Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 24

Episode Date: March 5, 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. Alright, I will find some clever way to introduce us.

Hi, Daniel. Huh. You know what? I might just go with that. I will find some clever way to introduce us, and that is the introduction now. Because I said it. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today, we are going to be talking about internet privacy and some new bills that will possibly undermine it. Today, I have with me Christopher.

Hello, Christopher. Hello, I am here. I don't know if excited is the right word, but... No, no one should ever be... People are rarely excited to come on the show. Yeah, no, this is a mild dread of the future of the internet. I try, because we definitely can. Things don't need to be always horrible and grim, even when you're talking about things that aren't great. But yeah, today we'll be talking about some interesting things.

As per the title of this episode, we'll probably be related to, we are talking about the Proposed Earn It Act. I'll explain what it is and the different kind of implications it could have on how everyone uses the internet. But also, it affects a few specific types of people in particular. But kind of part of this whole thing, we're going to start off by talking about something a little bit different than the segue to the Earn It Act. So last year, Apple, the company, announced a controversial plan to install photo scanning software into every device. Apple's kind of long been seen as a pro privacy company. In the past, they have refused FBI demands to help investigators bypass locked phones. So this idea and this plan to create a backdoor into the iPhone storage system to scan for photos,

it was kind of a big deal coming for Apple, because they were definitely, at least in the past, known as a generally, like out of all of the companies, the ones that, if you're dealing with sensitive matters, Apple is generally the better one. That it has become less of a case in the past few years, but that definitely was the case. So when this kind of idea was announced, there was a decently sized global coalition also formed to push back on this thing. And the company did pause the plan. Now, this came at a time that a lot of different kind of companies were also pushing back against not-safe-for-work materials, specifically for relating to the transaction of money and banks.

This was around the time that OnlyFans was flip-flopping on whether they would actually have not-safe-for-work kind of materials. As a part of this kind of growing trend of worrying about, the term now is like child sexual abuse materials. More traditionally, it's called child pornography. So it's part of this kind of overall kind of extra focus that tech companies have about being worried that if someone is doing that who is underage, or if someone's being exploited who's underage, they could un-financially hurt the company. So a lot of companies have been trying to do this thing to prevent that legal and financial issue from happening. Now, of course, all this really actually ends up doing is just negatively affecting sex workers.

But that's kind of a topic for a different episode because we're talking about the Ornate Act more specifically and not specifically talking about OnlyFans. But this was Apple's plan to kind of scan all these photos to make sure that there were not naked photos of children. Now, there's a whole bunch of other privacy issues around that because, I mean, obviously teens do take a nude and send them to each other and there is really no stopping that. So the idea that all these photos are getting scanned and then seen and then like it would be... The idea was that parents would be alerted if something was found on the phone automatically, which means that for me, I have a whole bunch of other issues with that.

Like that is a whole other kind of level of fucked up, especially for queer kids. Like that is a whole... Again, but that is mostly a whole other discussion that I'm not going to talk about right now because I do want to focus this more on the Ornate Act. So this plan was paused, but now that may not necessarily matter actually because Congress kind of wants to force Apple's hand along with essentially every other company that allows users to store or share messages or kind of really any content. And Congress is some senators and there's a bill that will try to essentially mandate photo scanning and specific photo scanning technology approved by the government.

So yeah. So while Apple's plan would have put privacy and it's the security at risk for all of its users, the Ornate Act compromises the security and free speech for basically everyone who uses the internet. The bill would create serious legal risks for businesses that host content such as messages or photos stored in the cloud, online backups, and potentially even any kind of cloud hosting sites such as Amazon Web Services which means basically most of the internet. So all of these services and companies would be in serious legal risk unless they use this government approved scanning tools.

A version of this bill was first introduced two years ago sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, and Senator Richard Lumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. And like a lot of these other things, it is allegedly aimed at tackling so-called child sexual abuse material online, which is a problem. The kids definitely do get exploited. Kids do get groomed, exploited. Photos of children do get shared online. That actually is a real issue.

Now, a lot of the ways that these tools get implemented don't actually address that issue. And of course, it doesn't actually deal with the people that do this, like the bad people that do exploit kids. It doesn't necessarily deal with them either. That is what they wrap this idea as. The original bill that was introduced two years ago threatened encryption and privacy features that would have actually put Americans' privacy, particularly the privacy of children, at risk. It also gutted Section 230 in ways that caused over 50 civil rights groups to pen a letter describing the potential consequences of such things like censorship,

cramming down on free speech, and the basically destruction of encryption. So when the legislation failed to advance two years ago, digital liberty advocates, sex workers, civil rights organizations all breathed a sigh of relief. But this past month, as I record this in February 2022, a group of lawmakers, again, led by Senator Richard Blumenthal and Senator Lindsey Graham, reintroduced the Earned Act, a slightly modified version of it. And on the 10th of February, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the dangerous Earned Act bill. So, yeah, it is chugging along a bit further than what it did last time.

The Earned Act aims to tackle the horrific criminal activity related to child sexual abuse material by making Section 230 protections contingent on the prevention and response to such material online. So Section 230 shields online services, like, you know, commonly used social media, from liability from most user-generated content. Under Earned, Section 230 would be amended to enable civil claims and state criminal prosecution related to child abuse materials online against platforms. Now, already this can kind of happen federally a little bit, but it depends on how the company, like, responds to it.

But this would introduce a whole new wave for civil claims and state claims to be filed against companies like this. If material like this is to be found hosted on their site, you know, including, you know, that that would even include if, like, someone who's underage operates a not-safe work Twitter account that they probably should not be operating. But this could also, this could basically make the company in trouble. They could fall under state claims or civil claims. So, as a result, online services could be subject to endless litigation under 50 different, you know, legal law systems for all the states regarding, you know, finding child sexual abuse material online.

So, the bill's proponents claim that this isn't necessarily a problem for any service, as long as it is scanning the files and reporting child sexual abuse material to law enforcement. Internet companies are already required to report suspected material if they come across it. And they do report material on a massive scale that often comes with a lot of mistakes. Facebook is often held as a positive example by lawmakers in law enforcement for how much they do report such material. But while their new scanning techniques have produced many millions of reports, most of them are inaccurate, like most of them actually aren't of minors. It's not, it's not actually, none of the scanning material is good,

because a lot of cases, many people up into their 30s can get often flagged, and often, like, even non-humans can get flagged, like, pictures of fruit. Like, it's not like, it's not like, none of these scanning tools are actually very good. Yeah, and like, this is, I think, I think a thing that, like, if you've never, like, had to work with a machine learning algorithm before, I think it's difficult to understand how unbelievably bad these things are. Yeah, like, it's just, it's, oh god, like, the incomprehensible horror of trying to get a machine learning algorithm to do the thing that you wanted to do

and not do the other things that you're not, that you don't want it to do, to, like, you know, be able to tell the difference between, like, a particularly smooth and round peach and, like, child sex abuse material, you know, you human being can do this, right? The machine cannot, and it is, it is horrifically inaccurate, you have to do all kinds of, like, hacking stuff together in order to get the stuff to work, and yeah, it's a fiasco. A good example of this that I've heard before, that I'm probably going to butcher this explanation, but, you know, that you can take, you know, a photo of a wolf,

maybe even three photos of a wolf, and say, here, these are photos of wolves, here's a, here's other, here's these other photos, find which ones are wolves, and it'll, you know, it'll sort through other ones, so some of them have wolves, some of them don't, and it only finds one picture that says, this one's, based on the three photos you've given me, this photo is a wolf, and instead the photo is not, the photo is of a tree, and you're like, why did it tell me this is a wolf? And the computer will answer, well, look at all the, all of the backgrounds are the same, because it's trying, it's trying to match, like, it doesn't have the same thing that humans do,

with all these computer algorithms that are trying to learn to replicate, and to, like, find these patterns, it is never perfect. So, the big thing that people often overlook is that, yeah, specifically with this, like, with Facebook's scanning tool, and the millions of reports that it does make, you know, federal law enforcement will frequently use the massive number of reports to suggest there is this giant recent uptick in child sexual abuse materials, but that's not because there actually is, that's because this,

the scanning that some companies are doing is just so bad, like, it's just, it's just so inaccurate that it flags so many things. So, like, in action, the new EARNET Act would just pave a massive new surveillance system run by private companies that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe, right? The idea is to compel private companies to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement, and it may not stop there. The EARNET Act could ensure anything hosted online,

including, like, backups, websites, cloud photos, and more, is all scanned. Now, of course, you can say, I mean, there is no actual true privacy online, right? The NSA does see everything, which is basically true, but stuff like local police departments in the FBI do not have constant access to what the NSA has. It does actually, like, legally, it does actually take some time for that to happen. The fact that all these private companies would be doing it for them, and the fact that this would actually break encryption,

makes people, like, the FBI, makes the local law enforcement have a much easier time accessing what we do on the internet. Because, yes, the NSA kind of does always see everything, but this actually is quite different in terms of the accessibility of that information. And I think it's also, you know, to go back into one of the sort of, like, encryption arguments, too, right? So, okay, once you put a backdoor into encryption, right? Once you have, you know, you have your system, you have your encryption system, but, you know, now there's a way to access it, right?

Because, oh, well, we need to access these, you know, we need to be able to decrypt this in order to see if there's, like, child pornography materials on it, right? Once that backdoor exists, anyone who finds it can use it for anything they want. And it's not even just that, like, we'll get into some other things around encryption, but, yeah, continue. Yeah, and, you know, and I think this is something that I think people don't, like, the people who are just thinking about this in terms of child pornography don't think about, which is that, like, I don't know, like, these kinds of backdoors, right?

Like, other people can find them. Yes. And, you know, okay, now you've just put a backdoor in all of your encryption, like, hey, here's, you know, like, you are going to get people killed. And you're going to get people killed because you're going to have people who are doing things under governments that, you know, will, like, you know, you're going to have people in Myanmar. You're going to have people in... Yes.

You're going to have people in Egypt. You're going to have people in Syria who, like, these regimes and, like, these, you know, private companies, right, are going to sell the backdoors to these regimes. And they're going to use it to hunt down, torture, and kill people. So... Yeah. There is a lot of problems with it, especially how it kind of addresses encryption. Because the bill does try to actually have some encryption protections.

But the way they go about it is not adequate. And it even kind of fosters its own negation in some ways if you read the entire bill. So... But I'll get more into encryption in a sec. There are other, like, technical issues with the way this bill is designed and how it would be enacted. There is this sort of benefit to having a legal material that is actually exploding miners being primarily hosted on big tech platforms. Because these platforms are used so much and are mostly non-restricted.

So it makes catching this stuff and reporting it actually much easier. Like, it is... If they're hosted on these mainstream things, it does make seeing it and reporting less difficult. So not only will this bill make tech companies be more likely just to ban all not-safe work material in general, right? Because if companies are forced to scan and they're going to be filing swimming reports, this will result in a lot more companies just saying no nude photos at all. Like, just completely gone. Not only will this bill just make tech companies more likely to ban all not-safe work content in general,

which would be horrible for sex workers and just a bad precedent. But yeah, they would be more likely just to do that because of how much over-scanning there would be and just a whole bunch of things. It would create too many fears of legal repercussions. Thus, you know, that would force people who distribute child porn onto more sketchy sites and sites that might just refuse to scan content in general because they're temporary hosting. But the bill could also just scare these bad people off of mainstream platforms and make them voluntarily migrate to more niche and hard to find the corners of the internet,

making illegal content harder to catch and take down, because there will always be weird temporary sites to host this type of thing. Like, these bad people will find a way. It is going to always be a problem. And so, in a way, it is better to have these things on mainstream platforms because reporting them and taking them down can be much easier. It's like when people really advocate platforms like Telegram shut down all fascist channels, right? The thing is, is that there's a lot of benefits to having these chat rooms on Telegram

because it makes them really easy to monitor and really easy to infiltrate. So, there's a lot worse places for fascists to organize. If you're doing it on Telegram, it's actually really easy to watch. So, it's this weird give and take in terms of where these things happen because they are going to happen somewhere. So, I now want to talk about how specifically this bill threatens online encryption services. The bill would strip critical legal protection for websites, apps, and specifically Section 230. If passed, it would empower many different levels of government to make sweeping new internet regulations.

Individual states will be able to pass laws to hold private companies like libel as long as they somehow relate their new rules to child abuse materials. It's like they will be able to have a whole bunch of new rules on internet regulations if they can sift it through this lens. The goal is to get states to pass these laws that will punish companies when they deploy end-to-end encryption or offer other encryption services. This includes messaging systems like WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and as well as web hosting like Amazon Web Services.

Earnit aims to spread the use of tools to scan all online content against law enforcement databases directly in a myths and facts document distributed by the bill's proponents. It even names a government-approved software program that they could mandate called a PhotoDNA, which is a program that Microsoft made that reports directly to law enforcement databases. So, Earnit doesn't specifically attack encryption per se, but that's because it doesn't need to. It doesn't have to because of the way the bill is designed. How it approaches encryption is actually a little more insidious.

It allows the fact that encryption exists on the platform itself to be used as evidence against a company in order to find it libel for hosting child sexual abuse materials. So, they can use the fact that encryption exists as evidence, which is wild. This is the thing CCP does a lot. They'll use the fact that somebody is using a VPN, for example, as evidence that they're attacked. This happens constantly, and it makes a lot of encryption stuff incredibly unsafe because you show up with your phone, you have signal on it, and the CCP is like, well, this is proof.

We're going to lock it up and throw away the key. Yeah, it's extremely bad. So, the result is that laws will make companies liable if they don't scan and report user content for child sexual abuse materials, which they can't do unless they break encryption. Big companies like Apple are going to fold to protect themselves. So, Earnit coerces these sites and platforms and services to do this sort of scanning and not just on messages, but all online content encrypted or not.

Companies that handle online content would have to weigh the benefit of their users securely encrypting their data content against the legal risk of doing so. And encryption becomes much harder when it puts the company's bottom line at risk. End-to-end encryption isn't just for messages. It's not just on signal. It secures most of the internet, or at least a lot of it, keeping what you do allegedly private and safe online. You can't have a secure internet where all the content is also screened,

because you can't have an encryption alongside mass scanning requirements. So, this isn't just an attack on encryption. It's an attack on any fundamental security that the internet has. Yeah, and there's lots of... Like, God. There are lots of extremely technical reasons why this is an extremely bad thing. Yes. It's like, okay, yeah, you think malware is bad now?

Oh, gosh. The things that will happen... You think people are stealing apes now. The things that will happen, if you have to deal with an internet that's unencrypted, or an absolute horror show. Yeah, this is a thing bad enough that I do not have the words to express how catastrophic this would be, just the fundamental structure of the internet.

It really is not just for messages. The Urnit myth and fast document also specifically attacks Amazon for not scanning enough of its content. And since Amazon is the home of Amazon Web Services, which hosts a huge number of websites, that implies that the bill's aim is to ensure that anything hosted online also gets scanned, like everything. The online service providers, even the smallest ones,

will be compelled to scan user content with government-approved software, like Photo2NA. And if Urnit supporters succeed in getting large platforms like CloudFair and Amazon Web Services to scan, they may not even need to compel smaller websites, because the government will already have access to the data through the cloud platforms. So as long as they get these big hosting platforms, they won't even need to bother with a lot of smaller sites.

I think there's another thing that's probably worth mentioning here, which is so we don't really have the time to fully go into this in this episode. There's a lot of this sort of stuff is being pushed by these incredibly right-wing evangelical anti-poor groups. And their goal is just to eliminate anything that is not part of their sort of fundamentalist Christianity from the internet. And those people, this is particularly relevant to this, because those people are going to find a way to bring lawsuits against these companies,

specifically so that they can do this, because what you've done is you've just handed them a gun. Poor Insights will all be taken down, because they'll be facing so many endless lawsuits. Only fans will no longer host ethical poor. None of this will happen. All of it will be taken down. This will attack sex workers to such an absurd degree. It'll make a lot of, if not most, online sex work just impossible,

because there will be so many lawsuits always happening that companies will just always ban it, just because they can't risk dealing with all those legal fees. And even the fact that state prosecutors and private attorneys will be able to drag an online service provider into court over accusation that they're users committed crimes, and then use the fact that the service chose to use encryption at all as evidence against them, the fact that that's a strategy specifically allowed under Ernett

makes the possibilities of this type of thing just endless. Imagine they'll be able to take down signal so easily, because it's wild. If they can find one instance of an abuser using signal or has you signal, then basically all of signal's encryption will be severely threatened, because of the way that legal fines will be forced onto this company. It's specifically for any kind of service allowed in the states. And yeah, it's really frustrating, because people, including senators who are pro-Ernett,

say that the new tools are necessary to tackle the issue of online child abuse and the distribution of illegal materials online. But obviously possessing, viewing, or distributing child porn or child sexual abuse materials is already written into law as an extremely serious crime. It's like the most legal thing you can do. Yes, and it has a broad framework of existing laws seeking to eradicate it. Companies can already get in federal trouble if they're found to continue, if stuff is found and they continue to host it,

or if their stated purpose is to host it. Some of the most trouble you can get into, at least on the books, because you can look at how many cops are involved with this type of thing, as evidence that it may not get enacted upon always. There was a horrible story recently of a teacher who... Sorry, this is going to be quite graphic, but skip ahead like a minute or two if you don't want to, of a teacher who fed students food containing her husband's semen.

Her husband was a cop, and her and her husband, again, who was a cop? The leader of a SWAT team had raped multiple children, and had pictures of children, and both of them were doing this together. The leader of a SWAT team was like, police! If you look at people often doing this type of stuff, it's cops a lot of the time. Cops rape so many kids that they arrest and detain. You can Google this every week, and you'll find new reports of it.

It is horrific. Online service providers that have actual knowledge of an apparent or imminent violation of current laws around child sexual abuse materials are required to report it, or they will face legal trouble. You can kill people and get in less trouble with the law than you will get if you intentionally do this stuff. There are scenarios where you can kill people where you won't get in trouble with law. There is no scenario where you intentionally do this stuff

where unless you're a cop with legal protection, your other cops won't rat you out. Or you're very, very rich. Unless you have extra legal protection, you are going to vanish. We already have a lot of stuff to deal with this, and the methods proposed by Ernit would not only chip at the last semblance of privacy online, but it would arguably make actually combating real instances of online child abuse

a lot more difficult. It would pressure distributors and abusers into harder to find corners of the internet that don't fall under big tech companies, plus the massive increase in content scanning would produce so many false flags, it would clog up any efforts to find actual materials because so much stuff is going to get flagged. You're going to get a wave of so many images that you have to sort through and figure out if the people in it actually are underage,

because a lot of people that are 30 can also look underage sometimes. With lighting, it's going to be such a task. We can hardly see this in effect with new scanning techniques used by Facebook that have produced millions of reports to law enforcement. Most of them inaccurate. Of course, federal law enforcement uses this massive number of reports produced by low-quality scanning software to suggest there's a huge uptick in these images,

thus armed with misleading statistics, the same law enforcement groups make new demands to break encryption, or with Ernit, hold companies liable if they don't scan user content. The scanning algorithms, right? Okay, this is an oversimplification, but to conceptualize why this is a bad idea, this is the same stuff that... You know how there's those trending topics on Twitter? Yeah.

They'll show you a tweet, and the tweet will be like... I don't know, there'll be someone talking about a subway sandwich, and it'll show up under trains, because it's a subway. Those are the algorithms that they want to fucking run the entire internet through. See, I've seen some very erotic bell peppers, and these things aren't going to be good, and independent child protection experts are not asking for systems to read everyone's private messages. Rather, they recognize that children, particularly children that might be abused or exploited,

actually need encrypted and private messaging just as much, if not more, than the rest of us. No one, including the most vulnerable among us, can have privacy or security online without strong encryption. The Ernit Act doesn't really just target big tech. What it does is it targets every individual internet user, treating all of us as potential criminals who deserve to have every single message, photograph or document scanned, and compare it against a government database, directly to law enforcement. Since direct government surveillance would be blatantly unconstitutional and provoke public outrage, Ernit uses tech companies, from the large ones to the smallest ones, as its tools to bypass that constitutional barrier.

If you hit the tech companies where it hurts, they will not allow this type of stuff at all. You cannot deny that this is also just part of a larger effect to ban porn, and just to ban any kind of sex recall line as well. You cannot deny that this is definitely an ingrained part of this, particularly with a lot of its supporters. Of course, Senator Lindsey Graham, appealing to that side of the Republicans, this is a big part of just trying to remove porn and remove any not-safe work material from being hosted online. The strategy is to get private companies to do the dirty work of mass surveillance. It's the same tactic that governments tried to use this year,

trying to convince Apple to subvert its own encryption and scan all of its users' photos. It's the same strategy that the UK law enforcement is using to convince the British public to give up their privacy, having spent public money on a laughable publicity campaign that demonizes companies that use encryption. That's really how it's operating. I do want to shout out the EFF for providing a lot of the research that I used for compiling stuff on this episode. Thank you, EFF. You often do good work. That's the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They focus a lot on internet privacy issues. I do want to point people to a link tree.

It is L-I-N-K-T-R dot ee slash stop earn it. You can find different ways. If you're the type of person that enjoys calling representatives or something, it has links for that kind of thing. It has links to send automated messages to your representative to vote no on the Earn It Act. If you're the type of person that enjoys assigning petitions, it has more info on what Earn It is and what it does. A whole bunch of other stuff around organizing to help stop this bill. There's discord channels that have people organizing to stop this bill. Links for it on that has info on actions you can take. If you're interested in looking for the different ways that contribute, no single person can make an impact, but enough people can.

That's link tree slash stop earn it. Also, another shout out to the EFF. I want to say two closing things before we close this out. One, if you think that once you're handing the entire contents of the internet over to the government to run through scanning algorithms, the only thing they're ever going to scan for is child pornography, I have an NFT to sell you. There's a picture of a bridge. Once you buy this NFT of the bridge, you will own the Brooklyn Bridge. Contact me for more details. The second thing is that when we talk about anti porn stuff, when we talk about how the way you get around this is by banning all non-suitable work content.

Another thing that almost immediately gets banned, inevitably, when companies, for whatever reason, and this is true of companies that are trying to comply with the app store or stuff like that, whenever you get things that target non-suitable work content, they inevitably, without fail, target queer content. Content that has literally nothing at all through sexuality because this has always been, like accusing queer people of being child predators, has been the attack line on queer people. Queer people are always on the front line of all of this stuff. They will always be the first people impacted, they'll be the first people demonized, even if it's not even not safe work material, if it has nothing to do with it, it will still always be impacted more than basically anyone else.

We've been seeing this on YouTube constantly. Lots of people who just make trans content. Queer channels are always being banned or demonetized. Mark does adult content. It's horrifying. If you want an internet that has sex on it, if you want an internet that has queer people on it, expressing themselves in any way that's not literally just it's straight person, but you say queer. If that's a thing that you think is valuable, and if you think that it is important for queer people to be able to express themselves for their own health and safety, you have to oppose this.

Yes, you absolutely. I guess one final thing I'll add, because someone will probably message me about it. There is a slate opinion piece by somebody saying that this bill would actually let child abusers walk free, because they could use the fact that this bill essentially compels companies to do scanning software via government mandates because of this bill. In their mind, this could possibly violate the Fourth Amendment. This would allow abusers the evidence that they was collected to prosecute abusers to become invalid in court. This would actually make the bill actually make people walk free. I do not agree with this take. I don't think that's how it would work out at all, because especially you can use this for political organizing, you can use this same argument for a lot of cases, and it never works out that way,

because the government does not care about that sort of thing. That's not how it works. Even if things are getting violated in theory, that does not know. That's no way. They illegally seized Ted Kaczynski's evidence. It doesn't matter. That's not going to matter, because then this bill would be seen as a good thing, because it would prevent people from, then encryption wouldn't be necessary, because then none of the evidence that people would have gathered would ever be admissible in court. They would never design a bill like that. That's not the case. I disagree with this take. Do not send me this article saying, actually, it's going to have this happen, because I do not believe it, because this assumes that the government operates coherently and operates like...

No, the government does not care. No, again, the First Amendment is superseded by traffic law. No, you're not going to be able to use... No, this just will not secretly let abusers go free. This is not secretly a good thing, because it will make all evidence inadmissible in court. Bullshit. Anyway, I'll give a final shout out to the linktree slash stop earn it. That's L-I-N-K-T dot E-R slash stop earn it, if you're the type of person that likes doing those types of things. And also, it has links like discord channels for other types of organizing beyond petitions and calling and senators and sending messages and blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, that is the episode. Thank you for listening.

I just thought this is an important thing enough that I have not seen enough people talking about the Earn It Act and the way it does seriously threaten digital privacy. And because it was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to be pushed forward, it is actually chugging along on the slow legal process. So it's gotten further than what it got in 2020. So I thought it was actually worth talking about privacy issues, how it affects queer people, how it affects sex workers and all that general thing. It's very easy to feel hopeful with this kind of stuff, but we've beaten legislation like this before. Absolutely. One of my former childhood experiences was when we beat SOPA and PIPA. We can beat them. It takes a lot of mobilization, but I know we can beat this because we've beaten things like it before.

Agreed. Alright, that does it for us today. If you want to find us on a currently more secure than what it could be internet, you can follow us on Twitter at CoolZoneMedia and happen here pod. I think apparently Instagram too, so that's cool if you're an Instagram person. Good for you because Twitter is bad. You can find me on Twitter at HungryBotai. You can find me at meCHR3. You can indeed. That does it for us. Encryption!

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here. Obviously, as I'm sure everyone is being bombarded with the war in Ukraine is in its fifth day right now, something like that. We just passed 96 hours. By some accounts, more than 300,000 people have been made refugees. Those are going to be very inexact numbers, but it's likely to be somewhere between like 50 and 100,000 people per day being made refugees. And it's possible that's going to last for the foreseeable future. So much of the coverage that you will have seen at this point is going to focus on heroic pieces of resistance, things that Ukrainian civilians picking up arms, throwing Molotov cocktails, Ukrainian soldiers, destroying Russian armored columns. Some of that's going to be propaganda, some of that.

A decent amount of that's actually happening, obviously. We have a fair amount of documentation. But what I think has not gotten nearly as much play is the situation at the border of Ukraine and Poland. Because this refugee crisis is enormous, but it's also not sexy. And it points to a number of things that are ugly about some of the stuff that people like to celebrate at this conflict, including the conduct of President Zelensky, who has, I think, handled himself objectively well as a wartime leader, who is also, as you'll hear in the interview that's about to follow, made some decisions that have had a catastrophic impact on people's lives. So this is an interview conducted by a journalist, James Stout, who is working with us on this project and with another project that will be launching soon. With a person, an individual, an American who was, well, has a couple of different passports, but with a person who was in Ukraine when the invasion began and left and eventually wound up leaving on foot with tens of thousands of other people for the Polish border.

So this is a story of what it is like to flee a country at the beginning of a war. And the reality is that increasing numbers of Ukrainians are going to be facing every single day. So please listen. Hi there. Hey, Manny, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you? Good, good. Sorry to keep you up late. I'm sure you're exhausted. No, no, it's okay. It's okay. I actually just arrived at New Hostel in a new city. And I'm going to be up for a couple more hours anyway. So it's a good time to talk. Nice. Great. Do you mind if I record this?

Go ahead. Cool. Excellent. Let me explain what we're going to do. So I'm writing the piece for NBC on the refugee situation that's emerging. And then I'm also helping to make a podcast for iHeartRadio about a similar thing. So it's okay with you. We'll use the audio for one and then some of your words for another. Absolutely. How is my audio coming through? It's great, actually. It's really, really good. Are you on a phone or you're on a computer? I'm on a telephone right now. I don't have a computer with me. Cool. No, you're doing really well. If you're on a computer, I'd ask you to record a backup. But this is just fine. I'm recording. So yeah, like, it seems like you've had a pretty exhausting 48 hours now. So if we go back to when you were in Kiev, right?

Yeah. So I was in Kiev a few days ago. I was in Kiev, I mean, eight days ago. And then I went to Lviv four days ago. Okay. And how long have you been in Ukraine? I've been in Ukraine or I had been in Ukraine in total for one week. Okay. So you had not that long. And you, so you arrived in Kiev, you went to Lviv. Can you remember, like, where you were when you found out that the invasion was happening and that it was going to go past Donbass and into Ukraine? Yeah, of course. So I woke up on the morning of 24 February to the sound of air raid sirens outside. And it was a very confusing sound. I had never heard air raid sirens in real life. I just heard them in movies and television shows and such. And I knew immediately what had happened. I didn't even have to check the news. And I did check the news soon afterward. And there were bombings all over the country. There were reports of bombings in Ivano-Frankivsk, which is a city 100 kilometers south of Lviv where I was. And there were so many rumors flying around. There were rumors that the Russians were coming to Lviv at that moment, which was not the case, but can still be the case very soon.

Anyway, so I heard these air raid sirens as I woke up and I shook awake my roommate, who's a British journalist, and I told him we might be bombed any minute. So we went outside to try and find a shelter. Pretty much still in our nightclothes, we went outside to try and find a shelter. And there were loudspeakers saying, everybody remain calm, find shelter, help the elderly, stockpile water. And it was repeating this on repeat. And people were shuffling along. There was a sense of muted panic. So it was an outright panic, but it was a sense of urgency, I guess you could call it. And we were at war. And that was when I realized that Ukraine was being invaded at that very moment. Wow. Yeah, it sounds dramatic. And at that point, you went to the shelter, I'm guessing. So did you spend some time there before making the decision to head to Poland? So after about 15 minutes, the air raid sirens stopped. The news generally came around the city that Lviv was not about to be bombed, but nevertheless, a massive exodus of people began from Lviv at that moment because, okay, we're safe for now, but for how long are we safe? It was the general sentiment that was around.

So everybody just started making for the train station, the bus station, they got into their cars. People were just leaving. There were huge lines at the ATMs. There were huge lines at the grocery stores. People were buying non-perishables. It was just not a panic full-out, I would call it, but it was an urgent departure. It was an urgent exodus that was happening. So me and my roommate, we went to the train station, waited in line for two hours to see if there were tickets. There were no tickets. We went to the bus station. We waited in line for one hour to see if there were tickets. There were no tickets. And so then we started to get a little worried because it was noon on the day of the invasion. Russian forces were everywhere in the country. There were bombings everywhere in the country, and we had to leave. And there was no viable means to leave. The airport was closed, of course. The airport was being bombed a few hours later.

And so we tried to look into car hire. We tried to see if we could rent a car. We tried to see if we could take an Uber or a Lyft or a Blah Blah car, which is the Ukrainian version of Uber. And none of those options were available because everybody was thinking the same thing. And in a sense of almost resigned despair, we decided that it would be best to just start walking west and see what happened. And it was around noon when we began to walk west. So when you set off to walk, did you just sort of take what you could carry and was that sort of what most people were doing? Or did you get the sense that at least the people were like preparing for a long period of time away when they left? The people certainly were not preparing for a long period of time away. The people were not preparing for war. For the longest time, President Zelensky and the Ukrainian government maintained that there would be no war.

They called indications of war alarmists. They called them ludicrous. And it was only in the final 24 hours that everybody sort of woke up and said there's going to be a war. So I remember the last day before the invasion, people were getting ready. People were waiting at the ATMs. People were buying groceries. People were packing. But it was not before that time. Nobody was getting ready for the war. And so when the war struck, everybody just sort of left hastily. And it was a terrifying departure, a sudden and terrifying departure because people didn't know what to do. And they just sort of grabbed what they had and they ran. Luckily for me and my roommate, we were traveling with just one pack or so because we were not living in Ukraine.

And so we were able to just carry what we had on our backs. Yeah. So talk me through that walk then. I think that's sort of like 43 miles, is that right? That's right. So we did take a municipal bus a little bit of the way. We took a municipal bus, I believe it was five kilometers down the road. Five kilometers being like three miles down the road. And the total distance from Lviv to the border is 80 kilometers. So that really did not make a dent at all in the distance. And it was noon when we started and we knew for a fact that we would not make it before nightfall. And we knew that and we were terrified of that. So at first we walked along. The countryside was picturesque. It was beautiful.

It was indistinguishable from holiday during springtime. It was a fair weather, sunny, and no one could even tell that the nation was at war. There was really nobody else walking on the road besides us in the beginning in the first 20 kilometers, I would say. And then we started seeing long lines at the petrol stations. Everywhere was out of gas. Nobody had gas. There was just no ability to fuel cars. And as a consequence of that, cars were running out of gas and they were being abandoned on the side of the road, which caused further traffic pileups and soon the road was impenetrable to vehicles. And so because of this, everybody started getting out of their cars and walking.

And so these families who had planned to escape Ukraine to Poland in their cars and carry their lives with them were suddenly faced with the hard decision of taking what they could carry with them. Yeah, that just sounds terrible. That sounds really difficult. I'm sure you saw older folks and younger people as well with people sort of struggling to... Because that's a long walk, right? That's not a walk that everyone can do. So that must have been very difficult. It's a difficult walk for a young man and many old women and little children under the age of five were forced on this march because there really was no other option for them.

It was either go back to Ukraine and risk being bombed, risk being under Russian occupation, or it was get out of your car and walk in the wintertime with no food or water, no toilet, 450 miles. It was just this nightmare scenario because all these people were on the road. There were people in wheelchairs who couldn't negotiate the mud. There were mothers with strollers who couldn't get the children out and the children were crying. The children were asking, why are we here? What are we doing? Why do we have to leave home and walk 50 miles in the middle of winter? And the old people were sort of resigned to it.

There was one old woman I passed who was using a cane and she was hobbling along. She had a backpack and I asked her, where are you going? Because we were a long, long way from the border. And she said, I'm going to Poland, very simply. It was a very matter of fact statement. And so these people walked with a sense of duty and a sense of urgency. And it was just a very tragic humanitarian scene. Yeah, I can imagine.

And that was a major route that you were on, like a major road that just become impossible. It wasn't one of the bigger highways, but it was, I believe, the M11, the Ukrainian M11. And it runs east to west throughout the country. And yeah, it's one of the major roads. And it had become completely clogged, yeah. Jesus. So on arrival in Poland or at the border, I understand that there's some, the men were broadly defined as like military age, 18 to 60, I think, aren't allowed to leave because they have to stay in it and enlist.

Is that right? Did you see? Yes, the border was absolutely the worst part for that reason. About five kilometers from the border at the end of our walk, we were feeling relieved. We were feeling like finally we've made it. Ukrainian military patrols started walking by and driving by and announcing through loud speakers and announcing with their own voices. All men must stay. All men between the ages of 18 and 60 have to stay, get out of line now. And so the fathers naturally asked, because there were a lot of fathers who were there to protect their families, to safeguard their families and to provide for their families.

These fathers asked, how about us? We have little children. We have children under the age of five. How are we supposed to provide for them? They conscripted us right here. The Ukrainian army did not care. They pulled them away, physically, from their families. There were a lot of tears, there was a lot of crying, there were a lot of hurried goodbyes. Brothers left sisters, mothers left husbands, lovers left each other, people just left. It was terrifying to watch.

Yeah, all these men were conscripted immediately into the army. I can imagine. And were people at that point, it seems like they were relatively stoic up to that point. Were people sort of resisting that? Just were they sort of sad but resigned to it? Was it a mixture? Well, that was when the panic began. Because everybody was sad but resigned to their fate of walking to Poland, but nobody was prepared for losing all the men. So when all the men were lost, when all the men were taken forcibly, and this was public, everybody could see these men being yanked from their families.

People first started yelling at the soldiers that didn't do anything, obviously. And they were so angry at the soldiers and the soldiers were didn't care. And then panic began because people realized, oh my God, this person who was here with us, who was a travel companion, who's a relative, now we have to leave without him and even more, he's going to the front now and he is in great danger at the front. So people began pushing, they began shoving, they began being rude to one another. There was no sense of empathy among the people at all because it was a panic to get across the border at that point. So there were people fainting and that was really just overlooked, the people who fainted were sort of dragged to the side and left there. And I think they made it, I don't know if they made it out okay, they certainly didn't die.

But there were people who were fainting, there were people who were sobbing, there were people who were hyperventilating, there was vomiting going on. And it was just this sense of absolute human panic as people just tried to escape in the last five kilometers and especially in the last 500 meters was the very worst. Yeah, terrible thing to see. I understand you've stayed in touch with one of the lads who was conscripted, right? Yes, that was a development from tonight. Yeah, tell me about that. So while we were walking, this was about 15 kilometers out from the border, we met a young Ukrainian man and we just got to talking to him because I mean we could relate to him, I'm about the same age as him. And so we were just sort of talking about our lives and it was almost as if the war wasn't going on. And then we got to these army checkpoints and they started calling all the men, you have to leave.

And so my friend said, oh, I'm not leaving, I don't want to fight in this war. And he tried to sort of stay with us because we were foreigners, we were not eligible to be conscripted. So he sort of tried to stay with us, he was a student, he was trying not to fight in this war because he had a life elsewhere. He had a girlfriend who he was traveling with. And so we were walking with him and I said, hey, do you want to do an interview? He said, sure. And I started talking to him on camera and then a soldier came by and yelled in his direction, hey, you get out of line. And he said, I'm sorry, I have to go.

And he just gave me this look, like this despairing look and he went with the soldier. Two days later today, tonight, he messaged me on Instagram and he said, because by the way, we had exchanged contact information when we were talking. He messaged me on Instagram and he said, hey, I saw that you mentioned me in your Twitter because I told him about the Twitter as well. And he said, just letting you know I'm safe in Lviv. I'm not in the East fighting the Russians. I am in Lviv and I am safe. And it is my knowledge that he may have escaped conscription because he would otherwise be in the East. But I'm not sure.

I just know that he is safe right now and he confirmed that he was safe. So yeah, you're not sure whether he's doing training or whether he's in some real rational role or if he's managed to get out of it somehow. I know that he has managed to escape the brunt of the fighting with the Russians. That's right. Yeah, okay, good for him, but still a terrible thing to have to deal with. So it's my understanding. There's visa-free entry into Poland right now. Is that right that people can walk across the border?

Yes, the entry into Poland was an absolute breeze compared to the exit from Ukraine. I don't know why, but you have to wait in a long line in Ukraine for an exit visa just for permission to leave the country. And so as I mentioned, that was the worst part because they were only letting 10 people out every 20 minutes, 10 people get an exit visa every 20 minutes, and there were at least 2,000 people at the border with us. Wow. And so that's where this panic happened is because every time they opened that gate, every 20 minutes, and by the way, this is like two in the morning in the cold weather and people are, as I mentioned, crying, vomiting, faking. And so every time they opened that gate, there was a human crush to get to that gate,

and they closed it and they forced the people back, and then it was another 20 minutes before it happened again, and this happened all night long. And this was literally just to get permission to exit the country. It was ludicrous. It was insane. So yeah, I'm sorry to divert from your question, but it's very interesting. Poland was extremely easy to enter. There was no visa process.

They understood, they let us through. I think they just barely looked at our passports. So yeah, it was easy. Were you at that point like obviously you had no plans or places to go? Did they house you with some kind of refugee housing that they put you in? Not when I was there. They did implement that about 12 hours after I arrived, but when I arrived, we retreated immediately pretty much right out of the border facility

with donuts and tea. And so they gave us donuts, they gave us tea, and then they said, hey, there's a bus to Przemysl, which is the city about 15 kilometers west of the border, where all the refugees are gathering, and they said there's a bus to Przemysl, it leaves every 15 minutes, and we got on that bus. And then we arrived in Przemysl, and at that time refugees were responsible for their own accommodation. We managed to book a room in a hotel with eight other refugees in the room.

And so I was sleeping in this room with eight other refugees. They didn't want to talk to me, they were kind of despondent, they lost everything. And so they were just very sad the entire time that I was there. But to answer your question about housing real quick, about 12 hours after we arrived, they began setting up tents for the refugees, and that is where many of the refugees are living now, they're in tents. Okay. Do you know if that's a Polish government or the Red Cross, or is that citizens of Poland? I have no idea which organization did that,

but I can tell you that I did not see a single Red Cross or United Nations representative while I was in Poland. Okay, interesting. Yeah, they can be sometimes a little slow to react. Right. Yeah, yeah, okay. So you then stayed in that hostel, you weren't able to really talk to the people there, because I understand they probably had a very difficult 24 hours. We all had had, yeah. No talking was being had, pretty much.

Did you get a sense when, as you met the people walking there, crossing the border, etc., were people, did they have plans to be gone from Ukraine? Were they thinking, where can I stay for a long period of time? Were they thinking, I'm going to wait this out in Poland and see? Right. I was pleasantly surprised that a good half of the people that I spoke to in that convoy, in that refugee caravan, had relatives either in Poland or elsewhere in Europe. And so they were all, they had all called their relatives,

and they had arranged them to go to Western Europe and meet their relatives. Okay, yeah, so they've got a place, they're trying to at least stay for a while. Yes, however, another half of them have no plans whatsoever, and they're terrified. And those are the refugees that I stayed with in that hotel last night, that they're terrified, and they have no place to go. Yeah, right, and no one's really provided them with one yet. No. Yeah, that's difficult, and it seems like, I don't know,

it'll be interesting to see how the United States reacts, because it hasn't really done very much so far. It's amazing, I heard that the reason I crossed at that place, rather than any other place, is that I heard that the U.S. Army was there, and I did not see the U.S. Army, and I searched for them, and I did not find them. So I don't know where the U.S. is. Okay, yeah, you haven't seen any evidence of like any, seems like no sort of NGOs or government aid for refugees yet then.

It's kind of surprising, as I mentioned, I haven't seen any UN representative, any Red Cross representative, any WHO representative. I haven't seen any NGO or governmental representatives. I did see, of course, Polish government representatives at the border, but that was about it. Right. It said, from Polish people, do you get a sense of sort of solidarity? Yes.

Okay, good. I'll talk about that later. So it was actually amazing to see, it was heartwarming to see, the citizens of Prezmendil are now swamped. Their population has been doubled or tripled by the incoming Ukrainian refugees, and yet they are showing great amounts of solidarity. I actually attended a solidarity rally today where the citizens of Prezmendil got together and they said, Ukraine are our brothers and Putin is clearly in the wrong,

and we will stand with them. We will show solidarity with them. And that was heartwarming to see. I talked with a few of those Poles at that rally and they said, yeah, we knew this was coming and we prepared for it, and we are ready to take in as many as is necessary. Yeah, that's really nice to hear actually that these people are sort of showing solidarity with each other and support with each other.

Yes. Yeah. So when you were on your way west, I presume that the conflict didn't catch up with you, right? You weren't sort of subject to like indirect fire or you didn't see any of that? No, however, there was about 50 kilometers behind us of Amin, as I mentioned. We did not hear it, but there were reports of the fighting going on all the time, but it did not catch up to us while we were in that caravan. And it would have been absolutely terrifying if it had, but I'm glad that it didn't.

Right, yeah. And then, so you've been there for about a week. Had you previously been doing some reporting in Ukraine? I have never done reporting in Ukraine before, but when I came to Ukraine and the war had not yet started, I was mostly just doing interviews with civilians about what they thought about the possibility of war, what they thought about the war in Donbass. Most, a lot of cultural stuff.

It was kind of boring. I mean, not that war is interesting or fun, but it was not really much of a story. So I was just doing interviews with people about basic Ukrainian things and then the war found us. Right. And it seems to have come as much of a shock to them as it did to the rest of us. As I mentioned, nobody was prepared for war until about 24 hours before it hit. And that's when the Ukrainian government said, yes, there will be a war and everybody began to have a sense of urgency about them.

Right. Did you see any of the citizen militias and citizens preparing for defense that people decided to stay? Yes. I didn't see any of the militias, but I went into a Ukrainian gun shop in Kiev, and there was a line almost out the door. People were buying guns. And I asked one of the people in the line, why are you buying a gun? And he said, if the Russians come, I want to be prepared.

So a lot of people are buying guns privately in Kiev, at least as of last week. Okay. So they weren't waiting for the government to supply them. They were supplying themselves with guns. I believe the government supply was a rather sudden decision. I don't think the Ukrainian people were counting on it, and so they were supplying themselves. And they're buying like Kalashnikov to the rifles, or like we talked about hunting rifles. Yeah, you can't buy Kalashnikovs in a gun store.

They were buying sort of hunting rifles and shotguns. Jesus. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Fairly under-equipped. All right. So they were just prepared to try to get anything they could get their hands on to look after themselves and their families. That's right.

Yeah. I bought pepper spray. Yeah. Better than nothing. Yep. Yeah. Okay. So there was, did you see like, of the people you walked with, was it, did families tend to leave as a whole?

Or did, did some folks say, right, I'm going to stay behind and fight, or I'm going to stay behind to stay and look after a house and then you should leave. Right. Did you get a sense of that? The vast majority of people traveling were families as a whole. There were very few single travelers or partial families traveling. It was, I think that people wanted to stick together. And so it was the vast majority of people traveling were families. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So they all stayed or left. Do you get a sense of how many people, you said about 2000 people there at the border, like, of what proportion of the city decided to leave for Poland? Not all the people at the border were from Lviv. A lot of them have been traveling since that morning from Kyiv and other cities in central Western Ukraine. So yeah, I was talking to people at the border and a lot of them were from Kyiv. A lot of them were from Zephyr, Zisa.

I'm pronouncing that wrong. A lot of them were from Ternopil or Ivano-Frankisk or Odessa. And so I would not have any sort of conjecture on what percentage of the city. Also, it was still pretty early in the crisis because it was still the first day and it was fewer than 24 hours after the invasion began. So I imagine the numbers are a lot higher now. When you were getting news, right, as you were traveling, etc., were you like on WhatsApp or were people on Twitter? Like, how were they getting news of what was happening? Everybody.

And absolutely everybody. It was completely dark during the walk because I don't know why, but there was no sense of cell reception. There was no sense of data reception. There was no sense of internet connection at all during the walk. And so everybody I met, we asked everybody we met, do you have any news? And they said, no, do you have any news? So nobody had any news. Until we got to the border, some people had news.

But for about 16 hours, we were completely in the dark about what was going on. And that was terrifying because when we left, the invasion had just begun. And we didn't get to be updated on the first half day of it. So, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And then on arrival, you were faced with this news of this sort of blitzkrieg all those of bombing and armor. Right.

Yes. I mean, we saw a little bit of it in the morning that day while when we started out. But it had really accelerated and amplified by the time that we arrived. And the Ukrainians were absolutely terrified of this because they did not realize what happened on such a large scale. Yeah. Yeah. I think very few people did.

I can imagine if it's in your own country, it's petrifying. Were you there when the fighting began in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone? Or were you in Poland by then? When did the fighting begin in Chernobyl? I believe about 24 hours after the fighting began, like, period. I was crossing into Poland 24 hours after the fighting began period. So I was probably crossing into Poland when that fighting began. Okay.

And I was interested to know, especially how sort of the older people or people who have been alive, you know, the nuclear accident in Chernobyl is wondering how. Right. I mean, I've been talking to plenty of older people. And as I mentioned, the older people especially were resigned to this because during the Soviet times, during the Cold War, this sort of thing was common. And so the older people knew what was going on. And the younger people were the ones who were more panicking.

That's interesting. Yeah. They've been raised with a fear of that, I suppose. Right. And this happened in 1989, too. Like, this is the biggest refugee crisis since 1989. Because of 1989, when all the republics fell in the Warsaw Pact, so many people took to the roads.

And so the older people were used to that kind of thing. But as I mentioned, the younger people were not. So. Right. Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, this is different reactions, I guess. This is very young people, obviously, unable to understand what's going on beyond that they're leaving their homes, which is sad.

Right. And especially the little children had no idea what was going on. And it was impossible to explain to them, so nobody did. And so I can't imagine how terrifying this must have been as a child, not knowing why you had to walk dozens of hours in the cold carrying everything you had. Yeah. It's always the saddest thing to see children in those refugee situations when they obviously don't know what's going on and didn't do anything wrong.

Right. Yeah, hopefully they're all safe. Hopefully they're in Poland. Hopefully they can go to safe places. I made several contacts during this trip. And as I mentioned, only one of them has gotten back to me. So I hope the others get back to me soon. Yeah, that's tough.

But you've got the sense that they weren't turned back per se, they just might be sort of not in touch because their phones aren't charged or something like that. It's either their phones aren't charged or in the men's case they were sent to the east or they're too busy trying to arrange accommodations or food for themselves or something. I mean, everybody was just very busy trying to survive. Yeah. So I don't blame them if they don't hop on social media and get to me.

Yeah, yeah. Of course. And of course, yeah, I did very, very stressful time for everyone. Did you hear of anyone who has been sent to the east? Like the second hand or like three people you met, people are at the front already. I do not have any contacts of anybody who was sent to the east. From what I understand, the Ukrainian army has a strict communication, social media sort of policy.

And so none of the soldiers that I met, one wanted to talk to me. I did not talk to any Ukrainian army soldiers in uniform because they had a very strict policy. They could not talk to me. I could not get their contacts for much of the same reason. Okay. So they didn't want to talk to journalists. They didn't want to talk to anyone.

They were just looking for... Yeah. No, they were just, they were very stern and they did not want to talk to anybody. So I talked to zero soldiers in uniform during this experience. Okay. Yeah. So where are you now? You've gone further west.

West, is that right? That's right. I took a long bus ride to Krakow today. So I am now in Krakow, Poland. Okay. What folks, is it different there being about a little bit more distant? I've already talked to a few people and well, it's a Saturday night. They're going out to drink and they, they're saying, well, yeah, it's terrible that this

war is happening 250 miles east of us, but what are we supposed to do about it? So they're going out and drinking. So it's this very detached sense here in Krakow, not the same as it was in Freshenbill. Yeah, interesting to people are living their normal lives and it's just, it's a news item for them. They're not worried about any potential spillover or fallout. Right. Okay.

Yeah. They're not worried. Nice. And will you, do you plan to stay there? What's, what's next for you? So I actually just booked a flight an hour ago. I'm going to be flying back to the States on March the 1st. Okay.

Great. Yeah. So you can, you can come back and presumably you're like your US passport holder. So you could just get, that's how you go through, you know, being conscripted, et cetera. I am not, I'm not carrying US passport right now. I'm carrying an Italian passport because I'm also a citizen of Italy and I was told before I left by some friends in the intelligence community that it would look significantly less suspicious to carry an EU passport than a US passport.

So I bought the EU passport. Nice. Yeah. And then you can travel freely through the US. Yes. Through Schengen. Yeah. You know, Ukrainian people can travel once, because once they're in Poland, can they then

move through the Schengen zone freely? Ukraine is not a member of the EU. They're not a member of Schengen. I do not believe they can move freely. Right. I'm just wondering like, yeah, they would be, I don't know how their passports would be checked if they're going across some of those land borders, but I think they, I do know that this was, it was an emergency situation yesterday.

And so that's why they were just very personally checked, but I'm sure it's stricter usually. Yeah. And that'll be like if they, they tried to exit Poland or if they'll, right? Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen to them. No, I don't think, I'm guessing there's been no communication about that. You've seen either right leg of what they should do or how to apply for asylum or anything like that.

I have talked to a few people. They say that they're banking on these countries being empathetic to refugees. And I understand. I think that countries will be empathetic to refugees. Yeah. Yeah. You certainly hope they will. So they're just going to hope that those countries, the ones who don't have a country

to go to, you get the sense that, yeah, that they'll, they'll apply for asylum wherever they can find a safe place. That's right. And I believe that countries, Western European countries that have been very vocally pro-Ukraine recently, will take them in. So I think that they'll, they'll be safe. Yeah. That's good to hear.

I know I've seen estimates of up to 5 million refugees, which would be, I don't know, be, I mean, Germany absorbed a million people from Syria, right? It's not, it's not impossible for Western European countries to do that at all. But it will be. But it would still be a catastrophic crisis, the worst since 1989. So. Yeah. And we have to hope it doesn't get to that.

Do you get the sense people are still flowing across the border? I know you're a bit distancing from it. Yes. I mean, it's weird because you want to believe that what you experienced and what the people around you experienced was a one-time thing, that it was a one-time incident, that it was one caravan, but this is happening constantly and it will continue to happen constantly for weeks. Yeah.

Are there trains across the border, things like that, that people can take, or is it solely that? Yes. So when I said that I went to the train station in Alive and there were no trains, what was really happening is, yes, there were trains, but all the trains until March, March were booked. So. Oh, wow.

People can't take those trains across, that kind of thing. If they try to book right now, they won't be able to find a booking for a while. Okay. So they were already booked up. And by the way, here in Krakow, the first two hostels that I went to, the first two places to stay that I went to, were all booked up and I asked why and they said Ukrainian refugees. So there are Ukrainian refugees here in Krakow.

Okay. Yeah, people are moving there. I'm sure a lot of people want to get far away as they can. Yeah. So people are just constantly moving west right now. Yeah, or they have friends or family that they're trying to get to or whatever. Yeah. And I've been hearing the Ukrainian language just constantly on my trip.

So. That's interesting too. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. So really, really interesting insight. Is there anything else you think from your experience that people ought to hear about? No, I believe I've told you everything.

I've retold the story dozens of times since it happened and I really hope that I hit all the right notes here. If you had to tell anything to the people who are reading or listening to this, Ukraine really needs weapons, yes, but they also need humanitarian aid. When I was walking all that distance with all those people, there was not a single sense of food being provided to anyone, water being provided to anyone. There was no chance to go to the toilet. There was often no chance to sit down.

If we could give even a chance for these people to eat something, to drink something, to have a minute of solace, that would mean the world to them. And so I think that we need to provide humanitarian aid to the refugees as soon as possible. Yeah. And you said you didn't see any organizations you'd suggest people donate to that you didn't see any of that. Is there anyone you can recommend? No.

And I don't know. I haven't actually done the research and I probably should. But I know that the welcome committee in Poland were private citizens. They were not part of any NGO or anything. They were private citizens who were welcoming us in. Yeah. I've seen some of them organizing on Facebook. So I'll try and maybe link to some of those or something like that so people can support

it. Right. Yeah, we'll see. All right. And then is there anything like you'd like to plug? Do you have a Twitter right? Is there anything else? You could tell us what your Twitter is.

I mean, so the Twitter that I'm using for this, which you've probably seen is a temporary one. It was meant only to cover this crisis. I guess my private Twitter plugged that, which is you've seen that as well, probably. Yeah. It's just my name. Yeah. I guess just plugged that.

And I mean, thank you for everything. No. Of course. It's Manny Marotta with two T's, right? Yes. M-A-R-O-T-T-A. Great. Okay.

We got that. And yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate it. It's been a pretty difficult couple of days. So get some rest. And if there's anything else, Manny Developments, please do let me know. Give me a shout. Teller, thank you.

All right. Cheers, mate. Have a good evening. That's the thing. Just take photos of his children walking into the door of their public school. Send them to him with a proton mail account. Yeah. Don't let him know what he did to provoke this.

Just frighten him. I do like it. It's just being recorded. Yeah. That's how you do it. The episode's begun. We're including all of that, Sophie, all of that. Welcome to It Could Happen here, the podcast where we will take pictures of your children

entering a public school and send them to you as a threat, but we won't tell you what you're threatening him over because that's, I don't know what that is, probably terrorism technically. Sophie. Speaking of child abuse. Yeah. Great. Garrison.

Very proud. Nailed it. Yeah. Yeah, so we're doing an episode to talk about the recent kind of letter and opinion piece that the governor of Texas and the attorney general wrote relating to trans kids in Texas. We're also planning like a week-long worth of stuff kind of going into this issue across not just the states, but also internationally as well in terms of the growing kind of war on trans people.

But because this thing happened, we do want to kind of talk about it now as well before we spend a lot of time making a week-long worth of scripted pieces on it. So anyway, we're going to be talking about what happened last weekend or last week at time of recording when the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, released an opinion piece on, I think it was Monday the 21st, declaring gender-affirming medical care for transgender children to be child abuse. In response, the next day, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate these practices.

And then kind of on that following Wednesday, the letter that Greg Abbott wrote went viral, detailing both the attorney general's kind of opinion that a number of the so-called quote, sex change procedures constitute child abuse under existing Texas law and directing the family and protective services to protect these, to quote, unquote, protect these kids from abuse. And I hear by director agency to conduct a prompt and thorough investigation to any reported instances of these abusive procedures. And what's really insidious is that like, it's not even, it's like, of course, like,

there is not gender-affirming surgery done on minors anyway. That does not happen. But this letter actually does go into, according to the attorney general opinion, it is already against the law to subject Texas children to a wide variety of elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty blocking drugs or doses of testosterone or estrogen. So it is also including HRT, including puberty blockers, which again, we already give to

cisgender children all the time. Puberty blockers are given to kids who have early onset puberty who are cis, but it's now including puberty blockers inside, like constituting that in and of itself as child abuse, which is an escalation of things that we've seen before. Yeah. And then it's also talking about how Texas law imposes reporting requirements upon all licensed professionals, including doctors, nurses, teachers, therapists, and provides criminal penalties for failure to report things.

So that was the main part of the letter that went viral detailing the different ways that they're trying to harass, intimidate, and introduce possible legal repercussions to parents and caregivers who support transgender youth inside the state of Texas. It is the perfect example of the thing these people always do when they make laws based on their bigotry, which is reflexively make a law based on whatever is the fucking Twitter talking point that they've been yelling about and then don't consider all of the different things that it's going to do that have nothing to do with the group of people they're trying to hurt.

Yeah. Because in lots of cases, this is just going to, it's not even going to, it's going to impact a lot of like queer people in general, right? Because it's in terms of like reporting things that seem outside the mainstream. So not even necessarily transgender, not even necessarily transgender people, not even necessarily queer people as well. Like there's a lot of like, you know, I, and definitely when I was growing up, there's a lot of like cis girls who enjoy dressing more like butch or tomboy.

And there's a whole bunch of stuff that will just affect like kids in general with all of this reporting and all of this like, and making, making these like procedures and like hormone treatments, like, you know, trying to make them seem like they're illegal. Because again, like the actual Texas law has not changed. It is, it is the, it is, this is an opinion piece, directing the Child Protective Services to investigate these things. So the actual law and the books hasn't changed. What it has done is caused a whole bunch of like a possible legal danger and a massive

headache and just a whole bunch of like legal harassment against parents and kids. And that that's what it's going to, that's what it's going to result in because it's, it's unclear what this, what the governor's directive is going to actually practically look like. Because in the, in the, in a tweet on, on last Tuesday, he said that he's directing the Child Protective Services to enforce this ruling and investigate and refer to for prosecution for instances of minors receiving affirming care. And then the Texas Protective Services told Time Magazine on Wednesday that it was going

to comply with the governor's directive. But in terms of like directing them for prosecution, there has been like five Texas district attorneys, including the DA's of Dallas County and Houston's Travis County. They issued a statement the day after condemning the directive and saying that they plan to enforce the constitution with their quote, unquote, that's what they said, and that they are, quote, deeply disturbed by governor Abbott's and attorney general Paxton's cruel directives treating transgender children's access to life-saving gender, affirming care as child abuse. We will not irrationally and justifiably interfere with medical decisions made between children,

their parents and their medical physicians to ensure the safety of transgender youth, adding that we will not allow the governor or attorney general to disregard Texas children's lives in order to score political points. So in terms of, you know, there's certain parts of the state where even if Protective Services does investigate reports of this, they're not going to get prosecuted. But there will be other parts of the state where they probably will. Because it is just an interpretation of the law, you can still get lots of legal trouble and it's going to be up to juries and other people to decide on what interpretation of

the law is going to be enforced and enacted upon. So you're seeing a lot of people being like, oh, no, it's actually okay because the law is not changing. It's just the interpretation. And we're like, well, no, it actually is a big problem. And it's not even, it's just the overall like, it's saying the things that have been gone unsaid for a long time. Like it's making the things that everyone kind of assumed or was kind of the unsaid

bigotry, putting it into writing and making it concrete. And it's like the overall escalation of this thing, which is deeply concerning. I mean, it's the thing that happened with like COVID restrictions, like masks and stuff where you've got the cities and stuff where you have kind of more rational leadership or saying like, we're not paying attention to this directive from the governor. We're going to keep having, letting people mask or we're not going to let you go after businesses that require masks. But with the added dimension of like, rather than it being sort of targeting businesses

and schools, it's targeting individuals and it's allowing individuals to target other individuals like the Texas abortion law. And the primary purpose of this is going to be to basically gradually erode the areas in which trans kids can live in Texas. Like yep, they'll be able to live in some of the cities for a while at least. Well, and even in the cities, right, it's like, yeah, okay, so maybe the DA doesn't prosecute, but that doesn't mean that CPS can't just, can't investigate you. And like that's, that's, that's really traumatic.

Yeah. A lot of legal harassment because yeah, I mean like, DFPS cannot remove any child from their parents or guardians without a court order and no court in Texas or anywhere in the country has yet found gender affirming care to be considered child abuse. So it has not happened yet, but they sure wanted to happen. And this is, these are the next, these are the next steps that can make it happen, right? They are trying to get there with this like incremental, like these incremental things, you know, starting off with like legal interpretations of the law.

Eventually they would want to change the law just to reflect this opinion, right? Like they want this to happen. They're just, they're trying to slowly, slowly, slowly get at it and it needs to be pushed back upon because yeah, any, any slow incremental thing that they're going to try to do to make it basically be impossible to live as trans in Texas and lots of other states as well. It's not just, it's not just Texas, there's things like this happening across all of the United States basically, especially, especially, you know, portions, portions of the South. And it's, yeah, it does play into this kind of overall in the past five years, you know,

once they lost the gay marriage issue, they're like, okay, the next line of defense for these people is making it be impossible to be trans. So it is that it's like the new, that's the new thing they're going to be really focusing on. And we've seen so many, so many new bills against, against like being trans over the course of the past five years. Again, it's, it is more so putting into writing the things that have been always kind of unconscious bigotry or even conscious bigotry, but it's putting that into actual stone and making

it like cemented. You know, just at, just at the start of this year, there was new restrictions put in place for Texas's transgender student athletes playing on K through 12 school sports teams. That went into effect on January 18th. There was a, it was a house bill 25, authored by representative Valerie Swanson, requires student athletes to complete an interslastic competition to play on sports teams that correspond with the sex listed on their birth certificate at or near their time of birth, which means that the legislation went further than the previous rules from the University of Slastic

League, which governs the schools, sports in Texas, in which the students' gender is determined by their birth certificate. But that, that can also be legally modified, you know, like you can change the sex assigned at birth on, on, on your birth certificate. The new ruling is that it needs to be, it needs to match the one that it was at or near your time of birth. So again, like they're finding all these little, these little small like thing is to like pry that just to make things overall be harder to live in.

And at this point, like 10 other states have put in very similar laws relating to, like relating to, to school sports and like bathroom bills and yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the, the, it's the same thing that authoritarians always do, which is they're just kind of edging further and further and, and continuing to proceed as they do not meet resistance. And the goal is to make it illegal and impossible to exist as a transgender person in society. You know, part of what they're doing with the, with the wording of how this change in

Texas has been announced is they're trying to frame being trans as a contagion that threatens children. And step one of that under the, is, is going, proceeding under the age of, we are protecting children by making these kinds of surgeries and stuff illegal. But the steps beyond that are eventually banning and restricting the ability of trans people to be around children and eventually be in civil society at all because they're a threat to children. That, that's the, the logical procession of the arguments that they're making.

And I think they're proceeding in a fairly logical way in, in terms of achieving that as a goal. And they're not going to stop until they are stopped by probably force. If anything stops it at this point, that's, that's what it's going to have to be. Because the local government has realized that that's how you get elected. Because you can't, you can't fix the power grid in Texas. You can't provide people with anything that makes their lives easier, but you can hurt trans people and Republicans are, are, will are always down with that.

It's, it's, it's, it's the thing fascists do where they introduce a false Christ. They introduce a false crisis that they can actually take steps to, to, you know, make changes about, but all that ends up doing is hurting more of the population. It doesn't actually solve any issue that actually hurts people. It's, it's one of the core things in the fascist playbook. And it's, it's even in the States where there aren't just like blanket bands on kids being able to participate in sports teams. There's other horrifying things happening.

Like in the beginning of February, it came out that the Utah Republicans propose a, a proposed a commission to analyze trans kids bodies, um, Utah Republicans first of its kind anti trans sports bill that would form a commission to determine a student athlete's eligibility on a case by case basis. The commission would have authority to establish a baseline range for various attributes, including height, weight, body mass, wingspan, hip to knee ratio, and other physical characteristics affected by puberty, bearing trans athletes, um, who do not fall within the established limits to from, from participating in gendered sports.

Um, and yeah, asking like a government appointed panel to analyze the bodies of trans minors does sound like a giant recipe for disaster. Um, and there is some even more like horrifying details. The bill would render the commission quote immune from suit like lawsuits with respect to all acts done and actions taken in good faith in carrying out their purposes. Uh, so yeah, you can't sue anybody for what happens under the guise of this commission. So yeah, they're just going to be investigating trans youths bodies. And yep, you can't, there's no lawsuits allowed.

Yeah, it's great. It's let, let, let, let's, let's give the, let's give the trans child abuse, uh, uh, phrenology panel, just immunity from lawsuits, like, uh, yeah, qualified, extend qualified immunity to citizens hurting the group of people that, uh, we don't think are human. Like this isn't the only way place we're going to see that logic extended towards. Nope. Uh, you're already seeing it in places like Louisiana with these bills to make it legal to kill protesters if you feel threatened.

Yeah. Um, like it's, it's the same playbook and it's going to be the same playbook because there's no way to fight it without some sort of force. You can't vote these people away. Nope. Uh, the courts are packed for the time being there's, there's only there's not a solution that isn't some kind of force that we can discuss. Is it like the force of, of getting the feds to intervene or whatever, but like there's

no, there's no solution that is just like democratic. I mean, and like Biden's office made a statement on this recent Texas law, like a law opinion interpretation thing and they're like, yeah, this, he was bad anyway. Good luck. And you're like, oh, cool. Yeah. It's that, that meme of like the person drowning with their hand out of the water and they high five you as you're thinking, yeah, that's exactly what's happening.

And I think the situation is like, it's worse than that too, because, you know, in the past couple of weeks, when something we've started seeing is we've started seeing democratic journals and democratic strategists openly talking about how we need to make a session to the right in the culture war. It's like, okay, well, what does that mean? It's like, yeah, throw transkins out of the bus, right? Yeah. Because they can't vote.

They're already freaks. So yeah, they're the easiest person to pick away at the rights for. Yeah. And because overall, just in the past year alone, more than 100 bills designed to restrict the rights of transgender people have been introduced at least 33 states. It's a record breaking year for anti-trans legislation that's been, that has been introduced in Arkansas. The state legislator recently banned gender affirming treatment for minors, including

hormone therapy, like puberty blockers and similar treatments. Again, this is the thing that, like, that could not happen for a long time anyway, just because, like, culturally and medically, doctors would never do that. But now at the point where that started starting to change, it is this, it is this, like, reactive, reactive effect that people are doing and be like, now that these cogs are turning, people are putting the massive brakes on it and putting the thing that used to be just unsaid now into actual legal writing. So now this actually is, like, just not allowed as opposed to it just not happening because

doctors were assholes. So yeah, in Arkansas, you can't even receive hormone treatment or puberty blockers. The bill was called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act. Yeah, so referring to medical treatment of affirming one's gender identity as experimentation, which is not great. I mean, that is how I view it for myself because I like being a freak, but as an overall trend, that is horrible. Like, that is a horrible way to phrase this type of thing for a lot of people, especially

the people who know specifically what gender they want to be and are, like, that affects them so differently. I mean, I'm lucky enough just to be more genderqueer-ish. And yeah, it's all of these bills are going to affect so many people in different ways and it's real bad. Like, shortly after the Arkansas bill prohibiting transforming medical practices was signed into law last April, reports of suicide attempts among trans youth in the state were going up and the doctor, Michelle Hutchinson, who runs the largest provider of hormone therapy

in the state, called the AP, that just in her office alone during April, she saw an uptick in suicide attempts from trans youth. And this is, it's going to keep happening and like there is, you can't trust a lot to stop it. But the Arkansas governor, Issa Hutchinson, a Republican, did veto this bill citing potentially dangerous consequences for trans youth and telling reporters that it was a vast government overreach and a byproduct of the culture war in America and her veto was vetoed by the state legislator.

So like, it's going to be a looping, endless problem of legal issues. So it's, there's needs to be other things. Like, I've been on Twitter the past week just looking at all the GoFundMe's by parents of trans kids in Texas who are trying to move out of state so that their kid can receive like hormone treatment and just like be allowed to be a person without being harassed by child protective services and teachers and the school system. And it's, it's, it's, it's horrifying, like watching all these people, like asking for help so that they can move out of state so that they can let their kid be just a kid.

And it's, it is, it is really rough. And a big part of why, part of why it's so horrifying is that like, obviously, if you're in that situation, you can get your kid out there, of course, but it also means the more people who move out of places like that, the less resources there will be in the future for kids whose parents can't get them out, you know, and the less support there will be the less like there is just, there is no real escape from it. Like you cannot get fully away. It is, you cannot ever fully escape that type of fascist thought and creep within the state

legislator and specifically around, you know, how it's going to affect different, different classes of minorities. I will direct people if you want to kind of learn more about this sort of thing. And if you, you know, can, you can find some, some stuff around, there's an organization in Texas called TENT, which is the, I just want to make sure I say it right. Oh no. It's the Texas Educational Network, the Trans Educational Network of Texas. It's one of those, but it is, it is, it has a whole bunch of like mental health resources

guides for trans youth in Texas for how to make things slightly less shitty. And yeah, they do, they do some advocacy work in Texas. There's also Equality Texas, which is another organization that does, that does some assistance for transgender people like in schools and just, you know, again, trying to make life slightly less, slightly less shitty. Yeah. I kind of, the last, the last thing I wrote is the, is just fix your hearts or die, which is the kind of overall, overall message that you can really only give to people who want

to do this type of thing is that, yeah, there's really no arguing with them. You have to, either they need to fix their hearts or not be around anymore. Like they're just like, whether that be like, they just secluded to your part of society, but it's, again, it needs to be actually like resisted upon because these people are never going to back down on their own. The other part of the problem here again is just with how, you know, like this, this is sort of kind of, this is an inherent problem that you have with democracies, right? With democracies and civil rights, where it's, yeah, you have a group of people who

aren't extremely small minority and, you know, and, you know, and this gets compounded by the fact that you're dealing with extremely small minority of people and, you know, you're already dealing with like the, you know, the thing that is called democracy, right, is only participated in by an extremely small number of people, especially when you get, you know, especially when you get down to like the state level, the local level, right? Like very few people are actually voting in these things. The people who are voting in these things like want trans people to die. And so, you know, you, you, you, you need some kind of other solution to actually secure,

to secure civil rights because there's just, there literally are not enough trans people and there are not enough people who support them and care enough to do it and also are in these areas to prevent this through just the normal like vote blue. I mean, like, I keep seeing this with, with Texas, everyone keeps saying it's like, well, okay, we just got to vote blue. And it's like, people have been like, people have been saying this about stuff in Texas for as long as I've been alive. It has never happened, ever.

Like it hasn't, my entire life, they keep saying is it keeps not happening and kids keep dying. And yeah, there has to be something else because yeah, Texas is going to come back here. Texas has been laboriously constructed as a political entity to stymie all of your liberal dreams of, of it going purple and, and it will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Like you cannot, this is not a voting issue. This is a, I mean, like I said, some kind of force is going to have to be used to oppose these people.

They're not, they're not, they wouldn't listen if you voted them out, you know, like, they wouldn't stop. And they do force, like they themselves do force, you can look at all the stuff they've been doing. That's what this is, is force. Yeah. And, and even like regular people, like this whole like thing of like, yes, you should like report to your neighbors that you see, if you, if you see a kid who doesn't look

like a regular, normal, boring cis child, then yeah, you should report them. You should go harass everyone who works in your school board so that they ban all books referencing anything related to being queer. It's like they, they do take steps to actually hurt other individuals. And they, they can do it through these means that, you know, they don't necessarily have to always punch you in the face, but they can sure direct the state to send agents to your house to, to like, to intimidate, harass you and threaten to, threaten to take away your children.

Yeah. Or they can, you know, if you're a therapist or a teacher, you can be fired or put in jail for failing to report, you know, kids who don't subscribe to their Christian supremacist ideas of like traditional gender roles. Because again, it's not even all, it's like, again, there's not tons of trans people in general usually. So like this is just going to affect a lot of cis kids as well, who maybe don't want to, who don't, who don't, who don't, who just want to dress cool.

Like it's like, it's, it's, it doesn't even just, it is, it is, it does affect everybody. So it is, it's a, it's a, it's a horrible, it's a horrible thing that is not even like, there's no escape from it and it will affect you whether or not you're trans or not. Yeah. And I, I think it's important to also talk about the mandatory reporting stuff because yeah. So even, but mandatory reporting in general, like even, like I've, I've had things where I was in a school and my school essentially turned into a police state because there are

people who I couldn't talk to about things because of things that happened to me that if, if, if any of them heard it, and one time someone did and I had to literally beg them like on my knees not to report me, right, not, not to report the thing that happened to me because if, you know, because if, if, if that had been heard, like, and if, if that had actually been reported, it would have, you know, it would have started a normal process and I would have had to, you know, like the, the, I, I would have had to, you know, deal with this, like, this is an institutionalized thing and that, like the absolute terror that this kind of stuff creates where you have to, you know, you have to watch every single word

that you say around all of the adults in your life because if you don't do it, they are going to report you. And it is like the level of psychological terror you are inflicting on people is horrific. And that in and of itself just is, is a cost, like it is something that is, is, is going to contribute to trans kids killing themselves and it's, it's, it's just that simple and that bleak. It is such a life and death issue, so you have to really be forced to go, yeah, it goes into like, it's like a very like ontological issue as well and it deals with so many things

around the nature of like being and what you're allowed to be inside as this societal construct. And they're just trying to make that impossible for so many people and make it, make everything so limited in their very narrow version of what they want the world to be that makes them feel comfortable. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, because, because it's not, it's not what the world is. They have to use violence to do it. Yeah.

So because it's suck because that is the rule that that is, that is the rules that we're playing by. That is the game we're playing. Yeah. My, my only the, the, the, the default response to be for those people is, yeah, they need to, they need to fix their hearts or die and just get out of the way. And because it's, that's, they, they already have that for us, except they don't want us to fix their hearts.

They just want us to die. Yeah. So like we are way more empathetic than they are because they can just not be transphobic. They cannot, they can, they can just not do these things. And if they're going to keep doubling down, then yeah, well, let's, if, if you want to play by their rules, then we need to start playing by their rules because they're not going to have, if, if they're not going to change the rules, then that is the, that is the game that they want us to do.

And again, like actual, like I want to, I always, I always, I always, perhaps it's like this, I always want to kind of end with like, here are some steps that you can like take that are relatively easy and it's, it's, it's challenging for these types of sorts of things. Like, yes, there is things you can do around, you know, getting, like making sure you're aware of what bills are being talked about in your local, in like your local area, contacting representatives to do stuff, going to, going to, you know, either whether they're school board meetings or stuff, but like a lot of the electoral list type of ideas around this feels always so inadequate and it feels always so fake that, you know, it's, it is so much,

it feels a lot easier to that, to like, you know, figure out different ways to actually help actual trans people in your area and give trans people money. Like, because like that is often can be, actually have a way more positive effects, at least effects that are like observable, but like, but there are also ways to stop this type of legislation. Like there is, there is, there is ways to do that and I will, I'll try to get into more of that kind of stuff as well. Once we get, you know, our, our week long of stuff about the war on trans people that

will be upcoming probably sometime in this, in this next month. Yeah. Remember, folks, if anybody ever suggests doing something for children that isn't providing them with food or shelter, you should probably hit that person because they're probably trying to fuck something up for somebody. It's nearly always. Don't trust anyone who says they're, need to do something to protect children that they're lying to you as, as a rule, they're lying to you.

Anyway, you guys, how's the, boy, that's Star Wars. Oh yeah. I love your sea ships. There's the, there's the, there's the, the Obi-Wan's coming out. That'll be good. I am excited for the Obi-Wan's because the Obi-Wan's will be good. Speaking of, speaking of Ewan McGregor, a few months ago, I saw the film Velvet Goldmine starring Ewan McGregor, which is a wonderful like pseudo fictional film, but about kind

of the glam rock era inside Britain, very, very gay, very, a whole bunch of a whole bunch of very good twink action. And there was one scene where Ewan McGregor's character, he's, he's like, he's kind of based off one of the, one of those types of music people. I forget, I forget which one it is. I think Ziggy Paw. Oh, okay. I think he's playing like a kind of a version of that, but there's one scene where he's

doing a performance where he takes all his clothes off on stage and you get to see Ewan McGregor's dick. And yeah, you do. So if people, if people want to see a kind of David Bowie-esque film starring Ewan McGregor, it has, it has like a weird gay email Christian Bale as a, as a twink and a whole bunch of other really, really solid twink stuff. I would recommend watching Velvet Goldmine. It has, it has a lot of great stuff.

And you do very early in the film get to see Ewan McGregor's penis just flapping around on stage. And it is, it's pretty good. Harrison, speaking of movies where you see a famous person's dick, if you want to see another famous penis, the movie Galaxy Quest contains several shots of Tim Allen Dong. I will say- You want to see Tim Allen's hang and wang, that's a- As someone who's seen both Galaxy Quest and Velvet Goldmine and who appreciates both

films dearly, Ewan McGregor is miles hotter than Tim Allen. Tim Allen's Dong shot is not hot. It is not pleasing. It is not supposed to be, he is hung over in his like, bathrobe leaning over. But if you want to- If you want to see, if you want to see Rainer Fassbender's dick, Germany in Autumn. Okay. That's, I could, I could, I could do that.

Very weird movie. However, come on. All right. All right. All right. In terms of actionable things to make you feel better, everyone go watch Velvet Goldmine because it has some very, it has some very good gender play, has wonderful, yeah, wonderful stuff around gender, wonderful stuff around gayness.

And yeah, they filmed from like the 90s where there was like lots of gay fucking and you're like, wow, how is this film made in the 90s? Because it is a whole bunch of like big name actors now who were like unknown at the time, all being gay and fucking each other and you're like, holy shit. All right. Well, folks, that is the, that's what we got. There's your action items. This action item.

Go, go watch, go watch Velvet Goldmine, make everyone you know watch Velvet Goldmine and it'll make you feel good about gender and take screen grabs of Ewan McGregor's dick, make Burner Twitter accounts and just start posting. Just just get it out there. Get it out there. The world needs to know. Throw some of Tim Allen's dick out there too. Don't be, don't be choosy.

Stick it all. All the dicks. All right. That's going to be the day. That's the show. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is, you know, this is a podcast about the world falling apart. The world is in fact falling apart extremely quickly right now and I'm your host Christopher

and I am here today to talk about an immense occupying army with an extensive record of torture and extradition killings. I am referring of course to the Chicago police department and with me to talk about yet more just absolute horrors that this department has committed here and worldwide, I have Raven who is a journalist from Chicago Free Media. Raven, welcome to the show and thank you for joining us. Hi. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, how have you been holding up in these, oh boy, things are going bad. Yeah, you know, we had discussed doing this interview earlier this week and I don't think either of us expected Russia to invade Ukraine last night. Yep, that was it. Yeah, and that wasn't even the, yeah, it was the convoy. So this is a time of chaos and death, but I think it's important to understand that it has always been a time of chaos and death and yeah, and I think it's especially where the Chicago police department is concerned.

We've talked about some of their more famous crimes on the show, but I wanted to have Raven on to talk about a police killing that I don't think got that much attention. I mean, even, I got a lot of attention in Chicago, but even inside of Chicago, I don't think it's as well known as some of the other police killings and that's the killing of Rikia Boyd. Yeah, Raven, do you want to walk us through how, basically, what happened the night that Dante Serven killed Rikia Boyd and, yeah, we can start from there. Sure, sure.

I mean, there's some context here, for sure, about sort of the way we ignore the murders of black women specifically and, you know, Rikia Boyd was murdered after sort of like the first wave of national Black Lives Matter protests. So it wasn't like it wasn't on the radar, right, that people weren't talking about police killing black people. But there is this long-standing issue, of course, with like the killings of black women specifically not getting as much attention, right? And this was just such a horrible, horrible incident that like, I mean, looking at the

details, even though I live here and I was like around when it happened and some of the other journalists in our collective covered the protests and the court drama and everything, it still just blows my mind the way this happened. And, you know, ultimately, the most important thing to take away from it is that her family never saw justice. He walked away. He walked away from the incident and then went on to start training police in Latin America, which we can talk about also.

Yeah. So not only did this Chicago police officer who was off duty with an unregistered gun murder an innocent 22-year-old black woman, hang out with her friends in a park, he then got a job with like a tactical training institute to travel to Honduras and train police there. Yeah. And I think, yeah, we can, I think we, yeah, we definitely will be getting to the sort of international angle of this, but yeah, I guess the export of American policing, essentially. Yeah.

But I guess for people who aren't familiar with what happens, can we walk through that? Yeah. So, so Serven showed up at a park with an unregistered gun. He, you know, witnesses reported that he smelled like alcohol that night. He may have been drinking. I don't know if that was ever verified, but certainly wouldn't be surprising. He showed up at this park to complain about a group of people making noise. And one of Rookiea Boyd's friends approached the car with his cell phone in his hand, which

Serven then would go on to say thought was a gun, and started firing shots and shot Rookiea Boyd in the head. He wasn't on duty. He wasn't actively policing. This was totally, totally outside of the realm of duty incident, right? Yeah. And no weapon was ever recovered from the scene, nothing like that. I mean, it was, there was no, in no universe was there any justification for this, right?

Yeah. It just defies logic, like that it could even happen this way. And after it happened, you know, so not only did he kill Rookiea Boyd in this park, but after it happened, there was, there was just a lot of like, there were a lot of missteps in the justice system. And it had been, I think, I want to say like 17 years at that point, since a Chicago cop had actually been charged with, with murder, right? So it had been a long time since there had been even any accountability.

And basically the prosecutor, there was something called a directed verdict where the prosecutor essentially undercharged him intentionally, or we think it was intentionally, with, with just like reckless conduct and manslaughter, and the judge tossed case because the judge was saying, you know, it didn't even meet the criteria for, for reckless conduct because it was clearly first degree murder. And then he couldn't be tried again because of rules surrounding double jeopardy. Which is like just a, like, it's just like, what, like, it's, it's such like, I was reading this, it's just baffling, like, it's, like, this whole thing is like, it's very, like,

very, very, seems very clearly set up to fail. It's like, yeah, like, we're going to, we're going to intentionally have a case where we try this guy with things that you, that you just, you cannot convict him of because it, like, again, it's, it's not, it's not like manslaughter, he just, he drove up and shot her. Right. So, he, he, he, he very, very clearly, with intention, shot Rikki a boy, and it very much seems like they planned this out, that they were, like, and you know, this is, we, we

talked about this on, on the last, uh, CPD episode, like, prosecutors collaborate with judges and the police constantly because that's just how the, the thing called the justice system works. Um, but like, yeah, like, this is like a precariously egregious example of them just setting up the case that they know, that they just knew would fail. Exactly. And this is the same prosecutor who was ousted in the aftermath of the, uh, the Laquan McDonald murder.

Um, you know, there were, there were very large protests, then there was a hashtag going on social media. Her name's Anita Alvarez. So the hashtag was buy Anita. Yeah. And, and the thing that was Anita Alvarez, like, I think people outside the city probably didn't, didn't, don't know about much about this, but like this, Anita Alvarez was like so hated that like, like every, like, like everyone in the city basically worked together

to run her out. Like you had like, you had like liberals and anarchist groups, like working together, like everyone in this, like all, like the, the, the electoralists, the anti electoralists, like the people who just like have no politics, basically whatsoever, like it was, it was this sort of, it was this really incredible like coalition because she, like just the stuff Anita Alvarez is doing is just so egregious that everyone was able to find a way to put aside their differences on just the logic of get her out. Right.

Right. But, you know, to note again, that was in the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald shooting and, you know, it wasn't, it didn't. What happened with Rikia Boyd wasn't enough for those large protests. And this is not to like denigrate or demean the people who did come out in protest because it's still like, like there were still protests. Don't get me wrong. Like people showed up for Rikia, but the difference in people showing up for Rikia and people

showing up for black men being shot, you know, like that, that's something that black women have drawn attention to. You know, they're like, why don't you care when we get married? Why don't you get murdered? And it's just, it's become this sort of, you know, ongoing chant. Like if you go to any Chicago racial justice protest, you will hear people say, we do this for Laquan. We do this for Rikia because it's just one of those names that for whatever reason, based

on what was going on in the media at the time, just like didn't make its way outside of Chicago very much. And we're seeing a similar sort of situation right now with what happened with Amir Locke in Minneapolis, right? Like that was something where I think a lot of us thought, okay, wow, this, this is going to, this is going to explode. You know, this is such just a horrible miscarriage of justice, like how could this happen? Surely there will be massive protests again, you know, something like that.

And of course, you know, Minneapolis was out there, we had like some small actions here in Chicago, but it didn't really catch fire, so to say. I mean, I think there's always sort of cycles of this, where, you know, there's cycles where you get these massive protests and cycles, you don't, but, you know, and I think this is one of the things with, that you can look at with Rikia Boy too, where it's like, regardless of whether people are in the streets or not, the killing continues. Right. Yeah.

And I think that's just sort of, that's an extremely grim thing to live with, but that, that just, you know, that, that, that's just what the police is, right? And until, you know, and until they are actually stopped, you're just going to keep getting this cycle of, I don't even know if select, like selective average is the right word, but you get these cycles of people who get merged and there's these protests and people who get murdered and get forgotten. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and it really does seem to be kind of, you know, there's a lot of layers to it. Like, like obviously the, the misogyny against black women is part of it. And I think the media just, you know, is a part of it too. Like, I mean, I'm a part of the media in a sense, but we're alternative media, so it's a little bit different. But, you know, like there are, there are choices made behind closed doors about what stories to follow and, and amplify.

And I will say, you know, what I will say is I think because of what happened in 2020, I think there's a lot more scrutiny on Chicago police now, at least more mainstream scrutiny of them than there was back in 2012 when Rikia was murdered. Yeah. Um, and that's not to say that we're doing enough because we absolutely are not. But I, I think 2020 did in some way, you know, push things just like a little bit further. If that makes sense, you know, there are some more liberal mainstream types of people talking about the horrors of Chicago policing and, and all of that.

But, you know, when it comes to Chicago police, like I just their, their apparatus is so massive, like not just from like the funding they get, but like their media and PR, you know, the, the prosecutors and the judges, like you mentioned, are absolutely part of the policing apparatus. Like they're not separate, right? It's prosecutors are cops and we have a prosecutor for a mayor and she is a cop. Like, and, and, you know, it was black youth who tried so hard to speak up about this before she was elected and said like Lori Lightfoot is a cop and people didn't listen to them. And that's where we're at now, where we have this, this prosecutor for a mayor who's because

of her background, like she can only view things through a punitive lens. Like her answer to everything is just punishment. How can we, how can we punish people? Yeah. Like one of the things she was trying to do recently was she wanted to do these like basically this measure where they called it like an anti gang funding thing, but it was basically just like, if there's a group of people, you can just take the cops and just take money from them.

And it was like, it was an incredible thing. Like it was, it was, you know, part of what's going on here is that I've talked about this before, but like Lori Lightfoot is, you know, at the time, I think people voted for her partially because they just didn't listen. And the North Siders were just like, Oh, hey, look, it's Lori Lightfoot. But then, you know, like part of it was, you know, she, she, she ran as like the anti machine candidate. And it was like, no, she's just a cop.

But like, what I think is interesting is, you know, like she, she's like incredibly widely hated, like to the point where like, you know, the Chicago city council is like not notably a anti police body, but like even the city council was like, you can't do this. Like, and then they, you know, they actually blocked, I think if, if, if I'm, if I'm getting my, my, my facts right on this, like, I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure they, they, they, they blocked life with reposal because it was just like, yeah. And that's been one of the things that was like, we've had a couple of like weird kind of like attempts to rein the CPD in, but they're not really happening because of like anti

police sentiment. They're basically happening because the city council is feuding with the mayor, right? Which is, right? Weird. Yeah. And, and you know, I've seen it like, it's, it's, she's such a, God, I could, the, the figure of Mayor Lori, Lori Lightfoot, I mean, it just makes no sense, right? Because she's hated by people on the left, you know, who obviously are anti policing.

She's also hated by the police. Yeah. The police hate her. I mean, it's, it's incredible. Like, she, she does, she does like, yeah, she, I mean, if you go through any of the conservative like cop blogs and Twitter accounts, you know, Chicago police are very active on, on social media, right? Which is, you know, it's whole, a whole thing in of itself because these people, you know,

they shouldn't be broadcasting the things on social media that they do, but she's universally hated by everyone at this point. Um, so, you know, it's just been a really, it's been a really tough couple years for Chicago since the riots, especially because Chicago, just the word has become so loaded in the national media, right? Like it's become this, this, this racist boogeyman essentially for like, what, what could happen to your city if, if the woke mobs successfully defund the police or, you know, whatever, which is completely at odds with reality because at no point have we defunded the police.

Like their budget just keeps increasing. Yeah. Like what's, what's their budget? It's like, is it, I want to say it's 40% of the total budget, but I think that's low. It's something like that. I mean, it's billions of dollars. Like it's, we're pumping billions of dollars into this standard. Funding army that has, that is basically occupying 40, 40% of, of Chicago's budget is it goes

to the police department, right, right. And you know, all of that money could obviously be spent on other things and, and we know, like we know what reduces crime. I mean, obviously we could get into like the category of what even is a crime, right? Like there are certainly lots of things that shouldn't be labeled crimes that are, but we know that communities with resources don't have significant violent crime problems. Like we know that lifting people out of poverty and giving them opportunities and homes and all of these things.

Like we know that that reduces interpersonal harm. And instead we just keep looking at everything through this lens of punishment and how punitive we can be. Yeah. Yeah. And it's been, I don't know, I, the Chicago police department is just, it's just an absolute horror show. And it's a horror show and, and they're also like, it's a horror show not just because

of how evil they are, but also because they're incompetent, right? Yeah. So you've got them doing all of these really bad things. And then they also just like struggle to, to cover up their crime. And they're, they're messing up like along the way at every step. Yeah. And it's, I don't know, they, they have the CPT's like, it's they, they have this kind of view.

I don't know how exactly unique it is, but, but I think going back to our sort of theory of like every police department has one thing that they're really good at. It's the CPT has this unique combination of like incompetence, torture and crime that they do. That's like, I think, I think sets it apart from a lot of other police departments. Yeah. I think that's a good place to sort of jump off into the second, I guess, part of the Rikia Boyd story or really as this, it seems to be the Rikia Boyd story, it's the story

of Dante Servin, which is his role in essentially exporting American policing and the horrors of, you know, the horrors of the American police system, the horrors of sort of American imperialism to other countries, because it is, it is not enough that the CPT murders people here. They've also got to do it other places. Right. Right. And, and so there was a, there was a Chicago reader piece written about this, um, back

in February, 2020, Servin's not mentioned in it, but it was a really good story. I recommend people look it up because, you know, some of this research is not like my original research, right? It's them from the research that people with the Invisible Institute did, but essentially, you know, there are Chicago police officers, and there's one in particular, his name is Aaron Cunningham. He's the man who founded this tactical training institute, um, that go, you know, they go abroad, like they go to different countries and, and it's private, privately funded, so

they claim to be working with, with the feds and there's a lot of like weird gray area there where there's not a lot of oversight and nobody really knows, like, are you getting federal money to do this? Are you just saying you are like, like what's the deal, right? But the Cunningham is essentially like a crooked cop who funded this tactical training institute so that they go overseas to under resourced countries with under resourced police departments and train them in how to be police. They train them in crowd control.

They train them in like narcotics and drug investigations. They train them in like gang warfare, you know, all of these things, right? And these are countries that have tremendous issues with like, you know, outright warfare going on between gangs and the existing police forces, right? So they're in desperate need of, of, of aid, of assistance. And of course, like some of these conflicts that are going on stem from American imperialism to begin with, right? So it's like, we caused the problems, then we're going to come in and like send a bunch

of cops over who like, you know, have extensive misconduct records in their, in their home cities. And some of them have even just like murdered innocent women in the park. Yep. And we're going to have them train your guys into how to be cops. Yeah. And yeah, you know, that goes about as well as you would expect it to, which is one of the things that the reader piece talks about is, so one of the, they, these guys get brought

in to train a bunch of cops in El Salvador after the El Salvador police do a bunch of horrible massacres. And then they train these cops and then the cops immediately turn around and also again do a bunch of horrible massacres. And it's, it's this, it's this, you know, I mean, I, I, I, I, I don't want to de-emphasize the fact that like the, like El Salvador, for example, like is a place that has its own like native right wing, like it has, like it has its own El Salvador, like right wing desk wads, right?

And they, they've, you know, right back by the CIA, but like, yeah, I don't want to like under my, like underplay just how violent, just like the local reactionaries are because it's, it's not, it's, it's, it's, it's not like they, they wouldn't also be death squads if the US wasn't there, but like the US, you know, and the chocolate police department sending people to train them is making them even worse. And it's, yeah, yeah, and, and every place has their own right wing reactionaries, right? Like we're seeing right now to bring, to loop everything together and just bring us back to like what's going on with Ukraine and Russia.

It's related, you know, like both sides of this conflict have their own reactionary right wing forces, right? Yeah. And anywhere you go around the world, that's going to be a sting. And empires like the American empire or the Russian empire are, or the El Salvador empire, you know, whatever empire they're going to be looking for ways to take advantage of, of those forces to achieve their own ends. I think that what I think is important, like one of the things I think is important about

this politically is to understand that there is a, like there, there, there is an incredible amount of international solidarity between cops, right? They have, you know, like, you know, I've seen, I think there's a book called The Thin Blue Line International, but it's, yeah, I mean, that, that, that's a thing. Like the, you see this basically everywhere, the cops, like the, the cops know which side they're on and it's the side of the other cops. And I think that's something that, that confuses a lot of people because you get things like, for example, like, like the Chinese police, right?

Like the Chinese police, like go, like we're trained by, I think, I mean, well, you know, like the Chinese police in Hong Kong, for example, like that, that police force, like is still literally just a colonial British police force. They just, they didn't even like, they didn't even bring in new people. They just like promoted a new person who was a British colonial police officer and then made them the new head of the police. And then, you know, and those, those, and those cops are also trained by, they're determined by American cops or British cops.

They're trained a lot by Israeli cops. This is the same thing, you know, this is the same thing with, with, with the, the, the, you know, like this is the sort of the same effect that gets you, like Eric Prince, like, you know, being, being like hired by the CCP to run stuff in Xinjiang. Like it's, it's, there's, there's an incredible right wing sort of militarist cop alliance that go just, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a kind of international police solidarity that scrambles a lot of the sort of perceptions of what people think, like, like what, what, how, how people try to think about the world because, right.

Yeah. And, you know, and like, it, like, fundamentally, like the, the, the, the, the, the basis they have is the defensive property and the defensive sort of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the global white supremacist regime and they all know, you know, when, when, when an American cop goes to El Salvador, like they, they know which side they're on, they're on the cop side and it's, and you know, and, and they, they share, they, they share information, they share weapons, they share tactics, they share, I mean, just literally people, they share training and, yeah, and, and of course, because again, it's the CPD, they share Dante

Irvin. Yeah. And so he, he, I, you know, apparently at some point, very shortly after the murder of Rikia Boyd, it looks like based on what I've seen on historical media and what I've pieced together from, from his employment history, it looks like he had begun working with one of these tactical training institutes right before the murder. And then he murdered Rikia Boyd and I mean, I guess technically I'm not supposed to use the word murder, but you know, yeah, no fucking me murdered Rikia Boyd and so, so he murdered

Rikia Boyd and then everything happened with like the going through court and he walked away without being charged or imprisoned, I mean, he was charged, but without being convicted or imprisoned, then the police board, you know, recommended his firing, but he resigned two days before like he was supposed to have his hearing. So he still gets a pension. I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Yeah. And so he gets, yeah, I don't, I thought to confirm that, but I'm pretty sure he gets

a pension. So he resigns and then at some point after he resigns, he starts posting to social media about his trips to Honduras and, you know, is posting photos of like hanging out in the bar with, with the cops down there and kind of just all of that. And this is not like public information. Like it's, he has like a LinkedIn page where he's like the things he's been doing, like, like this is completely public. I don't know like why nobody knows about it or has talked about it, but, you know, that

also I think just comes back to this murder kind of flying under the national radar a lot. And so, you know, we don't know what company or organization he's there with. It doesn't say he's with International Tactical Training Association, which is the Chicago based group led by Aaron Cunningham and his wife. My guess would be it's that group because that's the big one out of Chicago, but, you know, like we can't, I can't prove it. Yeah.

It could be another, it could be another right wing tactical training group that's training desk blocks. Yeah. And that's the thing, right? Is that this is not just happening here in Chicago. So like there are these tactical training groups all over and there are a number of U.S. based ones started by different police officers from different departments because it's kind of like a career path for them in a sense because it's a thing they can do

once they retire. You get, and it's a moneymaker, you hold these, these tactical training seminars. And so a number of them are domestically based, right? Like they're not necessarily going overseas, but what they're doing is they're, they're having these seminars and they're training other police officers in like certain things. Like some of them might be like an afternoon session where you go and you learn about like, you know, firearm safety or something, then there might be like larger ones where you go and you like stay and camp out for like three days and you practice like ambushing

guerrilla gangs in the jungle or something like that. And then a lot of them are based around gun safety and firearms training. And so many of those are open to the general public. It depends. Some of these are like only for other cops or law enforcement and you have to like show ID or military and you have to like prove that you're affiliated with police or military. Some of them are open to the public and you just have to have like a firearms cart. Oh boy.

So that's problematic. Yep. For one reason, because we found out in the aftermath of the January 6th capital riot that a number of, a number of the capital rioters did attend like firearms training classes, school training classes in just various sort of locations. Yep. So this is a way for officers who have left the force for whatever reason to then have a captive audience.

And yeah, they're teaching them how to like shoot guns and, you know, follow the more like specific sort of things like that, but what kind of conversations are they having? Like what kind of ideology is being espoused? What kind of other people are showing up to these meetings and what are they talking about? What groups are they recruiting for? What are their affiliations? Yeah. And, and I think, and I think that that's something that's important to think about.

And also to, you know, have more generational journalists look into because, you know, when you look at these, I mean, like, we've had stories like this before, right? Like, I mean, this is a lot of how, for example, like the Taiwanese Special Forces, for example, spent an enormous amount of, well, part of the Special Forces, part of just the Taiwanese Army spent an enormous amount of time doing stuff very similar to this. And, you know, the product of that was, and this is a, this is called war era. They're doing this in the 70s, they're doing this in the 80s, some extent in the 60s. You know, and, and I mean, the product of this is like arena.

The product of this is, you know, the, the, like, the, like one of the people they trained did the El Museo de Massacre, like, and that, that kind of stuff, you can trace these, these influence networks and you can trace the sort of, so I mean, a lot of this is, I mean, literally just funded by weird cults, but you can, you know, you can trace these different sort of paramilitary intelligence influence networks. And what you see at the end of them is a lot of the time, it's just a bunch of fascists and it's a bunch, it's a bunch of fascists doing coups. And you know, like in some sense, like, yeah, this is, this is a kind of like, you know,

like liberal democracy has this sort of problem, right? Which is that in order for liberal democracy to, you know, function as a liberal democracy, you have to have cops. And that means that you're, you know, you, you are producing domestically and internationally a group of just ferocious, bloodthirsty, right-wing murderers and you're, you're giving them sanatorium, you're giving them all these training and weapons and, you know, the product of that is they, they do what they're trained to do, which is they kill people, they torture people, they train other people how to do this and yeah, you get these, these cascading

series of effects that lead, you know, a bunch of people taking these classes January 6th, they lead them to coups all over the world, they lead them to death squads all over the world. This has been Nick Could Happen Here, join us tomorrow for part two of our interview with Raven. You can find us at Instagram and on Twitter at Happen Here Pod, check out the Cool Zone for more of a podcast and thank you for listening. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how much I, Christopher Wong, hate the

police and specifically the Chicago police department. And we are bringing you part two of my interview with Chicago journalist Raven about more crimes of the Chicago police department, their international in fact, and how the police weaponize race and class lines in order to preserve their power. Enjoy. You know, I, I've spent a lot of time just like in like cop social media spaces, right? And of course it's like rotting my brain and you know, it's, it's honestly just really tough to deal with sometimes, but you know, one thing that we see like over and over again,

if you look at the memes that they share and the, the posts that they write on Facebook and all of these things is that they see the people as their enemy, right? Like they're, they're trained, the military, the militarization of the police isn't just about the equipment that they have and the money that they have. It's also about their psychology and how they, they view themselves as like warriors fighting the bad guys. But because of the nature of policing, the bad guys are literally anyone who isn't complying with what they say.

And usually this is like black people, you know, marginalized people, poor people. And then there's sort of this like, you see a lot of these like memes where they, they talk about themselves as like sheep dogs protecting the sheep from the wool. And yeah, and like the sheep are supposed to be like the innocence, which typically if you, if you really go deep into it, it's like in their minds, that's like women and children who are like mostly white, right? Yeah. And they're protecting like white innocence from like bad guys.

And there are layers to it, right? Because like obviously it doesn't always work out that way. And you know, there are like poor white people in rural areas who deal with police repression. You know, there are like wealthy black people who get pulled over by the cops just because they're driving while black. Like there are certainly like layers upon layers here, depending on like class and just everything. But at the end of the day, like they're training themselves up to be a military fighting the

people, invading their spaces, taking over. And the psychology of it is just really, really dark too, because you have these people who because because we're sending them into under resourced communities, sort of after the fact, after traumas occurred, after there have been, there's been violence, there's been shootings, everyone's poor, you know, whatever, we're sending them into these places where there's just like the most horrible things about poverty and about violence are happening. And that's all they're exposed to. So then they end up with PTSD, or all of these problems, you know, like the alcoholism

rate, the domestic violence rate, all of these things within the struggle police force are extremely high. And all of this comes back to because we're treating everything as punishment, we're coming in after the fact, we're not actually treating these problems at the source, we're just sending people in to manage the chaos after the fact. And then they end up traumatized, they end up enacting more crime and more violence in these communities. And it just becomes a cycle that no one can get out of.

And then it comes back to just like defunding the police and state priorities, like where are we putting our resources, because if we were putting them in the right place, so many of these things wouldn't be happening in the first place. Yeah. And I think one other thing I think it's important to note that we talked about this on our, you know, the episodes about the cartels, we talked about this on our episodes about the other episodes about the Chicago police, which is that the other thing that happens is that the Chicago police just they, you know, they see the drug trade and they go,

okay, we're just going to get in on it. And, you know, and the sort of the combination of these people, these just incredibly violent armed people with like total impunity and an enormous amount of money is that, you know, they become themselves, you know, they become exactly the same thing that they were, you know, nominally supposed to be fighting. And that has all of these downstream effects, if you talked about the way that this militarizes is basically everything, right, this militarizes the police, this has, you know, the violence of it has the effect of militarizing, like militarizing everyone else militarizes the

non-state actors, and it just sort of it just keeps rationing up the level of violence. And as long as you keep throwing the state at it, and as long as the state just keeps essentially like going, okay, I just, I, okay, we have a drug trade, I'll just get a cut of it. As long as that keeps happening, like all of the stuff that the cops are, you know, nominally there to deal with is just going to keep escalating because the state that like, because, because state violence is intensifying and making it worse. Right.

Right. And it's just so like, they're so fucking racist. Yeah. And it's like, I just can't, I mean, like, we have to, we have to keep talking about that because it's just like so much of just like where, like where they get their information and how they exchange, like if you look at these cop social networks and where they're getting their information and the kinds of things they're saying to each other about black people in Chicago are all so ridiculously wrong because they're just parroting these

like cop blogs that they read full of all kinds of just batshit fucking conspiracy theories about like our, our black DA or prosecutor, excuse me, Kim Fox, being like a puppet of George Soros. They literally believe this. Yeah. And, and it's echoed by people like Tucker Carlson, you know, in national media, like anytime Chicago comes up, you will hear these kinds of just completely off the wall conspiracy theories about like communist BLM and Tifa Soros funded Kim Fox, like ruining Chicago.

And I'm not like defending Kim Fox, I'm going to be wrong, she's still a prosecutor. She's still like putting people in jail. Yeah. But she, you know, she was elected because she was, she was supposed to be this like big reformist and, and all of that. And so she's become a target and then she's also become a target for them because she's a black woman. So it's easy for them to, to make her into a lightning rod of hate, basically.

Yeah. And, you know, like they just, the dehumanization of, of black Chicagoans that you see in these, in these Facebook posts that these people are writing and the things that they're tweeting, like it is violently disturbingly racist. And all of that comes back to just how they view themselves as like an occupying army in these communities. Like they don't view themselves as like cooperative partners in helping these communities. Like it's no, we're there to occupy, we're there to extract resources, we're there to

like, you know, benefit off of this gang warfare if we can, you know, and, and like you mentioned, like if you look at like the corruption and, and the things that, that have gone on with that, I mean, like, I mean, that goes back to city council, right? I mean, we have, we have aldermen. We have, we have alder people who are essentially in bed with the cops looking for looking out for them. Yep. And, you know, like they're dedicated cop aldermen.

I mean, like all of our Chicago aldermen are alder people, excuse me, are Democrats by name, but it's like, no, we have five or six alder people who are Republicans. Yeah. Like they call themselves Democrats because they wouldn't be able to be elected in Chicago if they didn't, but they are absolutely like cop loving Republicans. You know, they just call themselves Democrats because they like support gay marriage or whatever. Yep.

Well, it's because it's Chicago and you can't run it. Yeah. Like the, like the, the, the, the only time a Democrat has ever lost one of these elections was the time a blanking on the name of the cult, the time a LaRoucheite accidentally won the primary and lost the, like that, that's basically it. Like, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know, this, this is a Democratic city, but you know, a Democratic city just means incredibly right wing and police, which, right, right. Yeah.

And when you look at the history of policing in Chicago, you have to go back decades and decades and kind of look also to it like where a lot of these cops came from in the aftermath of like the dissolution of like the official like mafia and like Al Capone and all that stuff. Yeah. And a lot of working class immigrants from like European communities, like the Polish community, the Irish community, the Italian community, and all of these communities have their own like police associations here, like the Italian American police association,

the Polish American police association, all of these things. And so like it becomes this being a cop to go back to sort of like the international ties here, being a cop becomes this like identity for them and their families. Like a lot of people are cops because their dad was a cop, their grandpa was a cop, their cousins are cops, their brothers are cops. There's like a family honor sort of in like being a cop and a lot of them show, you know, and that, that goes back to why they show so much solidarity too with like cops from other countries is it's like the profession in and of itself is lionized.

And then on top of that, you have right now in Chicago, like because of gentrification, because of just like immigration patterns and the way communities have changed. We have these like traditionally Polish, Italian communities that feel like they're being encroached upon by mostly like Latinx communities. So we had, for example, like, you know, this shooting, the murder of Anthony Alvarez up on up on the Northwest side, the far Northwest side of Chicago last year. And in the aftermath of that, we saw a lot of like tension between the traditional like Polish, Polish American community up there, and then the new wave of like Latinx immigrants.

And the problem is, a lot of the people in the Polish community up there have family and relatives who are cops. So we had like cops trashing the memorial, you know, to the Anthony Alvarez, we had like Polish biker gangs, like riding by the rallies trying to like intimidate people. And it all comes back to like white supremacy and just straight up racism, right? Like, there's another example of that with like the Columbus statue that was sent here by Mussolini that eventually, yeah, so one of the, like one of the, I guess you call it the second wave of the uprising in Chicago was a bunch of people like enormous numbers

of people throwing things at cops who were attempting to defend this statue. And this was like a, like the Italian, like American, like the right way of it got like extremely mad about this. And there was this sort of, there was all this sort of tension between, like, between these, these different communities. Yeah. Yeah. And some of that comes back to like also the construction of the interstate, right?

So like in the, I don't know when they started building the highways down by UIC is like in the fifties or the sixties, right? You have this like traditional Italian American community down there by University of Illinois at Chicago and like on Taylor street. And then people built the highway and it like fucked up a bunch of shit, you know, some people had to sell their homes, you know, some, their traditional neighborhood was like destroyed, all of these things. And then this university is built and that coincides with that.

And so you end up getting a lot of like old school racist Italian, getting pissed at the students and at the school and everything in the aftermath. And it's a really, really multicultural school. I don't know if you're familiar with UIC, but it's like, yeah, so UIC has like one of the largest immigrant student population student bodies, like in like the country. It's just a very, very diverse school. I'm pretty sure white people are actually a minority. If you look at like the demographics of just like how people identify in student surveys.

UIC is the University of Illinois in Chicago. Yeah. It's one of the big universities in the city. Yeah. Just for the non-Chicagoans. Yeah. Yeah. Different.

Yeah. There's a different one, University of Chicago, that's like down high park. Yeah, that's the one I went to, which is the first in many ways. Yeah. And they've got their whole thing going on because their campus police force is one of the largest private police forces in the world. Yeah. And you know, I guess we can talk about that a little bit too, because that's this sort

of like, it's kind of horrible binds where it's like, yeah, so that police force is one of the largest police forces in the world. It has shot students. It has shot people who are not students. It does a bunch of horrible things. But then, you know, there's this kind of trap, right? Because like, one of the things that happens is like, well, okay, so you get rid of the UCPD, right?

And then, you know, okay, so they're going to bring the Chicago Police Department in. And it's like, the Chicago Police Department are like, one of the few institutions in the world that's worse than like the regular UCPD. And it's, you know, and that was one of the things that was really inspiring in 2020 was just, yeah, the way that the abolish the U Chicago Police Department, like, movement was sort of like, enfolded in this broader, just in this broader attention of just abolish the Chicago Police in general. But it's this weird thing where it's like, yeah, you have these, you have these occupation

zones. And it's like, that part of the south side. And the other thing I think that people don't understand about the U Chicago Police Department is that they have an absolutely enormous range that they patrol, right? That doesn't include. It goes way off campus, like they have they have an absolutely enormous range of things they can include. And they do things like, you know, they'll they'll just like, like, like lock down the

entire campus. And they'll just do this. It'll just happen because they'll be like chasing someone who like, I like one of the one of the times I was there, someone like, they'd like stolen something from like a video game store. And the whole campus got locked down, like the cops were screaming and I want to stay in the buildings like, and they just like, you know, they had this play like enormous numbers of cops just sort of like swarmed through the entire the entire campus for like an hour.

And there's just like happens. I mean, there's cops everywhere. They just they do stuff like that. And there's this whole, you know, and this is one of the other things where you get these tensions because so you Chicago, the University of Chicago also has like, it's not as large but also has like a like, it also has like a pretty large international student immigrant like population. And there was this, there was there was there was a Chinese national student who got shot

on a who got shot on a robbery right last year. And that was a huge, I think that was last year. Yeah, that was. Yeah, it wasn't. Yeah. It was last year. I think. Yeah.

Yeah. And that turned into a huge thing where you had these sudden, you know, because we had these anti police protests. And then suddenly there was this huge wing of like, basically the right wing faculty, a bunch of just like absolutely reactionary, like extremely rich CCP scions. And like this, this sort of like nucleus of the, the, the like, like people like people in the right wing law faculty, like the econ people who suddenly had this like giant thing that was like, it was it was it was this sort of microcosm of the broader sort of like turn

against the anti police movements by using crime. They had this whole thing. It's like, we need to keep the campus safe. And they're like, oh, we need to give you the UCPD, the ability to lead to go off of campus, which, you know, they already have there, like, we need to give them more money. We need to have more cops everywhere. And it was just, it's just this sort of like, you get this horrible, horrible sort of pendulum effect where like, you get this violence.

And then, you know, people like the, like the, the, the rights response to that violence is just to create is, you know, just to send in more cops to create more violence. And it just keeps escalating and keeps escalating. And it's, it's, you know, and there's, there's this sort of dynamic of this, right, where rich students at the University of Chicago, and this is to some extent, this is, it's mostly a class and race thing, but it's not entirely, but like people who go there just like have this like incredible fear of literally everyone around them. It's like, they, they turn into many cops, like there are people who are screaming about

how like just the red line is not safe at night. And I was like, I, I have literally like, I, I have walked like 30 blocks back home at two in the morning and been completely fine. Like you guys are just cowards, but, and you know, your, your cowards and extremely racist. But like, yeah, like all, all of these sort of factors blend together and you get these, you get these coalitions of, of these, these right wing pro police people who want to just not, not just like, you know, not, not just support the police, but want to continue to expand it so they can feel safe.

And it's like, you're not, you're not even in danger, but they have, they have the same sort of like this whole town is trying to kill us like racist copper in mentality. And yeah, sorry. This is, this is, this has been me being upset about this because Yeah, no, no, I feel you and it's like, it's, but it relates back to kind of like campus policing in general and kind of why it exists, which is that a lot of colleges, I mean, not all of them, it depends on where you are, but like some colleges, especially in like large urban areas, you know, are, were built in the middle of like, largely black communities.

Yeah. And that's, that's Chicago to a T. Yeah. And because the land was cheaper to buy at, you know, there are reasons why necessarily like they're built in these places. And so the campus police department function as just a way to like, keep the students isolated from the community, like it's making a community within a community. It's making this little enclave.

And then, of course, people are, are then going to view anyone outside of that enclave with like racist suspicion, right? And if you have immigrant students who may or may not be wealthy, it depends on where they come from, but you, you will see has like a lot of, as far as I'm aware, like wealthy international students and they might be coming from countries where there aren't any black people or there aren't very many. And just because they're, they're coming from like this country doesn't necessarily mean that they like are left wing.

So they, they're coming into these communities, you know, with not a lot of experience, just sort of around people who look different from them. And so they're going to be, of course, looking to like these police figures than to quote, protect them, but, but to go back to it, it's like, okay, well, if, if you are feeling unsafe on the train at night, for example, why, why isn't the train safe? Like why are people using it as, as, you know, shelter? Why are people doing drugs on the train? Like why is there violence happening?

And that just comes back to, again, like we're not actually addressing the root problems by just adding more police. And I will say like, I think, I think again, like the other thing that's happening here is really just the University of Chicago, like is, is, is a place to which the world's elite is, is, is, is transplanted. And you can see this like very clearly along because like, yeah, like there's the, the, the wealth gap between like, between poor international students and rich international students is like, it's the largest single wealth gap in like, in this, in the entire

university. It's, it's unbelievable. And, you know, and you could, you could just, you can watch it playing down on class lines and it plays out on other lines, right? Where you have like, like, you know, you, like, yeah, you have like, you have both, you have students from, I don't know, you have students from China, you have students from Vietnam and like one of them will be trans. And, you know, it turned, yeah, it's like, oh, hey, look, like, yeah, like, when you

have like, when you have a Chinese trans student, right, it's like, yeah, the, the, the, the, the people who back home had, have experienced depression in various ways are consistently like consistently, um, are consistently anti-police and consistently like significantly less bad about this stuff. It's, it's, in my experience, it's, it's very much is just, you have this sort of transplanted, like you have this sort of transplanted elite from other countries that come to the University of Chicago so they can, you know, study economics and go back to their own countries and like continue to like rob their own populations.

And those people are the ones who are doing this stuff. And it's, I don't know, it's, you, you see a lot of kind of like this, like, I think really misguided, like, anti-racism that's like, well, okay, we have to take the security concerns of these, these, of Asian people seriously. And it's like, these are, this is, this is the Chinese ruling class. This is the, this, like, you don't need to take these people's concerns seriously. They are, they're ferocious right-wingers who've just read Hayek for the first time, like, you guys, these, these, these are, these are not the same people as the people who are

suffering under the, like, Right, right, and, and we saw that, we saw that too with like the big wave of, of stop Asian hate protests here last year. Yeah. Where we had like this big rally down in Chinatown with like a huge, huge number, like hundreds of people from the community came out and, and you had a lot of younger people who very much had like, you know, deep on the police kind of sentiments. But then you had, we had like police representatives speaking at the rally.

Yeah. About how they were going to, to make like Chicago safer for Asian people. Yeah. It's like, it's like this stuff, like it makes me so angry. Like CPD, not necessarily, yeah, no, it was regular CPD. Like I'm Chinese. They almost fucking killed me on campus. Like these people, like they're not, these, these, these, they, they, they, the police

don't keep us safe. But like, you know, there's been this, there's been this incredible weaponization of, of the Asian American community. Like you see this, you see this in Chinatown, there's been this, like there's like Chinatown is like, this is different even in the last like, like three or four years has turned into this just like, like incredibly right-wing, let me say, it's not everyone, but like you see like there, there are like, like there, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's a bench in, in, in Chicago in front of the library, right?

That had, they have these tables and the tables have an engraved plaque on them that says no loitering and that says, we will call the police on you if you'd loiter. This is outside of the library. Like it's, yeah, there's, they have this sort of like, this is incredibly right-wing, like anti, anti, like anti, like homeless people campaign that's happening. And it's, it's, I don't know, it's, it's one of just the most depressing things I've seen here because you have, you know, you, you have the Chamber of Commerce as the sort of like, you know, as the most powerful political force in a lot of these communities and like

those people are right-wingers and they just, they, they don't have the same interests as like the rest of the age of, of the Asian-American community and it, it, you know, and it gets, you get this horrible, horrible thing, which is what was happening on the Ushakawa campus, which is like essentially the right-wing, like pitting, the right-wing is like just, just pitting the, like basically, basically like pitting Asians against Black people. And it's horrible. And it, and it just comes back to like, who, who is benefiting from this? Like who, when we, when we have immigrant communities or non-immigrant communities,

you know, like being upset with other communities, what are the greater forces here that are like benefiting from that sort of like, inciting? And it's always like the fascist cops who, who ultimately come out on top there because if they can keep the people fighting amongst themselves or they can stoke prejudice and racism between the people, you know, they can then come in and scoop up resources. And when you look at like a school like University of Chicago, they just have a massive, massive amount of money. Right?

Like the resources there are just unbelievable, unbelievable. And so of course you're going to have people in the community who are resentful of that, who are upset about that because like they don't have affordable housing. They don't have good jobs. Like they're trying to make a living and keep their kids safe. And here's this like university in the middle of their neighborhood with all of this money. And wow, I'm so amazed. I'm just so happy that like somebody's doing construction right now outside my apartment.

Thank you for this timing. I'm so glad about this. But essentially like, you know, you say the students, the students end up being a scapegoat for all of their like, all the communities like justified fears about what's going on. Right? Yeah. Justified. They're justified in being upset that they don't have these resources, but it's not necessarily

like the individual students. Yeah. And there've been a lot of really good. So like right before one of the things that was happening in Hyde Park, like right before I got there was there was this huge campaign that basically there wasn't a level one trauma center like on this outside. And so, you know, if you get shot, right, they have to like take you in a helicopter to the north side to a hospital there.

And you know, in that time, like there's a good chance you're going to die. And there had there had been one, but it got shut down because it wasn't making any money. And so, you know, there was this huge community student campaign to like to force the university to open one of these trauma centers. And so I think and I think it's important that like we don't have to fight each other. Like that's not a thing that, you know, like, yeah, like I think I think like that university I I don't think it should continue to exist. I think at the very least it should be like taken under community control.

But who but like, yeah, like, you know, for the people who are there and you know, I think like for the Asian Americans listening to this and for for people who are students, like you you do not have to be the weapon to the cops. You don't you can you can work together and and and when you do that, you can win and you can win you can win like really incredibly tangible gains for the community and you can save people's lives. You know, it also outside of campus, same deal with Chicago police, right? Like we don't need to have the Eastern European communities fighting the Latino communities

fighting the black communities. Like we don't need to have these like all of these communities just like fighting each other instead of like the actual oppressive forces at the top. But you know, right now we're at like this kind of, you know, I guess tipping point, I think, where either people start to show solidarity or we're fucked. Yep. Like there are massive super existential with you, but like there are massive, massive forces right now, right wing forces trying to benefit off of all of this factionalization.

And as we see tanks rolling into Ukraine, like that's this is a global phenomenon. Yeah. It's not just happening at home. It's happening everywhere. And like we don't have a lot of time left to stop this and to bring it back to this like far right trucker full trucker convoy show that's about to happen and roll into roll into our capital. Like I'm just struck by the timing of it all and I'm certainly not going to be like a conspiracy

theorist about it and be like, well, Putin is has planned this all happen at the same time. Yeah. But I do think that whether or not it's like planned to happen at the same time, it's absolutely going to benefit these people that, you know, this is happening right now in Ukraine. And yeah, it's the same thing with with the just horrific anti trans bills that the anti trans wall is not bills, but anti trans government action, I guess is the correct term in in yeah, that's happening in Texas right now.

Yeah. And it's, you know, like people people draw comparisons to to the Third Reich and to Nazi Germany and them banning like, you know, homosexual dance parties and things like that, you know, like they didn't start out saying we want to kill all the Jews. Like it's not like it doesn't you don't start that way. Yeah. You make you would do the smaller attacks first you build up to it you take power inch by inch until like nobody can stop you.

Yeah. But I think I think, you know, there's an important note here, though, which is that like it's very easy to sort of especially in times like this to sort of just like be in a place where it just it looks like history is just washing over you, right, that, you know, we're bound by these sort of irresistible powers and forces. And that's not true. Like these these these these kinds of fascist movements can be defeated. These kinds of military movements can be defeated, but they can only be defeated when we actually

take our place as the subjects of history, right? Like we are that we are the people who through our actions create history. And you know, when we also are the people who create the world we see around us. But you know, as David Graver was incredibly fond of saying, right, is like we are the people who create the world around us. And that means that we can it can be otherwise. And you know, when when we essentially like when we reclaim our, you know, our status as subjects or status as human beings or status as the people of which history is composed

of and we move, we can stop these things. Like there do not have to be another like there don't have to be more Nazis. I don't have to be more genocides. They don't have to be more wars. We can stop them. We just have to fight. Right. I don't disagree with that.

I think I think it's completely true. I guess I'm just, I don't know, maybe I'm like a doomer, I don't know, like it's really hard right now to kind of see I guess sort of mass resistance forming in the U.S. specifically just because of the way the pandemic has wrecked us. And I feel like people are, I mean, people are just checked out, right? Like they're exhausted, they're broke. I, you know, a million people have died because of, because of the government's just complete lack of adequate handling of COVID.

And so I completely agree that like this isn't inevitable. Like we can stop this at the same time. I just, I don't know what it's going to take for Americans like as an entity to actually stand up and fight this. And I'm not blaming individual people because it's like all the reasons for people being exhausted and checked out are like also by design, right? Because of course, like if we keep people exhausted and checked out, then the oligarchs at the top like can continue to like loot society.

Yeah. I mean, I think I think I'm sort of less singling on that just because like, you know, because I remember this is the same thing that like everyone said right before the uprising. Like everyone was checked out, everyone was sort of like, you know, like the pandemic had just started. Everyone, there was this like general consensus that like mass action wasn't possible. And then, you know, like two days later, they burned down, they burned down a police station and like they're looting the miracle mile.

And you know, it's like, it's, these things, these things, these things, these things, like, you know, like every like the, the, the, the, the people who are in some sense the most in tune with like what is happening, it'll often tend to be the people who are most shocked by when, when these kinds of things just emerge seemingly out of nowhere. And so, I don't know, I think, I think, I think we can't know what exactly will set off the next wave, but I think it's a safe bet there will be another one because there always is. Oh yeah, for sure.

We've never, you know, we have yet to hit a point so bad that people stop fighting like ever in history. So yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And that's the long arc of history too, is it's like people have always been fighting for their liberation in some way. And if you look at the longer story, you know, there might be very long periods of darkness

and repression and collapse. And then people emerge from that and new societies emerge, new ways of thinking, all of that. And I think where we're at now, like at this moment, there are certainly small ways that people can resist and ways that we like we have to focus on like our immediate communities too. You know, it's so easy to get, to feel helpless when you like, you look at things on such a grand scale, because of course, like we can't all just like run into Ukraine right now and like stop Putin.

Yeah. There's really not a lot we can do when it comes to like things like that. But we can like take care of our friends. We can like make sure that the people immediately around us like have what they need. We can like check in on like, you know, our on-house neighbors. We can like take, you know, some people here in Chicago are prepping to like take in Ukrainian refugees, for example, right now. And that's like the sort of action that like is definitely going to be needed.

And, you know, like, when you look at the story of like something as horrible and just like awful as the Holocaust, like, of course, there are all, all these like small stories of like people who like sheltered, people who were, who were being sought out. And, you know, there were, there were all these different kinds of resistance movements in Germany and in Poland, and it's not just about like all the people that, that Hitler killed. It is also about all the people that like were, that people managed to save, you know. And it is also like, I don't know, we, in America, especially, it's like, we got to

get away from the Hitler comparisons, which I know I just like just made. Yeah. Like, it's, it's, you know, like, don't get me wrong, like, there's obviously like plenty of parallels and it's important to be like students of history and like understand what's going on and everything. But like, we don't, what we're seeing is like, we're going to see a kind of fascism that is unique to our era, right? Like, I don't know that Trump is going to come out and call for like outright genocide

and like, you know, build, build death, or like Ron DeSantis is going to get elected and like build death camps. Like it's going to look different than it has in the past, even if like some of the phenomenon are similar. So what we're looking at instead is like, especially with climate change, we're looking at a lot of controls over borders. And obviously some of that is like what's happening in Europe right now too, but you know, people are going to be looking to control resources like water, oil, land, as we know

that they're like running out. And so this, this sentiment against like immigrants, especially, you know, that's something that is going to just keep getting worse. And so I think it makes it harder for people to, to I guess, recognize that things are as bad as they were. If that makes sense, yeah, um, and ultimately, like it's just, yeah, mass resistance is the only way out. Right.

Yep. Like the people have to resist and we can't keep waiting for like Joe Biden or, or anyone to be our political savior. Yeah. And I think, I think that's, that's, that's a pretty good note to end on. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.

Do you have stuff that you want to plug? Um, not at the moment, no, I mean, I think, uh, I guess our Twitter account, but that's about it. Okay. Yeah. Well, this, this has been, this has been another episode of It Can Happen Here. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at happenherepod. You can find stuff at coolzone with a website, go there, stop asking me for sources.

They're on the website. You know, they get uploaded. Uh, yeah. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you once again for joining us. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It could happen here as 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.