured by the Chicago Police Department. But of course, by 2010, the statute of limitations on his crimes had run out. So he winds up going to jail for three years on purging. There's a statute of limitations on torture, yeah, that's definitely one of the ones we

should have a cap on. Yeah, definitely. It's great. It's it's it's a great system. Um, I'm going to read something from Chicago Tribune that was a description of this quote, while the jury was out, Burge still unrepentant allegedly asked the courtroom observer whether he thought the jury would quote, believe a bunch of n words. Wow.

Awesome, dude. This is 2010. It's great. Amazing. Burge, Burge tortured at least 125 people. That's almost certainly an undercount 125 is the number of people who we have who have come forward. A lot of those people probably have like the people he tortured have probably died by now.

Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, you'll never we'll never get an accurate count of all the people who were there. Yeah, yeah. And and Burge died a free man and has never served a day for his actual crimes. Yeah. Now Burge and his crew are the most famous of the 80s and 70s and 80s torturers. But there by no means the the only one and we're going to talk about one more in this torture section.

Uh, do you know Richard Zuley? Mm hmm. Okay. So yeah, Zuley's Zuley's the one that people tend not to know, um, Zuley was also a Vietnam war veteran. He becomes a detective in 1977. Um, what's interesting about him is Zuley is never part of Burge's cadre, right? Burge's cadre is working out of area two.

They're on the South side. They're in an overwhelmingly black part of the South side. Uh, Zuley works in areas three and six on the North side. You know, what I would need to mention off the bat is that Zuley is no less racist than Burge is. Uh, he wants arrested a black dude for just like having a car and wearing a watch. And like, like those are both felonies in the city of Chicago, right? Well, if you famously never know what time it is because you're a law abiding citizen.

Yeah. Well, it's law abiding citizen and also, uh, don't be black while doing this because well, sure. Yeah. He throws him in a cell and charges. Yeah. It gets, it gets you Zuley screaming no N word is supposed to live like this. Oh boy.

Oh boy. Yeah. It's, you know, we, we people like talk about cops doing stuff for that reason, but it's, it's, you know, they're so racist to just get a direct quote. Yeah. Yeah. Like I can't emphasize it like they're just, they're so racist. It's like ingrained into the, like the cop DNA.

Yeah. They're just saying the loud part. Yeah. Like they're just screaming. Like we're going to do with one of the things in the next episode is the cops will just drive around like blasting the N word out of their, out of their like cop stereos because Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Yeah. Now Zuley in a lot of ways is a more modern torturer than Burge is, you know, Burge is very big on your like overt physical violence, right? Your beatings, your legislation, your suffocation. The problem with these techniques from a torturer perspective that they leave incredibly obvious marks and you know, this is how Burge goes down, right? It's too obvious what he's doing. There are people who can just like show up to a court and be like, Hey, look at my neck.

Like here are all these burns. Zuley is much smarter about it. Um, you know, he, I mean, she does some beatings because cops are literally animals and are incapable of resisting the urge to beat the living share of anyone who falls into the grasp. But you know, mostly what he does is he does things like he'll just shackle someone to a wall for 24 hours and you know, and he'll be like, okay, like I'm going to shackle you to this wall and until you sign this confession, I won't let you leave and also you can't

talk to anyone. You can't talk to your lawyer. You can't talk to, uh, like you can't talk to your family. And in the next episode, we're going to see this. This is how modern CPD torture works, except Zuley is doing this in like the 80s. Now Zuley is a naval intelligence officer who's, you know, he's still, so he's still technically in the reserves when he joins the cops. And that meant when the CIA's torturers like autonomous base stalled out, they, they needed

a hero and that hero was Zuley. Um, Zuley is, was the most active. Like the thing is the most active in is, is, is the torture of Muhammad al-Sali, who is famously known as the most tortured manic, autonomous, um, he, well, that's, yeah, at least he got into Guinness. Yeah. He, yeah, they, they do sleep deprivation. I mean, they, they, so some of it's like the standard sort of like get most stuff, which

is like, they don't let you sleep. They blast like sounds into your cell all the time. They like beat you. There's molestations. And, but there's also stuff that's like, like, you know, the third of attack by dogs, but like, he'll do things like, like, he'll like soak, he'll like get soaked in ice water. Or like they, they, they stuffed him in this like straight jacket thing that didn't let him breathe properly and then stuffed it full of ice.

Oh cool. And then Zuley also, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's bad. And he also like threatens to kidnap, uh, his mother and Haver sent to Guantanamo to be raped because these people are again just monsters and yeah, Zuley is still alive today and, uh, Rome's a street as a free man having received literally no consequences whatsoever for being a torturer so good in the CPD that the CIA was like, we're going to bring this guy into torture. That's great.

It's great. It's yep. Yep. And that, that, that brings us to our first interlude, which is every year, Chicago police officers go to the grave of the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, who they assassinated in a police raid after drugging him in 1969. They go to his grave to shoot his fucking tombstone. They do this literally every year, Hampton's families, they keep getting new tombstones,

they shoot them every, they shoot them every year. It just doesn't matter. Uh, the CPD just keeps shooting it. And there's a quote from the great Trinidadian, Marxist historian, CLR James, that I think about a lot that goes, when history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which people will will wonder, not their ferocity. Yep. I really hope there's a moment of people doing things to cops that makes generations in the

future marvel at their ferocity. Yeah. I think I can say that without it legally being incitement. Yes. I'll make one other fun note, which is that five Chicago police officers died last year from COVID. So that's good. Yeah.

Only five, huh? Let's make it 50. Officer Dad. Look, they're working on it. They don't wear masks. They won't get vaccinated. They won't get vaccinated. Critical support to the Chicago police who don't wear masks.

Yeah. They're having their police academy exams in person now. Oh, that's good. So that's fine. You know what? Comrade COVID. Critical support. Yeah.

Yeah. Spend more time indoors together without masks, guys. Avoid those vaxes. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be great. No mandate. Nothing bad will happen.

Okay. So, story two, which is a shorter one, but no less bleak, I think. On October 20th, 2014, Officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 shots at Laquan McDonald, who had turned around and was walking away from him. Here's from the people of the state of Illinois. Walking away aggressively, Chris. Yeah. Oh boy.

Violently exiting. Yeah. Yeah, walking away while black, which, I guess, in the minds of like half of the United States is the same thing he's trying to do. I mean, they do have a court-defended legal right to shoot people in the back who are trying to get away. Yeah. Yeah.

Great country. We're nailing it. From the Chicago Tribune, an analysis of the video, this is from the court case, but in the Chicago Tribune, an analysis of the video establishes that 14 to 15 seconds passed from the time the defendant Van Dyke fired his first shot to clear visual confirmation of the final shot. For approximately 13 of those seconds, McDonald is lying on the ground. So he fires literally every bullet in his gun at a man who is by those like second shots

lying dead. Like, well, it's not quite dead yet, but like lying on the ground. Yeah. It's just, yeah. I mean, from the cops' perspective, like, why not? Like, they have the ability to do that if they get the chance, oh, I get to kill a black person and it doesn't matter, then why, like, that's like, if you have to think through like what they're actually processing this as and they don't see them as like an equivalent

human life. Yeah. So it doesn't, like, it's, they don't, it doesn't, like, you can't like apply the same rules of civility that, like, we should all kind of agree upon because cops have such a hierarchical viewpoint that with them at the top that they can never actually exist within any kind of humane society. No. That's why, again, unspeakable ferocity of the masses fingers crossed one day.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I think the thing, you know, okay, so look, if this is the price of liberal democracy, right, if you're going to, if you're going to live in a society that has like, you know, that where laws are enforced by the police, the police are going to murder people, like that's, that's what you're signing on for. And I think that I think that's an absolutely unacceptable price and but we shouldn't do this.

Now the other aspect of this is because you have to keep all of these just absolutely like just bloodthirsty murderers on the leash and because also all the people who are actually in the government are just genuine, despicable human beings, immediately after, I mean, like really before the shots have stopped firing, like there's a cover up that stretches from like it includes everyone from the officers on the scene all the way up to Mayor Rahm Emmanuel. So for example, mysteriously, none of the multiple dashboard cameras on the scene were recording audio for reasons only the discerning listener can guess at.

Yep. Yep. Everyone across the entire chain of command again, going right up to the mayor's office immediately goes, we cannot let this video get out because it's it's so bad that even the CPD is like, this is going to look bad for us. Yeah, because if it gets out, then people will want to do bad things to cops and they can't have that. And you know, so this this this this tape is concealed for over a year until the journalist

Brandon Smith, like literally gets a like sues sues them and literally gets the judge to like order the state to release it. And while this is going on that the cops are doing this massive PR blitz featuring this just like incredible pack of racist lies, including that McDonald had lunch for a jet van dyke with a knife. No, he didn't. He was literally walking away from them that McDonald had a gun, which is initially one because not only like they didn't even have time to like plant it like he they killed him

so fast they didn't have time to plant a gun on him. Like there's no gun, but the multiple officers will are like, you can you can find news things of them talking about how this guy Oh, he had a gun like there's no gun. Yeah. Yeah. I the the classic one is that like van dyke feared for his life and I know he didn't. He probably should now, but he does not. Yeah, he should never he should never live a waking or sleeping moment where he's not

in constant fear of someone cutting his head off. No, just as like in terms of the horror that should be imbued inside people who do these things, they should never like they should never be able to like sit down and be comfortable. Yeah. Because closest we've ever gotten to justice for one of these guys is when that mob surrounded Derek Chauvin's house. Yeah. And it would have been actual justice if they had gotten through the door.

Yep. Yeah. It's yeah. So you know, and you ever like so there's there's there's this huge coterie of cops who are all just lying about this. We're lying in the press. They're lying just they're lying. They start they lie like on the stand.

And you know, this strategy works for a while because this country is just a race to tell whole until the court forces him to release the video. And when it becomes clear if the video is going to come out, the state immediately charges him. Like they they charge him and then later that day they released a video. Now keep this in mind. They had this video for a fucking year. Yeah.

Exactly what he done. It's all it's all fake. And you know, yeah. And they only charged him with the alternative was literally being run into the sea by an entire mob of these literally the entire population of Chicago. So Van Dyke is suspended without pay, right? But he immediately gets hired by the by the police union. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. OK, cool. And Van Dyke Van Dyke eventually I mean, he goes down eventually he gets convicted of you know, second degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery. But you know, there's a there's a later report that describes the involvement of 16 other officers in the cover up.

Four officers were eventually fired for lying about the case. Three were tried for the cover up and acquitted and four officers were given a one week suspension for the mysterious lack of camera audio. Honestly. Yes. That is more than what usually happens expected. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is like this video is so bad that this video is so I mean, Roman manual

stuff doesn't really I mean, the consequence he suffers is that he decides not to run again because it will be bad for him. But Roman manual is currently now his his consequence is that he's the American ambassador to Japan. And OK, well, that is a fate worse than death. Yeah, I will also say this, the people of Japan do not deserve a manual. The Liberal Democratic Party on the other hand are maybe the only people on earth who actually deserve him.

Like if you didn't want us to palm a manual off on you, you shouldn't have taken all that CIA money in the 50s and 60s and let them run your political campaigns. So Liberal Democratic Party lie down with dogs get fleas. But yeah, Jason van Dyke was released from prison two weeks ago after serving less than half a sentence. Laquan McDonald's remains dead. Yeah, I mean, the really depressing part is that that is more consequences than usually ever happens.

Yep. Yep. And that that only happened because of like an incredible amount of organization. And like think of all of the times where there is no video. Think of all the times where there's nothing and things just happen. No one watches it and then dead bodies get kicked into a ditch. And that's way more common than anything where there's type of like recordings or even where there needs to be coverups.

You know, you both are probably too young for this movie. But in one of the Transformers movies, after they beat all the bad Transformers. I've watched all of the Transformers movies, including the old animated ones. Where the Navy lifts them all up and drops them into the sea. Yes. What if we did that with the Chicago Police Department? I drop them in the sea, big old big old sink or swim, scoop them up. Drop them in the sea.

Yeah. No, we put them in a bag. There's no swimming. Okay. That's fair. Look, look, they get one bag, each individual gets one bag for each bag they put over someone's head and strangled them with. I think that's fair.

And then right into the sea. And sea solves all problems. The last thing like I do I do genuinely want to say is that like, if you read this story over and over and over and over again, you get people who are like you get the governor going like the system is fundamentally broken to must reform it. You get the court saying the system is fundamentally broken and must reform it. And it never changes. They just keep killing people.

They keep enslaving people. They keep doing like they keep torturing people. They keep murdering people. They keep raving people. And this will not end until you abolish the police. No, like there is no alternative. If you if your car is fun is broken on a fundamental level, you can't you can't reform your car to make it better.

There's a certain point where it's totaled and you're like, well, I guess that car. It's like your engine block is shattered and you're like, well, I fixed the tires so it ought to go now. No, no, like if it's broken on a fundamental level, you can't reform it. Those were like those words don't go together. Yeah. Throw out throw out your car and build a train. Or that's what you have to do.

Walk. Use your feet to get a bicycle, honestly. Like. Yeah. I stuck a bottle onto the rail of my AR 15 so it's not a gun anymore. No, it's it's still a gun. Yeah. Yeah, this is really, really sad.

Yeah. It's good stuff. Pretty depressing. Anyway, I'm going to go watch 2008's The Dark Knight and feel feel great about myself. Yeah. All right. Well, that's going to do it for us that it could happen here today. Until next time, hope that more Chicago police officers get COVID.

There is that there is that fun scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker goes into the Chicago police building and blows up the prison block with all those cops inside. That is that is a fun scene. Yeah. Anyway. Oh my goodness, it's could happen here. All right. Well, that's the introduction.

I'm Robert Evans and my work's done for today. Chris. Yeah. It's me. It's Christopher. We are back with two more stories of rape, torture and murder from the Chicago Police Department. Oh, yeah.

What a fun show we have. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, OK, this one, this one will be more fun than last time because, OK, so basically since since I started showing up on this show, I have made a case I have been dropping references to the fact that the Chicago Police Department is literally a cartel. And today I am finally telling the story of how little unfair the cartel is to be honest. But yeah.

Also, also, I mentioned this before we go in. There's also a bonus cartel because while I was doing research on one of the cartels, I realized that I couldn't actually talk about it without talking about the other cartel. So there's two. There are two completely unrelated CPD cartels that are will show up in this story. Yeah, it's great. So all right. This is the story of Ronald Watts.

Now Ronald Watts joined the CPD in 1994 after serving in the army, making him yet another example of the fabled troop cop combination that produces the worst people on earth. Watts was assigned to patrol Chicago's old public housing like projects. Now Watts is from housing himself. There's the OK, so some of the people who knew him before he went into the police claim that like he was just always like a drug dealer and that he went into the police to like drug deal more. I don't know if that's true because I mean, he's also in the army for a while.

So I I don't know, it's sort of unclear. But you know, he's for the projects. He knows the terrain well. And that's why he was an extremely effective agent of terror in a place where officers would regularly drive by blasting the N word and other racial slurs out of their cop car speakers. But yeah, here's the intercept describing what like Chicago cops are just doing at the projects.

They were officers. You found it amusing to toy with those under their power, arranging a foot race of heroin addicts determined who would go to jail, for example, or forcing a woman they had searched on the street to walk home naked from the waist down. It's yeah. Yeah, people who find joy in exerting their power over other people and they think it's funny. Yeah, that's why they become cops.

Yep. And the other reason you become a cop is the second thing that they do constantly, which is they just walk into the lobbies of these buildings, just start taking everyone's money. And like they literally call the lobbies of the public housing buildings, like quote, their ATM machine. So they're just doing this constantly. There's also cops. This is not every cop.

There are specific cops who do this, who would show up on the first and the 15th of the month, wait for everyone to cash their paychecks and then rob them. And you know, the thing I think is important about this is that, okay, so like Watts and like the specific cartels do this, but this isn't just Watts. This is like, this is everyone who's working at these projects is just walking up like to like the poorest people in Chicago and just robbing them constantly. Yeah, like this is this is, you know, this is just how regular policing works and the elite units are even worse.

So cartel number one, or I guess I guess I'm a two since we've introduced Watts. So there used to be an elite unit in the Chicago police force called the special operations section or SOS. And these guys, these guys are different because they, you know, they're not attached to like an area or specific, you know, they're just completely their own thing. They're just like, they're the special response team. And SOS would just go into projects and just ransack the entire building. Like they would go room by room, like taking people's stuff and just looting it and then

just like walking out. And you know, it's not even like, it's not just that they're taking cash, like they're taking TVs. And I mean, the thing that the thing you, when you read interviews and people who lived through this, like they're not just taking like stuff that's like, you know, let's use that are expensive. They'll take people's like lamps, like they'll just walk out with anything, like literally anything they can sell.

And you know, again, like these are, these are the people living in these projects are like huge, like a lot of these projects are literally like segregation era, right? So they're, they're almost entirely black and they're just take, like they're just getting robbed, but constantly by both the regular cops, the special operations section. And there's not even like, you know, like cops nowadays have like, they have like civil asset forfeiture where there's this like pseudo legal framework. No, no, no, this, like they're not even, this is the nineties, they're not even doing that. They're just literally walking in and robbing these people at gunpoint.

Um, SOS, like they eventually get shut down 2007 after, so there's a series of scandals about them. They, they steal like hundreds of thousands of dollars from people. They do shakedowns of drug dealers. They start kidnapping people, um, at one point in SOS, dude, like tried to hire his coworker to do a hit on someone who was like going to report them to the feds and yeah. But SOS isn't the main story today because Watts is writing is running an even larger version of this operation.

Um, and, you know, well, I was researching this, I had the realization that like, so I've talked to people in Chicago about like the CPD cartels, right? And I had the realization that there were conversations that have people were, we've been, we've both been talking about different ones and we both, we both thought we were talking about this. Like I've had people looking back or it's like, oh, they were talking about SOS. I was like, no, no, no, I bet the Watts one, it's, it's, it's great. It's, oh, love, love our institutionalized just robbery system.

Yeah. So the other thing I want to mention because so the intercept did a, did a like really good like four, like huge four part series on, on the Watts, uh, like cartel. But I think it's worth mentioning that like even the, you know, there's like two quote unquote good cops who like go after Watts and for years and eventually bring him down. But like even those cops are doing things that are objectively horrifying. Like most of the actual cop work in this story is done by, is literally just the good cops. Like they, they know a homeless guy.

They call Chewbacca who they, they, they paid to be an informant in like blanket sleeping bags and food. And like it's like, it should be fair Chewbacca like genuinely like likes the two of them. But Chewbacca is the guy who does all of the work here. Like what Watts gets like, what, like, he's the guy who's like wearing the wire. He's the guy who knows everything. The cops, the cops don't know anything. And like Chewbacca has known this, everything that was going on from the beginning and they

just don't ask him for years. But like Chewbacca like goes to prison at one point because Watts, okay. So Watts, Watts is just like a drug dealer, right? So Watts and so Chewbacca would like, you know, he was like, he was like a sort of low level like runner, right? He'd get a bag. He'd like move it sometimes. And one time, and Watts also used information.

So one time like Watts was like trying to get information on where a drug stash was so we could rob it and then like, well, so he could do a police raid on it and then take the drugs and sell them. And Chewbacca just like didn't know. So Watts just like threw him in prison for two years and it's just like, you know, this stuff, this happens constantly. There are so many people who are just, you know, like people trying to survive in the city and then, oh, hey, you don't have the exact specific information that this cop wants

on this drug thing. So we're just gonna send you to prison for two years. And Chewbacca who like risks his life wearing a wire and brings down one of the biggest cartels in the CBD as best I can tell is still living on the street because the society is just broken in ways that like are difficult to comprehend and incredibly bleak. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah.

So, okay, back to Watts's operation. Watts has this thing called the Watts tax. The Watts tax is if you run drugs, you pay the tax to Watts and this tax gives you protection from the police. If you don't pay the Watts tax, the cops show up, they put you in prison, they take all your cash, they raid your drugs and then Watts resolves your drugs at a profit. I mean, that is like, objectively, that is a decent grift. Like in terms of...

Yeah, it's pretty good grift. Oh, it's incredible. Logistical planning. Yeah. Like, yeah, okay, I can see how this would actually be very profitable. Yeah, it's genius. And like, and the other thing about these taxes, like these taxes are enormous amounts of money. Like, if you're running a drug that's like, okay, so you have a drug that you move and

the drug is in the whole location. Yeah, I know. I've ran drugs for 30 years. I know. Yeah, so the tax for that single drug can be as high as $50,000 a week. So he is making... That's a lot of money. So much money.

Like, just an incomprehensible amount of money off of this. We could do that. We could. We're not cops. We're not cops. I guess we would have to become cops. I have an idea for a pivot. We're doing the cartel pivot.

This is how we get funded by this in a lower cartel. I mean, we've always been a cartel, but... We move from podcasting into drugs. We can partner with our friends at the scene of the lower cartel. Yeah, it would be great. Eventually there's a guy named Big Shorty who's another player in the scene. Solid name. Yeah, all the people in this world have great names.

Yeah, it's great. So Big Shorty is like, I'm not paying like $50,000 a week per drug to do this anymore. I'm going to go to the Feds. And so Big Shorty, he threatens to go to the Feds and he goes to the DEA and then like a couple of days later, he's gunned down the street by... Yeah, you never threaten to go to the Feds. Yeah. No.

Like, yeah. Well, if you do, you have to make sure they like disappear you because... Well, you never threaten it. Like that's the thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't threaten. In these worlds, you mention like cops and going to in any combination and everyone around you is just like, all right, well, this person's got to be dead.

That's just how that's got to go. Yeah. It's not the best acoustic move I've ever seen. Yeah. So, you know, and this is when the cops, the two cops are going to bring Watts down, like actually start to take notice because literally for years, I mean, they tell stories about this. Like if people, they'd be locking people up and people would say things like, why are

you going after me for two bags when Watts is running the dope? And just no one believes them. Like the cops are being told constantly for years, like the cops who aren't in on the, in the hotel are being told literally for years that this whole thing is, you know, that, oh, yeah, well, why are you bothering me? Watts is running this operation. They don't believe them. And they don't, they don't believe them basically until Big Shorty gets shot because when Big

Shorty goes down like another, they get another guy who's like pretty big in the scene. That guy's like, oh, yeah, no, he got shot by Watts and they're like, wait, hold on. Now the cops go to the FBI and the FBI, it turns out, has been trying and failing to put again, put together a case against Watts for so long that like they're on their like second like agent who they've had in charge of the case because the first guy like just could do it and laugh and so they had another guy. And almost immediately after this, there's, there's another guy, there's another dealer named Fierce who he has this, Fierce has this great grift, which is like all of his people

wear Obama shirts. This is like 2008, but he doesn't, no, just seven or something. But yeah, so like all the people doing this thing, they, they wear Obama shirts and they, they call the drugs like Obama. And so when everyone, they had their lines called hope and like, this, this, this actually works on the FBI, like the FBI doesn't understand that they're running drugs because they think that they're, that like all the Metro references of Obama are just like they're talking about like Obama.

There's so many, there's so many great like FBI weird incompetence things to the story like that. There's one point where the cops are going through the documents and they see the word, they see Lou and it's a, so Lou's just short for Lieutenant, right? But the FBI thinks that Lou is like a name. And so they're kind of tracked down this guy named Lou, which is just, it's, it's, it's just baffling, incredible incompetence. I mean, FBI's never thrilled when they have to investigate cops.

Yeah. Yeah. Even though it is literally their job. Yep. But hey, I hate doing my job too. So please continue, Chris. So, so that fierce guy who she's doing the Obama thing, like take 17 rounds to the chest. And so the FBI are like...

That's a good number of rounds to take to the chest. Yeah. That's a lot. It's an interesting number too, right? Because like, like... It does have a cult significance, yes. Yeah. Well, but also like, like, did they like reload?

Like do they have a gun that has exactly 17 bullets in it? No, no, no, no. They're 17 round magazines. Okay. Yeah. No, no, no. But is it like a handgun or is it a rifle? I think it's a handgun.

Yeah. Or like, multiple people with handguns. Yeah. Glock 17s have 17 round magazines. Makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So after this, the FBI investigation intensifies and so the FBI goes to the Internal Affairs Division, or IAD, who are like the most hated cops of all cops by other cops because there are people who are supposed to investigate the police. And you know, so they tell the two guys you're going to have to watch and they're going to be protected. And this works for like a year and then the head of AID changes and it's like a cop-cop guy instead of... So they have this like, they brought an FBI guy who was the head of AID and then he gets

kicked out and they bring in like a cop and that cop just immediately tells literally everyone that those two cops are running an investigation against Watts. And so... So do they die within the next few months, sir? I don't think they know. As best I can tell, Watts seemed to have thought that like they wouldn't be able to get him because he had too much protection, which worked for a while. I mean, yeah, it's, yeah, he has a lot of power.

Yeah. Well, and also, I mean, the other thing that's interesting about this is he just like, his stuff starts getting wilder. So he goes after this guy. He tries to go after the drugs of this guy named Monk and like Monk is carrying a bunch of drugs. He's trying to rob Monk from the intercept. A wild car chase ensued on the Dan Ryan Expressway, Lakeshore Drive and ultimately into the Hyde

Park neighborhood where Monk lost control of the car and crashed in a park. He fled on foot. Watts and his team seized the dope and cash. They didn't even check on the condition of the woman and infant who remained in the car, which is great. And also that's standard, that's like standard CPD procedure. I have literally seen this happen, like in Hyde Park, like I have, when I was in college, I almost got run over in a seat and like the CPD almost ran me over in this like car chase

that went bad and this giant multi car crash and like, there's like 16 cops, right? They all just run past the car crash after the two guys are chasing and like, I have to go make sure no one died. And I was like, I, this is great. You have just almost murdered me. And then also you're not checking on all of these people in this car, stupid and a wreck. I hate the CPD, I hate them a lot. They sound nice.

Yeah. It's great. Yeah, this just happens like all the time, like often enough that like literally in the same place. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting the way in which like all of these big, because you've got like a few really big shitty big city police departments. You've got your LAPD, your NYPD, you've got your Chicago police department. By God, you've got St. Louis cops and they're all shitty in simultaneously the same in

different ways. Like they're, they're, it's the same basic idea. It's brutality, it's violence, it's robbery. But they find unique ways to do those shitty things, which is fascinating. Yeah. Like if I was like like the NYPD is like their big thing is if you get a large number of people together, the NYPD is just going to annihilate you. Yeah.

LAPD has like the Nazi gangs, CPD thing, CPD's thing just seems to be crime. Yeah. CPD is just crime. Just the mob. Well, torture, it's torture and crime. Yeah. St. Louis police department will attack you with dogs if you're not a white person. Yeah.

Yeah. They've all got, they've chosen their cop subclass. Yeah. Now. Okay. So back in the investigation, the two cops in investigating Watts are like even, so basically all the researchers get cut off, it's literally just them to Watts know like basically knows that they're coming for them and they almost get him anyways because cops are just not

very smart and they're about to get him on a sting for drug running. And then right before, like I think it's like the day of that they're running the sting, they suddenly get transferred to the police academy and they basically just like get detained in this police academy for like weeks and it's, it's actually weird. And eventually like, and you know, this is when like everything just completely comes apart. Like the liaison between the CPD and the FBI literally tells them they can't move on the case because if they move on the case, it's going to reveal that Watts murdered a dude

because well, so they don't have good evidence on big shorty, but they have, they have evidence that they have good evidence that he killed fears. And I, and the head of internal affairs basically tells them like, yeah, like I won't do anything about Watts because it comes out that another CPD unit had gone rogue after SOS all be done for. So I'm just going to cover for them. The second cartel is too much. Yeah.

I said none of the only one cartel is great. I can excuse one cartel, but I draw the line and two cartels. But once you hit four cartels, we're back to good, which is why I am such a big fan of the Los Angeles police department. It's great. Look, you got it. You got it. You got it.

You just, you just got to get over the cartel hump. And once you're over. Yeah. You got it. It's like growing out your, your hair, right? It's going to be that period where it looks really awkward. That's when you, that's when you've got two cartels. And then you get hot at four cartels, then you're fuckable again.

Yeah, it's great. So there's an interesting description from one of the two cops that I want to read because it gets at how the code of silence works from the intercept. He had, she said, this is about the, the AID guy. He had, she said, made too many deals there by neutralizing his ability to act, attributing her understanding of the dynamic largely to conversations with Rivera himself, conversations he denied ever occurred. She described him as ensnared in a web of mutual blackmail at which bosses have leverage

over one another by virtue of their shared knowledge of the deals they have made. She gave an example, I'll make the CR against your guy go away if you promote my guy within your unit. The code of silence and clout are thus entwined. Rivera, she recalled, once remarked to her that the bosses quote trade CRs for favors like baseball cards. So yeah, this is, this is what the code of silence is. It's an informal code sort of that's also called the thin blue line, which is great.

Yeah. That basically it says that cops, you know, it's that cops will protect the road. But it's more than that if you, if you cross the thin blue line and you break the code of silence, you will be formally retaliated against by your commanders. And when I say breaking the code of silence, what that means literally is if you take any action against another cop, like it literally doesn't like they, they can be torturing people. They can be literally running a cartel. It doesn't matter if you say anything about them, you will be like formally retaliated

against by every other cop. And so the two cops who are investigating Watts, like they get arrested by internal affairs and internal affairs like tries to like basically make a fake case against them. And they eventually get out, but their careers are over, right? Because they, you know, attempted to like do the thing sort of that cops are normally supposed to do and they just immediately get arrested and you know, they have a lot of other stuff happen to them. Like one of the two cops comes home to a bell box literally full of shit with a note that

says, since you like shit so much thought you'd enjoy this. Amazing. Yeah. You know what? I mean, like that's fun. That's fun. That's fun. That should happen more often.

Just that should happen a lot more often. Other other scenarios. Yeah. It sucks that these are the cops that this is happening, like of all of the, this is like the only time I like do not approve of like sending cops shit. This is like, this is when it's, this is the wrong reason. Wow. This is the wrong reason to send cops shit.

You gotta get canceled. That's true. They have probably done stuff. They have done stuff. I will say try to make sure it's better, it can be safer if it's, if dog shit is used then DNA kids harder to track. You know what? The safest shit of all to use.

No, I don't. Should you fight on the street? Panther shit. Panther shit. Panther shit. Yeah. Yeah. I think FBI is never going to figure that one out.

Yeah. I can't. They're not the technology. Get right on. I'll get right on that. Yeah. We're going to go collect Panther shit and be gone for a month. You could be their unabomber for like 15 years.

You're trying to track down what kind of shit is getting put in people's mailboxes until your brother sends them a letter saying, I know someone who has access to a lot of Panther shit and grudge. Tragic tale. Tales all this time. And then you can get an HBO miniseries where they make you look slightly like you're in a boy band. Only slightly.

It's like you were in a boy band but aged out. Yeah. Yeah. You were in a boy band. So the code of silence also extends to friendly politicians. Here's from the Intercept Report. Soon after he came to the confidential section, he was given the assignment of investigating a deputy superintendent.

The allegation was that the officer or the official lived outside the city. Mills worked on the case for months and concluded the allegation was true. He produced a thick file. How does that take months? I'm sorry. They have to take months to figure that out. They're cops. Incredible.

You gotta make allowances for cop writing. The caper of where does this guy who works here live? Yeah. Very funny. The next day, the file came back to him. There was a yellow post-it note with a handwritten message, make it unfounded. So that's fun. Awesome.

Amazing. Yeah. Make it unfounded. Cops are a breed of their own. Poetry. Poetry. Yeah. Actually, there's a long history of like, yeah, politicians do this stuff with cops

all the time. If I remember the story right, Rahm Emanuel's nephew or something killed a guy in a car crash and the CPD, Emanuel got the CPD to just like, never investigated it. They just were like, oh, someone died in a car crash and it just went away. It's real fun. Yeah. So eventually, shortly after, those two cops get detained at the police academy. The FBI and the CPD move on Watts and his partner, Muhammad.

And no one else, interestingly, because again, if you think about this for about five seconds, there are an enormous number of people who either know about this operation or are actively involved in running a fucking drug cartel. That is one of the biggest players in the South Side who are still just cops. And like the CPD goes after exactly two people. There are like dozens of people who were actively involved in this, who are still cops. And you know, the only real tradition to this is that the FBI and the CPD are complicit, which is that, you know, I mean, so parts of the CPD want to keep doing, keep, keep

running the cartel. The FBI is like both the FBI and the CPD also have an interest in keeping this covered up because they don't want like, you know, oh, hey, look at the look at the loss of trust in law enforcement. It comes out that there were actually two cartels running in the same place at the same time, parallel to each other. And then we didn't catch them like, yeah, but it's great because literally nothing happens to these people.

They're still out there. They're still doing cop shit. But yeah, only two people went down for that, and yeah, so the cartel is just still there. It's, that's good. It's still still operating. Well, it proves that if you put in the work, you can really build something that lasts. And I think that's a lesson we all should be inspired by. Pull yourself up by your jackboot straps and yeah, it's good stuff.

Okay. So eventually, number two, on May 4th, 1886, someone threw a stick of dynamite at some cops in Haymarket Square in Chicago to do a general strike for the eight hour work day. They sure did. The cops fired wildly into the crowd and the state rounded up a bunch of completely random anarchists who by their own admission had nothing to do with it and had them executed. Now the cops for their part built a statue for the cops at Haymarket. Now the first of these statues was destroyed on May 4th, 1927 by a guy who just ran.

This, this was right. So he, he, he, he had the, he had, he was like, he was a streetcar driver, right? And he had to like, every single day he had to go past the statue of the Haymarket cop. And one day he was just like, no, and he, he, he ran his streetcar off of the streetcars or like on rails, right? He ran them off of the rails and rammed it into the statue. This guy rules. So the cops built another statue and that, that second statue was blown up by the weather

underground on October 6th, 1969. The cops make another statue. The third statue is also blown up by the weather underground on October 5th, 1970. Good work guys. That was like, that was less than a year later. Yep. Yep. They did it again.

And so the cops, they originally, they rebuilt it again, right? And originally they have it under like a 24 hour armed guard. Jesus Christ. And then, and then, and then, but even then they were so like, okay, we can't protect it. So they moved it into an enclosed courtyard in the middle of the Chicago, of the Chicago Police Academy because they're too cowardly to show it in public. Awesome.

See, that's good. That's a win. That's a win. They realize everyone hates them so much that they have to hide the statue to the assholes who got killed. Yeah. That's great. One day, one day, that fourth statue will follow the first three.

One day. One day. By the mere cosmic forces of the universe. One day. By entropy. The force of entropy will one day destroy the statue. Yes. Okay, so on to story number four.

Story number four is the Chicago Police Department's black site. So the Chicago Police Department has a black site called home and square. So normally, you know, you go to a police station and you get booked, right? They book you. They put you into the system and, you know, because you're in the system, like, you know where people, people can find you, right? Because you can just look someone up. You can look someone up in the system.

At home and square, they don't book people. If you just, if you go there, you just disappear. There's no record of you. There's no, there's no way to contact a lawyer if you're in there. Your lawyer doesn't know where you are because, again, there's no records of where you are. You've just been grabbed off the street and taken to a building. Yeah. And, and this is a, so storage people there tends to be pretty short.

They don't tend to hold people longer than a couple of days. But what it's there for is this is, this is a confession machine. This is, this is a way to force confessions out of people by just, you know, literally disappearing them and denying them access to lawyers or literally anyone knowing where they are and they're just holding them until they confess. And also, yeah. So, so at home and square, prisoners are routinely shackled for, for hours, like like tens of hours, sometimes 24 hours, beaten, denied phone calls and robbed constantly.

This is, this is another fun CPD tradition is, yeah, they'll just take you to this black site and then rob you and then maybe they'll release you, but, you know, they've still robbed you. And yes, you know, they do these beatings and these beatings are incredibly intense, like, you know, they're punching people, they're doing like knee strikes, you're doing elbow strikes, you're hitting people with batons, sometimes they're tasering people. We have a report that the cops filed of listening, listed as a cop being assaulted. And the thing that they're listing as a non, it was like, like non like fist assault was

the guy spat blood. Yeah. Well, yeah. And they listed that as an assault on the cops blood on them. Yeah. It's great. It's yeah. And they also do things like they put like flex cuffs around people's necks.

Oh, my. Gee. Torture. Yeah. That is. Yeah. Yeah. That's a way for someone to die.

It's almost like that's maybe part of the intention is that maybe someone will quote accidentally die. Oh, we'll get to that. Okay. So. Not great. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's not it's it's bad. There's another guy who. Okay. So the cops are completely convinced this guy who is completely innocent. Well, okay. I do want to say like, I'm going to say a lot of people are innocent because they are. But also like, even if you're guilty, you know, one deserves this.

Like maybe the cops doing it deserve it. But even then, it's I don't even think they do. It's not. Yeah. You don't. Yeah. No. It's not a thing you do.

Yeah. Like this guy. Yeah. It's yeah. It's it's really grim. Like, yeah. So they hold this guy's mouth open with a pen, right? And then they keep elbowing him in the stomach until he throws up.

And so he tries to get medical attention because he keeps throwing up because he has asthma. I mean, also because he just got elbowed in the stomach. Yeah. Yeah. And instead of giving him medical treatment, even though he like easily could have died, the cops just beat him up for asking. Yeah. Another guy who gets sexually abused with the barrel of a gun.

And when he starts screaming, the gun goes on a rant about how he needs to be careful or he might accidentally pull the trigger. Oh boy. Yeah. It's it's bad. So this is this is all within that specific. Yeah. This is this is this is all just in Homeland Square.

He claims that like the cell he's being held in, if he doesn't get any food, doesn't get any water, they keep him there for hours. And the like the cell just smells like blood and like feces because yeah, yeah, they don't let people go to the bathroom. Two other individuals, Stephanie Martinez and Calvin Kofi described relieving themselves will shackled in a home and square interrogation room. Martinez locked up in 2006 was told by a guard that she did not have the key to Martinez's handcuffs and could not take her to the bathroom.

Kofi to take into home and square on the 6th of February 2015 on suspicion of narcotic activity defecated on the floor after two hours fruitlessly requesting for the bathroom. A police officer made Calvin clean it up with his skull cap. The lawsuit alleges it's these people are sick. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. They hate that. It's like, yeah, it's cop shit. Huh. Yep. And you know, they do it. They're holding children in here. Like they have people as young as 15 who are being just literally everything is about

this is that when so sometimes you get sort of like arrested normally, although again, I should mention that the Constitution does not exist. Like it's it's fake. It's a lie. No one ever gets fucking read the Miranda rights. It doesn't matter because the Constitution doesn't exist if you're poor. Yeah. It sort of exists if you're not, but I will guarantee you they're reading their Miranda

rights to people who look like they got money. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. There's actually a story of these two Puerto Rican guys who got brought in and they like the cops are like trying to get them to give us something and they just like they start name dropping like civil rights lawyers and the cops are like, oh, OK, OK, we're good.

We'll drive you back. If you don't talk, we'll drive you back to like where you came from. Yeah. And it's yeah, it's it's extremely grim. Yeah. They just want to fuck with people who can't defend themselves. Yeah. Yeah.

And you know, I mean, the way they do this, right, like they they they do these raids where like everyone's they're they're not wearing badges. Everyone's just like wearing that like like black armor and like black masks. And so people describe getting like dragged out of their house and like they don't know if they're getting robbed or like if they're being kidnapped and then they are being kidnapped, but they're just being kidnapped like by the cops and they get dragged and then again, they're dragging like 15 year olds into into this thing. There's one guy who gets found unresponsive in an interrogation room.

Now the police say they died from heroin overdose, but this makes literally no sense. So the first reason why it doesn't make any sense is that the cops initially lie about where he about where he like had the overdose and died because they don't want to reveal that he, you know, was in their secret black site. So they like lied and said that he was another he was at another site. Now the other thing, you know, that contradicts to claim that this guy was had heroin overdose is that the hospital when he when when the hospital saw him, they wrote that he was sober. So I mean, he couldn't have he could have had a heroin overdose in terms of the cops

injecting him full of hair. Yeah. Like, yeah, that's the most likely thing. Like there's no part of this. So this guy was selling cocaine, right? Um, but again, he's selling cocaine, not heroin. And the other end, you know, his partner, like there was another guy who was selling cocaine with like his partner and everyone who knew him was completely insistent that

he, you know, he doesn't do drugs, right? He sells them because, you know, you sell drugs, but yeah. And the cops and the other thing is the cops do the cop thing where they change their story twice. So originally they said that he like committed suicide by heroin overdosing and then they changed their story to he died by accidents. The other thing that indicates that he probably did not in fact die from heroin overdose is that there's bruises all over his face.

He has a busted lip. Yeah. His neck is super red and none of that shows up in the police autopsy. And oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this all reads just like a standard burge error interrogation. So like they beat him, they put a bag over his head to suffocate him and then you plant

heroin on him. And, you know, you call him dead by two, that's the day's work. Yeah. Yeah. And there's another thing that I should mention here about the story, which is that, okay, so this guy is in a Chicago police department black site, right? How did he get heroin in? Like everyone in this black site is literally shackled to a wall.

Like there's no, the only place the heroin could possibly have come from is the cops. So it's like, you know, and yeah, independent autopsy says he dies of asphyxiation. So yeah, I'm going to read something from the Guardian about the guy who, the guy's partner who was in the next cell over. The other partner who requested to be cited as John Doe while he rebuilds his life post-conviction was in a home and square interrogation room near Galvin's. While Doe was unable to see inside, he told the Guardian he heard a lot of commotion, and then booming and banging, and then a gagging sound coming from his friend's cell.

His partner, yeah, so this guy, like his partner, like he's, that guy's also like chained to a wall for like 12 hours, he has something to say, I heard a holler, I heard officers talking to him. After that, I just heard a lot of commotion, like boom, boom, boom, boom, and banging, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I didn't hear nothing after that. My door was kind of cracked, and then they shut it after that. They shut my door all the way.

Before the police shot the door, Doe said, I heard a gagging sound, like it makes a choking noise. Like choking, like somebody was choking after the commotion, like choking, uh, yeah. Oh yeah, it's very obvious what happened from the get-go. Yeah, yeah, like they tortured this guy to death, and yeah, it's, yeah, and the other fun part about home and square is that home and square is also used to torture political personers. So Brian, Brian Jacob Church is a member of the NATO 3, which is a group of anti-NATO

protesters in 2012 who got set up by an incredibly elaborate government entrapment scheme and arrested for it. And he was taken immediately to home and square. He's never read his Miranda rights, he's cuffed to a bench for 17 hours, and he asked to call his lawyer because like a good leftist, he has a national lawyer's yield number written on his arm, and, you know, this is something that's important. So the Guardian talked to like dozens of people who were held here, right? Exactly two of them were able to contact a lawyer and they were both white, and church

is one of them, and this is actually how, uh, part of how home and square goes public because Brian Jacob Church like talks to the press about it, and Spencer Ackerman, a great journalist, does a bunch of incredible reporting and like brings the black site to light. And so there's 7,185 people we can prove were taken to home and square, 6,000 of those people are black, less than 1% of those people had their arrests logged, which means the cops just vanished them, it's almost certainly more people. Now I'm gonna read something about this from the book, Writings from the World of Policing. This home and square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of practices

that date back more than 40 years, said Flint Taylor, the civil rights lawyer most associated with pursuing area two commander John Burge. Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, Taylor continued, my clients often told me they'd been taken from one police station to another before ending up in area two where they were tortured. That way the police prevent their families and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce the torture or other means confession from them. So yeah, that's a fucking police reform, instead of taking them from police station

to police station, the police have now been reformed so that they have one institutionalized black site instead of multiple ones. Home and square is still open to this day, this came out in 2015, there have been over half a decade of protest against it. Supposedly the rules have changed and if you get arrested they have to put you in the system, but home and square is still open. There's probably another one like somewhere that they've switched which side they're doing their black sites on and yeah, well, I have a closing statement which is that it is an

inhuman crime that a single one of these fucking demons is allowed to roam our streets with a badge and the authority to rape, torture and murder us and the certainty that the system will beat us into a pulp if we attempt, even in the smallest way, most symbolic way possible to resist them. The police must be abolished, there is no alternative. For the sake of our survival, for the survival of our children and for the sake of every generation that has bore its horrors before us, we could only abolish the police, salt the earth upon which it stands and drive the very concept of policing into a space of such

infamy and terror that even the worst among us would not dare to even propose bringing it back. Also, get rid of that last statue. Yeah, that one, it destroyed. Let's knock that one out of there too. Yeah, I mean, I feel like everyone who's ever been to that site should have the universal right to take a hammer and maybe an RPG and just do whatever they want to that building. Yeah, I think the men who continued to work in CPD, like anyone who was ever arrested

by them or otherwise brutalized them, should just forever have the right to just give them like a solid shot to the balls, you know, like just like they get to wear a little sign around their neck. And it's like, oh, that guy used to that guy was, you know, was one of Burgess dudes. So anybody who sees him can just give him a give him a little haymaker right in the right in the bread basket. Yeah, that is a proposal that is I'm running from mayor of Chicago. I mean, I look our mayors all suck.

So, you know, move move over here and we can propose a solution to this problem that is so unbelievably not proportionally violence to what the police have been doing, that it boggles belief. And I'm pretty sure I can still manage to be corrupt. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's Chicago, you can't not. I mean, I guess I mean, life was sort of corrupt.

Life was less corrupt than normal. She's just bad. But yeah, it's Chicago, you'll find corruption will be foisted upon you. I'm I'm I'm actually fine with that. Well, another another uplifting fun episode of it could happen. Yeah, I will say this, like, or as Garrison named it last year earlier today, hi, here's a problem. Bye.

You know, I will say this at any time, any time someone tells you that, like, no, it's fine. We're going to reform the police. Just like remind them that reforming the Chicago Police Department went was that the reform was that we don't have black sites. We don't have we don't have consolidated the black side. Yeah, yeah. It's like we went from multiple black sites to one black site and also they probably moved

it again. It's just you just have to get rid of that is that is the essence of police report. Report. So yeah. They're anyway. Yep. There's a problem. Okay.

Bye. Yeah. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash

sources. Thanks for listening.