Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 29

Episode Date: April 9, 2022

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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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where we talk about things falling apart. And this week we're talking about our ability to have things that don't get co-opted by fascists falling apart. Garrison, take us away. Yes, so today we're going to talk about kind of why maybe it's great not to cede any aesthetic ground to fascists anytime it's uncomfortable.

And to do so, we've brought on someone who I found on Twitter who wrote a very, very great article about some kind of ongoing debate and drama around anarchist symbols and fascists trying to use symbols. But we are talking to Black Ram. Hello. Hey, how's things? I'm actually doing okay. I've been looking forward to this chat for a while. So yes, if people are unfamiliar, it looks like the past few weeks people have really freaked out about an eight-pointed star. People really seem concerned about it. Yeah, this has a lot tied in with what's been happening in Ukraine, because as always happens when there's a new story that has anything to do with the far right, people got acquainted with some symbols that they had not been aware of before, particularly the Son and Rad,

which is a common symbol that you'll see on members of the Azov Battalion, kind of some other far-right organizations in Ukraine, as well as elsewhere, you know, the Christchurch shooter wore a Son and Rad, and then they started identifying all sorts of things that they felt looked like Son and Rad's everywhere on the Internet, and things kind of spiraled from there. Well, and I think there's actually a little bit more to it than that. We're going to get into Black Ram's article here shortly, but yeah, I kind of first want to briefly go through, I think, why this debate happened now, because the debates happened before, but it's never gotten this intense. A big part of this is tied to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and everyone wanting to play like, where's Waldo with symbols, being like, can you spot the Son and Rad on the pictures of the Azov Battalion?

And I think the other, so like, everyone's already kind of looking for symbols as like a fun game, but the other thing that's kind of happening is because of the Russia-Dugan connection. Dugan's like a political fascist writer who's a very influential inside Russia, but because of the Russia-Dugan connection, some people are now seeing Dugan's symbol, the Eurasian square, for the first time, right? And now that they've seen the square, they're seeing anarchists using the Chaos Star, which looks a little similar, they're not the same, but because they just learned about the Eurasian square, now they're seeing the Chaos Star, and they've never really noticed the Chaos Star before. Maybe they just don't really care about what symbols random people use,

but now that they see the Eurasian symbol and they see the Chaos Star, they're making this connection here, and they think this is a new development, right? They think this is like, they're asking themselves, like, why are anarchists suddenly using this fascist symbol, which they either think to themselves or they think out loud on Twitter.com, which is really rich, because anarchists have been using the Chaos Star longer than Dugan's been using his Eurasian square, and if you have been watching anarchists for any amount of time on the internet, I know you would have seen them using the Chaos Star. It's not a new development by any means, but because everyone's trying to, like, wear his Waldo and ostent their way through the war, they're kind of drawing these false connections,

which is kind of unfortunate, because there is actually some interesting things to talk about in terms of how Dugan did kind of base his design off of Michael Morkock's Chaos Star and a whole bunch of stuff around, like, why anarchists use the Chaos Star, and, you know, there's a nice debate to be had there around fascists always inserting themselves in these subcultures and trying to gain ground, whether it be, like, the punk scene, the industrial music scene, you know, online gaming, right? Fascists always try to do this, just often we try to push back on that, right? Like, Nazi punks fuck off. But it seems specifically with the Chaos Star, a whole bunch of people just want to cave and let them kind of take this symbol,

which is, I think, not a great instinct. But to kind of talk about this and other kind of background stuff, like I said, we brought on Black Ram, hello, to help talk about this. So, yeah, what kind of prompted you to write your article, I guess? You know, watching this debate kind of go down. What kind of actually just, like, what was the straw that broke the candles back and being like, okay, now I need to write, like, a decently long article on this topic? I think I've said this on, like, on Twitter a little while before writing the actual article.

But I think the spark was a friend from a guy you may or may not have seen him around. He's like somebody, he's like, well, dem sock, but he has, like, anarchist leading on his bio, which I guess sort of communicates the idea that he would probably like anarchism if he did not consider it to be impractical. Sure, yeah. But anyways, I actually, I kind of wavered on the idea of covering it at all. I thought it would, I thought it would only go for like a few days. And it was sort of a Johnny come lately by maybe a day or so, admittedly.

But I figured it would be sort of ephemeral, but there's things I sort of kept seeing. But in the midst of writing it, there was like some tanky who went even further and made the link to the Chaos Star. And I think it was the logo of the Sif Empire from certain Star Wars media. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah. It's like, well, it's like, well, one has six lines and they're not even arrows. They're just like blocks in like a sort of hexagonal shape.

But it's like the same guys really like the idea that the logo of the Ukrainian armed forces is actually the iron cross. Yeah. A big chunk of this, I think kind of the prehistory of why this became such a specific problem started with kind of unite the right in the period after that, where you had all these new fascist groups on the ground in the United States and they all had their symbols. And, you know, I was a part of this to the degree that there's some culpability here.

A number of researchers, including myself, were warning people like, hey, there's some like symbols that people are taking to right-wing gatherings and they're claiming to be normal conservatives. And these are symbols of groups like the Phineas Priesthood or groups like different kind of fascist organizations. And you might not be aware of them. And so you should know what kind of these, you know, the Kekistan flag or whatever means because people are trying to kind of signpost their sympathy to these extreme groups.

And I think that was important because those people were legitimate problems and they were trying to kind of stealthily hide their very radical right-wing sympathies behind some like obscure images. But the problem is that it got a lot of people looking, not just looking for fascist symbols and everything, but also looking for the clout that comes from like pointing something like that out. And I think that's kind of the root of a lot of these problems. And it's not surprising that it happened with Dugan's symbol.

No, absolutely not. Because it does, like again, if you're just like kind of a casual observer, it does look a lot like the Chaos Star. It makes an eight-pointed star with arrows, yeah. And it makes sense, if you know anything about Dugan's philosophy, Alexander Dugan is essentially a Russian political theorist and author. There's a lot that's kind of set about how close he is to Putin. He certainly was at one point closer to Putin.

There's a lot of debate as to whether or not Putin kind of saw him as more of like a useful person to kind of a useful propaganda organ or whether or not he really bought into what Dugan was saying. But Dugan is and was a really big advocate of like what he called like multipolar international politics. Which is this idea that like the United States should not be the hegemonic power in the world, right? Which it kind of was after the fall of the Soviet Union. It's this idea that there should be a bunch of equivalent powers. Which is number one, you can see how a lot of folks on the left would be drawn in by that

even if they weren't particularly fans of Putin. Just the idea that like, oh, well, yeah, it's been a problem that the United States has this massive hegemonic power. Perhaps it would be better if there were a bunch of equivalent powers. And it's one of those things where there's a logic to that, but it does kind of require ignoring all of the times in the past when we had a multipolar world and there was tremendous violence. There's a root error in this sort of pathway which sort of like refuses to deal with imperialism as a global system. The reason that's a hang up is because once you think of imperialism as a global system, you then have to move on to the idea that it's a global system that then has to be dismantled globally.

Yeah. You can't quite do that with camp because it implicates nations that are supposed to serve as like moments of world historic progress against like hegemonic capitalism. And it is one of those spooks of the mind that people kind of have to do away with which the anarchist movement sort of does pretty successfully because that mostly comes from the fact that it starts off from the position of like the state as an actual sort of structural presence. It's sort of funny that like the Marxist argument is usually down to like hyper focus on the state and hierarchy is idealist, which is odd when you consider that hierarchy and the state are very much material in the same way that capitalism itself is. So it's like, it feels more like a sort of argument that's like, well, my materialism is the materialism.

Your materialism is in fact the form of idealism. I think with that, we're going to go on a quick ad break and then we're going to come back and I think we should probably now talk about like the origins of the chaos star and Michael Morkock and discordianism. And then we'll kind of get into the kind of current debate on it some more. So yeah, anyway, here's some ads for your ears coming in through the earwaves. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's time. It's time to talk about more time for more. Okay. Well, you beat me to it.

So I guess black grab, you you actually did a pretty good succinct kind of things on how the chaos star came into being initially via Michael Morkock. Do you want to just like as brief briefly talk about kind of how he came up with the symbol for his books and stuff? Okay, so full disclosure, I haven't really read the books themselves. I have read some Michael Morkock. A lot of what a lot of my familiarity from him is pretty secondhand. One of the main things of that is Syrie Fungal being like this, this sort of 80s band that I sort of think back to. Yeah. Because their whole vibe is Morkock's works. But but anyways, the reason why the chaos star is the shape that it is, is because what it's supposed to represent is meant to extend outward endlessly.

Yeah, the counter symbol for order is a single, a single upward pointing arrow. Funny enough, when I thought about that, I thought about the T was ruined or like here. It doesn't really have to say meaning, but it's like upward pointing arrow in a symbolic context. That's the other example I have. Yeah, but but that upward pointing arrow signifies a straight, narrow expression of where possibility goes where potential sort of goes, which creates structure. The chaos star, by contrast, has like the eight directions are meant to represent all directions in a circular sort of space, like a compass of sorts. And the energy and the potential and possibility goes out in all of them with no set path, no definite limit, no boundaries, it just goes, it just sort of goes out there. It's little wonder why the chaos magic movement embraced it for a very similar set of reasons. Because even though it is kind of a myth that there's absolutely no rules in chaos magic, what is true is that you can explore a very, very broad and like almost limitless range of like practical possibilities within that movement, within that sort of framework.

It's a very post-structuralist, post-modern view of it. Post-modern is how I've heard it described. And kind of getting back to what Moorcock was in brief because I do think we need to kind of give an overview of who he is. Yes. He's still alive, last I checked at least. He is alive. I heard him talking at an anarchist sci-fi conference a few weeks ago. If you didn't immediately know who he was, he is the most influential fantasy author you have not heard of. He is like a George R. R. Martin level of influence, if not significantly more so.

Some people will say he's the most influential fantasy author since Tolkien. And among his, you've noted the band Sirith Ungol. If you've been a fan of any of the Warhammer games, he's a huge influence on that because the thing that he created was kind of the concept of chaos as a sort of religious entity. I'm not going to get into the depths of the lore in his books, but a lot of it is about kind of the struggle between order and chaos. And so the Chaos Star, he created that specifically for this kind of theological conflict that occurs throughout his books. And it became the symbol of one of the sides in Warhammer. There's tens of thousands of people who have the Chaos Star tattooed on them, not because of Warhammer, or not because of any political reason or because of Chaos Mansion,

because they were fans of Warhammer 40,000 or whatever. And it's interesting because in the same time, when I first got into anarchist political theory, long before I considered calling myself one, it was because I came across a book published by AK Press. I think I bought it in 2007 called No Gods, No Masters, and it's a collection. A lot of people have a copy of this book in their house if they're into anarchist theory. It's like a collection of early anarchists, like people like Prudhon essays on kind of the first wave of anarchist political theory. And it has a Chaos Star on the cover because, number one, Michael Morkock is an anarchist, is both an author and someone who identifies as an anarchist.

Politically, yeah. Yeah, politically. And so his books were particularly popular among anarchists who don't always get a lot of chunks of pop culture to themselves. Absolutely. And so it was kind of from the beginning, both this nerdy fantasy symbol that you could see, you could put alongside a bunch of different shit from The Lord of the Rings. You could see it as like somebody having a tattoo in Elvish, but it also took on almost immediately this dual meaning where it was actually representing aspects of anarchist political theory.

And so it was put and printed on books that were about political theory and had nothing to do with fantasy. So I cannot actually think of another symbol with a similar pedigree. It's a really pretty unique case. It is because it's less of like an anarchist symbol, but more a symbol created and used by anarchists. Like it was invented by an anarchist. It was a symbol invented by an anarchist to represent something in fiction that had such resonance that people adopted it as an actual political symbol. Yeah. It honestly doesn't require that much reach to see why people who like the idea of there being no hierarchy and no state,

even if not total freedom, there's still like the most range that you could get that results in that negation. It doesn't take a lot of elaboration to see why the symbol expressly meant for the symbol of chaos would gain traction. Absolutely. Yeah, I was talking with Margaret Killjoy about this a while ago, and she was like, yeah, like if you were in the 2000s, then you were like a traveling crust punk. At least like 25% of people would have chaos start tattoos because that's because that's like it's about expanding out in all directions. You know, the single arrow is law and order. Instead, we're expanding out ever in every possible way.

Yeah. I mean, I have a chaos start tattooed on me. And it's for primarily ideological reasons as opposed to the fact that I spent my entire child with playing Warhammer. So yeah, I think now, so it is worth mentioning. So the chaos start was invented in the 60s by Michael Morkock. Of course, there's been other eight pointed stars over the course of thousands of years of history. Yes, Jesus, of course. It is like a broad geometrical shape.

Every kind of star has meant something. Yes, but the specific design was made by Michael Morkock. And then because of Morkock's anarchist tendencies in fiction, his work was used or at least appreciated by a lot of the Discordians, which is also popular around the 60s, a lot of the situationists. And then as the Discordian and Situationist movement kind of morphed and started to kind of intermingle with parts of occultism, we have the Chaos Magic movement starting in the late 70s, which started also using the Chaos Star, which makes sense because Robert, you were talking about how it's almost like personifying chaos as like a thing to worship, which is actually a big part of early Chaos Magic text is like reveling in the idea of chaos as like a primordial God,

because there's a lot of primordial gods in like the actual world, you know, like if you look like through histories of various cultures, like chaos is one of the original primordial gods. So there is a big part of that in early Chaos Magic books about kind of looking at chaos as this very ancient force that should be kind of respected. And I think that is a big part of why the Chaos Magicians started using the Star. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of crossover between like sci-fi writers like Robert Anton Wilson and Michael Morkock, who then Robert Anton Wilson was very influential in the Chaos Magic movement. So you can see how this gets carried over from like Anarchist sci-fi to Chaos Magic. And then because it's in Chaos Magic, it gets way more visibility.

So then it starts, then you start seeing it inside more, it's more like underground Anarchist scenes. And then so around this time, Dugan was starting his political career and he was he was he was dabbling in a lot of various like occult circles himself, right? Now he's he's more of like a traditionalist, like a more like a Christian traditionalist that is kind of his primarily that is his that is his primary kind of occult interest. As long as it could be called occult. Yeah, it's it's it's not it's not worth getting too much into the weeds on on Dugan at this point. I think I think it's worth mentioning like he like he because he obviously did rip that he did take inspiration from the chaos star to make his own version of it. Yeah, he certainly because he was in those same circles.

Occultic leanings and and a degree of knowledge. I think again, like with a lot of things, a lot of things about Dugan are overstated, including his like closeness to Putin because he's this really easy in part because he's like so prolific and and there's a lot available on him in English. It's really easy to kind of tie everything happening in Russia to do to him. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's kind of a degree of what's happening here. There's a website I forgotten the name of, but I think it had like a bunch of like online reproduction of Dugan's various writings from the 90s.

All sorts of weird shit about occultism. And yeah, and yet I do think that there's a very obvious gulf between the Dugan of that weird eccentric like esoteric Nazi sort of phase of like his relative youth versus today where he frames his entire rationale for multi plurality as a kind of Christian, a Christian crusade against a hegemony that he legitimately believes to be a satanic empire. He has basically said that and it's not the only thing he considers satanic. We should point out that like one of the one of the main forces that were that were going like against pussy riot where Eurasianist set that this at that time and he called them like devils and witches and taught his followers to show up with pitchforks people in the West don't really understand them. So you get guys like where you get both Alexander Reed Ross describing him as an inherent of chaos magic and some guy from the National Review referring to him as the leader of a satanic cult somehow. Yeah.

And boy, I mean, there's a long history of people liking to flat liking to flatten fascist movements within a cultic tradition to just Satanism. We're not going to talk about that at length, but it whenever whenever you hear people talking about a problem and like they reduce it to its Satanists, you should be a little on edge because usually they're wrong or at least incomplete. And they just have have kind of over anyway, we don't need to get terribly into that. The only thing I wanted to bring that up is because like this is around the same time that people that are fascists were trying to enter in a lot of different political like some cultures, whether it be like the punk scene and industrial music, including like the fascist stew because that that is like their primary means, right? Like they they try to like they are an aesthetic driven movement. They try to co-opt any aesthetic and use it for their own gains and to to kind of overlook the anarchist origins of this thing. Just because fascists tried to co-opt it at some point, I think it's very silly because then like what are you going to throw away all punk music? Like come on, or even like or even like crosses, like a lot of fascists still use variations of Christian crosses that still have essentially political Christian meanings that I'd probably still assume that the majority of religious fascists do lean on some kind of Christianity and to the extent that there's neo-pagans involved, there's sort of a minority.

There's a couple of things that this is like, one of them would be kind of in the United States fascist co-option of the flag of the United States, which we can talk a lot about like the fact that the United States is an imperialist power and the genocide is done on under that flag without it while still acknowledging that attempts by fascist movements to co-opt it as a purely fascist symbol are problematic in part because that symbol the United States flag has a lot of power to a lot of people. And so if you if the fascists kind of co-opt it totally, that's a harmful thing. That's a thing that can like allow them to get their brain worms into more people, which doesn't mean like you should take and wave the US flag. But it does mean that like it's just a matter of don't you don't have to let them take the ground, you know. And I think on a kind of a different angle, one of the things I think about a lot is the first time I went to India seeing, especially in a large parts of India, you'll see swastikas hanging over the doors of many, many houses all over the place. You'll see them hanging from cars. They're constant things. And it's only unsettling if you have allowed yourself to forget that the swastika is a symbol that the Nazis stole from another culture, co-opted and invested with a new meaning. You should see Japan. Yeah. And why should people in other parts of the world who have been using it for a totally different purpose for thousands of years, why should they be like, well, I guess we don't get this now.

Also, like India has had to deal with their own fascists as well. Yeah. Well, yes. And there's, I mean, again, we're delving into a lot of very deep topics because there's a lot to be said about how the fact that the Nazis took the swastika led to degrees of sympathy with an areas of Indian culture that allowed some fascist ideology to creep in. Like that's also tied to the fact that both the Nazis and a lot of Indian nationalists were fighting against the British Empire. It's all very complicated, right? So we don't need that. The guys like V.D. Savarkar did, who were founders of the Hindutva movement, did openly praise Hitler. Yeah. And it's kind of easy for some people to think of it as entirely motivated by religion, but his whole concept of nationhood is entirely racial. Yeah. It says himself that it has nothing to do with religion.

Yeah. And it's one of those things, if you actually want to understand things and engage with them in a useful area, you have to understand that history and grapple with it without, like, looking at a 2,500-year-old Hindu temple and going, well, I guess they were Nazis. Hashtag problematic. Yeah. The last thing I actually want to talk about is how the kind of debate around symbols and use of symbols has just kind of morphed into just fast-jacketing anarchists in general and worrying about, like, oh, the fascists are secretly infiltrating the anarchists and they're going to turn anarchists into fascists. Which is pretty silly because, I mean, if you're going to turn anyone into fascists, I think anarchists are one of the hardest people to do that to. There's a lot of other people. It's way easier to convince to become fascists. Although when anarchists go fascist, they tend to go fascist pretty hard.

Well, yeah, but the type of, like, fear-mongering around it is still, it's really frustrating because, like, I'm looking at all these tankies, like, fast-jacketing anarchists for using a symbol created by anarchists, which has been used by anarchists for decades, right? But then you also have, like, tanky superstar Caleb Malpin regularly hanging out with, like, Malpin regularly hangs out with Dugan. And then you have someone who's another, like, pretty, like, popular, like, tanky influencer, like, Ben Norton, who openly uses Dugan's multipolar theory, right? And so if you're looking for the most visible example of fascist and nationalist rhetoric trying to enter into leftism, you should look at, like, the growing, like, patriotic communists, you know, people... I believe it's referred to as, like, patriotic socialists, but the idea is basically the same. But yeah, it's like, people like Peter Coffin and this, like, growing, like, patriot-communist-socialist kind of live streamer grift, which is, like... Because, like, the easiest entry on the left for fascism is in forms of nationalist authoritarian communism, right? It's like, you know, that is how you get, like, national socialism, right?

It's like, they just had this, like, super cringey, uh, nozzbel convention just a few weeks ago. Oh, it was some of the best moments on Twitter up until Will Smith slapped that guy. Yeah, but, like, you know, you have, like, Coffin and Malpin hanging out, and, like, Malpin regularly hangs out with Dugan. Like, so, like, if you're going to live your... If you want to be watching out for, like, a fascist creep, maybe you should direct it towards the people just, like, doing it out in the open and not fast-jacketing, like, queer anarchists who have been doing the thing that they've been doing for, like, decades. I guess one of the last things that we'll mention is, uh, the hilarious incidents with the Sith Empire thing, of people just fully, like, fully getting consumed by their own brain worms, and trying to insist that a Star Wars symbol is secretly a fascist chaos star,

and then doing the same thing to the Warhammer symbol. Um, it is, yeah, it is... I mean, it's funny because, like, in Star Wars, it is a fascist symbol, right? That's not a fascist symbol in the real world, but it is within the world of Star Wars. That is absolutely a fascist symbol. But it's also not a chaos star. It's not a chaos star. And in Warhammer, it is a chaos star, but it's not a fascist symbol. It's actually an anti-fascist symbol within the world of Warhammer. You can basically argue that, yeah. It is just frustrating looking at all these people trying to play the Where's Waldo game, just to all, like, dunk on anarchists.

And it just kind of shows the fundamental misunderstanding of the history of anarchist culture, and the history of, like, anti-fascist anarchists, you know? Most of the anti-fascists that I know use the chaos star because it's a red symbol. It looks red. It looks cool. And, yeah, trying to, like, insisting that we must see this ground and let fascists use anything that they think is aesthetically cool, I think is, first of all, like, a losing battle to actually just, like, to start that now, I think, would have some pretty bad implications for fascism and its use of aesthetics. You don't have to give them things just because they want to take those things. It makes sense that you would see, like, tankies do it because then, if you're a tankie, you could basically get into a position where

you can basically discard all sorts of symbolisms and just replace everything with, like, old, like, Soviet symbology or stuff. Which is obviously not tied to any atrocities that have happened. Right. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Incidentally, don't ever tell them about Georgia. Don't don't tell them about Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Ukraine. That giant lake that was like the largest lake in Europe that they turned into a pile of poison. You know, don't mention a few things. And Trotsky would be proud considering he wanted to turn mountains into, like, city structure. I mean, that that actually is one of the things I think Trotsky was on the right ball about.

More Minis Tiriths. More Minis Tiriths. Let's tear it up some mountains. So any any any final thoughts on our lovely circular chaos chaos star? I'm thinking I'm thinking of a quote from like, what was his name? Pablo Friere day. I hope I've gotten that name right. Yeah. A quote I've seen going around that I think goes around something to the effect of when the point of education isn't liberation, the goal is to become the oppressor. You could sort of usually that quote is like relevant to like the material processes of like being inculcated into a capitalist system. So so so you can kind of make the most sense of it as basically like you are educated to become a boss instead of wanting to abolish all bosses.

But on a micro level, you can sort of apply it to the ways in which people even in like radical spaces sort of this sort of become like self styled cops, as it were. That I think is a phenomenon that a lot of the anarcho nihilist tendency sort of responds to anyway, this is coming from a perspective that is sort of flirtatious towards anarcho nihilism, but not necessarily. But it's like, you could a lot of the interactions with like, like certain people demonstrate that there are some instances of it where I think I can't quite tell if it's power or not. Somebody I somebody posted like a photo of themselves with like a like a jacket and they had like the upside down cross and the inverted pentagram on board and somebody somebody with like basically no followers who somehow blew up somehow blew up when they posted that photo next to like a Nazi uniform to try and compare the inverted cross to a swastika or no, not if not a swastika, then like maybe some other part of the jacket and the pentagram to like the armband or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think I'm still not sure if that was entirely serious. See, that's that's the thing is like, we have to be careful.

Like, I don't like anarchist infighting. It's rarely useful. And we have to make to make sure to be watchful for like how much of it is just people trolling people trying to prompt infighting just for the sake of infighting right so if if like, I tried for a long time to not engage in this debate because I don't like talking about this like I don't like infighting with anarchist I don't like I don't like having these types of debates. So hopefully the next time this debate starts, we don't need to because we can just we can just point to how this last one went and say, No, look, we clearly demonstrated that this is this has a long history of use by anarchists and invented by anarchists and not start and not start and not and not start the debate again, because we don't we don't need to do it and there's no telling if people are doing it sincerely or people doing it ironically or people just doing it just to get, you know, people upset. And I mean, like, if you want to look at anarchists and look at I wear, where is right wing people where is fascist trying to kind of blended with anarchists, like look at like books, right. Look at and caps, right.

These people who try to claim to be anarchists are very bad at actually blending in because they can't help themselves when they start talking about like the validity of anarcho capitalism, or the validity of like small nation states like it's it is it is. It is hard. It's hard to actually infiltrate anarchists. This is the thing that the FBI has said multiple, multiple times. It's hard to actually do. So whenever fascists try to blend in, whether they're Boogaloo boys, they can't help but use their old like Boogaloo symbols. They can't help but just like, like give hints. It is it is astonishing how how bad they are at this thing. It's also bad at like the protection that they claim to offer. Like there was a there was an article from like last year going over going over. Well, part of it mentioned that they were basically at this like purported protest that they were supposed to offer protection from. And most and most of what they did was get drunk and like this on the sidewalks. The Boogaloo boys I've seen at actual protests who are like with like cops attacking protesters, the Boogaloo boys are the first ones to run because they're cowards. Yeah.

All right. Well, I guess where can where can people where can people find you online and where can people read your reader article like chaos nihilism and the way of no surrender. WordPress, basically, I could I call the site a left theoretical domain, but the but the link goes like my thoughts born from fire dot wordpress.com. I actually try I actually try changing the URL once I changed it to a left theoretical domain, I think in 2013 14, but I figured that doing so would fuck up all of the stats and whatever so I just didn't bother. Thank you. Thank you so much for kind of writing. I would I would say probably the most definitive stance on this debate at the moment, which we can always point point back to whenever this inevitably comes up again in like a year or two. I've seen it. I've seen it come up like every every few years you see it. So thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you for coming on.

Yeah. If you want to follow follow us, you can do it at the, you know, the thing, you know the thing. Instagram, it happened here, pod and cool zone media. You can look at my unhinged chaos tweets at hungry bow tie. Yeah. Nothing is true and everything's permitted. Also, at Ace Katinas is where I go to like sort of ramble about politics and occasionally the occult and other things. We do we do we do love a good we do love a good ramble.

All right. That that doesn't for us today. Fuck fascists, Nazi punks fuck off, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast where the host asks all listeners and guests to provide their social security number and bank account number, routing number, all that good stuff. This is a podcast about how things aren't always great and maybe are kind of falling apart a little bit. And it has also not been, for the most part, a podcast about the expanded war in Ukraine for a variety of reasons. We have done some coverage of that, but we've focused specifically on stories of individual people. And that's generally where I feel like our strength is as a program, but people have been repeatedly requesting.

We do a little bit of a bigger picture, look at what's gone on in that conflict. And so I have brought Aram Shambhanian into the studio. Aram, how are you doing, buddy? Oh, not too bad, man. How are you doing today? Man and dandy like sour candy. Now, would you describe kind of who you are and what you do and why you're someone people should listen to when we're talking about a conflict like this? Because you are one of the people who, when everyone was like, there's no way Russia will invade, was saying, well, it might happen. I mean, well, I think one of the things that sets me aside from a lot of other analysts out there is that I never thought I would become an analyst and I never thought that I would do this. It wasn't set in stone for me from the beginning. I thought I was going to be like a high school history teacher.

And so I've always studied the world in terms of reading books on different conflicts around the world. And I've tried to keep appraised on where these books have led to, right? So if I read a book about the Second Congo War, it makes sense to then follow current events that are related to what happened after the Second Congo War. Yeah. As a result, I followed things going on in Ukraine starting in 2014 with the year on my done and elsewhere in the world. But Ukraine has been one that I focused on pretty heavily because there's been a lot of information about Ukraine ever since 2014 because of how late the war happened in terms of human history and in terms of recent conflicts. 2014 isn't that long ago. And so I started following it back then and I think that if you combine modern open source tools, modern technology, some of the stuff that organizations like Bellingcat can do with traditional research and knowledge,

some of the stuff that I've done in school, you have a really powerful tool to combat disinformation. And I think that's one of the best tools we have to combat disinformation is wedding Oscent with traditional research. But yeah. And yeah, when it comes to open source intelligence, the Ukrainian war is actually kind of one of the, it's not the conflict where that really started to become a thing that would probably be the Libyan Civil War when that began to be something people were talking about in a big way. But the Ukrainian, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in particular in 2014 is really where open source intelligence kind of came into its own in a really widely known way. That's when Bellingcat's reporting on the downing of MH 117 like went out. And that was kind of like the first, first really huge international story involving like open source intelligent cracking a case. And now, since the expanded invasion of Russia back in February, we've kind of entered.

And again, this isn't really where this period started, but this has been kind of, we've seen an explosion of what I think would be fair to call open source intelligence disinformation. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about kind of some of the stuff that you've seen because there's there's a number of accounts claiming to be doing OSINT on the Ukrainian war. And boy howdy, they are not all giving out good information and it can be difficult for people to tell what they should trust because if you're if you're kind of just scanning over it, bad OSINT or even outright fake OSINT can look very similar to good OSINT. Right. And so I would put a lot of the OSINT community into four rough categories. There's OSINT analysts and those are pretty rare. Those are the kind of people who combine what they're seeing in real time on social media with a background of knowledge in the area. So like a Ukraine regional expert combining that with what they're seeing happen in Ukraine. That's an OSINT analyst.

There are some Twitter accounts that are more OSINT aggregators. They don't really have much analysis that put into what they're what they're producing, but they spit out a lot of information in real time. And so if you follow the right ones that use the right sources you can get some pretty decent information from them. Then there's more of the misinformation aggregators which are accounts that just kind of spread whatever they see without regards to whether it's true or not. They'll sensationalize stories. If there's a rare command and control plane takes off somewhere in America that's known as the doomsday plane during the Cold War, they'll tweet out, the doomsday plane is in the air. It doesn't mean a clear war. And they're not doing it to be hurtful. They're doing it for likes. And then there's disinformation aggregators who are deliberately out there trying to sow discord and sow problems. And those are four categories that I've seen all of them develop in their own ways in the last 10 years. I think the best example of that final category, there's an account on Twitter called SMM Syria.

And if you look at the account, it looks almost identical to the OSCE's special monitoring mission to Ukraine. It takes the same kind of graphics and it has the same kind of terminology, but it's an Assadist disinformation outlet. And so but they've woven their way into if you just took a casual glance at the war in Syria, you might believe that it's a valid source. And that's the kind of more malicious disinformation that I'm talking about where like they know what they're doing and they're trying to confuse people. I think one of the best examples of something that really struck me recently as problematic in the war in Ukraine is you've got a video going around of that purports to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting captured Russian soldiers, which is a war crime. And I think credible people within the OSCE community have said this is something that desperately needs to be investigated more seriously. This like is very has a very good chance of being legitimate and people should be looking into this. Whereas you've also seen folks who kind of reflexively jumped to defend Ukraine against these allegations, putting out what I think is fairly shoddy oscent claiming to show like issues with the video and stuff.

And it's like people circling blurry sections of the video and saying like this is, you know, looks like it could be edited or this doesn't look credible. And it is the kind of thing. I think one way reason people get tripped up by that is prior to the invasion of Ukraine, there were some Russian false flag events that involved like cadavers bodies that had been autopsy and stuff, which was broken down by people like Elliot Higgins at Bellingcat. And one of the things that again, if you're just kind of looking at the surface level, you could see like, oh, well that those were videos that were faked. These like the o-cent around this people like pointing out different sections of the video looks the same. Some of the differences are, for example, when they were analyzing the bodies in those those false flag footage, they brought in actual, you know, corpse cutter uppers, morticians. Yes, to analyze like the cuts in the in the skulls and whatnot, as opposed to, again, just kind of a guy circling aspects of a video and being like, this doesn't seem right. And it's like, but you can I can see why people get tripped up by it. And it is important not to get tripped up by that kind of stuff, because war crimes are bad, I think is a general attitude that we we both share.

And should be investigated regardless of like whether or not they're being done by the side who's also towing Russian tanks away with tractors that you're you're on the side of, right? Right. And I think that that's that's exactly an important distinction because like there are certain claims that have come out from the Ukrainian side, certain statements that have come out that as an o-cent analyst, I could probably look into more and maybe poke holes and stuff like the number of kills that the ghost of Keith has claimed, right? Okay, maybe it's not 30 kills or whatever it is that people are saying. Yeah, maybe he's not real. But that's not harmful as much as did these guys shoot people in the legs, right? Right. And so one of those bears examination just because of the nature of the claim. The other one, maybe we can examine it after the war when it's not.

Yeah, it doesn't really matter if there is an Ukrainian ace fighter pilot who's dropped a bunch of a crazy number, like obviously in a military sense of Russian jets are being down to that does matter. But like from the perspective of people just kind of observing this war as news consumers, it doesn't really matter. Whereas whether or not a country gets away with a war crime, absolutely matters. And people are treating it with the same reflexive hand wave as they do when they accept these the ghost of Keith myths, right? They're saying like, well, no, but I want the Ukrainian side to win this war so we can't even look into any claims of war crimes. And that's just not how it's supposed to be. No. You condemn the crimes upfront and you investigate and you try to move forward.

And that's how we prove that we're better than the opposing side. Like that's that's been the rule in this war and it's been the rule in the war's past. You know, you you prove that you're better than your opponents by being more decent. Yeah. And it's it's I have seen some really unsettling logic from some people along the lines of like, well, these were artillerymen who have been, you know, shelling civilian areas. So why shouldn't they be be shot in the leg? And the answer is because like, that's number one, it is a war crime to shoot captured prisoners like that. That is a thing that we as a as a species have attempted to make illegal and and ought to be. It is a thing that like should not be done.

And there's actually ever wide variety of like tactical reasons why it's bad for Ukraine. If Russian soldiers believe they will be shot after being captured, it makes for among other things, it makes soldiers less likely to turn themselves in. One of the wiser decisions that the Ukrainian government has made in this war has been really deliberately pushing the idea that like, hey, Russians, if you surrender, we'll pay you. You can get Ukrainian citizenship, like bring in your tanks, you know, land your planes or whatever, like we'll, you know, we'll make it worth your while, which is a lot, which is potentially a force multiplier. Right. If Russian soldiers think when I get captured, they will shoot me, then they will fight to the death and Ukraine will lose more people in that fight. As opposed to if Russian soldiers think, well, shit, I could actually have a pretty decent life if I just turned myself into these guys and refused to fight. That means less people you have to fight. So it does, it does really matter whether or not this is happening.

And it's also just like on a moral level, you shouldn't accept it. And I see some really, I think one of the things that I find so unsettling about that logic, like these are these are, you know, artillerymen who have been targeting civilian areas. Why shouldn't they be shot? It's not that much of a leap to like some other shit we saw people saying in Vietnam, you know, these villages are harboring insurgents. Why shouldn't we treat them like the enemy, you know, like all of this logic leads to people getting murdered who don't deserve to get murdered. And that is bad. Right. There's the snowball effect, the slippery slope effect with the moral side of it. And then like you're saying, the tactical side of it.

I mean, if you look at part of the reason members of ISIS fought so hard in places like Mosul, which was because once you're in that organization, your options are a bullet or like a desert cell. If you're lucky, they're not going to treat you well and reintegrate you into society. Come on, like, no, that's not how it works. So you fight like hell. You know, that's that's a very basic rule that's pretty easy to understand, I would think. Yeah. So that's why this needs to be looked into. And if it's proven false, if it's proven to not be a correct true video, that just strengthens the Ukrainian side.

But if it is proven to be true, it's something that needs to be investigated. It can't be overlooked. It can't be swept under under the rug just because we we want one side of this war to come out on top. Doesn't mean that we have to ignore. Yeah, like one, a good rule of thumb to approach a war from when you're trying to analyze it is that there there has never been a side in a war who have not committed war crimes. So that should always be on your mind when you're trying to evaluate the reality of a war crime. It doesn't mean every claim of a war crime is true. That would be a very silly way to translate that.

But it does mean that when there is a claim that the side you support has been responsible for a war crime, your default should be this is not impossible. And I should I should proceed from the area that this could have happened and it should be analyzed without reflexively dismissing it. And also without saying that like war crimes committed by a group of soldiers in a single part of a theater necessarily mean that the war itself is being prosecuted in a criminal level by that government. No. Because for example, I mean, I was about to say U.S. soldiers committed war crimes in World War Two, but actually the prosecution of that war was criminal in a lot of fundamental ways. Yeah. They won't let that one go for a minute. But that doesn't mean that like your granddad committed war crimes because other U.S. soldiers who were in the field executed captured German POWs, you know.

Right. Which I think is something people have an easier time understanding when it's not a war they feel the need to have a series of 280 character or less takes on in Twitter. Yeah. It's that's the weirdest thing about about the social media age and kind of OSINT in general is that while it does make it very accessible and easy for anybody to get involved in investigating these crimes and these events. It also means that everybody thinks they have an opinion that matters on it. And in that sense, they muddy the waters. A lot of people can imitate the OSINT look pretty well. They can circle things in pictures that look similar or as we saw in Syria a lot, they'd take two pictures of two totally different dudes and say these are the same guy.

They're both members of El Nusra or something like that. And they would compare the eyes and compare the chins and stuff and it was kind of like a Bellingcat image, but it wasn't. Right. Yeah. That's the danger here is that like everybody can can help but everybody can hurt now too. Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those things.

Every every aspect of this cuts both ways because like a thing people started saying rightfully so after the invasion or the expanded invasion, I should say of Ukraine by Russia is like. Well, now all of these people who were experts in whatever the last big story was are going to become experts on the Ukrainian conflict, right, which is absolutely a thing that happened. You get all of these people who I think are pretty bad journalists and reporters who suddenly like rushed to have their commentary on this thing that they have ignored for the last eight years. But at the same time, it's to talk about Bellingcat, the founder of Bellingcat, my old boss, Elliot Higgins, was like literally an unemployed dude sitting on his couch when he started analyzing war footage and is now one of the most respected conflict analysts in the world. And that is a thing the Internet has made possible. And I think a great example would be the caliber Obscura Twitter, which is just like a dude in the UK who has an almost impossible ability to recognize firearms and pieces of firearms. And so just analyzes people send him footage from all over the planet and he'll say like these are these guns and this is where they came from and this is this one is like looks like this kind of gun. It's actually a fake one that's being made locally in this country and it is supposed to look like this and you can tell because like that's not a person who caliber did not like go to some sort of fancy gun school.

They just are. I mean, it's definitely not right to call them an amateur because quite frankly, I don't know any people who are working at institutes and better at the thing that caliber does than caliber is right. But they did just start as a person on Twitter, you know. And that's the thing about this is that you get people who were not kind of born with the idea that they were going to become analysts in this field. And so you have people like both of the people you mentioned, whom I know personally, I don't know Elliot personally, but I remember him from our days, our shared days on a comedy website together. Yes, the website that shall remain nameless. Right. And then, and then, you know, caliber and I have talked on Twitter a bunch and you know we're friends there and it's just interesting to see that like both of them are very real people behind like their professional personality and their expertise. They're also down to earth real people, which is rare in this field because a lot of people are kind of elitist.

And, and, and gatekeeper E and neither of them are about that. They're both all about like getting as many people doing this as possible because more eyes are better. Yeah, Elliot is is I mean the whole reason my career with Bellingcat existed is because like I emailed him out of the blue one day and said, Hey, I've been noticing this weird thing in videos of fascists talking to cops. Can I write a thing for you? And he was just like, Okay. And, and that was, I mean, like that was how that started. And he's, I've met him since a couple of times. And yeah, is a very, I think is very informed because of the fact that he did not come from sort of this big institutional background has a humility with which he approaches his investigations that I think is one of the things you should look for in trying to decide whether or not open source intelligence that you're seeing on Twitter, whatever is credible is how, how, how conclusive are they stating their claims are how many times do they offer only a single possibility for what something is like, you know, there's a number of things you can do. I think at this point, we should probably move to a separate area of discussion, which is, has the has this war gone? Who's who's who's winning? Well, so I, I made a statement on my Facebook page, my personal Facebook page weeks ago. And I still feel confident in that statement. And that is that, well, Ukraine has yet to win this war. Russia's already lost. They've already lost their objectives. They've already lost what they what their goals were. And at this point, it's a face saving venture on the Russian part. So, um, Russia carried out a cunning faint action to distract while they while they took the east by burning a fifth of their general staff and all of their armored vehicles.

There's a cunning fate. Yeah, I saw someone on Twitter posit that was actually a move to use up all of Ukraine's ammunition. Cut brilliant. They're very zap Branigan logic on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Ukrainians have a preset kill limit. And once they hit 10 generals, they hit the army will shut down. Right. Exactly. But no, the war is not going well for Russia. And that's not to say that it's going great for Ukraine either. But no, needs to do less well to succeed here. Yes, it's a, I mean, because one of the things that is a black box, right, I do think, because there was a lot of discussion earlier in the war, particularly like how credible are these numbers that the Ukrainian government is putting out for for dead and for destroyed vehicles. And I think the ocent out there, like the verified vehicle casualties and stuff that we could verify means that like, obviously the Ukrainian government is patting their numbers, but not by as much as a lot of people might have. Like it's not wildly off. No, I saw their first casualty count. I think first casualty count. I think it was like 2,500 dead. Yeah. Okay, guys, come on. It was like day two or three. And then like, all of the Western intelligence. Yeah, actually. Yeah. It's probably about 2000. Oh my God. Wow. Yeah. The perspective for some people who may not that number may not jump out to them. We lost, you know, just shy of 3000 soldiers killed during the Iraq war. So yeah, 2000 in a couple days is an extraordinary number of losses.

Yeah. And of course, the black box here we don't have nearly as good an information on is what kind of casualties has the Ukrainian military suffered and what kind of civilian casualties have been suffered. And obviously civilian casualties nearly always take much longer to get to the extent that it's ever I think we have a better chance of getting objective civilian casualties for this because unlike a lot of other conflicts, these civilians being killed are civilians under the ages of a government that is a functional state as opposed to Syria, for example, where the there's basically the only people with an interest in accurately reporting the death count are a number of different non governmental organizations. Because the people being are being killed by one government to the other right including like this is this was the same thing like in Iraq, the civilians who died in Mosul were technically under the Iraqi governments, you know, whatever protection seems like the wrong word to say. But I can tell you from my experience there there was no, we still do not have anything that approaches a credible civilian death count for for that conflict, and probably never will. Right. And on that note, on the civilian casualties note, we were talking earlier about what how you can identify a credible Austin account versus one that you probably shouldn't give too much credence to. And one of the best ways to do that honestly is is a look at their their morals, I guess. Yeah, if they're ever posting and celebrating the death of civilians anywhere, you should probably disregard them. Like, yeah, never see Elliot Higgins being like, yeah, suck it, people of Belograd, like, yeah, hit with a missile, like it's not, it's, you know, it's not going to happen.

Yeah, it's not. It's the same thing as like, I get why people celebrate, you know, battlefield victories. Obviously, I don't think especially if you're literally a Ukrainian living, you know, in the area affected, I don't think there's anything morally wrong with celebrating opposing soldiers being defeated. But I am I continue to be deeply unsettled by footage celebrating things like the destruction of armored personnel carriers full of 19 year old kids. Even though a non insignificant number of those 19 year old kids are accessories to war crimes, right? Like, it doesn't mean like I'm broadly OK with it. But I do I do feel a lot better about celebrating losses of special forces units like the VDV that have been heavily involved in war crimes around the world like that I have less kind of an issue with but And I felt that personally, you know, I'm Armenian and during the Karabakh War in 2020 it was just day every day I would wake up to dozens of videos of Armenian conscripts and soldiers being blown up and hunted from the air. And people on Twitter cheering for it because they were for one reason or another on the Azeri side. And like, I get it, you know, like you were saying, you want to cheer your battlefield victories. And I understand that from people who live on the battlefield and live near the battlefield. I get it. It's happening to you. Sure. People thousands of miles away cheerleading on the Internet. What the hell is wrong with you?

Yeah, maybe don't do that. Maybe don't do that like you. What the hell? Like, you know, those are real people in that video that never did anything to you. And this is not like a sporting event where like they go home at the end of the day and they've just lost like they're dead. Even when they do like I've spent a huge amount of my career talking directly face to face with victims of ISIS, right? I have been to like eight or nine refugee camps in two countries at this point, specifically for that war. In addition to days spent on the refugee trail in between Hungary and Serbia talking to to Syrians and talking to other people who had like fled the region. But at the same time, I can't help it. Like, like I've literally been under fire by ISIS and then had those ISIS guys gotten killed and I have celebrated and cheered when that's happened. And I'll never forget we were embedded with this mortar team and we were under fire from this sniper and the mortar team. I forget you can in the article I wrote on it.

I list the exact number of rounds fired, but it was like nine or 10 something like that where they're gradually walking and mortars until they they get this guy. And obviously we like cheered when they fucking killed this dude because he was shooting at us. And I remember like kind of on our way out away from the front. My fixer Sengar was like, how many rounds did they drop before they got him? And I was like, I don't know. I think it was like nine or 10. I've got the footage somewhere and he was like, I wonder what else they hit. And then Sengar's like was born and raised in Mosul. And it was one of those things we spent the very next day we were like talking to people fleeing their homes and stuff. And not only did we like see some of those people who lost family members to misses both by Iraqi forces and by coalition aircraft and stuff. But like we came upon this dead ISIS fighter in a fighting position where you could see he had been in there with his wife for days and he had been wounded two or three days before he got killed.

And you could see the evidence of the first aid she had done on him. And it was one of those things. I guess I could try to make the case that like, well, maybe she was a captive and didn't want to do it. But quite frankly, everything I saw in there makes me believe like she cared deeply for him and stayed with him until the bitter end trying to keep him alive and fighting. And that doesn't mean he's not like a monster and it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been killed because he's a fucking dashi who was in the middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things. He's also like, you can't you can't ignore the humanity of somebody when you have seen that element of what what happens in the conflict. And that has stayed with me quite a bit ever since. Yeah, and it's it's one of those things. And you got to you got to remember that the majority of young men of fighting age around the world who join a military or an armed organization or an insurgent group, whatever it may be.

They do so typically because it's whomever is in charge of the area they're growing up in. Yeah, right. You don't join the Russian army because you weighed all the options and the Brazilian army offer some good aid, you know, some good health care packages. And I looked at the Italian army, but really I want to go with the Russian. No, you go with wherever you were born. Yeah, whether and, you know, and I was talking to my roommate about this last night. We were watching this footage from the flood of 96 here in Oregon, you know, and it's this National Guard helicopter where they're pushing bales of hay out of the back of the helicopter. Down to cows stranded out in your Tillamook.

And so depending on when you join the National Guard, you either fed cows hay from a helicopter or deployed to Iraq. Yeah, that's the luck of the draw. Right. That's not fair. No, they don't deserve to die any more than the guys dropping the hay out of the helicopter did. Right. But people get, yeah, they get carried away with like turning it into a sport almost and they forget that there's people on the other end and that like, well, some of them are threats. And they may need to be dealt with.

It's like, you know, a bear comes at you in the woods. You shoot it. You don't, you don't skin it and make fun of it. Like, you know, go kill its kids. You know, that's not, that's not how it works. You know, so like, yeah. Yeah, don't, don't be, don't be a piece of shit. Like, don't, don't, don't, don't lose your humanity because I mean, one of the things that makes it easy to lose your humanity is that like videos of shit getting blown up.

Looks dope. Right. Like it does. It looks cool to watch things get blown up. That's in fact, I suspect how a lot of people who become very good. Oscent investigators, part of what draws them in is just like, I'm sure that was a part of why caliber started obsessively researching guns is like, they're neat. Guns are neat. You know, weapons are interesting.

People are inherently interested in weaponry, which is not a good thing. It's just a thing. You know, it's not a bad thing either. It's just like a thing human beings will always be interested in because warfare is as natural to us as eating and fucking. Right. Well, you're talking about the mortars, right? The mortars walking in and there's this video on YouTube of made by an American Navy attack squadron of them dropping bomb after bomb on targets and muzzle and and rock up places like that. Yeah.

And it's set to the devil's going to cut you down and every time there's a beat in the music, you see a bomb drop. Yeah. And some of these bombs, it's like four bombs dropping at a time dropping an eight story building. And so I'm sure there was a guy inside there with a weapon, but like, you want to tell me there wasn't anybody else in that eight story building and like. Okay, yeah, you're celebrating the death of the combatant there, but like also all those other people are being celebrated indirectly. And so like, you got to remember that like these bombs explode and they take out a large area and these fights are happening in cities a lot of the time. Yeah. The weaponry that the United States uses is more precise than something like a barrel bomb, but not by as many orders of magnitude as you would hope.

Right. And precision doesn't precision matters. Yes, it's not a non important thing. But ultimately, it doesn't matter if your missile went right into that living room full of civilians and blew them all up, or if you leveled the block and maybe, you know, killed them indirectly. You got to know what you're hitting the target is what really matters. Right. So it doesn't matter if you can hit the target, you got to make sure it's the right target. And that's where we're starting to have issues now is like, we can hit targets really well, we just aren't always sure that it's the right.

Yes, as opposed, I mean, and you are seeing. So let's let's talk about we started this chatting about Ukrainian, a potential Ukrainian war crime. What we have absolute documentation of is a tremendous amount of war crimes on behalf of the Russian invaders, including a thing that they have done repeatedly in Syria, which is the targeting of hospitals and medical facilities with with terrible civilian casualties as a result. And this is something that the New York Times actually published an incredible article based on a mix of OSINT and like, I'm not entirely sure how they got them, but combat flight recorders like the audio that these these Russian fighter pilots were sending back and forth to command as they attacked hospitals in Syria. So we actually have a tremendous amount of detail about like what it looks like inside the cockpit and in like the control room and whatnot as air strikes are being ordered on medical facilities. I really recommend people check that article out. It's it's pretty harrowing shit. But yeah, are you are you surprised at all by kind of what you are what you've seen so far on behalf of the Russian forces in Ukraine.

No, no, not even not even the slightest because I followed the war in Syria rather closely and I mean there was a point when they had to stop marking the hospitals with hospital markings because the Russians would target them so consistently. The United Nations had to stop giving the Russians the coordinates of the hospitals in Aleppo because they kept getting targeted. There was an aid convoy that was struck, I believe by Syrian aircraft, but it was the targeting was given to them by Russian aircraft. There was an aid convoy coming into Aleppo United Nations aid convoy and it was bombed and strafed repeatedly for you know several hours. Things like that that happened so regularly in Syria to the relative silence of the rest of the world. That led me to believe that when they go into Ukraine, they're not going to be any gentler. They're suspected early on that like well, they, it's harder to demonize people who look like you so they're not going to have as much of an easy time demonizing Ukrainians and I think there has been some degree of difficulty with that, at least in terms of some of the conscripts on the Russian side. But the other thing we're seeing is like a lot of these, a lot of people seem to genuinely believe the mission of denazifying Ukraine.

So if that's what you believe you're doing, then the bombing doesn't surprise, doesn't become a surprise, right? If you think that you're going into Ukraine to suppress it and occupy it, then bombing cities full of Russians and Russian speakers seems like a bad idea. But if you believe that they're all Nazis, then it makes sense that you might just blow them up because they're all the enemy. I'm not condoning it, I'm saying. But I mean, that is literally what the US government and the British government did in World War Two, you know? Right, exactly. There have been claims made that what Russia is doing in places like Maripole amounts to an act of genocide. What is your opinion on that?

Genocide is a big word. It is, it is. There's a ton of letters there. Yeah, but it has a lot of meaning behind it in the sense that just because somebody is killing large numbers of people and doing so in heinous ways does not make it a genocide. You have to prove it was an attempt to destroy culture and destroy heritage and things of that nature. As it stands, I would say that it looks likely that there are signs of potential genocide in Maripole. I am not confident enough to come out and say that I conclusively think it's happening. But the way that it looks like the city is being deliberately targeted to either force the entire population to flee or to radicalize them. One way or the other is it goes beyond military targeting.

I think the thing that is the most troubling potential sign of genocide is the reports that the Russian government has been evacuating civilians in parts of Maripole. They have captured two places in Russia, which is, this is a misconception. You don't have to just be killing people. As you stated, it's an attempt to destroy a culture, which you can do by killing, but you can also do by things like separating, moving people, forced migration and whatnot. There are aspects of that. Again, look at the genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. It was not all straight up killing. A lot of it was forced migration, which is an act of genocide as well.

And that's the kind of thing where I'm kind of waiting for more reporting on that to hear exactly what's happening and the extent to what's happening. But that really troubles me in terms of potential signs of a genocide. Yeah. And when they coined the term genocide after World War II, it was with reference to the Holocaust. But what they had in mind was the Armenian genocide when they drafted these words up. And because it was beyond just sheer number of people killed. If we're talking sheer number of people killed, the Nazis also killed six million other people. Yeah.

In addition to the six million Jews they killed. The reason we talk about the Jews is, one, six million is a lot of people. And two, it was a deliberate attempt to destroy their entire culture and make them have never existed. And that's very different and very scary. Dying is also very bad. The idea of dying and then all the people who were like you just don't exist anymore and all your books and your literature are gone. That's monstrous. Yeah.

And that's why there's a difference between genocide and mass killing. Yeah. And it's the difference that we talk about U.S. war crimes in World War II, of which there were many, including the firebombing of Dresden, I would argue. But it's not an act of genocide because when they firebombed Dresden, it was certainly the killing of civilians without particular regard to the direct military efficacy of the action. But it was not an attempt to destroy German culture or obliterate the German people. And you brought up the Armenian genocide. We'll talk about this at some point behind the bastards. But you mentioned that that was kind of what the people, when the term genocide was invented, that was what people were looking at, even though it was kind of a direct response to the Holocaust.

It's also worth noting that like when the Nazis planned the Holocaust, they used the Armenian genocide as a model. Hitler's literal statement was when people, when he was asked during like one of his dinners with a bunch of Nazi officials, like what about kind of the international reaction to what we're planning? To what we're planning to do. He was like, well, who remembers the Armenians? You know, like that was his attitude. He was like, we'll get away with it because nobody did anything during this genocide. Right. And I think while I would hesitate to call the entire war in Ukraine a genocide, as of yet, I would say that there's a similarity between the Armenian genocide and how that led to the Holocaust.

There's a similarity between the Russian war crimes committed in Syria and how that led to the war crimes being committed in Ukraine in a sense that if the world had stood up earlier, we would not be seeing this now. Yeah. The problem is the world looked the other way when the Russians bombed hospitals in Syria, when they repeatedly bombed hospitals. In fact, the world didn't just look away. A lot of people in the West mocked it. I'm sure you've heard it as often as I have the last hospital in Aleppo joke, right? Oh, they're bombing the last hospital in Aleppo again. Well, the reason that happened is because when you bomb the hospital, they build a new one and then it gets bombed again three days later. So they've bombed the last one again.

So it wasn't a joke. It was just a tragedy that kept playing out that people couldn't really fathom. So they mocked. And so when that's the attitude of a lot of the world, it's no surprise that what's happened in Ukraine has run out of control. Where do you think we go from here? What are you expecting to kind of see next within this conflict? The most recent kind of reporting is that Russia is framing it as they're pulling back from Kiev to focus on other fronts. The Ukrainian side is saying like, well, they've been defeated around Kiev and they're pulling back.

What do you think kind of we're seeing next? What is your opinion on kind of the next stages here? So I think it really depends on Vladimir Putin's power and how long he remains in a position of unchecked power. I'm not saying necessarily he will fall from power. I'm saying that how long can he go as the only guy calling the shots? Because as it stands right now, it doesn't look like he's the same Vladimir Putin that we were used to dealing with. It seems like something may have changed with him. And that's a wild card because if Vladimir Putin wants to continue to escalate here, he can continue to do so. Because he may not be getting the same reporting that we are about the condition of his army.

He may think his army is doing better than they're doing and that they actually are just repositioning. So if that's the case, there's a chance that he'll escalate against potentially a NATO country. I find that unlikely, but there's still a chance for it. I think what's more likely is that we're going to see the Russian military refocuss its efforts in the east in Donetsk and Luhansk with an attempt to create a land bridge to Crimea through the area, through Mariupol and Melotopol area. And I think they're going to try to crucify the area as much as possible and remove as many of the Ukrainians as possible one way or the other. And I don't know if they'll be successful in that, but I think simultaneously while they do that, they're going to try to tie down and destroy as much of the Ukrainian military as possible.

Which will be difficult because the units in the east are Ukraine's best equipped units. So I don't know how this ends. I don't see a reasonable end to this in sight, but that's just because there's too many variables at the moment. I do think one thing that's kind of worth looking at this war in an historical context. A number of comparisons have been made to both of the world wars here. I think the thing that it most reminds me of is World War One, not in that it's a conflagration on that scale or in that it's a similar war in terms of the combat. But it is an example of the first big war that utilizes a variety of weapons and tactics that have been battlefield tested in a series of smaller wars, right? And I think we are seeing in Ukraine for the first time the actual... I think one thing that we have seen is that drones. And I'm not talking about the big ones here, you know, they get a lot of the Bayraktar and stuff like that gets a lot of attention.

But like small, the kind of drones anyone listening to this could pick up and buy today, right? Those drones, I think, are proving to be a game changer on a tactical level in a similar manner to the machine gun in the turn of the last century. Before the last century. With the drones, machine guns are good comparison. I've often thought of it as like the airplane in that we had airplanes and we even had combat airplanes before World War One. We didn't have very many of them because nobody really realized the utility of them in war. And then as the war got closer and then the war started, countries started to slowly build up these small fleets of aircraft. And then by the end of the war, everybody had an air force.

I think we're going to see the same thing with these small consumer drones, is that like by the end of this war or whatever conflagrations are coming after it, every military in the world is going to have little, you know, phantom threes or whatever, basically for every infantry squad. One of the things that's so wild is that if if you again, if you sitting here right now have not an insignificant amount of money, let's say three to four thousand dollars and the enough mechanical like competence to carry out modest repairs on your own car, you could with things entirely available over the shelf, build a weapon system capable of disabling a variety of armored vehicles at night. You know, like you that that is a thing that individual people, you could do that and you could have it up and running in a matter of days. I'm just I'm imagining the next protest in unnamed city and a consumer drone flies over the police line and drops a little thing on him. This is bang. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like there's a lot of people, even even as influential and meaningful as they've been on the battlefield in Ukraine, people still are kind of slow to understand the extent like there is one of the wildest stores that's come out of it is that the Ukrainian military has a an outfit of civilian drone operators using hacked and home built drones to attack Russian forces at night. And they have been the documented efficacy of their raids has been significant. And I can I can remember spending a brief period of time with an Iraqi military unit that was just using DJI phantoms that they had rigged to drop what were essentially mortar shells with shuttle cocks on them from a height. And they were very effective at killing people as ISIS drones were effective at sort of spotting, you know, mortars for folks. Well, and one of the things I saw ISIS use their more their drones for to great effect wasn't so much to kill large numbers of enemy soldiers.

It was to do the same thing that American Predator drones and Reaper drones had done for for decades by that point to terror groups, which is let them know you can't gather in large numbers. If you gather in large numbers, you're a target. And so you saw Iraqi soldiers saying no more than two or three in a group. Any more than that will get targeted, you know, and it's they flipped the equation basically. Yep. And don't I mean, I one of the reasons why I have a general policy heavily informed by my time in Mosul that the last place I want to be in a anywhere near a war zone is an armored vehicle. Because that's really unless you are in something that's heavily up armored like an MRAP little bombs dropped by drones can do significant damage to something like a Humvee. And that's exactly what you target.

You don't target a Toyota Corolla with a drone like that unless you specifically know an individuals in that Corolla that you want to kill. But you may just behind the line see a target of opportunity in an armored see an armored lightly armored vehicle and drop a wet ammunition on it. And that's one of the things this has done. There was a lot of talk prior to the expanded Russian invasion about how immediately Russia was going to get air superiority. And that's obviously a bigger story than just drones. There's a lot of factors in why Russia it's probably accurate to say they have superiority in a number of parts of the war, but they don't have supremacy. Like they it's not like an absolute matter. And part of that is because it's not really possible to at this moment.

Someday I suspect there will be more effective ways of stopping drones and at like a theater level. Maybe, but it certainly hasn't happened yet. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing, you know, there's there's the drones and then there's also on the Ukrainian side, they, you know, I think they recognize that air force against air force. The Russians have a numerical superiority. So you can deny the Russians air supremacy by shooting down their planes with man pads. You don't have to have an air force to deny your opponent.

You just have to die them the ability to freely operate in your airspace. And this is one of those things. There's been a lot of talk about a no fly zone, which I tend to think would be a bad idea in the traditional sense in terms of like the US and NATO sending in planes to down Russian planes over Ukraine. There's a number of reasons why that's concerning. But you can effectively establish a no fly zone by shipping in a fuckload of man pads. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm not against that.

I think in terms of what kind of what kind of armed armed support is ethical to provide, giving people the ability to stop planes from bombing cities is broadly speaking, one of the most ethical things you can do in terms of shipping munitions around the world. Right. And the other advantage is that man pads, I'm sure somebody could turn it into a lethal ground weapon, but they're pretty hard to. Yeah. Use against ground targets against houses, things like that. Not really what they're designed for. So it's not like just handing over, you know, some indiscriminate weapon to the Ukrainians to use against Russian cities. You're giving them a weapon that's specifically used against military aircraft like most man pads can't reach the altitude that airliners are at even so.

Yep. So I think that's probably what we want to talk about today. We want to plug your plugables, tell people where they can find you and your analysis out in the world. Yeah. So you can you can follow me on Twitter. My handle is at shabanian arm. And I work, I publish occasionally with the New Lions Institute. So you can see my work there as well.

And I have a website that I sell them update the folder gap.com hasn't been updated in probably eight months now because I've been tired. Yeah, those are the places to find me and DMs are open on Twitter. So if you have questions or anything like that, let me know. I'm happy to talk with anybody who's got questions on these kind of things. Hell yeah. Well, that's going to be us. So, you know, enjoy this analysis of the of the war in Ukraine before we return you to your regularly scheduled multi part series on Nazi cat girls. The primary focus of this podcast.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark and on the good badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Money! Money!

This is... welcome, Dick, to happen here. It is me, Christopher Wong. This is a podcast about things falling apart, things going back together again, and also today is just about money. And also, well, okay, it is not just about money. It is about money and is about seemingly esoteric arguments about the nature of money that actually turned out to be extremely important for any post-revolutionary society, or even just this society. So yeah, and joining me to talk about this are Kyle Flannery and Steve Mann, who are the co-editors of Strange Matters Magazine, which is a new workers' co-op that's in the middle of a fundraising drive. So yeah, go support the magazine. And Steve and Kyle, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Chris. Thanks for having us. The basis of this interview is a piece that is coming out. Actually, when is it coming out? That's a good question that I should probably have asked before this.

Oh, let's see. It will come out later this month. Okay, yeah, it will be out later this month that is about the history of money and what money is. So I guess we can start there, which is... Yeah, can you walk us through a bit about the debate over what money is and how various people have gotten parts of it wrong and parts of it right? Sure. I got into this debate as an economics graduate student in 2011 and a book that really kind of shaped my initial understanding was David Graber's Dept. The First 5,000 Years. Great book. Yeah, it's excellent. It's very long and it's a bit scattered, but I love what he put together with it. So he kind of introduced me to ideas from a school of economic thought called chardalism. And chardalism is kind of the theoretical forebear of MMT. And MMT, which is Modern Monetary Theory, is kind of in the news now as a theory which is saying, like, okay, if you're a government that issues its own money, its own currency, that is not really backed by anything, it's not backed by any other currency or any other commodity, then you don't really face a financial limit as far as how much you can produce.

You're the sole source of that money and you can spend it into existence, spend by buying things, the money into existence. And people will accept it to the extent that they either need it or they want it. And that's one theory that's kind of in the air now. But chardalism, over 100 years before this, is putting out very similar ideas around money that is created by states in order to marshal physical resources. They call it biophysical resources, which is just a fancy word of meaning all of the material, people, techniques, physical processes that are required to create economic activity. So to the extent that people either need or want your money, you can use it as a social technology sort of to marshal those resources into action. And you being a state, chardalism says. So from chardalism we got MMT, but David Graver's book is about a lot more than just chardalism and MMT. So it's about the origins of money. And origins of money turns out are at least 5,000 years ago as the title says. There are examples of early accounting systems where people are just, rather than there being a circulating medium of exchange type money like a coin or something or a dollar bill, there were just records of what people own and what people owe and their debts and credits against each other.

And it was in early Mesopotamia, so we have these early accounting systems that yield more advanced credit systems over time that are ruled by temples, which are sort of proto-states in a way, in terms of like they administer the flow of goods and services through their territory and between their territory and another temple's territory using their domestic money. But also international money. International money was facilitated through trade networks. Trade networks use things like they needed to convert between a domestic money and international money. And Graver goes through these wonderful examples of silver and other metals being used as international means of payment. That's sort of our term in our piece basically, which is covering foreign exchange. But he says like in order to get from the domestic money into the international money, you need to have these linkages of experts in the temple and the trade networks to get together and make credit instruments which knit them together into this trade network. And from there, we go into, I don't want to spend too much time on the history, but we go from there to situations, thousands of years later, we get coins. Coins are being minted by starting in the roughly 600 BC, I want to say, Carl.

That sounds about right. It's going to be early Iron Age. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been doing some homework on this because I've been on a few podcasts and they're like numismatists in the comments and whatnot. The first, okay, the first mixed gold and silver coin was sometime in the 7th century BCE, and the first gold coin was not long after. I think it was like they were both Lydian kings, like one after another. Anyway, just wanted to hit that because someone said I got it wrong earlier. But these coins were kind of the first widely used sort of retail means of settling debts, like at the point of sale between people. So it wasn't just an accounting system. It wasn't an elaborate credit system with no circulating means of payment. It was a circulating money now, and it's getting around based on military conquest.

Military conquest and the Axial Age spread the use of coins much wider than the domestic spheres in which they were first minted. Yeah, and I think we should just to talk about roughly when this is. If you go back, I mean, this is a slightly later, but one of the huge sort of like the periods where like the entire Mediterranean is using coinage, right, is this is when you're dealing with your sort of like classical Greek, like your Greeks and your Persians and you have your sort of like Athens and Sparta. And those guys are very much, they're engaged in this thing that Graeber calls the military industrial coinage slavery complex. The military industrial coinage complex. Yeah, and I think he adds slavery on the end because it's yeah, it's this giant sort of like this giant warfare system, right? Like these are like like Athens is an empire, right? They run around, they steal, they seize people's gold. Like this gold and silver mines and they like have slaves that work in this this whole sort of like like this.

Yeah, you get the system of empire that is like what the Axial Age is sort of defined by. Yeah, yeah. And it's like whereas previously, like so precious metals did circulate, but they weren't in coin form and they were more as like a bulk means of payment stored from one temple to the next, almost as if they're central banks, but central banks don't exist yet. And Axial, the Axial Age coinage system gave rise to the more much more sophisticated medieval coinage system. And I'm going breezily through this because there's a lot there. But several thousand years of several thousand years are passing in a few minutes here. So bear with me. But there are there now in the medieval and Renaissance times, not only do we have the coinage circulating, but we also have credit instruments, which are being submitted transferred transmitted rather between banks, between banks in different countries and territories that are saying, hey, you don't even need to based on what is written on this piece of paper. I already know you're good for it. I will dispense with the coins that I have in my bank because this paper signifies that they you're good for it basically.

And so that greatly speeds things up in terms of settling commerce debts and settling bills between different states. So but going through all this history, the point of it is that at every at every sort of step of the way, you see, OK, there's a lot of different types of monies are circulating and they're being exchanged against one another. And there also seems to be a domestic sphere and international sphere. The international means of payment, which is a analyte category that I and my co-author, John Michael clone thought up is kind of sort of sets the tune as far as what kind of hierarchy of money, if you will, develops in each of these ages. So like in the prior to the actual age, there were both there was bulk settlements from one temple to the next in terms of silver, although it wasn't coins, it was just like bullying, basically. And then and then later it was coins and later it was bills of exchange. And then after a while there emerged gold standards that existed between nations and they had central banks eventually, which horted gold. Not because not just because they are fetishizing it or something something basic like that, but rather because it was the established international means of payment. And if you either you need that or you need something that is easily transferable into that.

In order to conduct your trade, especially if you're developing country or a otherwise like an upstart state of some type. Now, today, we're in a dollar rise world. The dollar is the international means of payment from 1971 onwards. The MMT story. Yeah, I mean, that's basically true. The MMT for the US government as the issuer, the sole issuer of the dollar, which is a fiat currency, which is not backed by anything. Yeah, you can make as much of that as what you want. You could make you can create and spend into existence as many dollars as the US government wants, and then delete it from existence by taxing it away. And that makes perfect sense. Totally acknowledge that. But there's some problems nonetheless, in terms of how they apply that into a more general theory. Because it's like, can you okay, you can make as much of your own money. What about other types of money. From the perspective of a US statecraft interested individual, like, why would you care about other people's money, basically, if you're just the sole source of the US dollar, which happens to also be the international means of payment, of course, you wouldn't. However, if you're like, say, Tunisia, the Tunisian dollar is accepted almost nowhere as payment. Yeah. And one of the big things, I mean, it's not the sole driver and people sort of emphasize this, I'm going to caveat this immediately because people will yell at me.

But like one of the very important things about the dollar is that the dollar is what you can buy oil in. And this is extremely important because if you are a society in the world, you need oil. This is basically universally true. And the fact that you need to buy oil, and the fact that you need to buy a lot of other things that are manufactured in the US, means you have to find some way to get US dollars. Now, again, this doesn't matter for the US because we can just make them. Well, okay. This is another thing. This stuff gets very weird and convoluted very quickly. But essentially, the US can just sort of make this money. Technically speaking, it's a Federal Reserve and there's all of this just incredibly convoluted finance stuff. But yeah, the US doesn't, the US does not have to worry about obtaining US dollars. You can just do it. But yeah, if you're, I don't know, if you're Tunisia, if you're... Denmark's an example I like. Yeah, Denmark. Yeah, like you need to find a way to get US dollars because you need to have stuff where you need to use US dollars to buy it. Yeah. And so in our international context, this is after all of the history I just went through since about 1971 or so when we went off the gold standard.

We have a system of central banks dominated by the dollar and the dollar represents about 60% of settlement of all trade. And the next five or so currencies are plus the US account for like 80 to 85% of all trade. So there's really just a few currencies which dominate everything with the US being outsized among them. And when you look at the historical record, this is like very similar to other forms of international means of payment where it's like, okay, I either need to have the one that's at the top or failing that one of the other sort of reserve currencies, even though that that terminology generally exists prior to about 80 years ago. Yeah, so like if you don't, if it's not gold, then okay, it's the US dollar. So we need dollars or we either need to be printing dollars because we're the US or if we're not them, then we need to get into either US dollar or the yen or the euro or one of the major trading currencies. And like China, China does a lot of trade with the US and they sell things to us, we give them dollars, they're rational, they put their dollars into treasuries to gain a little bit of a return instead of just holding the dollars themselves for no return.

Can we explain what a treasury is because? Yeah, sorry, a treasury bill is if you receive dollars, you can use them to purchase what's called a treasury note or a treasury bill. It's also called T-notes too, so if you ever hear someone talk about T-notes, that's what this is. Yeah, so it's a way to learn, it's like moving from your checking to your savings account essentially. So if you have just dollars in a bank, it doesn't earn hardly anything. If you're in a saving, if you go into the savings account, which is basically the treasury bills, you'll earn a little more. And you'll earn dollars, you won't earn reminbi from them, you'll earn more dollars. And dollars are the international means of payment, so that's good. Yeah, so basically the US government puts out a bond and you buy it and then whenever it expires, there's like a 10-year T-note that people talk about that's like in 10 years you buy it and it'll give you a certain amount of dollars later on that is more than what you paid for it.

Exactly. So you'll earn a little bit of interest over time and then you may earn like a little lump sum when it matures in the future. So China has tons of dollars, it's part of a huge strategy that they have in order to manage their foreign currency reserves or what's called forex. So forex is the, and it's a term we're going to use a lot, that just is the foreign currency reserves you have on hand in order to pay for things that are only available for sale in currencies that you can't make yourself. Okay, so you have this question of like why do we care about this, right? Like why do we people who want to make the world better care about this? And the answer is, okay, take your hypothetical scenario. Your hypothetical scenario is the scenario in which like a bunch of workers in alliance with like tribal confederations have taken Vancouver Island, right?

And they've set up a new government, they have worked out sovereignty arrangements, things have happened, you now have a new sort of entity that is in Vancouver Island. So immediately you have both resources and you have problems, right? You have a certain amount of resources that are on Vancouver Island, right? You have literally like, you have the things that are on the island, right? You have cars, you have like probably some yachts you've managed to like steal. You have shops, you have production facilities, you have an extremely large number of very good Chinese restaurants. You have trees, got a lot of trees. Yeah, you've got trees.

Major asset. Yeah, you know. Chinese restaurants, I mean. It's true. Like I, yeah, my family spent a lot of time like specifically going to Vancouver Island just to eat Chinese food. Yeah, you know, and say like, let's say you've taken Vancouver Island and you expand out and you now have like a swath of Canada, right? That has now sort of been liberated and you have a lot of resources, you have sort of timber, you have, I don't know, maybe you have coal, maybe you have other stuff. And you also have a lot of people.

Yeah, whatever labor you can marshal. Yeah, you have a lot of labor. And you know, and those people have a lot of skills, they have a lot of education, they have like, you know, they have a belief that you can make the world a better place. And I think this is where, you know, this is the arena in which MMT can sort of explain what you're doing next. Yeah, so you have this, you have a territory that has undergone revolutionary change and you have bio physical resources that are in it and bio physical resources that could be in it. And you have, and you also have the social technology of money. Some of the money you can just make yourself other monies you cannot. MMT is applicable in the sense that it says, in this scenario, I think the most the way MMT is most equitable is to say, everyone can be employed, who wants to be employed?

Yeah, there's no there. The one of their principal ideas is a job, a federal job guarantee, and it could be applied just as easily conceptually in this situation. It says, there's nothing preventing a revolutionary government of some type, not necessarily a state, but any, any non state type of administration from setting up something sort of like a central bank to make its own money to marshal domestic resources, in terms of within its own territory. And to get everyone, everyone who wants to be employed to be employed and to be paid for their work, like not to be too vulgar, but like why, why this is stuff is important. This monetary theory in this history is like, people want to be paid for their work. They're not going to go and barter things, they want to get paid. Yeah, and I think this is something that, like, you know, if you look at sort of like the thing that gets held up was like the classic example of an anarchist revolution, right, is what happens in Spain 1936.

And if you look at what they do, right, like they're almost immediately after the revolution, what happens is you have basically like a union of all of the bank workers, and those guys take over all the banks. And you have the individual workers in different unions start seizing, they start seizing the factories, they start seizing like the trains. And once they've done that, they start just pulling all of their resources into, you know, like into like they now have this, like they have the banking union, the banking union is the sort of central body that has resources that can distribute it. And, you know, what MMT is essentially saying is like, yeah, so as long as what you're moving around is the resources that you have in your territory, like, you can just create money in order to do that. And you can sort of, you know, and you can use this to get people to do certain things. And like, you know, the Catalonians, like, they equalize everyone's wages, for example. I mean, it would be better if we equalize everyone's wages. I do agree with that.

Yeah, I mean, they do have a lot of other stuff that's like, okay, so like they get rid of a lot of jobs that are like, sort of managerial stuff or like just bullshit jobs, they just kind of eliminate. And yeah, you know, and this frees up people to like do stuff that actually matters and is real instead of sort of this like this sort of bureaucratic hierarchy that's above them. And yeah, but I think the other thing they do that's very important for our sort of scenario for us talking about money is that like they immediately start like, they start seizing gold and they start seizing, you know, like they start seizing foreign currency. And yeah, and I think this is where we can get into where I guess MMT doesn't work because MMT, like, it doesn't really think much about the fact that like, okay, you have Vancouver Island, you have a part of like Canada, right? There is a lot of resources that you don't have. Absolutely. Yeah, that's, that's, that's going to be a lot of why foreign exchange matters so much as that, you know, you, inevitably you think, what if we just made an autarkic society? That's sorry, that's a little, I probably should jump the gun a little bit there. What if we just made everything ourselves? What if we made a society that was fully economically independent?

That's what autarky tends to be used to mean. And the answer to that is because that sucks. That's the problem with it. It sucks. Like, you don't want to be trying to manage an autarkic society on multiple grounds, not least of which is that, I mean, we've seen societies try to do it. And, you know, we, me, me and Steve could go for hours and hours and hours talking about historical precedents of previous economic systems, many of which did try to be autarkic because that was something that monarchies liked a lot. It was the idea that their kingdom could be fully independent because the thing is that when you're economically independent, that means that you've got a certain amount of security, of international security. And there's kind of a trade-off where the more stuff that you're reliant on importing, the more vulnerable you are to the people you're importing and screwing you. But it's just so massively difficult to be a good producer of every possible good. Yeah. And this is true even if you have an enormous amount of resources. We can talk about one case study of this, which is Socialist Period China.

And Socialist Period China, they're getting resources, and especially in the early periods, they're getting some resources from Hong Kong, they're getting some stuff from the Soviets. But they get into like Mao famously does not like markets. This is a thing that is known about Mao. And so Mao is like, OK, no, we're going to shut off the sort of like market system that we've been running sort of through Hong Kong. And then China had been getting technology transfers and aid from the USSR, but the USSR and China got into a bunch of political fights. And the USSR like pulls out all of its visors. And China has an enormous amount of resources, right? They have a large population. They have just an enormous geographic mass. And so they basically try to build an attack on society. And they try to sort of just, OK, well, we'll just marshal our resources and we'll just sort of like, well, we'll plan a way out of it. And they run into this problem, which is that there is actually things that they need from other countries, which is technology. And they hit this thing I've talked about before, which is like they basically hit this production bottleneck where it's like, well, OK, so in order to produce more industrial goods, they need more food.

But the problem is in order to produce more food to support a larger urban population, you need more industrial goods, right? You need your like fertilizers, you need your tractors, you need stuff like that. And, you know, and once they're cut off from sort of the rest of the world from through Hong Kong and from the USSR, they don't have what they, you know, they're sort of scrambling to figure out how we do this. And their solution is the Great Leap Forward, which is essentially we're going to just bust through this whole thing and we're going to do it by forcing everyone to work for like an absolutely enormous like increase in hours, right? Like we're going to have peasants working in the fields literally until they collapse from exhaustion. And it just doesn't work. It is a it is a apocle failure. There are millions of people die from famines. And, you know, and sort of the response to this is that, like, is that China eventually ends up like winds up opening its economy again. Yeah. And yeah. And yeah. And like, you know, and this is the thing, like if if China, which has like just just an astounding breath of natural resources can't pull this off, like it's probably just not a good idea.

Because like. Yeah. Well, I mean, we even have like a very, you know, a very contemporary example that, you know, makes, certainly makes my blood boil. And I'm sure we'll make some of the listeners blood boil the, you know, vaccines. You know, the realistically, you know, the the coronaviruses fund is a more or less is an incredible threat to basically every state on the planet at this point. And the really, really chemical and biomedical research is done in just a handful of places on the planet. And there have been attempts to create vaccines outside of those places and they have been somewhat successful, but it has been difficult and most places are just not in a position to create a to develop their own competing technology. And even China struggled with creating their own competing vaccination technology and I'm not at all a bio biology expert. I understand it's a not quite as efficient vaccine, the Sinovac, but at the end of the day, this is like South Africa is not developing their own independent vaccine.

That's a quite sophisticated economy. Yep. All the various South American countries could have pulled their resources together in theory, but it's so hard to turn a dime and develop from scratch a primary research industry. It's so difficult, and it's so not worth it. It's, you know, if you have trade relations with a country that has technology developments in a field that you really care about. It's just not really worth it like we don't the United States doesn't really compete with several forms of Japanese technology because it's just not worth the bother. Just let Korea and Japan handle that for us and we buy it and they accept our our forex they accept our dollars. But you know let's say you're the Philippines.

You know, how are you going to get those and this is this is now international trade and international politics. And if we're creating our now independent Vancouver Island, we have now entered into this territory. We have now entered into international politics and international trade. Yeah, and this is an arena that's fraught in a lot of ways because it's, you know, as we've sort of been talking about, right, it's not just that you need, it's not just that you need forex. For example, like, you know, if you have you have your sort of like, you know, you have your new society in like Vancouver, right? Yeah. You know, you need the thing you need mostly is dollars. And this is this is a real problem because this requires you to have something that you can turn into dollars.

And you know, okay, so you're going to have some amount of dollars that are just there, right, from from when you see society. There's there's assets you can sort of just sell off that like, okay, like, do we really need this yacht? Like, okay, we can we can sell this for some amount of dollars. But this becomes a real economic problem because you need to produce something that you can exchange for dollars. And, you know, there's there's a pretty good chance that like, whatever sort of new currency, whatever new sort of like MMT currency that's like, oh, it's controlled because we're producing it. It moves our resources around, we can make and bust of it as we want. Like, yeah, you have to actually be able to convert that into dollars. And, you know, why why does the why is the US going to want your currency?

Yeah, it's a bit dialectical, because you have to. Okay, you have your MMT currency, which domestically is accepted because of tax receivability or something, or or national fervor, if you will, to create a new Democratic Confederalists Society. And that's accepted there. Yeah, you need US dollars. So like, you need US dollars, but why do you need them? Partly because like, you eventually want to not need them. Yeah. And so you have what you can you have assets right now that you can just sell.

So that's one way. But long term, you can't do that. You can't do cash flow over the long haul that allows you to buy what are called capital goods, which are is a fancy term for machines that make machines or machines that make some sort of like in product, which is a physical thing. It's not like a service or something. And you want to classic like really classic economic development advice that is actually pretty good is you want to move up what's called a value chain and eventually be not producing just like a stable crop or something but doing really innovative advanced technology things later on. So you like, here's where I am. Here's what I have. Here's what I could have though.

How do I get there? Part of part of the formula to get there is yes, acquiring forex. But it's other things like saying, how do I cultivate political alliances that will yield trade partners such that I have a stable flow of forex and maybe even technology transfers, you know, or something down the line, which could be a game changer. You need to have an education system, like if you're a fan of the economist Thorsten Veblen, he thought like in his mind he thought the economic development was ultimately from the human intellect. And like everything was downstream of that. So like, you need to have money to, you can use your MMP money to create a basic education system, and you can augment it with buying importing things that you can't yet make, and using it to create like a university or something, which can do R&D work. You have to find tools to get enough of the money that you can't just infinitely produce forex in order to augment what your society can produce beyond what it initially could, and show essentially that you, okay, I can make a better mousetrap. Like I don't need to, I don't need donations from well-meaning imperial powers or something.

We're building what we need in order to move up the value chain and then build out our productive capacity in such a way that it doesn't leave anyone behind. Everyone is, everyone's employed because we're doing the classic MMP stuff on the home front, such as a job guarantee. But we're also doing the international economic development stuff of assiduously monitoring our foreign currency reserves and then using them to import things that we cannot yet make, but can make things internally and then have a snowballing effect as far as being able to sell even higher value things, which to our trade partners who are hopefully share our values of like democratic and federalism or whatever your chosen guidelines are. Yeah, and this is something that becomes very difficult in the current market. This is to some extent like why the Cold War went the way it did, which is that once you have the Sino-Soviet split and once you have Chinese and Russian troops killing each other on the border, China enters a situation where it's like, well, okay, so we still want to do economic development, but we've lost the Soviet Union as a way to get technology transfers. And their solution to that was to ally with the U.S. And this is like, it works out for the Chinese economy.

It is a debacle disaster for like literally everyone else on earth because like it means that capitalism is the thing that wins the Cold War. And this means that like, you know, I mean, like if you look at how, you know, like the things that China are doing in order to be able to get technology transfers for the U.S., it's like, like there's, so there are joints like Chinese CIA like operations inside of China that are like monitoring Soviet missile sites. So there's just like CIA outposts just like in China that are just, you know, doing spying like for the U.S. government. There's like, they invade Vietnam, which is a, you know, and it's not just that they invade Vietnam. It's like they invade Vietnam and then they fight this like, there's really, you know, the immediate war doesn't last that long, but they fight this like horrible border war that goes on for like a decade that kills enormous numbers of people. And, you know, and the end result of this is like, yeah, like, you know, trying to get the technology transfers and they developed the economy,

but everyone else on earth, yeah, the cost is like everyone who's ever tried to be a labor organizer in like, you know, in like how Salvador gets murdered by a bunch of fascists. And that's every development econ is so fucking frustrating because at every single step of the way, there's like, there's like a really razor thin line between risk and reward at every step of the way. And so like, imperial powers will dangle technology transfers or extended trade agreements on somewhat favorable terms in exchange for allowing them to just like go to war with your neighbors, like, or rope you into it, or extract resources that would be valuable for you later in your development phases. Yeah, actually, this leads to me, you know, going to our hypothetical here thinking about Vancouver Island, the People's Republic of Vancouver Island. And we can kind of talk about some of the development traps because that's kind of what I'm was turning through my head right now, because I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for Vancouver Island is that incredibly deep research. And so what they listen to the economy is there's a tech sector logging fishing tourism and food. And so, you know, we talked first about like you could like sell off like the yachts and the cars and stuff like that.

And that's, I don't even know if that counts as a sector of the economy at that level that's a zero. Yeah, you can have a yard sale. Yeah, you can have a yard sale. But you know, logging and fishing, those are those are pretty solid primary sector economies. You know, to describe the terminology, you know, they've got this. This is part of that hierarchy that Steve was talking about that, you know, the chain of development, and a primary sector is like a basic, extractive element of your economy, a mine, logging fishing food production, you know, basic goods. And then you know you talk about a secondary development which is like manufacturing and then a territory which is you know services. Those are kind of your basic. Those are usually considered like sectors of the economy but in a way they kind of correspond to development. And they require different amounts of development and you know the thing about primaries everybody needs those things, like, unless people just stop using wood for construction which we are very far from doing we still use a lot of wood for construction. Your logging industry is going to have buyers until people stop by eating fish, your fishing industry is going to have buyers, you know, up to a really ludicrously bottomless reserve. But you're going to be stopped on that secondary industry until you have capital. Like, I don't mean just like the sense of having a lot of money but you know, as Steve said, the right money.

The right money and well you need capital production, you need capital, you need the machines. Yeah, you need like you need your factories, you need your like. Yeah, so you and wealthy countries, partly in order to maintain their power, they have, they want to be the only seller of capital goods. Yeah, and they're going to be very withholding about it. Like a really good example for right now with like all the inflation stuff going on and like the chip shortage. Yeah. So the machines that make the machines that make the chips. Holy shit. Those are like, those are, they only make like 50 of those a year.

Yeah. And it's all two companies. Yeah, well, you know, the thing with the chip shortage, right, is also like, if you can be like the people who do that, that gives you a lot of economic power. Like this is one of Taiwan's things, right, which is that like, you know, it's like, okay, so why hasn't Taiwan just sort of been pulled over by China? And like, I mean, there's a lot of sort of geopolitical reasons for that. But it's also partly it's just that like, yeah, like Taiwan has this enormous chip making industry and it's incredibly advanced. And, you know, it has like, you know, this is, I think in everything that that's a real problem for sort of revolution society doing this is that like, yeah, like Taiwan's chip making economy. Like it's not like people like fall in like vats of chemicals, like a lot, like there's a lot of just horrible sort of labor expectation.

And this comes back to even your sort of like, like, you know, if you're talking about your sort of primary primary sector stuff in the economy, which is that like, okay, well, yeah, I mean, like oils, particularly example of this, like, you know, same with timber and same with fishes that like these are extractive industries. Yeah. And this becomes a real problem for a lot of your sort of like newly revolutionary developing societies because you get this tension between like, and you see this a lot in Latin America is like this is a there was a huge tension like this in Bolivia, for example, you see this in Ecuador, too, where like, you have different factions of you have different factions of the political movements where you have people who are like, okay, yeah, I'm okay with just like, you know, building these highways through indigenous land or just like doing massive forestation or like doing open pit mining. And those people will be like, those people will be leftist, right? There'll be people like, okay, well, we need to do this because we need to like, you know, this is an anti poverty measure.

We have to do the value chain, we have to increase our production. But then, you know, you have the indigenous people who's like homes, these are, right? Yeah, yeah, you can rationalize a lot of people's shit if you have the right intellectual backing. Yeah, and like, and this this happens like in China, too, there's like, like a lot of the industries has been absolutely devastating, like, and this this becomes a real like the fact that you need forex becomes this like incredible trap that that you sink into because it's like, on the one hand, like, yeah, like there are resources that you need in order to have a functioning society, but it's also that that you can't get in your territory, but also like the cost of getting that forex is enormous. And a lot of times it's, it's a it's something that just simply destroys revolutionary project. What hit me when I looked at this list of Vancouver's economic sectors was, you know, tourism being listed among the big ones in my mind immediately went to Cuba, to pre revolutionary pre castor Cuba. And you know, pre castor Cuba has all these things going for it off when you when you're looking at from like a developmental standpoint, you know, it's got this like very good productive base of you know, primary resources like sugar. It has great relations with the United States of America, particularly through the mafia.

Yeah, wonderful right. It has the tourism industry is very successful it's producing manufactured cigar so it even has a secondary industry bridge, but he is still absolutely failing to develop in a way that is meaningful for the people living in Cuba. You know, pre pre castor Cuba was a nightmare for most people. And that's, you know, that's like Steve said, you know, there's this razor thin thing between risk and reward. And during that, you know, during the 40s and 50s in Cuba. It just made so much sense to just stick it with this impoverished extractive tourist heavy mafia friendly economy and yeah they were friends with the US they could have gone technology transfers in principle but were they actually going to. And that's something we have to think about with our people's Republic of Vancouver Island is you know yeah like people are going to want our logs people are going to want our fishing American tourists are going to come here and go whale watching and that's going to be like we're going to be able to do a little bit of forex but we're going to be able to like leverage that and how would we leverage that. Yeah, yeah. And I kind of want to move the conversation to like I think people might be listening and saying like, okay yeah I can see why it for actually be important but like what are the specific ways in which we can acquire it but also manage it. Okay, well, without being evil, being socialists who want democracy.

Okay, so I think if we're, I'm, I'm picturing some sort of assembly structure taking shape, because I'm a libsock libertarian socialist. And it could be something else, but in any case, I think they should appoint 50 or so people, some of them experts, some of them not to examine, they should do a thorough economic analysis of the entire island. And you should do it on the basis of here are the assets we have. Here's where we want to go in terms of assets. How do we get from here to there. And one of the assets that you have is okay we have so many us dollars we have so many Canadian dollars. We have reserve balances. So we need to import things. We can make some of it ourselves. And we need to buy the rest of it. We can't buy all of it now. We need to cash flow some of this we need to. We need to do export led growth as the develop the classic development econ people would say, where we say we have some industries where we can gradually and consistently ramp up to the point that they give they give us the types of money which we need in order to input capital goods, the machines that build machines to buy them, learn how to use them and maintain them and then build more ourselves, ideally. And over the course of say, basically, I'm basically suggesting that Vancouver Island should have a 10 year plan.

They should have a 10 year plan for further economic development. And it should be as democratically decided upon as possible within the limits of like, okay, there's some experts which will obviously be needed. And not everyone can do that. But whatever assembly structure you have should be given oversight ultimately. And you should say, just be really frank with it like, we have these are biophysical resources now, in 10 years, they should be this. In order to get there each year, these things need to happen. We have to have this much foreign currency. We have to have this many workers involved in this industry. We can change things along the way, but we're constrained by these factors, where like we need trade partners, we need to reverse engineer some technology that we've acquired or something in order to to educate ourselves on how to like create chips or something in the future. Yeah, there's like, there should be like an extremely vigorous discussion of what assets we have, what do we need, what's our goal, and then thread together a development plan from there. And then use your MMT money to marshal the resources that you currently have, and that you need for like the next year, say domestically, while monitoring and augmenting your foreign currency reserves and using the tools of monetary policy to safeguard those reserves and economize on them in order to import what you can't yet make, so that you can make it in the future.

I think the thing that we should learn from the fact that like a lot of these projects haven't worked is, well, I think it's twofold. One is that you have, okay, there's constant sort of like, there's traps you have to avoid that have to do with like, for example, like who actually has access to the forex. Because this is what this is a way that like, you know, and also like, because it's very, very easy to like access to sort of like, incidentally redevelop ruling classes when you're trying to do playing technology stuff when you're dealing with enormous amounts of foreign currency. And this is a problem. And, you know, and the second problem has to do with sort of like, how do you make sure that your economy essentially doesn't end up as a resource colony. And this has other components and you know, and I think this is something that like, there is a lot that can be done if you control like a region of territory, but there's political limits on it. And the political limits have to do with, you know, who actually controls the sort of like vast majority of resources and technology. And the only way to really deal with that is that like, you know, you can't you can't sort of have like you if you want to actually have sort of long term stability you can't just have your sort of like your like libertarian social councils in one country.

Like as a thing that has to like, keep moving and keep spreading because otherwise it becomes it becomes just increasingly difficult and you come under increasing pressures. You know, for, you know, in order to do things that you do that you need to do in order to make sure people don't starve in order to make sure that people have educations to make sure that people, you know, are able to sort of live through life. And also like in order to make sure that you don't just annihilate the like annihilate the entire environment while doing this because that's something that happens a lot when in these developmental states is that like, you know, you get you you get groups who like come in the power and are like, well, okay, we're like, we're gonna be an ecological regime and then, you know, they wind up having to they wind up doing oil extraction and like, well, put mining because that's, you know, that that's the easiest way to to to get money and I think I think, like, I think it's, it's valuable that like, these are things that if you're serious about taking power, you have to think about. I also think it's important to keep in mind just the inherent limits that you have if you're just sort of an if you're if you're if you're completely isolated, like, if you're completely isolated revolutionary movement in one place, it doesn't have people where that you can, you know, give stuff to and move stuff around between. Oh, yeah, I mean, it's, it's always been kind of, I mean, that's been like a kind of inevitable thing that like, you know, there are, there are communes in my extended family, you know, I've got members of my family who live on, you know, those little farm communes,

and they're not fully economically independent. And I'm sure that we could find people who would be willing to say, oh, you know, this is like, this is totally fake, this is not a real commune because they, you know, sell, you know, sell sunflower seeds at the farmers market and stuff. And that's kind of the unfortunate, that's kind of like the tough reality that unless you manage to create a truly global revolution, as I said, unless until you've got like two thirds of the population under your umbrella, you're going to have foreign relations, and you're going to have foreign trade, which is going to, it's going to be, it's going to be difficult to manage, you know, you're going to have to be both you're going to have to have like a diplomatic core, that's something we're barely mentioning here, but like we're going to need to have diplomats coming out of this council if we're talking about them having relations with the US and Canada, and you know, negotiating these trade deals, these trade deals don't happen out of nowhere. And, you know, we kind of brush this aside, but it's a bit of a, there's a bit of a misperception that people tend to have that the United States is pro free trade in like an extreme sense that like any trade with the United States is done without any tariffs. Oh, yeah, no. I don't think that you if you believe that without having done a lot of research, I do not think that that is an absurd thing to believe because that is the propaganda that is passed along in common knowledge.

A very quick examination of how trade works between international actors will reveal that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of tariffs active all the time in every trade deal. The big one with the US agricultural subsidies, which are just, it is illegal to have them, we have like just billions and billions of billions of dollars of agricultural subsidies that have us producing cheap food that's like, we're not even good at making it, like it's a complete disaster. This is just single handedly annihilated the economies of like enormous swaths of the globe because no one can compete with American agricultural subsidies. And it's, you know, but like when you join the free trade system, like that's one of the carve outs that's in the WTO is you can't have subsidies for your agricultural programs except for the US. And it's, it's great. And by that I mean everyone dies. Well, there are all sorts of like weird technical ways that you can create pseudo subsidies, you know, you know, Italy very famously has a price floor on wine. And this means that, you know, if you if you make a bottle of wine that nobody would buy for the minimum price the government will buy it off of you for that price. And so there are there are wineries in Italy that just produce wine at such a there's so bad nobody would buy nobody you'd have to pay people to drink it. But the government just buys it at this minimum set price and then throws it enough in a giant Olympic swimming pool vats to go rot. And like there are, yeah, they're the trade is, you know, there's a lot more complex. The free trade is kind of a myth at the international level. It is at it's at the most cynical free trade as a doctrine is a cudgel used by more powerful

countries that they impose that you have to do free trade with them and that they get to do protracted trade with you. Well, it's a it's well, firstly, like you mentioned, it's a myth. And historically speaking, we had like we had infant industries in this country that were highly protected from the very earliest days through most of the 19th century and we had we had export lead growth from infant lead for infant industries in the US. And that's precisely the opposite advice we now turn around and give via our imperial, like apparatus from the IMF and the World Bank to developing countries on the countries countries that that examined what the US was telling them to do and did the opposite or the ones that succeeded. Yes, like South Korea said, no, fuck that. And they went up the value chain and they did all of the things that we said Vancouver Island should do basically. Yeah, except, except not being evil. They did not do that. Well, they were evil. They were evil for a time in their dictatorial. But in terms of their economic development plan, divorce from political reality, which is probably naive of me to say, they took the opposite advice of the IMF in terms of that narrow scope. Well, yeah, I think the other thing that's kind of important here that we haven't really touched on yet is it like, so part of what was going on with with South Korea's economy is that South Korea's economy was was a war economy.

And it was a war economy designed to build. I mean, originally just it was it was a war economy because they were fighting a war, right? But then it became this, I mean, essential access to sort of the production of Korean war and then it became this axis that like, it became a huge part of the American sort of arms industry in Vietnam. And this is the same thing that Japan has this to where both of these economies are like a huge part of the reason why they're able to develop is because they get enormous amounts of just money and that guarantee contracts and stuff like that from American military development. And this is this is another really big problem for like your sort of free state that like you've created like whatever your sort of like Council Republic, you're like, if I'm in a zone, you're like indigenous confederation is that like, you need weapons. And the people who make guns are like the US and Russia. And this is a really, you know, and, you know, we've been talking on this show about about producing like 3d printed weapons. But I mean, you know, in terms of things like, you know, you're like artillery, right? Like, in terms of your mortars and like things like that, or like, you know, you can't you can't 3d print to best of my knowledge. And I'm like 99.99% sure about this that like, unless you had extremely advanced facilities and even then it's not clear. Like, I like, I don't think anyone on earth has ever pre 3d printed like an anti aircraft rocket. Like, you can't make you can't make stingers, you can't make man pads, you can't make like anti tank anti aircraft weapons. Not to not to get too much into it. But like the way in which Ukraine is fighting like Russian tanks in its very specifics is kind of encouraging actually. Yeah, but like, like things that you like the like specific. Yeah, I mean, there's only a few companies who are making the components for these things. Yeah.

So it's a problem. And that's like the personnel launched the inline or whatever things. Yeah, like the anti tank anti aircraft weapons. Like, yeah, if you can get them, they're effective and they do they do stuff. They're mostly just handed out from by the US or the UK. Yeah, yeah. And that's that's that's a huge problem if you're, you know, not trying to like be a political colony of these two things. And this is another trap that you see like, you see dictators especially falling into which is that that they, you know, OK, so like on the one hand, yeah, you do need weapons, right? Like you need you need some kind of military complex and you need arms in order to make sure that like, you know, you're not like the US doesn't roll tanks across the border. But simultaneously, like there's there's a thing that happens a lot with this happens with Petro States where, you know, OK, so the US is like, OK, so we need this oil, right? And how do you how do you deal with this sort of balance payments deficits? And the answer is we just sell them like 100 billion tanks and we just like we just like dump F 35s on them. And you can get into these scenarios where like you get these like because I mean, the problem with weapons, right?

It's like, OK, so you need them to survive, but they also they don't produce anything, right? In fact, they're sort of they're sort of net economic negatives because the only thing you could do with a gun is I mean, I guess you could technically hunt. But like, you know, the thing you're doing with the weapon is destroying value. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, and they were fine maintenance. Yeah. Yeah. These things are substantial net negatives. Yeah. And you know, and countries get sucked into these traps where like, you know, OK, we're just going to keep buying American weapons because of security. You're like, we want to invade some other country or like, well, you know, and you see this with Soviet weaponry, too, like back back when that was a thing. And today, modern Russian weaponry where it's like, yeah, you can you can get funneled into these traps where like the ruling class of your society just decides that the thing that it wants.

Just spend his forex on his weapons. And you have to be very, very like you have to be. And this is the thing that happens like. Like Evner Hoxa, for example, famously, like makes just a bunch of bunkers, right? And like militarize the society. And it's like, well, you know, part of this is just Hoxa being extremely weird, but like. You have to be very careful when your society is genuinely under threat that you're not sort of like just throwing all of your resources into into stuff like that. Where you know, it doesn't it doesn't produce anything, but you know.

And yeah, and also I mean, this is a. It is a it is a need. Like yeah, whatever the Vancouver Economic Planning, whatever group should like one of one of the objectives would Frank would be military. Of course. Yeah. You would need to. I don't know if you could get your hands on in-laws or manpads or anything like that. But you.

I think you'd be foolish. Frankly, not to distribute and train on weapons and stuff like that. Yeah. Some of your forex for that. Yeah. Yeah, like, I think, like, yeah, it's like you have to use something for that. And it sucks because this is something that like this, this sucks you into the arms complex. Right.

Yeah. I mean, like Rojava Rojava is using its oil revenues to fund like 50% of its expenditure almost is at least like in 2020 or the last time I checked was to defense forces. Yeah. And like, and this is a lot of that. A lot of that came from dollars, euros and Turkish lira that they require to oil. And like this. And this is the thing that like, yeah, this is this is a problem if you're in the revolution society surrounding people who just literally want to murder you. Or it's like stuff like this winds up happening and you wind up like.

I don't blame them. Yeah. It's like it's hard to. Yeah. And I think that's a, you know, that that's a good example of like what happens if the revolution doesn't spread. And if you get sort of like you get isolated and contained by imperial powers who just want to murder you is that you wind up like. You basically you want you wind up fighting an endless war against both the proxy forces and the real forces of armies that are significantly larger and more powerful than you and. Yeah.

And there's a lot of times there's not much you can do about it, but it's like, I think, you know, in terms of like like in the school of high principle, like this is why internationalism is important. I mean, yeah. And of course, obviously the other answer is, you know, selling out on the revolution and you know, we, we, you know, there's the example that people don't think about of Sarita. You know, Sarita gets elected on all these like radical promises for Greece and that just doesn't do any of them. And then you can look at, say, Nepal and, you know, the, the communist one in Nepal and then they establish a government that's functionally, you know, it's a liberal government. Yeah. My, my, my, my favorite Nepal fact is that the, okay, so that Nepal has like 17 different like Maoist factions with the guy who's the head of the largest Maoist faction. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it's him. He's the one who now lives in the mansion of the guy who used to be the Nepalese head of security. I think so. Yeah. And it's like, huh, huh, we've, well, this is, this, this has gone great. We've changed the person in the mansion. Yeah.

I mean, the, and, you know, not too surprisingly, you know, the second leader, a couple about a year ago, Kiran was on the verge of declaring a new people's war against the Maoist faction. Yeah. A Maoist war against the Maoists. Like, yeah. I mean, that's, you know, you, you end up, it's, yeah, it's, it's tricky to try to like game it out, so to speak, because, you know, my, I, maybe I'm just squeamish. I am hoping for things to not happen with a river of blood. Yeah. In life, I hope that, I hope that we don't get rivers of blood.

Oh, plan, plan for war. So you get, you get peace. Yeah. Yeah. But you, like, like Chris has said, you know, you can get trapped into like that, that escalating security dilemma. Yeah. And of course, you know, investing in security doesn't actually necessarily lead to security. We have, you know, over a century of looking at Latin American countries that investments in the military is just investments in the next civil war.

Yeah. Or, or you get couped. I think that's, that's another real problem. Like, like, I mean, it's weird because it's like a double, it's a double-edged sword because like the 20th century, like, there's all, there's a lot of like socialist-y governments that come into power just from military coups. But also, like, probably more of those governments, like, get overthrown by their own coups. And it's. Yeah. There was, there was one lesson I learned from playing Tropico.

It's that if you try to invest more in your, no matter how much you invest in your military, it only will. It only will ever get you up to 50, 50 odds of surviving a coup. Yeah. This is a, don't have colonels and don't have generals. Yeah. Then you can captain's coups. Yeah. Jesus.

It's always colonels. Yeah. It's always colonels. It's because they're like passed up for generalship by the next administration or something. Yeah. Again, sometimes, sometimes you do get like, sometimes you get like your Pinochet and sometimes you do get your captain's coups and it's like, this is a. That goes, that's ambition right there. When the.

It happens. Who is the government? Yeah. Yeah. Once, well, once your captains have hit fuck it mode, it's like. Yeah. Things are bad. Yeah.

That's indicative of like bigger, deeper problems. Yeah. Well, and I think like the Bathis are an interesting example of this because like, okay. So like the Bathis were never like good, but like, you know, the Bathis like originally like were kind of a mass movement, but then increasingly like over time as, as they can solve a power through military sort of revolutions, like it becomes increasingly just the Bathis are powerful because they have control of like various portions of the military. And, you know, and like the end result of this is like, instead of having revolutions,

like you just get, you just get all political power has nothing to do with whatever's happening in the street. You get these giant protests that are like, we want to go back to being part of the United Air Republic and it just doesn't matter because the actual political power is just what happens when the army fights itself. And yeah, I think like there's no easy solution to that other than just like don't have an armed body that's separate from just the masses of people, which is difficult to do, but also like,

I mean, or just armed the people somewhat. Yeah. And, you know, it's, It means of violence should be more evenly distributed. Yeah. I will say that I was, I guess, part of why the scenario we had started off with like, you've declared the People's Republic because the question of how you get that People's Republic feels like that's a 75% of your podcast podcast episodes.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, we've done, we've done, we've done just like a miracle has occurred, but like a revolution has occurred. And then I don't know, they like blockade all the roads or something like, I, as I like to say, it's good to have a plan for it if you win. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think like to win and then fumble once you've already gotten. Yeah. And this, this, this is something that like, that actually does happen a lot, which is like, you get into the, you get into these revolutionary like moments, but then there's just sort of like no, like no one has any idea what to do next. And so they sort of bungle it, or, you know, you get into some scenarios. Yeah. Or you get to various scenarios where like, nobody's thought about what happens next.

And that, that's, that's another way that like, yeah, these things class all the time. That's another way you get like, you know, and this, this is in some sense like the, the whole of the sort of, like the trial and error of the 20th century, which most of which just sort of ended in error is that, you know, a bunch of people were experimenting and a lot of the stuff they tried didn't work. And there are lots of reasons for that, but you like, you have to, in order to win, you have to actually be serious about taking power. And you have to be, you know, you have to be thinking strategically and have a like,

have at least a vision of what you're going to do before you like, you know, like before things happen, because otherwise there's just sort of like, you know, you just, you just get sort of mass confusion and Yeah. And say, say what you all about the fascists, they know what they're going to do when they seize power. They're not confused about it. It's more, well, their, their problems are what you do after.

Yeah. They're not confused about that those first like 48 hours when things start going away. Like, I hope that nothing we've said, I hope that nothing we've said on this podcast kind of makes people think like, oh, they, so they have like one weird trick basically to like secure, secure your power. Like obviously no. And like, and that we aren't like singularly focused on acquiring forex or something.

Also, I mean, it's just like, it's an important lever to have at your disposal. Like, well, number one, you should know that it's important. Number two, you should have tools in place such as like running a running a fixed exchange trade or something to make it a bit easier to acquire forex on the whole or doing capital controls or doing price controls or something like that. And you should have these tools in mind in order to get from year one to year 10 in terms of your biophysical resources. Like, here's what we have.

Here's what we need. And, you know, some of that could be military, some of that could be economic and some of that could be political. And no one, like, I don't know the answers. We don't know the answers, but each step of the way, you need to find groups of people who can come together and think objectively about them. Yeah, I want, yeah, it's not that I think that there is an answer. I'm kind of thinking about almost a little bit parallel to like, we know that if we create

our, you know, if, if socialists manage to seize any amount of power, they're going to reform whatever healthcare system they're currently existing in. We know this is going to be better because it would be hard for it to be worse. But, you know, that's making a good hospital system is not the entire thing that makes a revolution happen. It is just one of those things that you need to do and you need to think about it. And my objective here, and it's a lot of my objective with, you know, making this whole magazine project is that my socialism means that we have say over our lives, you know,

that's fundamental to me that we have say over what we do with our lives. And I want to make sure that the people who are in this with me, which is hopefully everybody, I am an optimist, I am hoping that everybody is with me on creating a better social store world that all of us are at least somewhat informed about the decisions we're making. I'm not actually economically trained. You know, I've learned this stuff as I've gone. It's not insurmountable. And it's, you know, I would want the decision about how do we make a socialist economy,

you know, the core of socialism, worker control of the means of production, the people involved. Again, hopefully everybody has, you know, at least has an inkling of what's going on. I don't want people to be confused and baffled by the decisions being made on their behalf. That's, you know, fundamental evil of a capitalist system that we don't know what the fuck decisions are being made for us by powerful people. Well, part of the problem comes back to education because like people are, the bourgeoisie have hogged, they've hoarded the knowledge of how to plan in certain respects. And I think socialists, socialists will sometimes look at the body of knowledge in terms of planning

an economy and say like, well, because they are the only ones who know how to do that, the knowledge itself is tainted. And like, I don't need to learn this because it's evil basically. I don't need to learn how to manage a currency board or do forex management because that's money and that's evil stuff. Yeah, I hope, I hope what we've described so far says like, I don't know if it's evil or not, but it's important and it should be, I think, I honestly think you're going to probably, probably fail if you don't consider these things at each step of the way. Yeah, and even in your like, one of the things that you see a lot with socialist countries is

they have basically have like a firewall, right, where they try to keep a separation between the parts of their economy that like are planned and the parts of their economy that like are about moving forex around. And I think like, okay, like there are varying degrees of effectiveness of this, but like this is like even if you're like, okay, like we want to get rid of the economy, right? Like we want to get rid of labor, we want to get rid of all the stuff as a concept, like you're going to have to deal, like until you like win, right? Like until you've like raised a flag over like New York, Berlin, Shanghai, like, and New Delhi at the same time, right? Like you're going to have to be dealing with this stuff. And how you do that and how quickly you're able to figure this out and how quickly you're able to implement it

and how quickly you're able to sort of like seize control of and use the resources that you have in order to advance your political project is, you know, that's going to be one of the things that determines whether or not your revolution survives no matter what it's fighting for. Like in addition to all the military stuff, military and economic, I think you have to just say like, you have to get to a point economically and militarily and all the other stuff to where you can just say to international powers like, I don't need to make some moral claim to you. I've built a better mousetrap. I'm going to let the people decide. And it's like it just shows people living freely together and enjoying a good standard of living and they don't need to exploit each other to get it. And like for not everyone, but many people that will be really appealing and you have to have like, well, more than just a diplomatic core, you have to have like an entire like a full court international push to say like, it's just a better mousetrap.

It's like it's, I don't need to focus on moral claims about like, well, it's better because you should just care about people because of like, you should care about people more than capitalism permits because it's just morally right. That may be the case, but also people want to get paid and they want to be treated well and have a decent standard of living at the same time. And we can do it. So here's how like you've shown them specific steps you've taken and you've shown them the material standard of living that is shared democratically. And it's not just like a state giving handing things out to people. It's like a true industrial democracy where it's like you get plugged in, you make decisions along the way. And yeah, basically that. Yeah, and I think I think I think that's a pretty good note to end on as a thing that we want and things that are going to have to be components of it.

And also, I guess thinking about, you know, like rejecting theories about money as incomplete that don't deal with the fact that you don't have all the resources in your country. And you in fact need other things to acquire them that you cannot simply create into existence. Yeah, do you have anything else you want to say before I guess you move into plugs? I mean, like I said, I mean, I, you know, we this may have sounded like a whole bunch of, you know, high minded theoretical egghead crap. But again, I'm I'm not formally educated on this stuff. This is stuff that I have learned and participated in as a socialist first and foremost, and it's been driven from the get go at least for me from a really fundamental desire for egalitarianism and for people having a say in their own lives. And I hope that the people who have stuck with us through this, who didn't know these concepts before, feel a little bit more equipped to participate in a discussion about how you would handle these things.

And as as I kind of alluded to this scales all the way down to, you know, 12 hippies on a farm. You know, this scales all the way up until you've got a total total global communism for pretty much anything below that. This this this principle scale and I, I hope that people feel more able and more willing to engage both first of all, you know, to tell liberals to, you know, shut the fuck up that I should have a say over how I participate in the economy, even when that's things like forex that seem very abstract and far away like I am I'm a person who's affected by this therefore I've got a stake therefore my opinion matters. And that you you can get there you can learn and you should be allowed to participate in that and yeah, this is what I'm trying to create is, you know, that socialists do not feel like they can, those are brow beaten out of the room of a discussion because some liberal nerd pushed up their glasses a whole bunch and spun their bow tie and then sense of bullshit like you know you it is your life and you have a right to have an opinion on it. And this is not an insurmountable thing to it's hard. I want to be clear here this is hard and I want but I want you in the discussion. Well said. Yeah, so I guess speaking speaking of things that people are involved in I can I can do transitions like this because I'm a professional.

Yeah, do you do you want to talk a bit about your magazine. Sure. Like we mentioned at up top, we're Kyle and I are both co editors of strange matters magazine. And we're in the middle of a fundraiser right now, you can find the fundraiser at the URL tiny URL dot com slash strange matters. No, no dashes or anything. You can also follow us on Twitter at strange underscore matters. And the magazine itself is going to be a, we're a literary magazine, and each issue we're, we're publishing in both print and digital. And the print issue one is about 300 pages and it's split in half between the front pages which is topics like economics philosophy politics, more technical fields. And then the back pages is art, like culture reviews, anthropology is anthropology, like more certain we kind of attach it to the word meaning, like meaning development. And, and there's a middle resting spot, which is actually called the futon, which is a prayer, a play on the word futon, which is like kind of a resting spot between those two halves where there's going to be short pieces of usually of humorous nature. And overall, it's going to cover a wide range of topics. And you can find out more of us, you can find out more about us on our fundraiser and our website, strange matters dot co op.

We got a couple articles already up on strange matters dot co op. We have a Steve wrote an amazing piece explaining of some very, in very layman's terms some arguments about what inflation is and why we should care about it. You know, very good. Yeah, very relevant right now. We have a truly delightful review of some of very contemporary very recently made cyberpunk works by Elizabeth Sandifer, author of neo reaction of bass list which anybody who listens to this podcast needs to read neo reaction of bass list. And she did us the wonderful favor of doing a pop culture review for us. We've, yeah, we've also got a work by the editors words for our present reality about what's how how can we discuss what actually exists in the world and what are the shortcomings with our current with just like the basic levels of our discourse and how can we advance beyond, beyond this difficulty and it's, you know, something that sounds like it's supposed to be this very high level philosophy but we've been I think I don't want to take too much credit for this because I was not the main writer on it. I think that we've successfully managed to bring it down to a to a lower brow level. You know to a to a level that doesn't require you to have 18 letters after your name of various college degree. We also managed to publish a piece by Russian dissidents. And we I'm very excited for the works that people are going to see in the future from us we've got a history of black cooperative movements. We've, I wrote a nice little diddy about colonialism in modern board games.

I'm very excited for people to get the chance to read these and you know it's all kind of in the service of us creating a more of us democratizing the socialist world and making it making it meaningful making it useful and also making it pleasurable for people to be socialists and to fight for a freer and more equitable world. Yeah, do you do you want people to find you on social media and if so where okay you can say no to this people do sometimes because hell site okay well have social media. I'm in WACM and I'll spell that out because it's kind of confusing at C. A. P. M. N. W. A. C. C. M. Yeah, so Strange Matters is our campaign will run through this month and it's going pretty good so far but we can use every little bit of support goes a long way so yeah fine find us at our website and also the fundraiser. Yeah, we're not getting paid just to be clear this is the we need to pay the authors we need to pay for the printers but you know this is not us trying to make a quick buck this is us trying to make sure we are not willing to accept paying our writers standard writing yeah we're going to pay our writers higher than market rate as on principle because we think the market rate is just too low it really is yeah and oh and by the way we're I think I mentioned it but we're workers cooperative so we're 100% worker in control there's no there are no levels of employment or ownership we're all horizontal yeah yeah so yeah go go check out Strange Matters yeah thank thank you to both for thank you both for joining us.

It was a wonderful time Chris thank you thank you for having us. Yeah, and if you want to find more of us for at happen to your pod on Twitter and Instagram. I keep saying Instagram I've never actually. I'm not on Instagram so I've been told we have one I've never interacted with it. Yeah and coolzone media has our other shows go listen to them. They're good and we work a lot on them. All right bye bye. During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his heart was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, it could happen here and it's currently happening there. There being Ukraine, which is in the midst of an invasion by the Russian government.

I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about bad things and how to make them better joined as often by Garrison and Chris, my co-hosts. And we are talking about some of the advice good and bad that's been going around on social media about how to disable and destroy armored vehicles. This is something we've kind of waited to do until the conflict was a little bit more of a mature state. But in brief, if you have been following what's been happening in Russia through the lens of social media or what's happening in Ukraine through the lens of social media, one thing that has happened is in the early stages of the invasion, a whole bunch of people flocked particularly to Twitter. But also not this did not just stay on Twitter. There were a large number of mainstream news articles published on the subject of the things people were saying to talk about different ways civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise stymie and thwart the progress of Russian military units through their cities.

And this has been accompanied by things like the Ukrainian government giving out information on how to make Molotov cocktails. We talked about this in our Molotov cocktail episode and putting out really neat infographics on where to throw Molotov cocktails to disable armored vehicles. But it's also come with a lot of bad advice that I don't want people who are maybe looking at the potential of urban combat happening in their future to take away from this conflict because there's also a lot of disinfo. So that's what we're talking about today. Yes. And I guess one of the first places to probably discuss this urban combat idea is probably the guy who's tried to make kind of a career out of talking about urban combat, which would be George Spencer, who wrote a relatively viral Twitter thread on this topic and has been writing about this thing for the past few years. He's the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point Modern War Institute and served for like a quarter of a century as an infantry soldier, including two deployments into Iraq.

And yeah, the past few years he's tried to kind of make a name for himself as the guy who writes about urban combat. And obviously, since this was happening, largely when Russian started invading Kiev, John Spencer put together some of his thoughts that went pretty viral on this said topic. Yeah. And it's frustrating. You've got a quote in here from one of the articles about he was giving out that says, some of his advice, such as preparing simple Molotov cocktails, is already being seen on the streets of Kiev, which is kind of framing it as if Spencer advised the Ukrainians to make Molotovs. No. Absolutely not true.

Before he made that thread, the government was urging people to res and also like Molotov cocktails got their name from people in Finland, not super far from Ukraine, resisting the Russian military in a very similar way to how they're being used by Ukrainian civilians now. Yeah. What I believe what John Spencer did, he's a guy with some qualifications, certainly like not a random person. We'll talk about random people giving advice to on Twitter, but he's also all none of his advice is new. None of it is from him. None of it is counterintuitive. A good deal of it is bad. And most of what he said that is good is just him pulling things from US military combat manuals and from Ukrainian military combat manuals and then putting it up in social media in order to go viral and try to get another book deal.

By making it look as if he is giving advice that is being adopted in real time, which is not what is happening. Yeah. I mean, like a good good instance of this is, yeah, that is claiming that they're making Molotov cocktails due to his advice. I mean, there's a picture in that very article that was taken before he even posted that thread. So it's like, no, there are people know how to make Molotov cocktails. That's not hard to find out. In a lot of cases, the Ukrainian Ukrainian government was giving out instructions on how to do it. I mean, and if you if you look at this picture, it looks very similar to a lot of a lot of like the the almost like small defensive weapons factories that we saw across the states in 2020.

We often see just collections of bottles just ready to be thrown all kind of laid out in in in milk crates very similar to this photo. Now there was there was less actual Molotov cocktails. But the way that this is whole the way this is all set up looks looks very similar to any kind of insurgency tactics of being like, yeah, there's going to be spontaneous on the ground organizing because people are just kind of naturally gifted at that. And on a on an objective level, Molotov cocktails have a place on an urban battlefield. They can be useful weapons for disabling armored vehicles for causing distractions for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they are capable of doing that. And they that's part of why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing like where to huck the sons of bitches in order to disable, you know, transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now that said, attempting to attack a military column with a Molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal.

And I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it. And the times that seem to be most successful is when you have areas where the Russians are attempting to establish control. You have small groups of vehicles that are moving down residential streets. You have a significant amount of traffic of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys. And as they pass the convoy, a civilian Huxa Molotov or as they pass a building, a civilian Huxa Molotov. And those seem to be broadly speaking the situations in which people have kind of gotten away with it. We don't have any kind of I'm not aware of any kind of solid overarching analysis of all of the use of Molotovs in this. But that is broadly speaking a potentially effective way to use a Molotov cocktail in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier.

What doesn't work and what Spencer and a number of other people suggested is hucking painted tanks or other armored vehicles. And that may be surprising to a lot of people. I think there's a lot of folks who want to believe that that could really work because it's like you walk shit, right? And it does work against some police. Yes. But here is the thing. When you have police officers who are tear gassing an area and you hook a bunch of paint and you get it over their face masks and they cannot see. It reduces their ability to tear gas you for a while.

It makes them uncomfortable. It makes them have less fun and it damages gear. When you hook a bunch of paint at an armored vehicle, the armored vehicle will return fire with a 50 caliber mounted Doshka or some other similar gun, which fires bullets that are large enough to take chunks the size of your head out of concrete and you will be torn apart and your organs liquefied in a hail of metal. Meanwhile, the paint that you are attempting to throw at that vehicle is almost certain to have no impact on it. Not only are you unlikely to get close enough to use the paint because you have to be considerably closer to do that than you have to with a Molotov in most situations, but also tanks are built with the understanding that it is possible that one or more of the ways in which they see will be obstructed. Tank drivers are trained to drive blind.

There are ways of utilizing tanks when vision is obstructed because in the kinds of fights that tanks are built to get into, they are often in situations where there is so much smoke around them. So many things first. Yeah, exactly. But there is effectively zero visibility, which is why when Spencer started talking about people throwing paint at tanks, a number of tank drivers came out and said, that's actually horrible advice. They don't work that way. And I was chatting with a couple of people.

There was one fellow, a former green brain named Mike Nelson, who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the Ukrainian government. And then getting up anytime journalists or media figures would comment about Ukraine would like, there's a nasty post here where Ann Cabrera, who I think is some sort of reporter, was like, I feel heart sick upon the latest news out of Mariapol, my God, just like expressing horror and humanitarian tragedy. And Spencer posts a link to his personal website and says, me too. Not sure if you saw my mini manual for the Urban Defender, but it is available in English and Ukrainian. Oh boy. Yeah.

So like, anyway, grifty shit like that. But yeah, because it's all that's very different than also like throwing paint at like a squad car or like a riot like a riot truck that's coming through. Because if you obscure their vision, the worst that they can do is crash into a wall. They're not going to start firing massive explosion rounds from a central. Yeah. So they do not like for one thing, the like the police as bad as they can be their default when they come under any kind of like attack is not to start firing machine guns wildly in all directions. Not not Russian soldiers do not yet at least. But you know, the other thing I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's a is has been one of the guys who's been yelling at Spencer on Twitter.

Matthew was a Marine Corps tank commander and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he was in a tank that was attacked several times and eventually destroyed. So he's he has some firsthand knowledge about what works and does not work against tanks. And one of the things he pointed out is that the people who destroyed his tank put together, I don't know, $100, $200 worth of various accelerants and random scrap metal and made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams tank that works a lot better than paint. Yeah. And it's it's the kind of thing where I think one of the things that's frustrating here is you've got a lot of these like American kind of military academic guys and I know Spencer served but that doesn't necessarily mean much doesn't mean just being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean you did anything. But they were deployed and maybe they did see urban combat but I have watched United States soldiers in an intense urban combat environment. And most of what they did was be inside of MRAPS because it's very hard to blow those up while the Iraqi military did a great deal of the fighting and when US soldiers did engage in fighting.

They did so with absolute air supremacy and with artillery supremacy, which isn't to say that it wasn't dangerous but it is a profoundly different situation than engaging in urban combat when the airspace is contested and when you do not have artillery supremacy. So what does that mean in terms of like what can people actually take away that's useful from this. Well on an individual level something has have been extremely effective Ukrainian territorial defense militias have been very effective at doing things like picking up small arms going out in small patrols into rural environments around the area where Russian troops are moving into small convoys and oftentimes because of the way the advance went you would have a single or a couple of Russian munitions trucks essentially alone and unsupported trying to find their way around. You had civilians doing stuff like turning signs around like removing the signs which they were instructed to by various Ukrainian officials as well. Yes, yes, and which I'm sure some people just started doing because it seemed like a good idea. This sort of shit causes them to burn fuel causes them to abandon vehicles you had these kind of independent groups of farmers towing away abandoned vehicles. You had small raiding parties attacking convoys and attacking isolated units.

You had cases where you know Russian military units early in the fight would get into Kiev, kind of on accident and be ambushed by territorial defense units and wiped out. And those are all very effective examples of decentralized kind of ground up resistance against a major military force. Now one thing we don't know that is important if you think about the potential that you might have to endure something like this is we have no idea what the casualties were like among those units. It is a total black box and it's probable that part of why Russian forces did the war crime they did in Bukha was because they had an attitude that all civilians were insurgents, which is, you know, what happens when you have kind of a people's war, which doesn't justify an act of genocide. But it is something people should keep aware of when you start fucking with the signs and ambushing the convoys and throwing molotovs. One of the things that will happen is it will accelerate the violence that is being done. Yeah, and it makes it seem more of a justified target in some propaganda lens.

Yeah, exactly. And that doesn't mean like it's you should resist if you are invaded. But these are things that also should be noted is this is what happens when you resist, right? This is what a modern war of this type looks like. Other things that I'm not sure if they've been effective, but they're certainly not bad strategies is the construction of a lot of vehicle barriers, tank traps, blockades. That was what I was talking about next is, yeah, is the barricade thing, both than what we've been kind of seeing or being speculated about in the East and then how we've seen, you know, barricade setups a lot in the past few years in various resistance movements to, you know, a variety of success levels and non success levels. Yeah, yeah. And these are like, you know, barriers, tank traps have a very long history in warfare, so they absolutely can be and have been effective many, many times on the battlefield. So this is not an area of does this thing work, but it is a question of like, and this is something we just don't seem to have perfect data on, did it, did it particularly play a role in what's happening here.

And that's harder to tell and is probably going to be different, you know, depending on the tactical in area you're talking about, which kind of like theater you're talking about. But, you know, one thing that's like the way in which these kind of barriers hedgehogs and like whatnot work is they're they're an area denial tool, it's like an area denial tool for vehicles. And it makes military units slow down, it makes them take more time in clearing area. They have to tow things away or blow them up. And they also can provide depending on the type of thing cover for infantry and urban combat situations, which obviously can cut both ways a little bit. But there's a reason why you see these kinds of things in every conflict and also a reason why people put them up in protests. It can be very useful to deny the vehicles of the enemy access to an area temporarily and a big pile of metal always does that 100% of the time it requires something to deal with it. That was something that was very kind of considered when there was an increase in like vehicular attacks during 2020 of like a lot of vehicles ramming into massive, massive marches.

There was definitely a concerted effort to try to block off streets where stuff is happening, whether that be like, you know, corkers for marches of people who specifically block off the sides of streets with their own cars to follow the march around, or, you know, less effective barricades, like throwing a chain link fence in the middle of the street, which is I guess better than nothing sometimes, but also maybe not the most effective thing. In terms of trying to like build layered barricades, that's not just, you know, one flimsy wall, but a series of things that can compress down. And when you're talking about barricades in a kind of militant situation, there's broadly speaking got to be two purposes. One of those purposes is to create, to add to the friction that you are attempting to create for the enemy. And that's, that's all in search, all insurgent warfare is about creating friction, right? Because friction degrades assets. It's over time it, it calls basically like, okay, so say you blocked off a bunch of roads and you've added 1520 miles to the transport distance that this convoy has to go.

Well, generally speaking, in the case of war, when we talk about war, it's assumed that about one mile is in terms of wear and tear, like 10 plus miles, because of how much more difficult the strain on vehicles is in those situations. So you've added a great deal more strain on the vehicles that increases the chance that one of them is going to blow a tire, one of them is going to crack an axle, one of them is going to have an engine block go like blow or whatever. Which means over time, if you're doing this a bunch, if you're setting up barricades and you're effectively increasing or all the amount of travel time or at least the amount of idling time that forces have to go in by a significant amount, you're guaranteeing a certain number of those vehicles are going to break or be rendered inoperable in that time. Also, the other thing that they do is they allow you to deny area and funnel the enemy into a place more advantageous for you, right? And this can be advantageous if you're trying to set up an ambush, if you're just trying to buy time for forces to move back to a better position. There's a number of uses for it, but if you set up a series of obstacles like this and guarantee that they're going to have to find an alternate route and you know broadly speaking because it's your terrain, what kind of route they're going to take, then you could do stuff like throw a drone at them. Or if because of the damage you've done to the roads and how difficult you've made it to advance, they wind up just parked for a long time, that's also a great situation to bomb people with a fucking drone.

Which is by far the most effective weapons unit that we have seen built by civilians in this war by the way. It's not Molotovs, it's certainly not paint, it is civilian volunteers who put together combat drones using generally DJI drones that they have upgraded with thermal imaging cameras in order to see at night. And they have used 3D printed parts in order to drop bombs from and they have done carried out for weeks now hundreds of extremely successful night time raids on Russian positions. This has been effective for a couple of reasons. One of them is that the Russian military does not widespread have effective night vision. We don't need to get it, the reasons for this are complicated based in a mix of like appropriations, corruption, issues with the technologies they do have, yada yada yada, but they do not have the capacity in large scale to carry out operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. And so you get when night time comes, these forces that were advancing in places like Kiev, clustering up and huddling for the night and then these hunter killer drones would sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking see in daytime. I can tell you from experience at night, they're ghosts just dropping bombs on, on armored vehicles and on groups of soldiers. And these, you know, what you have seen with these units which have been integrated, they are like started out as civilian volunteer groups, they have been integrated into the military to a significant extent.

And I think what you do have some of this is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot of Russian officers and generals killed, generally because they have been communicating over open phone lines. And I suspect some of what's been going on is when they figure out where one of these guys is, they send some of these fucking drone units in to blow them up because it's not hard if you know where someone is to kill them with a drone in this way. I think the other thing to talk about in terms of, you know, building obstacles, building barricades is the whole cover versus concealment thing where a lot of people think that if they hide behind a barricade, they're now impervious. Which obviously isn't true if a drone is going to get you and obviously isn't true for a large, a large number of the munitions that get fired, whether they be bullets or tank rounds. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, and I think that's something in videos I have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact. You have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they lost hiding behind vehicles, which if it's an armored vehicle, definitely can protect you from small arm fire. But if somebody shoots that vehicle with a with a javelin, you may find yourself next to a cooking off tank. And I've seen shit like people hiding behind fucking fences, which is terrible to hide behind failing to go to ground, which is always your best bet is to kind of get behind a berm or something get load the fucking ground.

It's interesting to me, a lot of the worst videos of responding to contact that I've seen on the Russian side have been there, the Rosgaria units. I'm not great at pronouncing Russian, but they are essentially police special forces units. That actually makes sense. They have every video I've seen of these guys handle being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that. They're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody, you know, like, yeah, this is not where they're what they're supposed to be doing. The other thing that Spencer really focuses on is this whole like a sniper idea of being afraid of someone, of someone just cutting you down from above, which obviously kind of is, you know, more of a thing with the drone stuff as well. But this idea of not even being good at firearms, but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere that you can't see. Yeah, in terms of like knowing your terrain better than whatever invading force does and knowing how to set up spots where it's it's less you're less likely to get shelled.

I mean, Yeah, and that's that's very, I mean, this is very basic and old military doctrine, but this is like, you know, the ways a sniper can work in a dense urban environment is you have a large number of guys and they are trying to move to a specific area. And if they take fire, that limits their options from forward movement unless they're willing to just risk getting hit. And generally, they're not. And then you find yourself kind of holding up for time to take out the sniper, which can be an involved and difficult process for just a single sniper. And yeah, that's definitely a thing like that. You don't have to be the fucking Chris Kyle in order to effectively work in that kind of situation. Now what makes that effective because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly.

But if you have small units of snipers kind of oftentimes just like civilians with hunting rifles who are doing that within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment. Then yeah, a handful of people with rifles can be a significant force multiplier. It's a lot extra to deal with. And I suspect shit like that has been part of why you have seen cities like Maryapole resist so long under overwhelming force is that there's a pretty wide comprehensive amount of resistance going on in those areas. And yeah, a single person, if they're not like the only person engaging with the enemy in that in that area can make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond to contact. I think the last thing I wanted to kind of get into today is the whole, I mean, this kind of ties into the weaponized on reality aspect of being like all of these people who are giving, you know, unsolicited advice on Twitter.com, whether they be John Spencer, whether they be, you know, the wife of a former Marine, whether they be there we go tank mechanics, whatever, like everyone's everyone's doing this now and it's all seen as like completely valid right we're giving instructions on how to do urban insurgency online. And this is totally fine.

Yet when, you know, when information from Hong Kong gets used in protest kind of propaganda for your urban insurgency instructions, then it's like international, like organized like terrorism. Yeah, yeah, if you're telling people how to use fucking laser pointers. Yeah, so like the selective thing, however, you're like, okay, we're allowed to tell people how to do urban insurgency right now. But when this is over, or in the past, it's not allowed, right? You have John Spencer, who I doubt would be giving, I doubt was a big fan of any Black Lives Matter demonstration. Yeah, I don't know personally, but I mean, I certainly doubt was giving people instructions on how to disable bear cats. Yeah, I don't think he was giving instructions on how to ambush police officers or anything like that. So you had this whole like coalition of people on Twitter dot com, giving all this advice out how to do urban insurgency and whatever. Well, also, you know, whenever something is happening like that where they live, it is that that is obviously bad and obviously not a good thing, whether you know, you know, you could talk about whatever like ideological drive people have. I think this is just an interesting thing worth talking about in terms of how we will off, we will view, you know, this type of discussion of urban insurgency is always like a bad thing, right? It's always this thing that like terrorists do your help, you know, you're always you're rooting for the destruction of civilization or whatever.

Then it just takes a few things for you get, you know, an instructor at West Point to start, you know, posting threads to help sell his new book on these very same topics. Yeah, I mean, there's I think a little degree to which I might push back on some of that not necessarily Spencer, but I can remember during like the Fed War in Portland, which was the probably the part of Portland that like most people are aware of when you had a bunch of federal agents snatching people. It was the most war like part of the summer. You had for this brief period of time, a lot of folks because I took part in this like giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle police munitions that went I think that certainly went more viral than it would have gone in a different sort of situation. That's true. And I think you do have I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine and this is just sort of a general thing that happens online is when something a news moment blows up in a way that is like big enough. It disrupts the norms and suddenly for a while you can talk about things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight like, you know, the reality suddenly becomes so much bigger. What is what is acceptable discourse suddenly expands out much bigger than what it usually does.

It becomes a lot more permeable and I do think broadly like we're shitting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. But I do think that like really, really broadly, it's good when stuff like it's good for people to think about even if I I certainly don't I certainly do not want there to be. I don't want anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare to experience urban warfare. I will absolutely I will I will say that right now, but it is not bad for people to be thinking about and talking about the ways in which a civilian population can do damage to an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse to exist and it's not bad for people to be thinking in this way and it's not bad for the people who are potentially in power to have that in the back of their heads, you know. Yeah, I mean like the one of the first things you sent me when I started working for it could happen here was the was the city is not neutral piece on why urban combat is is hard. It's horrible. It's definitely it's the thing that.

Yeah, it's always it's it's worth thinking about but you don't want to we're not trying to wish on anybody and I think you can you can look at all of like the weirdos on the Internet who have like, you know, this you know there's some degree of like Nazis who have done this but also just like random other people who've like flown to Ukraine to help join fight off the Russians, because they think it's going to be cool and they'll be able to work with the as of the Italian or something, who then get stationed to basically be cannon fodder, because they're this like 20 year old from America who's never actually held a gun before. I hope that one's true. It is just like a post because if it's true, then it means that someone in the Ukrainian government is consciously making the choice to use want to be a saw veterans as cannon fodder, which is very funny, extremely funny if it's happening right we don't that's not that's not confirmed. Certainly, a percentage probably not an insignificant percentage of dudes who have done shown up to do this have like been like, oh my God, what the fuck. Some of them, I'm sure just didn't have much experience.

I'm sure some of them were dudes who had experience being on the side with overwhelming air power. And we're like, oh fuck, but you also do it's fair to note like the stories of people like having like freaking out go viral. There's plenty of videos of like mixed foreigner units in heavy combat, including a bunch where you can hear us and British dudes. Because there's a lot of people who have legitimate like hard combat experience who have volunteered to go do this. The one thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is I mean, it's not super unlike what we're doing now, though we're trying to come at it from a more like critical standpoint, but like Americans who maybe have gone to a protest or two, but no real experience just going on Twitter.com and talking about how they think beating an army is best done. How that works. Yeah. Well, and like, you know, if you look at like the okay, like the the times that like the U.S. has actually attempted to fight its own army, right?

Like the last time this happened was the L.A. riots in 92 and they got their shit pushed in. Like it it went really, really badly for the people on the street. It was really ugly. There was a lot of bodies. Yeah. And like, and you know, part of what you know, I will say like part of what's I guess useful about this is like, yeah, this is I mean, this is the thing that is I mean, I wasn't alive for it. But like a lot like Robert, you were alive for that. Like that is a thing like in living memory, the army has been deployed on American soil. And one of the things that went wrong is that the people on the ground had basically no time. And this is something you can read from from like the army's accounts of this is that like the people that they were dealing with had no tactical experience whatsoever.

So whatever they did, they had no conception of tactics and the army was able to sort of very quickly crush them. Yeah. And you know, if you don't want that to happen to you, yeah, like there is a way in which the stuff is important to be thinking about. But also like, dear God, that is the worst shit. Like, yeah, you can't put that here. Here's what's what's important to understand about that. Anytime you are dealing with any kind of conflict, like physical conflict that involves violence, and that can be as narrow as like a protest, you know, where people are squaring off with the cops or an actual like full on military conflict. The winner is the person who is most disruptive to the enemy's Oda loop, right? Observe, orient, decide, act.

That's the loop that you go through when you are trying to decide how to act in any kind of a kinetic situation on the streets in a protest. One of the things where I where we have all seen people be the most successful against cops is when you change the rules on them is when they are in a situation they did not anticipate being in because they tend to freak out. And they tend to respond in effectively, right? You do not want to if you see them preparing to act in a certain way because they believe you are doing this specific thing. You ideally do not then do the thing they are preparing for because that is a situation in which you're going to wind up battering yourself against a riot line, right? That's what the that's the core of the move. Be like water thing from Hong Kong is the idea that do not engage them in a way they are prepared for. That is a piece of advice, broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as it is in a protest situation.

Do not meet them on their own terms. What this also means is that you don't want to be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective in the situation you're getting into. So like when you had protesters in 93 in LA engaging with the military, they were playing by the rules of how do you deal with cops and suddenly they were dealing with soldiers. And boy howdy, are the rules different, you know? And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where again, they had air supremacy. They had artillery supremacy. They were backing the state that was fighting against these insurgents. And so their soldiers gained the combat experience they had with every advantage in their pocket.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military, if you're talking really about like, because we've talked about a lot of little things that have maybe had an impact on the conflict here and there. One of the things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian military has responded and comported itself in this war so far versus the Russian is four years, eight years since this conflict started. The Ukrainian military has developed a posture of having soldiers sign up for these brief contracts, sending and rotating them through the battleground in the Donbass. So that when this war started, they had a huge number more than anyone else in Europe of combat veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary when they did not have supremacy and artillery or air support when they engaged them. And then the Ukrainian military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their their units, which is what you want to do. Any military is going to want to like spread out your veterans among units because you're not everyone's not going to be a combat veteran, but you want some guys who know what it's like to be shot at and every kind of unit that might get shot at because they stiffen the back of everybody else. And this is what so again when when the war started to get back to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing for a police action like the ones they carried out in Chechnya, like what they did have done for Assad in Syria, and they got a war. And the Ukrainians came into that fight prepared for a war.

So you you I think one of the things that is important when you look at consider any kind of possibility of being involved in a conflict is you want to know what are the rules. Your opponent is going in ready to abide by right what are the things they are expecting to happen what is kind of the rubric with which they are looking at what they expect to occur in this conflict. And by God you want to be going in there with a different one, you know, and that again, depending on how you do it that can go badly or that can go really well because like I said if you're if you're going in prepared to fight cops and you wind up dealing with soldiers. That's not great. But if you have prepared, if you are able to kind of lock your enemy into the kind of conflict that they're not ready to face. Then generally speaking, you'll win we have 20 years of experience in the war on terror of more or less that going down. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a good example of this also with the like with the IDF's war against Hezbollah in 2006 where it's like the IDF is a really good army. But they'd spent like, I don't know, like they spent like 40 years basically just sort of like, you know, they spent about 40 years doing police actions.

And then they run into Hezbollah and they expect Hezbollah is going to just, you know, they've made Lebanon 2006 and their expectations that Hezbollah is going to go to ground they're going to do a guerrilla war. And instead Hezbollah like, they go into bunkers where they stand and fight and the IDF gets smashed. And like, you know, they they they pull out and they spend a bunch of time just like murdering people from the air but like they don't win the war. And like that that happens a lot, especially with these armies that are used to dealing used to doing these sort of police action things and they lose to enemies that like if the fact that the IDF lost a war that Hezbollah is like, by like balance of forces, it's like, this is inconceivable like how on earth they possibly lose this but it's like, yeah, this stuff happens because they weren't like, yeah, they were they were they were doing they were doing this police action thing and they weren't used to they hadn't fought an enemy that was actually going to stick it and fight them since like the 70s. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the great defeats in military history are because of a force came into a situation expecting a different kind of fight than what they got. That was a part of what happened to Napoleon when he invaded Russia, right, and the Russians did not respond the way that he expected a state to respond to having their capital occupied and effectively kind of starved him out.

There was other shit going on there. He really depleted the French military before it got there but but yeah, yeah, how I would want how I would want to wrap up this is basically saying like, you know, all of that stuff regarding how this war is really prompted a lot of things that were seemingly expected and seemingly thought to be previously more impossible in terms of how fast both rhetoric around these types of conflicts can spread and morph and the role in which like disinformation and misinformation is used for you know, both both sides to gain to gain ground on the other and how, you know, relating back to it could happen here is term in terms of like the urban crumbles or like, you know, the small small like urban collapses and you know, escalating escalating like inter intercountry conflict in various places around the world, how fast certain things can happen that we once thought are kind of more impossible or improbable at the very least. So how fast you can get people giving advice on how to take out armored vehicles on Twitter.com how fast you can get, you know, people like people who are, you know, seemingly are, you know, seemingly not not tied to certain to certain like ideas or giving out, you know, information on types of types of ways to resist invading or oppressing forces it is. It is an interesting kind of. It's like case studies the wrong word because it is it's obviously having horrible effects with, you know, thousands and thousands of people being slaughtered. But it is it is intriguing to watch how, you know, in terms of like the microcosm macrocosm idea of, of eventually, you know, conflict if conflict breaks out in other places around the world and next in the

next few years, how our current like social media landscape how are kind of rolls around like urban conflict like urban conflict and all of these things kind of interact with each other and how we view yeah what is what is likely and what we you know who who you're going to predict is going to do X thing based on people invading a city that it's not theirs. Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of stuff that that people can take out of this, you know, without necessarily needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency one of them is that anytime big shit happens and more big shit is going to keep happening for us you have a window of opportunity through which you can get things across to people that they would not normally listen to. And that is a really important time. And it helps to think about the kind of situations that might occur and the kind of things that you want to push out into the world. Because this is this is true with climate change as it is with war right we're going to have more disasters. And when those disasters hit, it will be easier to get people to talk about radical solutions to things like climate change. Yep. And it will be easier to do things like get out in the fucking streets and get large groups of people agitated. You know, we're at some point fucking God willing we will have the climate change equivalent to what happened in 2020 where something so terrible and fucked up happens that a lot of people take to the streets. And hopefully, we will succeed to a greater extent in forcing actual change than maybe we did in 2020.

Yeah. But but that's that's something like that could very well happen. And so that's one of the lessons I think you can take out of this again without sort of obsessing over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers is Ukraine is is hard evidence that that is the way the media environment works. You get these moments where you can really push some wild shit to people. And that's that's why I like the whole uprising or insurrection model more than the revolution model, because the uprising model posits that basically you have, you know, base, base society, based reality, you know, always at like the baseline level, then uprising happens. It's like it's like shooting up onto a graph. Suddenly, so many things that are just outside the normal way that we view, you know, systems and governance systems of social control. So many things become so much more possible in this like heightened place. And that's what the uprising does. It gets things that were suddenly that were once so far away and once just only in the imagination. It almost it makes them so much closer. Right. Yeah. There was this feeling in like July 2020 during the height of the Fed war being like so many things feel possible in this one moment. Nothing is true and all is permitted. Like, yeah, you can get away with some shit. Yeah. And so using the uprising model. Yeah, it can really or the or the insurrection model, like it can really it can really make things feel so much more possible than what they usually feel like.

And there's, you know, brief moments in time where massive social change can happen. And, you know, you have to learn how to recognize when these moments are happening and then organize effectively when they do happen. Yeah. Yep. Well, I believe that does it for us today. Yeah, I we've been we've been wanting to talk about this topic for a while in terms of, you know, one of the very first things that started happening was various governments giving guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with mall tops. You're like, oh, wow, this is this is intriguing to have a government giving out instructions. This is probably has some implications on how we view, you know, collapse in a in a general concept. So yeah, ever since that's not happening, we wanted to talk about it. So yeah, it certainly leaves us with a lot to think about. And I didn't get to go on my rant about the structure of the Russian military vis-a-vis their lack of an NCO core, but maybe we'll talk about that in the future. I'm sure we'll have enough time to talk with this in the future.

Well, everyone, I don't know, do do something productive. Yeah, do something productive. Don't charge armored vehicles. Don't charge armored vehicles with paint. But maybe think about the different things you would like to get a bunch of people suddenly radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake of a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of folks are suddenly willing to take to the streets, seemingly overnight, maybe be thinking about that and trying to talking with your buddies about it and being like, hey, if everybody gets out in the streets again, what kind of information do I want to spread? What would be good to get people talking about in that instance when they're suddenly listening for, I don't know, about two weeks? It feels like you get about two weeks. Honestly, yeah. About two weeks.

Yeah. Well, in the wake of the new IPCC report, we certainly have a lot to think about. All right. Bye. Bye. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. The FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's goblin mode! Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is today in goblin mode. You know what it's about, you've heard us say it like about 20 million times. But yeah, I'm your host Christopher Wong, and with me today we have Juniper, who is a really... Twitter post extraordinaire on to discuss language, media culture, the nature of reality, and goblin mode. Juniper, welcome to the show. Hi, how's it going? It's going good, it's going much better since goblin mode has ceased control of the world, and we are now living in the age of goblin mode.

It's the year of goblin mode, as the Drew Barrymore show said this morning, apparently. It's been quite a time. I didn't realize just posting would influence so much around me, I guess. It's been an interesting time for sure. Yeah, so I wanted to talk to you about the absurdity that is goblin mode. I want to hold off on talking about what goblin mode is or isn't for a bit, because I think that's actually weirdly the less interesting part. I want to start with, instead, the story of how goblin mode became a thing and why I am reading. Every time I look for more goblin mode headlines, there's more goblin mode headlines.

There is, yeah. I think my favorite so far is from Bloomberg, it's diesel prices have gone goblin mode. Forget crude oil, this could be the real energy emergency. Yeah, that is by far one of my favorites too. The full headline too, if you search for that one, it's what you said, but then it adds on, thanks to the Ukraine war. I never thought that I would see an official Bloomberg headline with goblin mode and the Ukraine war. That's just by far my favorite one for multiple reasons. Amazing.

The other part of three that's extremely funny is that the people who are doing these articles keep getting asked. Someone is asking an intern to find a picture of a goblin and they keep posting pictures of orcs, which is enormously funny to me. I'm not sure what they're searching to get those. Yeah, I don't know. It's really incredible. We should start from the beginning of this story, which is, yeah, can you talk about your shitpost and what you were thinking at the time when you made a shitpost that randomly has had months-long ripple effects on the world? Sure. I think you were right though. The post itself, and that's the least interesting part of all of goblin mode, in my opinion, as well. Just seeing the ripple effect is what's been super interesting and really funny to me. The post, basically, I think it was the day that Kanye West and Julia Fox, which, just a quick note, I've never heard of Julia Fox before any of this.

Sometimes if Twitter is all talking about one thing, the most recent thing being the Will Smith slap, everyone's talking about that. So whenever some big event like that is happening and everyone's posting about it, I try to think of some creative different post I can do just to get in on the discourse or whatever you want to call it. So I really don't know what compelled me to make a fake headline, but basically I just decided to search. I think I was driving home from work and I just decided to search Kanye West, Julia Fox, and I just found the first headline and I just edited it to say, Kanye West doesn't like it when Julia Fox goes goblin mode, basically, and that's why they broke up. That was the whole essence of the post itself. And I really didn't think too deeply about it beyond just making the post and it just caught fire with, I guess, what we would probably call Normie Twitter. People that aren't even necessarily leftists or anything like us, it just really caught a hold with the whole of Twitter. And pretty much like most of the people that saw it, you can go back and check the replies. Most people think it's real at the time.

People posting it and replying about it all think it's real and no one hardly anyone verified it. It was kind of insane to see. Yeah, I think it's funny because you could just Google this. You could just Google it and it'd be like, oh, wait, hold on, this isn't real, but no one did that. Yeah, you could have just easily searched the main part of the headline like Kanye West to Julia Fox. It was literally the second or third headline search. You could have found the same website, same author, but seeing that it wasn't the correct headline, although that does remind me when there was an initial article about my post. I forget who wrote it at this point. I think it was the focus. Yes, that's right. It was the focus. They for some reason made the assumption when they decided to talk about my tweet that the website, the headline that I made made up the original website edited that part out.

So they thought that my headline was real, but it was just edited and taken away. So that also affected what some people thought about it too. A lot of people thought it was really real. That's what's insane to me about this. Yeah, and Vogue picked this up. This was just a thing that everyone believed was real. Everyone was just reporting on it as news. There's so much incredible stuff about this. Part of it, so one of the articles that gets published about this like after. So there's this initial period where everyone is running around going like, oh my God, it was Goblin Mode. And then Julia Fox has to make a statement that's like, no, there was no Goblin Mode. No one said this. Yeah, that's the interesting about the evolution of Goblin Mode. Stemming from my posts specifically is at first the coverage was talking about whether my post was real or fake and talking about that aspect of it. But as time has gone on, it's kind of evolved away from that. You won't see any Goblin Mode article talk about the original Julia Fox tweet that jump started this whole thing anymore.

It's kind of like shifted away from that initial post, which I found really interesting. That's what's sustaining this, I feel like. Yeah, I wanted to read a passage from one of the, I don't know why I'm calling it a passage. It's just like a sentence. But read part of one of the articles that came from the initial search, which is from the streetwear company called High Snobby. Don't tell me if I'm pronouncing that wrong. Well, okay, that's not true. Twitter, if I'm pronouncing that wrong, my Twitter is at I write okay, yell there. Yeah, but I want to read this quote because it's interesting. So the article, they have this whole thing that's like, okay, they get to the denial, they post your tweet about like, oh my God, I can't believe Julia Fox had to respond to this. And then they say, I'm not saying Fox was lying, but wearing a borderline not suited for work dress, a purse trimmed in human DNA, and DIY eye makeup to an Oscars after party is Goblin Mode to a T. And I think this brings up an interesting question, which is, to what extent was Goblin Mode real in the first place before your sort of meme to went viral?

So like the phrase itself, you mean? Yeah, yeah, like what part of the phrase existed before my post? Yeah, and I think it was also like, what were you thinking? Like, did you have like a conception of what Goblin Mode like was before you made the post? So the only thing I had in my mind at that point, it stems from specifically, do you know the user on Twitter, hottie pants? Do you happen to know that guy? I don't think so. He goes by, I think his ad is like punished pants or something like that. But anyways, around that time, he was posting a lot about like Goblins. He would post a lot about like Goblin Time and like it's Goblin Time and he would just make like a bunch of just like posts like that. So Goblins were on my mind at that point. And then I forget his username, but his, I think his username is uncontrolled. I forget his username. I'll have to tell you afterwards or something. I don't remember off the top of my head. But he made a post that went viral, something to the effect of like, your honor, I was going Goblin Mode at that time, you know, that format that's like you're in court. But yeah, excuse is like, Oh, I'm going Goblin Mode. It really in my head. That's really the only reference I had. So I didn't make up the phrase. A lot of people think I made up the phrase Goblin Mode, which I definitely did not.

But I think just there was a lot of people posting about Goblins around that time, like early mid March. Yeah. And I just in my mind, I was like, Oh, you know, I'm just going to say Goblin Mode on this. Shit post about Julia Fox. I don't I really don't know why it's just the first thing that popped in my head. And whenever something pops in my head, like a tweet idea and I laughed to myself, I'm like, Okay, I should post it. I don't know. And it seems to work. Did you end up so one of the things one of the things I think is really interesting is that right. So, okay, so you have you have your first wave of like, it's the Goblin Mode thing and then you have your second wave of articles that are trying to explain what Goblin Mode is. And I was wondering if you'd see if you'd actually even seen the post I just linked to the chat. There was like, like the thing I'd seen from Goblin Mode before this like all started was this like Reddit, someone on Twitter had a tweet that went viral about Goblin Mode and it was about just like someone it was about this Reddit post of like someone creeping around their house and pretending and acting like a goblin. Yes. Yes. So I didn't see that until I made my post, like in my initial because I think someone linked it under my post. And I was like, Oh, shit, is this like a thing like this is actually like a thing that started popping up more because people saw that reply. Oh, shit, this is like actually a thing. And to my surprise, it like totally worked out for me. Like, everything kind of just came together in a really insane fashion. Oh, that's another tweet to the one that you linked. That's when I was going. That's when I was in Goblin.

That came before my tweet, too. Yeah, had you seen that one before you made it? I follow her. I follow Telgor. I might have seen it. I don't remember. I remember the other one I was referencing before. I might have seen this one. Yeah, like I think like that was what was interesting to me about this was that like the moment it went viral, there was this whole sort of like attempt because there was an attempt to figure out what it is. And then there was an attempt to like back project a history on it. And so you get a lot of these articles and you get a lot of people like, I don't know, like I would talk to people about this and they would like, you know, okay, so they do this thing or it's like, okay, so they go to know your meme, they look at the Google trends and then like the people sort of like, you know, okay, like there was an urban dictionary thing from like 2009. That was like a completely like a weird sex thing. It was completely unrelated to this. But it was interesting to me the way that people like, okay, so you have this thing that goes viral, right? And like, you're just fucking around. Like there's no way like it just sounds cool. But then like, yeah, there's the extent to which it becomes this like, you know, it gets into the sort of like virality machine.

And these journalists who like have to cover it right because like, you know, the way the journalism model works is, okay, so you have this trend, right? People can see it trending, you see something on Twitter, you do like four sets of Googles and you write an article about it. And it's like, well, okay, because they're trying to you're trying to like capitalize on on the clicks as fast as possible. So when someone Googles what is goblin mode, it's like, okay, your thing comes up. But it's interesting because it's like, it's like they have to fill the content in because there isn't any. Yeah, yeah, that's what was interesting about the specific that that first one, the focus article, it was just a lot of like filling in where there was really nothing. Yeah, and that's what's interesting about that. Yeah, and then like after that, like all the other articles are like, you get to see this proliferation of sort of how the media works where it's like, okay, so you have the initial article, the initial article, Google some stuff and it's basically just making it up.

Because they're they're trying to like give coherence or like give a meeting to an empty signifier. And then after that, it's like all of the other articles are just copying off of the first article. And you get this like or Boris of like, everyone just is repeating the same thing over and over again and none of them seem to understand that like it was not the thing that they originally talking about was just kind of. Yeah, that's really all it was. And it's it is interesting to see how it is just able to proliferate off of, as you as you were saying, they just Google search urban, they find an urban dictionary. Urban dictionaries as a good source. Yeah, and like, I think this this is like, I mean, I think there's like a few interesting things here, one of which is about how. Like, I had this before, like, I'm not sure if I've actually talked about this on the show. So the day of the Atlanta shooting. Garrison and I spent a lot of time trying to like track down the shooter. And there was there was this like fake Facebook post that was going around. And, you know, Garrison I spent like a lot of time looking for this guy and we realized he doesn't have a Facebook, right.

And so we were like, it's like, I was like, look at this, like I saw this fake Facebook post and I was like, oh, this is fake. And then like a bunch of a bunch of like a bunch of like actual journalists like found, you know, people like this journalists have been passing around the fake Facebook post as like, oh, this is a post alleged to be a thing. And then and then suddenly they were like, oh, hey, this is fake. Hey, you can see all these things. Like, oh, look, it's like, you know, there was like the it was pretty clear of it like his face have been copied and pasted into like a thing that's supposed to look like a Facebook post. There was all these like minor details about that were just wrong. It was like, okay, so this isn't real. But the media cycle of it was like, all of these people saw my Twitter post that was like, this is fake. And then they just wrote a story off of it and like never mentioned that that they literally got it from like me fucking around on Twitter. It's like, it's like, you look at this stuff and the extent to which these people are just like these people who are journalists who are you know supposed to be real journalists are just like woefully unprepared. Even people even people who are extremely online like wind up being woefully unprepared to deal with like anything like they're woefully unprepared to deal with anything of any complexity or deal or like figure out that they're being like, they're hoaxed. Yeah, no, you're you're you're really right about that. I mean, I mean, I think this it's, I don't know what I would call this phenomenon but it there's definitely something there where it's like they will see something like I don't know and I don't know what it is about specifically

that like I feel like that's where a lot of people get news just in general, but I feel like a lot of journalists just assume anything that they see. Maybe I'm over generalizing but if they see something on Twitter, even if it's like a joke, like they'll just assume it's real or something. I'm not I'm not entirely sure. Like, it's super easy to make a fake post. I do it all the time. I make all sorts of like fake, fake things. Most of them are more obvious than goblin mode, I guess. Yeah. But I don't know that they're I don't want to say journalists are too trusting. Yeah, well, I will say like, there are times when it's genuine like when you first started posting the headlines of like the actual Twitter articles that were about goblin mode. I didn't even bother looking them up because I just assumed they were fake. Yeah, a lot of people told me that. Like I think specifically the one that like most of my followers realized that they weren't fake anymore was the one that was like, as a disabled woman goblin mode, this goblin mode trend is really problematic. And people people decided to look that one up and we're like, oh, it's real. And then everyone was like, wait, we're all these other ones that you were posting real. And I'm like, yes, they were all real. Yeah, Julia Fox one. Oh, that's been real. It was agencies have been there all these news organizations have been writing all this insane shit about nothing. Yeah. And there's, you know, I think this one is funny just because like, yeah, I mean, like it's goblin mode, right? Like it's it's it's just funny. Like there's no like, you know, but I mean, I think there's an interesting thing that happens with with the the specifically the disabilities one because the disabilities one isn't like, it's basically about something completely different that the goblin mode thing spawned, which is that like, like the other thing that happened with goblin mode was that.

Okay, so people saw goblin mode and then physically on like tick tock. I don't know if they knew where it came from. But like people like people turns goblin mode into an actual thing where like it became this thing about like I like I think I think this is also influenced by like some of the like shitpost answers that you gave the media people that were like goblin mode could be whatever you want. It's when you aren't awake at the pendant or like you're not doing your makeup in the pandemic or whatever. Yeah, but but it's interesting. I'm not sure how much that like fueled like that. I really don't know if the tick tock thing came before or after. I think it's after. Yeah. From what I've seen, it's it seems like it actually became a thing after and that was really interesting to me too, because it was like, it's this way in which like, you know, okay, so you start running into these sort of like fundamental problems with the nature of reality where it's like, okay, so we made this thing that is fake, right? But then it became real because enough enough people believed it was real that it turned into a thing that people actually use to describe stuff and then you know that that's how you get to like you get a bunch of people complaining about how like there was an article that was like the great resignation and go in goblin mode or like the two great threats to employers as they try to go back to work. Yeah, it's it's like goblin mode like self manifested into reality like I feel like a lot of journalists are saying like people being lazy and like you know how the whole meme of like oh no one wants to work anymore. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people are trying like attributing like oh not wanting to work and being lazy to goblin mode and it's it's self manifested through the media or Tik Tok or whatever, whatever it might be. I actually don't know. But it's it's become a thing now in a really strange way.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I think this is like this is an interesting way of looking like you know like this was the whole sort of like, like in terms of like, okay, in so far as posting can actually affect reality, which it can but not as much as people seem to think like there are there are there are people who like seem to think that like the three letter agencies care what they post on Twitter, which is like, it's like no no no hold on hold on if we post correctly interventions won't happen as like, if you seen the CIA, like, like there's this whole thing where it's like, you know, I mean this it's okay this this is going to be the like someone's going to pull this out of context and be like hey look at a dump crisis but like you know this is kind of what happened with Trump which like this is this isn't like what the mean magic was like if you just mean something long enough, you can kind of turn it into reality by just sort of convincing enough people that it's real that it and you know and once you've done that like you you have effectively made the thing real. Right. And what's interesting about this one is, is this like a lot of people like do that on purpose right like this is how this is like there's a lot of propaganda stuff that works like this or like you know this is like what the the the meme like for Chan Trump bullshit was like, you did this like completely like as a joke on accident. Yeah, I didn't intend this I just mean I just wanted to make a one off joke. Yeah, I didn't think that would happen but you're totally right about the whole like, I don't know how much like the meme magic was really a self manifestation of him kind of just winning the election and becoming popular with the certain people. But it definitely feels like like that self manifestation of like posting to a certain extent really can become real if it hits a certain zeitgeist of some sort. And I think a crucial part of it is it needs to get picked up by the media and taken seriously by journalists specifically. Because the thing that really I feel like broken camel is back for goblin mode specifically was the

first journalist that reached out to me, because she she wanted to interview me about the whole the whole experience like, and her coverage of it was about the whole fake meme thing and then how it became sort of a thing in that aspect. And then from there, they all a lot of different journalists and websites referred back to that article and now it seems to be the one that everyone's referring to now is the Guardian article about it that seems to be like the media's favorite piece about it which is the one that talks more about it being like a lifestyle trend. And I think that's where it really went off is when like some people took into the tiktok aspect of it and kind of manifested it that way. I think there's a couple of interesting political consequences of this one of which is that like, like Twitter as a platform isn't really I mean since Trump got banned it's kind of like it hasn't really been where most like stuff is happening like tiktok is exploding. I mean you saw like the boomers on Facebook like it hasn't like it hasn't been the sort of like driving force of politics that normally is but the one thing that it has is that all of the journalists are still on there. And that means that like yeah like there's all these weird political consequences where like yeah you can sort of like like you can just sort of will things into existence by convincing journalists that it's real. And that's I think really scary in a lot of ways for because you know like the people who are really really good at the sort of manipulation of right wingers and right wingers can have sort of like like I don't know like I people are probably mad about me for this like one of the things that I remember from like, God was 2016 was like there was this whole discourse about like, like, there's a bunch of like all a bunch of people are really mad about like they're being a black strong trooper in Star Wars.

Oh, God, yeah, the whole, yeah, interesting about it was like, yeah, I think I think that was. Yeah, yeah, there was the thing was interesting about it was like, so I know people who like who like looked into it beforehand and it was like the only people who were talking about this it was like people who were confused because they thought that stormtroopers are all clones. And we're like why. And then and the other thing the other people who were mad about this was Stormfront. Right. And Stormfront was able to like turn this into like, like a discourse like they able to convince they were able to convince journalists like this was a real thing that like a significant number of people are mad about and then it like actually turned into a thing that a significant number of people are mad about because you can sort of just like like you can start these like panics and like this is one of the things we were talking about in our trans episodes were like, you know, a fairly small network of well funded people can cause like enormous swaths of the US to just lose their shit and get extremely violent and get like, you know, and the specific thing they're mad about changes like pretty frequently, but you can just sort of like. If you're able to manipulate the media well enough and you know that there's other ways to do this like you know you could do it by like weird memes you can do it by, you know, being the cops or just like having press releases that you send out you can have you can do it

through like these sort of like Ashoturf like I don't know you have like an Ashoturf intellectual like what's his name Margaret UFO. But it's interesting to me that like they all seem to work like the pathway through it all seems to be very similar which is you what you do is you convince a bunch of media people something is real. And then once once they start taking it seriously it sort of manifests itself into reality. Yeah, no that is what I realized what was happening like I one of my initial points that I was trying to make after the whole goblin thing after the first article came out I was like it really made me realize like how potent fake I hate saying this phrase just because it's become such like a nothing sort of phrase but like fake news how easy it is to just yeah like what if instead of goblin mode I decided like me let's say I'm like a crazy right winger and I had this weird zeitgeist moment causing a panic about like trans people and I made like a fake tweet. Like that you would we see that happen all the time like trans people people a lot of people hate us and it would be super easy put it in the right community. Make this fake tweet or a fake headline and people right wingers specifically will go wild and it'll really influence the discourse I mean look at the current. Kind of over now but the last thing was last week the swimmer the trans swimmer that won the women's competition. I mean the amount of vitriol that was able to be created over that.

Imagine what like as you said like a well funded type network of but I don't know but I for lack of a better phrase like fake news creators just yeah all they need to do is put something out on Facebook the boomers see it and then it's over. What are the things I learned about like what I was doing research for weirdly an episode about Reverend Moon was that like people figured so this is sort of like this is like how the Republicans came to power like that they figured out you could do shit like this and like. Rubber Vigieri like in like in like the 60s figured out that like if you just if you sent like you could just send letters to like they weren't I guess they weren't even boomers that way if you just send letters to old people that would say stuff like I plan parenthood is harvesting baby fetuses you could just get the really mad. And it's like and it's funny you know in the 60s like he's doing this like by mail right like he is mailing you a chain letter. It became this like yeah yeah it's like it's like it's because you can watch them invent this and then it's like oh yeah this guy was funded by like. A weird cult guy who was trying to take over the world who was being backed by the Korean CIA and it's like. It gets into this yeah it all sort of comes back into this weird thing where. Yeah I mean I like one of the sort of political transformations I've had to sort of working here was like I didn't take like it's sort of similar what you were saying like I didn't take the like weaponized unreality like fake news stuff like that seriously and then it was like.

You cover it every day and it's like oh my god like the like the the weird like watching like 4chan like invent the I should know if it was. I one of. Watching like just weird right wing like message boards invent like the whole Ukrainian bio lab thing which like grand grand wall now tweets about and like like. Like the official state media of Russia and China are like talking about these bio labs and it's like. It's turned into this weird like like thing where like yeah like actual countries with like nuclear weapons are like basically. Using shit posters as like as like a way to do propaganda and it's just like really weird. I don't know it's just really weird and incredibly disturbing media space to live in. Yeah it's like it's a weird synthesis of shit posters just posting online to like whatever audience and I guess like media of some sort and maybe not like.

In the case of the the the bio lab I don't know too much about that especially because I'm blocked by Glenn Greenwald so I don't see a lot of stuff yeah. But yeah no it's interesting how how kind of interlocked there and to your point about there earlier about the whole Trump me magic thing. Like I didn't take that too seriously at the time like in 2016 I was like oh all these silly right wingers making these memes like this isn't going to do anything. I don't I truly don't know if it really had an effect but I mean it's we can't really ignore the power that just simply manifesting something even if it's artificial. Can actually have a hold on certain people as you were saying with the the mailing letters. I mean if you just say enough if you say something enough to the right type of person they'll just believe it. I mean it's it's not hard to lie to people as horrible as to say it's really not that hard to lie to people. Yeah like I mean that's the whole sort of like everyone yelling groomer like constantly about trans people it's like yeah they just lied over and over again and like half the people who were like saying this stuff are actually.

Pedophiles and it doesn't matter because you know if you just like do this shit over and over again you get these you get just get these like hate mobs and it's. Yeah no the right wing right wingers specifically are phenomenal at creating hate mobs. Yeah it's kind of incredible to witness it's it's really scary but it's it's an incredible thing to see there's not really an equivalent I would say on the left in the way that. Even maybe in Liberals there's an equivalent but like on the left there's not really like an equivalent to like some like a mob. In that way yeah I noticed. Yeah I mean I think that's you know like okay there's always an extent to which like these stuff the stuff has like material constraints. Like you know I talk about like constantly on this show the fact that like this is like this is the stuff that the neocons believed and then they ran into the material constraints of the Iraq war and their entire project imploded. And like I mean I think one of the reasons why this is easier for the right is that like.

There's there's there's there's there's there's there's always a political base for them that is there that they can access fairly easily which is okay they have access to like. You know that they have access to. Like a vast swath the petit bourgeois they have access to a bunch of white business owners they have access to like this sort of like. This like white professional class they have access to this sort of like white gentry class and like those people. Can very easily be sort of like. Whipped into a frothing rage and like part of it is because that like that that's essentially that's just what they're that's what their class interest is that's what the sort of like. Like their status the racial racial hierarchy like brings them to do already and you could sort of like. You know if you just shuffle a bit of coal on it you can you can make the fire go.

Absolutely. And I mean it's talked about a lot I'm sure but like the one thing that is really powerful is Fox News. Yeah. Fox News will pick up literally anything like I saw I saw a post on Twitter just the other day screenshot or just a just a picture of Fox News and they they cited the the Libs of Tiktok Twitter account. Yeah. Talking about school classrooms it's like what is that like no like the right wingers will just take the source of a random Twitter user that has a Tiktok. So that takes messages from random people that message them and then that's their news like that is just insane. To be fair to Fox News which is not a thing I will ever say again.

It wouldn't surprise me if that whole thing like well because the I don't know if you saw this the Libs of Tiktok person is like is that that thing is run by an old Bush administration person. Really I did not know that. Yeah. So it wouldn't I mean OK like there's probably a three and four chance that they just saw someone who's like trying to own the Libs on Tiktok but there's like a one in four chance that like all the old like Bush network people like know each other. And that's why they're promoting it. I know that's that's a good point. That's a good point. I mean they have to know that.

Well maybe I don't know. Like it's it's one of those things where it's like it becomes I don't know it becomes really difficult to to know the extent to which the world believes. Yeah. Well how organized they are into the extent to which they believe what they're saying because part of that like that become like you know if you know who's behind that it becomes easier to. Sort of be like oh yeah we're just sort of playing a game but it could also just be like. No this is this is content that we like. We were all too lazy to go or just message the person to see who they are like. I mean they had the specifically in this case the the Libs of Tiktok lady they had her like on Fox News once talking.

Oh yeah. Yeah I referenced her multiple times. So they have to know her. Yeah they do. Yeah they have. Yeah that's another technique that they do a lot which is that they take someone who is like you know like an old part like who's literally a Republican operative right. And just launder them as an actress. Actually the funny part is you see like like the New York Times and shit like all the main street outlets do the same thing too where it's like.

Oh right. Yeah well like anytime you see an article that is like I was a Democratic voter but I'm going to vote for the Republicans. Nine times out of ten that person is a Republican operative and if you Google their name and look hard enough you can just find it. And it's like. And that's the other thing you're sorry. Yeah that's the other thing was like I don't know whether they whether they're just lazy and don't check or whether they're just sort of like doing this kind of like. I don't know what whether they're doing this on purpose because. I mean that's that's the thing with journalism like it's it's difficult to like when someone screws something up it's it's difficult to determine a lot of times whether it's malice or whether it's.

They're just the only research they did was they Google something. Yeah. I feel like in the realm that we're talking about right now with like right wingers I think a lot of it obviously is pretty malicious a lot of the time. But in terms of like the whole goblin mode situation where that that stemmed off just from like random like guardian whatever articles I think I think that was just more of like. Oh let's kind of try to explain this thing that is apparently now a trend and we're manifesting it in real time. I do think there's like a distinction between that I feel there's no like. With goblin mode there's there's no nefarious aspect of it but that like technique can be used in a very nefarious way. And I think that manifests in the most easy to waste easiest to see ways in right wing media.

Yeah I do want to also mention that like the yeah I think I said briefly like the people who do this the most often are cops like the cops and. If you see a story about the police in a mainstream newspaper and you see the same story in another paper it's because they're basically printing a press release. And you know I mean this this gets used to like launder just straight up police lies about shootings. They manufactured like the entire crime wave thing like the whole thing about people taking boxes off of trains it's like yeah you look into it and it's like yeah there's these like. There's these sort of like shadowy police networks of people who are basically running I mean they have enormous budgets to do this to like they have these enormous. Like departmental like public outreach budgets and those public outreach budgets are basically them running information ops on us which is incredibly fun. You know that is absolutely like a real phenomena I don't know too much about it specifically in cops but I know I know the White House does that all the time. They've done that forever too where it's like oh there's a White House leak.

And it's like oh no they wanted people to see this. This is entirely intentional. Yeah they try to balloon stuff a lot and that's I don't know. And like this is this is Goblin mode is like the fun version of looking at how the stuff works but this stuff happens with stuff that is extremely deadly and has real world consequences and. Yeah it's it's something we need to be thinking about and trying to. I don't know if use for good is the right thing but like it's something that we need to be really conscious of as we're dealing with you know a bunch of fascists trying to murder everyone. Absolutely I mean that that's been the most interesting thing about this to me is watching like I hate calling it this but just for lack of a better word kind of like. Goblin mode is like being manufactured like manufacturing consent in real time like from the genesis of my post watching it in real time seeing all these articles come out.

And kind of all tie into each other and refer back to each other it's been it's been kind of eye opening about this topic. That I think a lot of leftists kind of know a lot about like in terms of like media manipulation. You're it's you're right when you said it's like the fun version of that yeah and it has been the fun version of it but deep down it's like oh this is kind of like. Watching like how they did like this might be dramatic but like how they did the Iraq war in real time like this is on some level a very similar strategy like media strategy. And I think I mean I think I think there's. We specifically Goblin mode I think there's because it's like the Iraq war there's a lot of just malice there. But in this one it's like yeah like that you know not all of the media like all of them like. Okay in order for something that's completely fake to get traction it doesn't require everyone involved being malicious what it requires is one person saying a thing and then a bunch of journalists being too lazy to actually look into something and then just.

You know basically reprinting the article but like rewriting a few things which happens constantly. Right and yeah and that like you know it the thing I think that's scary about that is it reduces the number of actors who actually have to be involved in a thing for it to. Just sort of like take off like this. Which yeah again I think like there's there's an extent to which okay like it rocks like something on that scale is pretty rare because it requires. Like in an enormous amount of buy in from a lot of people but there's lots of small examples of this stuff that just happens sort of constantly and that stuff. Like yeah I mean you know as we've been talking about like that that kind of thing with small numbers of actors and then people just sort of lazily reprinting articles like that stuff. Right I mean I think the best example of this currently at least just in my mind because I am trans the whole trans panic that's happening right now. I think that's a really good example of it was just where like some website will print this certain thing and then it becomes a historic panic.

Yeah. Yeah like I think the best or the most recent example that was that that spa where it was like some person claims. Like made it made a bunch of claims where they were like they might have seen a trans person maybe and it turned into just like literally mobs showing up at this spa like anti trans mobs just like a bunch of fascist showing up a bunch of like. Like yeah and that kind of stuff. Yeah that affects reality. That really affects people. Yeah and like the the other one that we've talked about in the trans episodes is people to people are starting to do these kind of stuff with gender clinics and it's you know. Yeah it's like yeah like that's only a matter of time before they start killing people like.

Yeah I said that is the same. The media can easily whip someone into frenzy to do that. I mean we've seen that in the past with I think as you referenced before like the whole like abortion. Yeah. The whole like in the 90s and the early 2000s the whole abortion panic. Yeah I mean we saw we saw people die over stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah the bombings like.

Yeah. And you know and the other thing is that like they're winning like they are on the verge of after this like half a century long battle. Like they are on the verge of overturning Roe v Wade. They are. And yeah like you know that and that's I think a really grim thing for the left where it's like one of the asymmetries here is that like if a leftist like assassinated the head of ICE right. Like there were like I would be in prison in like a day and a half. There'd be like 15 people who'd be shot in police raids. Like.

Yeah. Yeah. But you know but like when the right wing just like does terrorism like just murders abortion claim writers it works. And that's a really grim asymmetry. But it's sort of the reality of the situation that we're in. Right. And. Yeah.

That reminds me of the this is a while ago this was during the Black Lives Matter protests. I don't even remember why he was on the feds radar. But there was the dude I think in Portland and there was like a there was like a raid and they just shot the dude in the street. Yeah. Do you ever remember that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it happened again.

Yeah. They just murdered him and then like it happened again with Winston Smith in Minneapolis where like the cops were mad at him because he was like he was one of the leaders of this was happening in Minneapolis and they just walked up and shot him. Yeah. And that's insane. Yeah. And it's it's. It is a really bleak look at. You know how this country actually works which is not really what I expected this episode to be ending up.

And I was like we'll do a fun episode of a goblin mode and now it's like yeah here's the state just assassinating people and they're going to keep doing it and also they're going to like to start bombing abortion. Well I mean to keep bombing abortion clinics and start bombing gender clinics and it's like. Let's hope that doesn't actually happen but yeah I think it was our point was that it was like we've seen that happen in the past. Yeah. By the arm of the the reactionary media fueling this hysteria through it doesn't even matter if it's real or fake stories. That's that's the main issue is it can be totally faking. It'll it'll just fuel hysterics against anyone any target. Yeah.

It's just that easy. Like yeah like what the we should probably close out but like the the one that's been fun for me and by fun I mean dear God has been the the the fucking the Wuhan Biolab shit which was like literally like like literally this this this like literally this whole thing was a sigh of by Steve Bannon who was like this is how we can have Trump win the election by by by uniting everyone in like anti-Asian hate and like it worked like well I mean OK he lost the election but like you know all like eventually this. This is just like completely crank like absolutely batshit all the people who are advocating for it are like like they like they're like mushroom scientists or they're like people who like you know like they're like we're like we're ivermectin truthers like all these people you know like we're legitimized by the media and like that had that had an enormous impact on the last sort of two years of anti-Asian violence like that's like that that's the thing to get as bad as it did and again it was just completely fake there's nothing it's it's that they're just they're just you know like a bunch of fascists made up a lie about a plague so that they could try to win an election by like murdering Asian people and yeah yeah and it's it's that's the interesting thing is that if you look at like polls about like oh how do you feel about China like you go back even just four years ago most people were like I don't have exact numbers on my head but most people it was like maybe split like oh like China's kind of scary or like China's OK but like most Americans at this point even like a lot of liberals do not like China like it's like yeah in the red China it's like it was just manifested through the whole maybe not all through the whole Wuhan lab but just the last few years and years of both Biden's

government and Trump's government re-ratcheting hard against China and just like anti-China or even anti-Chinese like people sentiments yeah there's an interesting thing there too where it's like okay see for the first about it so this pivot starts in like 2018 when Trump starts a trade war right and there's this interesting thing where it's like for the first about two years of it it was like the views about China were changing but the actual level of anti-Asian violence wasn't doing much but then when COVID hit it was like you know it was kind of like an abstract thing right it was like okay well we don't like China but like there was nothing there wasn't like a super strong like thing you could point to to directly tie it to Asian people and then the moment the moment the pandemic started and then the moment the like Wuhan shit started it was like suddenly there was like a concrete thing that you could point to and it was that was like hey look it's the Chinese people they're spreading the plague they benefactured the plague in a lab it's because they're dirty and like the moments became that was when everything just like all the attack skyrocketed like that that's that's that's when like everything just sort of like really like kicked off and right that was like that was like the targeted hysteria of 2020 and most of 2021 I would say yeah yeah and it's when you know the fun thing I'm bracing for is like yeah this looks like it's gonna be the Democrat strategy in 2022 as well as Republican strategy and it's like oh hey more of us are gonna die this is gonna be fun so yeah yeah yeah it's kind of scary yeah this started out as a fun episode but yeah it's how kind of fun so I guess there's still a lot of fun yeah yeah do you have anything else that you want to say or do you want to tell people where to find you I don't really have anything to say necessarily all I really do on the internet at least like my whole my whole internet presence right now is just on Twitter if you want to follow me it's at meow meow

me you I don't know if you'll have like that link to anything it's kind of hard to spell with the last the whole me it's me you W but that's really all I have is just my Twitter yeah that's all I really do online I mean it is extremely funny and every once in a while you'd create goblin modes as a actual thing which is yeah it's fun yeah I have a good time on Twitter people people complain about that website a lot but yeah I since I joined in like 2019 or whatever I haven't looked back it's it's it's a lot of fun I've met a lot of cool people I've known of you for a while but it's nice to actually talk to you yeah you too yeah yeah it was it was a good time I yeah so I'd go goblin mode I don't let the fascist murder trans people I yeah this has been it could happen here you can find us on Twitter Instagram at happen here pod yeah have fun find cool trinkets press the turfs got it you got to have the trinkets you got to find the that's what goblin mode is all about getting trinkets that's right all right bye bye folks we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visitor 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 in monthly at coolzonemedia.com thanks for listening

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