Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 43

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that for the first time ever is being recorded on an earth that I no longer have to share with that fascist rap bastard Chinzo Abe. And with me to celebrate this occasion is Garrison Davis. Hi.

I said hello. And James, have we actually introduced you yet? I don't think so. No, I just pop up talking about 3D printed guns and people who hate butterflies. Yeah, yeah. This is truly a dark day for democracy. I'm saddened by the horrible loss of a great leader, a hero to feminism and women. And I guess a hero to those who defend war crimes.

So I guess it's really hurting. Before we fought, we get into one of the funniest things that has happened in maybe 20 years. James, do you want to talk about who you are because you are now one of us and I'm really excited about it? Yeah, I'm now a podcast. So who I am? I am a journalist, I guess, and a historian. I wrote a book about the first week of the Spanish Civil War and my PhD is in the history of international anti-fascism, building international anti-fascist alliances through physical culture, which is very nerdy.

But yeah, I love that stuff. What else? In British, that had not been made abundantly clear by my accent. And I live in Southern California. Which means this episode is a majority Commonwealth episode, which is really exciting. We made it. Yeah, we'll be doing the National Anthem in a minute here and we'll all just stand up. So ex-Prime Minister, he's not around anymore, is he?

No, he is dead as fuck. So I guess we should explain who Shinzo Abe is. Yeah. Okay, if you want a really, really long account of what the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party is, because they are some of the worst people who've ever existed, go listen to my bastard episode on Kishi. Yeah. How can this be? So the very short version of this is that the Liberal Democratic Party is a party that was founded by Nobusuke Kishi,

who was one of history's worst war criminals, personally responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of people in China. He's the guy who was in charge of the economy of the fascist war machine. In Japan during World War II, he was the guy who ran the sort of fascist puppet state called Manchukwa that was run by Japan after they conquered it. Real war criminal also just personally raped an extremely large number of people. I think that I was almost never discussed when people talk about him. Yeah, almost like a shockingly high number of sex crimes. It's wild. Yeah, and he's involved with the Japanese military sex slave program, which he referred to as Comfort Women,

and I fucking refused to call it the Comfort Women because that is a fucking horrifying euphemism for, again, a program of military sex slavery. He also was one of the people who signed off on Unit 731, which was Japan's chemical weapons testing unit, where they purposely infected and tested chemical weapons on prisoners. Yeah, he's one of the worst people ever, and then he got a bunch of CIA backing and some backing from the Yakuza, because the CIA is working with the Yakuza in early 1950s Japan, and he's able basically to force all of the other conservative people to join his party, and the merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party is now the Liberal Democratic Party. This is Kishi's party. He founded it. He dragged everyone else into it. He does an immense amount of corruption. He tries to bring fascism back. He narrowly fails.

Shinto Abe is his grandson. The LDP Liberal Democratic Party, yeah, it sucks. I love it when they're families. The way that I've been thinking about it, how do you explain this to people who don't have a background in Japanese war crime stuff, is imagine if one of Hitler's generals had survived World War II and then the CIA made him the fucking Prime Minister of Germany. And also he got more fascist because people were saying mean things about his grandpa. He's like, oh, I don't like that they're calling him bad names. I'm going to get more fascist now. Abe himself, he's been carrying out a lot of the same things that Kishi was trying to do.

Kishi was trying to restore the full fascist power of the police. Abe has been doing a whole bunch of shifts of centralizing power in the executive and expanding the police's power to just arrest whoever the fuck they want. One of the other things about Japan is that legally in their constitution they can't go to war and both Kishi and Abe, they're big fucking things. They want to fully rearm Japan, they want Japan to be able to go to war because they want to do the fucking empire again. And so this has led, Abe's been doing that. The thing he's probably most famous for in terms of the reasons people think he's bad because he is, he's just actually a monster. He's just like a unfathomable degree of war crimes denial. Japan in the 90s had admitted that they fucking kidnapped and enslaved an enormous number of people from Korea, people from China. I think they also did it in the Philippines and Indonesia too, although there's less coverage of that and turned them into military sex slaves, did things to them that are like fucking unspeakable.

And so the Japanese government in the 90s had admitted they did this and apologized for it and Abe was like, no fuck that, that's wrong. He's also a part of this group called Nippon Kagei, which is like a fascist group. And okay, so this is according to a US congressional report, what they believe, quote, Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers. That the 1946-1948 Tokyo war crimes tribunals were illegitimate and that the killings by Japanese troops through the 1937 Nanjing massacre were exaggerated or fabricated. Oh boy. They also openly, yeah, yeah, yeah, they also, so they're Nanjing denialists, they're sex slave denialists, they openly call for the restoration of the monarchy and the institution of Shinto as a state religion. Abe has continuously said that the sex slaves were there voluntarily. But Hillary Clinton just tweeted that Prime Minister Abe was a champion of democracy and a firm believer that no economy, society, or country can achieve its full potential if you leave women behind.

To be fair, both Abe and Nippon Kagei did in fact believe in using women to fuel the economy, just not in that way. He also, there's another thing that, so probably the most famous, most controversial thing was, so there's the shrine called the Yasukuni Shrine, which is the shrine that's dedicated to soldiers who like died serving the Japanese emperor. And in this, so there's this thing called the Book of Souls that has like lists of names, right, of just like the people who died. And 1068 of the people who were, of the people in that book are people who were convicted of war crimes. And there are also 14 class A war criminals who either died or were executed who are considered martyrs there and Abe fucking like visited there and like prayed and shit. And this pissed off everyone. This is like, there are lots of people who have gotten mad at me already for celebrating Abe's death. And my official line on this is if Abe didn't want me to celebrate his fucking death, maybe he shouldn't have celebrated the lives of the people who killed my fucking family. So fuck them. Yeah.

So he's not a great dude. He's real bad. Yeah. And problematic dude. So the everything we should mention to before we go into sort of like the details of the shooting is that there is an election. Actually, but by the time this episode drops, I think the election will have happened where there is a real chance that the liberal democratic party is going to sort of like just fucking sweep it because liberal democratic party immediately starts with the left for this. There's a whole bunch of I mean just absolutely horrifying stuff where they're blaming Korean people who live in live in Japan, which if you know anything about Japanese history, when that stuff starts happening like in 1923 after the Kanto earthquake, a bunch of people just started blaming Koreans for the whole thing and they fucking literally exterminated almost the entire Korean population in several major Japanese cities.

And so this stuff is very scary. It's possible this is going to set off like an incredible right when there's Japanese politics. And there's a chance that this this this could be the actual thing that like full on triggers Japan like we are being and you know going back into sort of just being a pure fascist empire. So this is not yet that that part is really bad. The motivation for the assassination is still at least at time of recording still slightly unclear. Very unclear. According according to some politicians and news media, we do know the suspect is Hideo Kojima. So that you can you can infer a little bit based on. So yeah, there's there's like French politicians and a Greek news channel who are using pictures of video developer Hideo Kojima and passing them off as the shooting suspect.

Yeah, funny. Pictures of Kojima like inside like a Russian like communist hat fucking thing pictures of him wearing a Joker shirt and standing in front of a Che Guevara picture. Very funny. And they're using this as proof that it's by a left wing terrorist and it's actually video game developer Hideo Kojima. It's yeah. So anyway, I guess what we know about the actual shooter. We don't know that much is a 42 year old guy who was a former veteran of the of the Japanese Self Defense Force. He was he was a Navy guy, which I guess partially explains why he can shoot a gun. But yeah, the details are really murky. What we've got at time of recording is Japanese police saying that it wasn't because of a political thing and that it was because of a group that he was that I was a member of who the fuck knows what that means.

That can mean any number of things. I'm not going to speculate life on here because I don't know. Yeah, but also it was extremely funny. And we should we should talk about the weapon that was yeah. This is why this is one of the reasons why it's extremely funny. And we we should probably going to hand this over to James because James is a bit a bit more of an expert in this type of DIY weaponry. So what great. What the fuck is going on with this homemade gun?

Yeah, this shit. Yeah, this shit is fucking this is crazy. So funny. Yeah, it's extremely funny. It's extremely funny that all these people with 50,000 followers on Twitter who quote unquote do Ocin like immediately labeled this a 3D printed gun, which it's not. It does not look through this. No, this gun is being held together with duct tape. Like that is that that is the kind of weapon that we are dealing with. This is a homemade gun like held together with fucking duct tape. It is extremely it is like he got blown up by an electric blunder bus.

It is yeah. There could very well be 3D printed parts in like around it, but it is but it's not it's not looking it's it's not like it's not like an FGC nine or anything. No, it's it's a weird like electronic pipe duct taped together shotgun. Yeah, it's I think perhaps if people don't understand we should like break down how firearms work broadly and then how this one works specifically. Sure. Right. So like, and there's no reason why you should be familiar with this, but like you need something to explode something to make it explode and something to go out the end and a way to make sure it only goes in one direction right. So what this character is done is seemingly it's yeah it's like a blunder bus or a musket in that it seems to be like muzzle loaded from the front.

And I'm looking at it now and it really is just covered in duct tape. I tweeted a picture of it. It's again, yeah, this shit is is very old fashioned. He seems to have made his own powder to like it was very, very smoky, which you can do. I'm not going to tell you how to do it, but it's the thing that that is possible. And so essentially from what I'm seeing here, it looks like it's like a piezoelectric ignition, which then ignites this homemade powder that he had. And then he's put something in a shotgun means it doesn't have rifling right so it doesn't impart spin on the projectile. So he's basically got two pipes, a piezoelectric igniter some homemade powder and then he could have put nails in there he could have put a cast lead ball anything bolts.

And this wasn't the only homemade weapon he had. No. The police raided his house. He had a whole bunch of skies that look it looks out of like it looks like it's out of like fallout or something. It is like there was one like blunderbust that had nine different barrels all duct tapes together. It's like exposed wiring exposed circuit boards like it's like it's extremely janky. Yeah, it's like I'm not entirely sure that the the nine barrel one the central barrel isn't touched by the by the structural duct tape. And I'm not sure that it wouldn't have moved in one direction or the other when he fired it.

It's really incredible. Yeah, I think there's a there's like a yoga. I can't see what he's put something on that he's made a buttstock with that one. So like he can shoulder it, I guess. And I don't know if that's like a piece of tire or what that. Yeah, yeah, this is not a precision weapon. Wooden boards. There's like some type of like reflect.

It looks almost like a smartphone's attached to some of the wiring. I wonder if that's what it is. There's some like reflective screen that looks like it's like an electronic control box, which could could just be like an old smartphone or something. Yeah, I wondered if he could because that's what you use for for an improvised explosive device, right? It's a it's a cell phone to actuate it. So it could be maybe he had a plan to just put it near where are they was going to be and then call it. And then have it go off. Well, I mean, no, this is a much better.

This is a much better assassination. It has the stock. So I'm guessing I'm guessing he would he would be planning to hold it because otherwise there's no reason to put the buttstock there. True. But who knows like this guy's operating on a different level. We have no way to know what he was thinking. At least at least at least not at the moment. What he was thinking was I want to kill Shinzo Abe with my pipes and planks.

And he did it. He's exactly whatever you think of him. This man did successfully kill Shinzo Abe with a gun held together by duct tape. It's pretty impressive. Like I think the other thing about this is kind of impressive as a he so it so he there were there were two barrels on it that each fired. And he he managed to hit him from like a pretty good distance away. Like we don't have there's there's no video that directly well at least not that's out yet. They're like directly shows the shooter.

We have a lot of video because I'll be giving a speech right. So we have a bunch of video of like filming Abe and it's because of where it is coming from off screen. Like that was a pretty good distance. And as best I can tell he only hit Abe. I don't I don't think I haven't seen any reports of anyone else getting hit. So I. Yeah, that is actually that is actually kind of slightly surprising. Yeah.

There was there was no one else hit. It's like he just got the guy he was. That is genuinely pretty rare and assassinations like basically like a homemade blunderbust cannon. Yeah. Like surprisingly, surprisingly controlled and accurate. Yeah. I've just found a picture of it with the Cyberpunk 2077 logo underneath it. Which is pretty great.

Oh, that's that rules. Yeah. This does rule. Yeah. He did manage to cause it kind of just put like a large massive lead ball in it. I guess. Yeah. Whatever.

I don't think it I don't think it was one thing. So the one the one thing I could say about the WSB know about the ammo is that like there there were like a bunch of like they're one of the most of the reports about the injuries that he suffered. We're talking about like he got hit in the back, but there are also holes in his neck. So I might my guess is that from there was a lot of blood from a lot of different places. Yeah. My guess wasn't one thing then.

But I don't know. The everything is kind of interesting about this is like the extent to which. Well, okay. So like he was like it was like very clearly dead. Like people people had like reported him at the scene is having no vitals and they were like, yeah, his heart stopped. And they they helicoptered him to like what Tokyo? Yeah.

Tokyo. But the Japanese government did a very good job of making sure the press had like no information. And so there was just like it was like many, many, many hours where they were like pretending that he wasn't dead and like wouldn't confirm that he was dead. And he's like this man is clearly dead as shit. He has gotten blown up by a blunder bus. Like in the back, his neck's gone. He's like, I mean, he's not gone like his neck.

His neck's been shot. His heart has stopped and they just sort of like keep it there for a pretty impressively long time. And that's the other thing. We know very little about what happened and why the press has been keeping the government has been keeping a very tight lid on information about the shooting so far. Yeah. I guess we want to pivot into the gun control side of this.

Sure. I guess. Yeah. I mean, like there was a mayor shot a few years ago. Yeah. Just in seven. Yeah. A Yakuza guy shot the mayor of Nagasaki.

So like there's there's been a lot of people like journalists, people who are like supposedly Japan experts who are like, oh, this is really rare in Japanese cultures. Like no, it's not. People get assassinated. Like like Japan has a very low rate of gun violence, but of that gun violence, the number of politicians get assassinated is like unbelievably high. And you know, I mean, like there have been there have been a lot of I mean, like Abe's like grandfather, Kishi, like got stabbed right after he left office, like, and he only

didn't die because the guy who stabbed him claimed that he wasn't trying to kill him. He was just stabbing him, which is one of the weirdest things I've ever heard. I don't know. I suspect some Yakuza bullshit was going on there. But yeah, like I Japan has assassinations. It there's there's this weird thing where people think Japan is this place that's like no violence happens. Like it's a completely orderly society.

It's like all this all this like weird stuff they made up about famously pacifist in Japan. Yeah, it's like this is a country like this is a country where people like like even in like the 70s, like through the 80s, people would charge me like army convoys with sticks and like fight them. Like this is a country that like like people they have a sort of eight shit switch that just like. Yeah, they have their fair share of like cults that do acts of violence like this. They have their fair share of political extremists that do acts of violence like this.

And like everywhere else and like like everywhere else in the world stuff just happens sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting that like Japan has extremely strict gun control, right? Like licenses, tests, background checks prohibitions on most people owning and carrying. But like it's kind of interesting that this is more of a like a like a first amendment question, I guess in American terms, right? Like if you're on the internet enough, I'm sure it looks like this person has just googled

how to make gun. And like this is what came up. And so I think it's kind of fascinating that that this person has been like aside from their possible connections to any criminal networks, but like I know the Yakuza was selling guns to people in Myanmar pretty recently. So they have access to this. Yeah. Yeah.

And like the the mayor who got whacked by Yakuza guy, like if the Yakuza is going to do like, I don't know if Yakuza is going to do a killing like they like they have access to weapons. They would use a real gun. Yeah. Well, I mean duct tapes together. Okay, so like probably but also like I wouldn't completely rule it out because I wouldn't rule out them just finding some guy and doing this thing the FBI does and it's like, hey, you're

going to go do an attack now. Like it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if that if they did that as like a plausible and ideally thing. But like we don't know. I still don't think we can rule out that Hideo Kojima is the mastermind behind this. And it's all. I mean, it's convoluted enough to be a I know, right? It's just a ploy to plug his next game.

Just have to add a few like nonsense names to the all the people involved like Blunderbustman and then it's just it's it's easy, easy. But yeah, it's fascinating that this person was seemingly like maybe had other plans or had tried several other like craft firearms and settled on this one. But yeah, they have access to a lot of pipes. That's for sure. Did you guys see the Yakuza guy who was arms dealing to Myanmar? No.

No. Oh, for fucking wild. So he was like extensively stung by the feds. So this guy, he was Yakuza. He was part of it like an ongoing sting operation for like several years where he was selling like basically like trading guns for drugs or trading guns to buy drugs. So he was selling to a couple of groups in Myanmar. He was two groups in like the Tamil region and a couple of other people.

And he he was at least one of the people he thought was a buyer was actually a fed. And they've captured all of these amazing conversations where they call the guns like cake and ice cream and like one of the one of the things in the in the criminal complaint. There's a picture of him just with like a a law, like an anti-tank weapon. And he's just like, if you get like the V sign and he's wearing these like yellow aviators and a leather jacket, like the way they arrested him was at a steakhouse. I think either in New York or New Jersey, but like they they lured him into a steakhouse meeting and then he got busted by the feds.

But yeah, these guys were trafficking like serious stuff like surface to our missiles and things because they have access to some pretty heavy equipment. Yeah, and that's that's a pretty old like the Yakuza has been sort of like I don't know how you describe it like a kind of like para arm of the Japanese state in a lot of ways for a very, very long time. Like there are there have been like Yakuza people with basically special forces training. They they at one point like kidnapped and killed the Empress of Korea as part of like a thing to like justify starting a war.

So they are they're very well hooked up. I I don't know. It's still unclear to me because like that's the other thing again like there the the LDP has a lot of Yakuza connections because kind of partially kind of everything is Yakuza connections, but partially also because the Yakuza were like a sort of founding like political block of the LDP in the first place. So who knows like people LDP people have gotten like attacked by Yakuza people before it could be that it could be something else we sort of just don't know yet.

Yeah, yeah, nothing identifying this guy like I just looking at a picture of him and there's nothing particularly sort of identifying his clothing or anything like that. Yeah, I guess I guess that's the death of Shinzo Habei. Extremely funny rest in peace critical support to Hideo Kojima and all of the other freedom fighters. Oh, I guess I guess we can talk a little bit about the international response to this. Yeah, because people have no idea what's the ethnic. Yeah, I mean like so like all the Americans are sorry of like are doing all American liberals

are doing the like, oh my God, he was a good guy. It's like, no, it wasn't this guy was a monster. Um, okay, I will say this, both the Chinese and the Korean embassies are being surprisingly diplomatic about it. As in no one they haven't no one has actively insulted him yet. I social media wise politically that's a good move for like inter-country relations. Yeah, but like I okay like a try Japanese relationships with Korea with South Korea are no and North Korea are really bad and a lot of the reason why they're really bad

is specifically because of Chansu Abe and because of all of his bullshit with yeah. So they're obviously happy, but they're not going to like a rub it. Well, I mean, it's not clear to me that they wouldn't have done this if this had happened in like the 2010s like it's like these guys really hate each other. Um, yeah, I there's been some sort of like people I don't know people are trying to do a Taiwan angle on this because Abe is like a Taiwan supporter, but I I don't I don't think there's actually that much. Do you people want this to have much more geopolitical like significance that it probably

actually will? Um, yeah, yeah, well, it's meantime, yeah, fascist is dead. That's always funny. It happened. Yeah, it did. It did. In fact, happen here. Well, it happened over there, but you know what I mean, yeah, it could happen here.

Yeah, statistically, we are we are about to do based on yeah, yeah, you wouldn't need to resort to the duct tape model in America. No, with the amount of firearms here, it is kind of a little is sometimes a little surprising how little stuff like this actually happens. See, there's obviously a lot of work that goes into like preventing it, but but still sometimes it's kind of it's kind of shocking. Um, yeah, like I think I think I think if you look at the last 20 years, I think more Japanese politicians have been assassinated, the American politicians like I'm trying to

think of an American politician because we are because there's a lot more American politicians and a lot of guns, they killed they killed when they went after Gabby Giffords, they killed someone I think, but I don't I'm trying to think of anyone else other than that. Not in recent memory. The guy who shot Reagan is now touring. Yeah. He didn't even kill him. That's not even assassination.

That's just an assassination attempt, like a very botched one. Yeah. Yeah. Cross the crossover between John Hinckley and Hideo Kojima, it's possible. That will be the game. I'm just going to keep referring to the suspect as Hideo Kojima. It's worth noting that he did have armed guards. There were armed guards present that you can see their guns in their holsters as they take

down the person who shot him, but they were not on their A game that day. Yeah. You can see in the video there's like one of the guys is I think trying to like get a bulletproof briefcase in between Abe and the guy and just doesn't work. He just, it just doesn't, it just fails completely. They had one job, operation meat shield. They weren't just on, they weren't just not on their A game. They completely failed at their own shop.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not like the guy even tried to run away. He just like stood there and got arrested. Yeah. Yeah. He did not really put much of a, did not put up much of a fight. Yeah.

Yeah. He, no, he didn't. I think. Yeah. He, he went down pretty fast. I guess he went with like this smaller gun maybe to conceal it because it looks like he was pretty close. Yeah.

That is, that is very likely. Well, a very dark day for democracy. A dark day for feminism, as Hillary Clinton said, anyway, yeah, luckily they have Rahm Immanuel as a ambassador to Japan to come to them in his difficult time. The LDP are the only people on earth who does, who actually deserve Rahm Immanuel. So look, if you, if you, if you didn't want to have to deal with Rahm Immanuel, you should have taken all that CIA money. This is, this is, this is now their curse.

Well, I'm sure we'll talk more about these types of homemade weapons and all that kind of stuff in the future. Cause it is, it is interesting and you know, places where, places where like actual firearms are harder, are harder to get. We're seeing more and more shit like this popping up. Yeah. Yeah. And that will definitely be worth, be worth getting into along with 3D printed weapons.

All right. Yeah. Anything else to add? Oral, does that, does that do it? Yeah. I think that's a wrap. All right. Follow the show on Twitter and Instagram, what happened here, pod and coolzone media.

Uh, see you next time and critical support to Hideo Kojima. Welcome to it could happen here. The podcast that just happened here. All right. That's my, my part done. Chris, what are we, what are we talking about today? I have brought you all here today to discuss one of the most sacred and venerable of our political institutions and institution whose words echo through history and carve the political,

legal and economic framework of our world. I am referring of course to the bread riot. Hey, there we go. I love a good bread riot. I do too. This is a good, a non zero part of why I wrote this episode. How, how is this, how is this relatable? The grain supply seems really stable right now.

It's all about the grain supply. No one, no, no one has thrown a Molotov through a bank window in 200 years. I was, I was reliably informed by several Marxist historians that that bread riots were over. I'm going to, I'm going to Google Ukrainian wheat harvest as I do every exactly five years. The moment just now came up where, where I check it every five years. So let me just. Oh, oh, is that a good idea? Oh dear.

Oh dear. Oh dear. Is there a problem? Well, let me go eat my fifth Wonder Bread slice of the day and not think about it. Good stuff. All right. So yeah, let's talk bread riots. Yeah.

We're talking bread riots. Bread riots are an ancient institution. Um, you can, I mean, you can find them like very easily as far back as the Roman Republic. Yeah. It is 80% of Roman Republican politics. Yeah. It's just people rioting over bread. Like, okay.

If you wanted to like go further back than that, I have no doubt you could like spend probably 10 minutes and find bread rioting in like Sumeria or something. I didn't do this. And the reason I didn't do this, even though I'm talking about the history of the bread riot is that the sort of the structure of the bread riot is shaped inexorably by the sort of political and economic conditions around it. And the political and economic conditions of ancient Rome are somewhat similar to us, but not really.

So instead of doing that, we're starting in the late 1700s, where there are a lot of bread riots. But particularly there's a lot of very well documented bread riots in the UK and France. And I guess before we actually like talk about the specific riots, we should talk about what a bread riot actually is because, okay, so I mean, on a very superficial level, a bread riot is when people don't have bread and they riot. But the actual response to that and what the riots look like are interesting and sort of complicated.

I'm going to quote now from the book Free Markets and Food Riots. This is talking about specifically the 1700s riots, but yeah. Food riots took several forms. A, the blockader entrave that prevented the export of grain from an area in which shortages existed. B, the price riot or taxation popularity in which food was seized by protesters, a just price set and the lot sold. C, agrarian demonstrations in which farmers destroyed their own produce as a dramatic

protest. And D, the market riot in which the crowd took retributive action against commercial agents, bakers, billers, local magistrates in the form of looting or tumultuous assembly to force dealers and local authorities to reduce prices. So okay, there's a lot of different things going on here. We're going to get back to the farmer's protest stuff like a lot later because there's the specific kind of like rural like versions of this kind of fade into the background for a couple of centuries.

What's happening, the urban centers, though, is really interesting in a lot of ways. And it gets at the core of what's going on in these sort of like late 1700s riots. Notably, the crowds who are doing the rioting aren't just like, they're not just like seizing the bread and eating it, which is the thing that like you would assume they would be doing if they were, you know, there's a bunch of people who are starving and there's bread and they take it, right? But that's actually not what they're doing. What they're doing is essentially negotiating over price.

You see this in the sort of price riot thing, right? You know, the thing that they actually do is they seize a bunch of grain and then they sell it off at what they sort of like and what they deem a fair price is. And you know, what this is something to do basically is it's a very, very direct way of trying to get bakers to lower their prices. And the other thing that's about these riots is that they are, they're very politically sophisticated and they're very targeted. There's a thing you hear a lot and if you've ever read anything about any modern riot,

you will hear just people ranting about how people are destroying, blindly destroying their own neighborhoods. And it's just like not true. Riots tend to have a sort of specific political focus on attacking specific targets, which is why the first things that go up in a riot are pawn shops, liquor stores, police stations and now stores that drink their employees badly. They literally have specific targets. Yeah, yeah.

Like it's very, all of the stuff that's happening is stuff that has, it's the result of political grievances that people have sort of been accumulating for a long time. And this is also true of these sort of, of these early bread riots to going back to the book free markets and food riots. Protesters did not rampage indiscriminately, but focus their wrath on particular individuals and institutions whom the crowd held responsible for unjust practices. Typically, it was not the producers or retailers of food, but the middlemen who were seen as responsible for shortages and price raises, the grain dealers, wholesalers, speculators

and mills. Green shipments by wagon, ship and canal bars were seized and distributed among participants or sold at a just price. Warehouses were rated with similar results. Textile workers in 1770 reams, quote, seized the town's markets, proceeded to sell all the grain in the market at three quarters of the current price. They then turned their attention to the warehouse and to the granaries of numerous religious houses, which they treated in a similar fashion.

Yeah. And so, you know, this is like, this is a pretty remarkable degree of political sophistication, right? They're targeting sort of farmers or bakers, and especially not targeting people who are like, well known, like in the community. They're targeting people who they can directly tie it to grain price speculation. And this is a, you know, in some ways, it's like, this is a demonstration of the kind of like basic contradiction of the market, right?

On the one hand, you have bread as this like physical thing that you need to survive. And on the other hand, you have bread as this market commodity. And the market, you know, as a market commodity, it's a sort of speculative asset, which people are like buying and selling and hoarding like stocks because not because they actually need to eat it, but because they're interested in this sort of market value. And the Marxist will call this the difference between use value or like the value you get from eating a piece of bread and the exchange value, which is like the bread as a commodity that can be traded for the commodities.

And you know, like this is, this isn't sometimes like, this is behind a lot of like the housing crisis right now. You have a bunch of people who buy houses and apartment buildings that, you know, not because they need to live with them, but as an asset that will appreciate over time, you know, like appreciate in value over time like stocks do, but this means that people who like need houses to like live in them, like don't get a house because they're being held by people who are trying to get their value to appreciate. And the goal of these riots is basically to prevent bread from becoming an exchange value.

That is to sort of like market commodity use, speculation and turn their back into use values. But even again, here, this is interesting, right? Because it's not like these people are like, like, like anti market, anti capitalist, right? They tend not to sort of just seize the bread outright. What they're doing is they, they're insisting on buying it at a specific quote unquote, just price. And this, this sort of gets into the question of like, why are these riots happening in the first place?

Um, the obvious explanation, like, okay, the people are rioting because the price of bread is increasing, but that's, that's not actually like an explanation, right? It's just, it's a precondition, but like, there's a lot of places where bread prices rising, you'd never get a riot. So a lot of people have studied this and tried to figure out what is happening. The second explanation that historians come up with is something called the moral economy. Um, and in this model, people aren't just reacting to like a price increase, but what they're actually reacting to is what becomes known as the entitlement gap, which is this

gap between people, what people think they're entitled to based on like the morality and how hard they work, etc., and like what they actually get. And so, you know, in less academic language, it's people going like, I'm getting price scourged, this is bullshit, bring the prices down to what they're supposed to be. And you know, that's part of it. There's another theory that argues that, uh, food riots are driven by these like really complicated sort of like webs of horizontal social relations and like things like networks of wives and like political organizations and sort of like alliances that happen inside

of villages, stuff like that, and that, you know, and these groups sort of like react to price increases by banding together and forcing people to lower prices. Now, notably, I wanted one of the like the things I listed in those like web of things, right, is wives networks as the sort of like first community, what it leaves the food riots. And this is, this is turns out to be important. Women are often like the leaders and initiator of bread riots and the sort of theory behind it is that they're actually the ones like buying the bread. And so they're sort of, they're more in tune with disturbances of food prices, et cetera.

And you know, the food price increases are a threat to what academics call social reproduction or in essence, like taking care of yourself, your family and your household, like making sure you can sort of support and raise your children. So there's, well, so the, the, the good version of it is it's you're taking care of the people around you. The cynical version of it is it's social, it's re, it's social reproduction because you're creating another generation of workers for capital. But because women end up doing like an enormously disproportionate amount of that work, they,

you know, they, they wind up in the streets first because they're the people who are most acutely sort of like sensitive to the stuff happening. Yeah, what's, what's, you know, and, and the other thing that's sort of worth noting here is that riots are, these, these kind of bread riots are usually urban affairs and they're sort of, they're the product of people who live in cities, right? You're sort of artisans, you're industrial workers. There's this like fighting core of teenagers who seem to show up in all these bread riots. And thankfully that, that, that never happens today.

We do not have a bunch of teenagers who show up at any time to fight the cops when something bad happens. No experience with this. Yeah, I've certainly never seen anything like that happen. Do these other countries have the feds put piles of bricks out on the street? Well, you know, this is why we haven't, they haven't gotten to that level of entrapment yet. Right, right, right.

They're not powerful enough. This, this is before the development of the police state. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they didn't have an FBI to burn down the third precinct. Yeah, they haven't invented the agent provocateur yet. Yeah, a cunning false flag. So what's interesting about the 18th century riots, though, is I've been talking a lot about how these are led by women and that's true.

But specifically the 1700s ones tend to be more gender balanced than later riots. And I'm going to read this from the historian Lynn Taylor because it's, it's one of the funniest things I've ever read in my life and I love it. Cynthia Bolton's study of the French Flower War of 1775 makes clear the mixed nature of traditional food riots. Indeed, the number of men involved had increased significantly in the flower wars due to the changing male economic social, including familio and political status during the Ancien Regime. This was a life of precarious and declining social economic position.

This equilibrium in the family structure of political alienation, one that left them in position similar to those of mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. The men who rioted had, in crucial ways, been feminized. Oh boy. They forced, they are rioting because they've been forced found. Yeah, I mean this, this is a thing that literally happened in, in Myanmar during the uprising. There are kind of local, local cultural sort of attitudes there that make it, that have made it for a long time like essentially considered like shameful to touch women's clothing or

particular, like there's certain things that like you don't wear and that you're not supposed to look at if you see someone dressed that way that are like traditional women's clothing and so a bunch of male protesters would dress that way and form up and like ranks at the protests because it made the police like uncomfortable and sometimes like back off. That's extremely cool. Yeah. There's like some literal examples of that and very recent riots. Yeah.

And I think that gets at one of the things that's sort of happening is happening in this period too, which is that like one of the kinds of things that generates these red riots is this kind of, is this instability in gender roles and is this sort of instability in, in what the role of a person in society is going to be and that, I don't know, it has a lot of interesting effects and when those effects are riots, the stuff, the stuff that happens is really cool because you get a lot of sort of like gender roles getting messed up. You get a lot of like social ties being broken.

I guess so the other thing that's going on in this period that is, is important because it's sort of like foreshadows a lot of what the sort of later bread riots are going to be about is that, and this is like the fourth theory of red riots if you sort of like go through your economic historians of this stuff. They're talking about basically, the late 1700s are one of the sort of key moments in like the formation of the modern state and what this means in terms of food is that control the food supply is moved from these, this sort of like parentalistic like feudal state thing where on a local level you have guaranteed prices and access to food and this is shifted

to laissez-faire capitalism in which there is, there are no price controls. There's no guarantee you can get food and subsequent to this also at the same time is a centralization of the military bureaucracy and the centralization of the military bureaucracy means that they're taking more control of the food supply. Here's some free markets as food riots again, older parentalistic models operating at the local level and assuring a printable supply of necessaries at a low price were undermined by new national policies aimed at greater efficiency and market regulation spanning a century and more.

The policies included such varied activities as enclosure, land concentration, capital intensification of farming, proletarianization, grain exports, taxes, tariffs and other government efforts to regulate the food supply. Price riots were simply one expression of popular grievances stemming from this broader change. And this is something that's very common. Bread riots are deeply and intimately linked with the ways that the food production process is changing and specifically linked to the ways the food production process is changing

because of the state and markets. But we're sort of leaning into the late 1700s and at this point something happened that no one expected. A bread riot went completely the other direction and irrevocably changed the state and the market itself. And I am talking about history's baby most famous bread riot. That's right. It's the French Revolution, baby, liberty, egalité, fraternity, Han Han.

And this is this is like you mean to tell me that the French had a revolution? I mean, it's kind of it's kind of marginal admittedly. The fame. That doesn't sound like the French that I know. That's true. The modern French have replaced revolution with racism, unfortunately. But you know, look, look, we're we're we're in the 1700s. Things are different.

Yeah. And so we're in in a second we're going to talk about the bread riot that changed the history of bread riots in the course of world history forever. But first, do you know who doesn't love bread riots? Mary Antoinette. Yeah. Yeah. Who is the primary sponsor of this show?

She realized the whole cake thing didn't work out great. So now she's saying, let them have podcasts. Let them cast pods. We're back and our primary sponsor has been executed by a mob. So if you are a member of European nobility, maybe you're a Habsburg, you know, hit us up and offer us a sponsorship. Yeah. Well, OK, we're going to rewind a little bit before they kill Mary Antoinette to get

to how that happened. So one of the things if you read the sort of literature on bread riots, one of the things bread riot people will talk about over and over again is bread riots being a political. And they kind of like stretch this to a point because I mean, OK, so like there's a couple levels which doesn't make any sense, right? Like, OK, if you think that bread is being sold at too high a price because people are gouging you, that is political, right? And then you go out and make them do that.

Yeah. That's politics. People love to say things aren't political when they don't align with like a simple political party. Like if it doesn't line up directly with the kind of approved debate topics between the political parties that dominate things, they like to say shit is a political. But you know, starving because of the tax decisions or whatnot is an inherently political thing.

Yeah. And deciding that you're not going to starve and taking bread from people is an incredibly political thing. Yeah. You have done a politics. Yeah. You've done a lot of politics and, you know, but one of the things that the other thing this leads to is if a thing that involves bread suddenly like turns into capital P politics

and suddenly you have people doing things that are like well understood as like conventional political gestures, immediately everyone stops calling it a bread riot. And if you look at what's actually happening, it's here's a bunch of people who are mad about the price of bread. They went to change the price of bread. It kind of didn't work and so instead they over through the government. And this is the bread riot that we're getting to now up until, you know, up until 1789 like you can argue that like historians will argue that oh, these bread riots are apolitical.

That just ends in, you know, I think it's October 5th 1789. But by this point, the French Revolution is like well underway. They've stormed the Bastille. There's a bunch of people in a parliament writing a constitution. But like in October of 1789, it's still unclear like how radical any of this is going to be, right? At this point, it still seems likely that there's going to be a king and not only is there going to be a king, the king is still going to be pretty strong.

And then, yeah, on October 5th 1789, maybe history's most famous bread riot breaks out. So 7,000 women who are like incredibly pissed off at the high price of bread in Paris march on Versailles, which is where the royal family of France had been like governing France from for like a hundred years. And these women are really, really angry and they basically forced the royal family to come back within the Paris. And I guess it's important to note here that Paris and Versailles are like 12 miles apart. So this isn't like a multi-day journey.

They just like get mad one day and they wake up and they walk to the next city over. And this radically changes the entire direction of the French Revolution because once, well, if the royal family is in Versailles, right, like the Parisian mob doesn't have direct access to them. But once they're in Paris and once this bread riot like brings the king to Paris, suddenly the entire like the entire concentrated political power of the French system is now centered in Paris and is now in a place where subsequent bread riots can actually do stuff. And this directly leads to the kings being executed.

This leads to our sponsors getting guillotined. And it basically it completely cements bread as sort of like the central part of like one of the central aspects of what the French Revolution is about. Like by the end of the revolution that the slogan of the sort of revolutionary French working class is bread in the Constitution of 1793. So you can look at the priorities there and look at like all of this is sort of an sort of extended rolling bread riot. Unfortunately for us and spoilers to everyone who has not caught up on the end of the French

Revolution, the revolution loses and Napoleon takes power. And this is where we enter the era of what's known as the bourgeois revolution. This is this is the modern era. And if you've if you've read your like you're like Arab cobswam, you're like you're sort of very conventional like Marx historians or your conventional sort of liberal historians. They will all tell you that the bread riot sort of dies nearly 1800s and that's replaced by like strikes and political protests organized by unions and parties because like the the rural class has been like displaced at the center of history by the industrial working

class. And that's just like not true. And it's not true in two senses. One it's in the sense that like we have bread riots now, but it's also not true because there's another wave of bread riots that are that are very, very conventional and very much sort of in in the class of 1700s mold. Here is here's Lynn Taylor again. It is true that the proactive form of protest became common, even predominant by the early

20th century. However, scattered to the periodical literature are accounts of 20th century food riots, which look surprisingly like those of the 18th and early 19th century, something not expected in modern industrialized nation states. Food riots occurred in northern France in 1911 in Britain during the winter of 1916-1917 in New York in 1917 in Toronto in both 1924-1923 in Barcelona in 1918 in Vichy France in 1942 in northern France throughout the German occupation. The form of protest was remarkably consistent in each and reminiscent of traditional food

riots of earlier centuries. And these are these are these are very conventional sort of 18th century bread riots to the women. They refuse the women who were refusing to pay a higher price for food. And in some sense, they kind of are a political in that there are various attempts in like basically all of these protests by like organized political organizations to take them over. And basically every single time the women who are involved are like, no, absolutely not. There's a very funny one where I think this is the I think this is the British one. In 1916-1917, we're like a bunch of men show up and the women are like, no, go home.

You can't riot with us. This is our riot. Now, yeah, the British case in particular was also interesting because this is the middle of World War One. And so, you know, this is the sort of giant presence looming over these these these bread riots. And, you know, the government sort of like the government in response to this response to widespread hunger, like decrease these price controls on food.

But farmers are just refusing to obey them. And so women in Mayport organized and the result was, quote, when one farmer said he did not care what the government said about price controls, there was bedlam. The women rushed the farmer's cart and the street was, quote, filled with hooting, yelling women and young people while potatoes, cabbages, and turnips were flying through the air. The example of Mayport soon spread to other parts of the country. These riots are led by housewives who had filled the front lines and did much of the fighting.

Also, the miners of Cumberland were also active in supporting their wives' efforts, both as added bodies strengthening the crowds, but also through the miners' association and other working class institutions. So A, I don't know, I had to include this specifically because the image of a bunch of people throwing cabbages at farmers is extremely funny to me. But the other thing I think is interesting here is you can start to see the shifts from the 18th century riots to these ones on a social level, where in the 1800s you're dealing with town and peasant cultural groupings who are supporting the protest.

But by the 1900s, red riots are being backed by organized political institutions. There's another one in New York in 1917, which is remarkable for being, it's self-organized by, like, it's remarkable because it's self-organized by women, even though this is, like, the part of New York they're in is a Socialist Party stronghold. But the Socialist Party isn't the people who do it, it's the women who are, like, married in a lot of cases to the Socialist Party, and to some extent are in it, but are sort of operating autonomously. And they do this thing where they sort of, like, they start setting and forcing these

boycotts of, like, shops that are deemed to be at, like, price gouging levels and they fight the cops and they do a bunch of stuff. And the ones I mentioned in Toronto earlier are interesting because those ones actually do, like, have an organization in the beginning, but in keeping with sort of the tradition of the bread riot, the organization was the Jewish Women's Labor League. And these are remarkably effective political movements. They win their demands really quickly. I'm going to read one more account because it just rules.

Lester Golden and Tema Kaplan have both examined food riots in Barcelona in 1918, part of a wave of riots which occurred between June 1917 and March 1919 throughout Spain. As in previous cases, these riots erupted because of devastating price inflation, I think we know nothing about now. This time resulting from the post-war collapse of the economy. The participants were all women, they forbade men's participation, and the actions were led first by radical Republicans and then by a small group of female and narcosyndicalists. The women's demands were simple and straightforward.

They demanded lower prices for foods. They attacked bread shops and coal wag as it took over a ship laden with fish. When police and civil guard attempted to break out the women, crowds of women on the street, the women turned on them stripping some of the officers of their pants, spanking or thrashing them and sending them home. Yes. Yes. It rules so much.

And that's... nom nom nom nom nom. It's so good. Perfect. Perfect. This is the energy we need in every century that human beings have ever inhabited. It's amazing. The historians, a parenthetical note, after that is, quote, rather undermining their authority in the process, which, yes.

I would imagine so, yes. If you are being spanked by a crowd, you have lost control of that crowd. That is, that is fair to say. And so they, they, it takes about three weeks and they, they win and prices drop 30%. That's good. Good for them. Yeah. That's a pretty solid look.

Hey, I think, I think most of the people listening would do some hardcore spanking if they could get a 30% cut on their grocery bill. Yeah. It's, it's a, look, I'm just saying, it is much harder to pull down a modern cop's trousers because they're wearing like so much weird shit on top of it. But. Belt technology has improved tremendously since then. Yeah.

However, comma, where there is a will, there's a way. Yep. If I learned one thing from high school, it's that anyone can be pantsed. Just, you just, you just have to, you just have to, you just have to want it hard enough. You have to want it more than the person wants to be wearing their pants. That's right. That's right. You have to believe.

So there's one more of these bread riots that's worth talking about, which also is not conventionally framed as a bread riot, but is entirely keeping with everything I've said here. The February revolution in Russia, so the February revolution is the revolution that actually overthrows the czar. There's another revolution, which is the October revolution, which is one of the Bolsheviks come to power, but that's, that's, that's a separate one. They're fighting a complete group of people.

The February revolution has all of the sort of key factors of a bread riot, right? There's these massive bread lines, women are pissed off by a lack of food. The revolution itself is, is led by women who's like male comrades had literally told them, don't like, don't go out and do a protest on that day. Cause this is international women's day, but the, like all, all of the men who are like doing this are, are convinced that like the conditions aren't right for revolution. So they try to get everyone to stay home and everyone's just like, no. And you know, like the, the, the sort of key difference between the, like this bread riot

and the other bread rounds we were talking about is that, you know, the, the demands of the, of the, the, the marching international women's day in 1917 are overtly political. Like they, they are chanting down with the czar and they're trying to overthrow the government. And this, you know, this is another thing that has this sort of like incredible impact on, on how the Bolshevik revolution is, is sort of working, right? Like Lenin winds up using peace, bread and land as one of the sort of like central like Bolshevik slogans because part of, because a huge part of what the revolution is, is just a bread riot.

And that, that, that's where we're, we're, that's, that's where we're going to leave it today with the world, just completely and utterly transformed by another bread riot. And next episode we're going to get to the modern bread riots because those are also interesting. And yeah, we're going to once again prove everyone who insists that bread riots don't happen anymore wrong, a thing that I didn't know existed until I started reading this and I'm now incredibly mad about. Yeah.

So go out there and have a bread riot. Hands to cop. Or some other kind of riot, you know, a guacamole riot, a mate riot. You could have, you could have some kind of corn riot. You could have a riot over Ortolan. That would be a unique kind of riot. I don't think anyone's ever rioted over that, that bird, that, that's such a beautiful songbird that eating it is a sin.

So you have to like hide your shame underneath a sheet so God doesn't see you eat it. Have a riot over one of those, you know. Yeah, do that. Yep. I love how often the Holocaust has been trending over the last year. That's good. That's a thing you want to see trending in 2022. Um, it's it could happen here.

All right, Chris, continue with your bread riots. Yeah, we'll back. There's more riots. Now last episode, we talked about historians declaring the end of the bread, death of the bread riot. And like in the 60s and early 70s, like I think that this, this is one of the ways you can tell that period. People genuinely thought the world was going to get better.

It was that like they genuinely believed that like the centralized state and like capitalism can always provide foods. You want to bread riots anymore. You get marches going. If you were born in that period, you like grew up and people were fleeing from dynonic kisses in the street and like getting, getting eaten by woolly mammoths. And then by the time you're 40, you've got the telegraph. So I get it.

Right. I get why people think that that progress was, was really going back in those years because they got, they wiped out the dynonic kisses. Yeah. I mean, you have seen Howard Taft building the pyramids. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. You have, you have, you have seen the future rise up literally in front of you. And yeah, you went from eating mud to Hershey's chocolate. It's, it's an incredibly impressive sort of, sort of period of modern historical evolution. And you know, one of the things you see, like, you'll see like Marxist calling bread riots, primitive rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced by proper Marxist class politics. And then like every single one of these people was like the most wrong anyone, like basically

from that period until, until the moment the, the, the, the end of history guy starts writing, they are the most wrong people like on the planet. Well, it's also funny to hear that idea that like there, there was something primitive about these people's class analysis because you look at like the brothers, Gracchi and ancient Republican Rome, a lot of the shit they're saying is not at all primitive class analysis. Like it's, it's pretty developed. Yeah.

And I mean, like the, the Marxist will do some long arguing about how like, oh, they have, they have false consciousness. They're not trying to abolish the class system or whatever. And it's like, well, I mean, like I look at the, the Marxist didn't abolish the class system either. So like, you know, like, yeah, like these are, these are very, and this is something we're going to be coming back to a lot this episode is that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors.

And one of the, the sort of modern version of this is in the 1970s, not only did bread riots not end, there's a new kind of bread riot. And these riots are collectively known as the IMF riots. But from, from, from January 1976 to October 1992, there were riots in Peru, Egypt, Ghana, Jamaica, Liberia, the Philippines, Zaire, Turkey, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Tunisia, Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary, Venezuela, Jordan, the Ivory Coast, Niger, Iran, Albania, India, and Nepal.

Were you just doing like the Waco, the Waco Warner song? It's, it's, that's literally all the play, I, I found the chart that has all of them is like, there's just so many, they just keep happening. And again, that, that's all until 1992, like they're, they're still happening. And the other thing I should mention is those are just the ones that are called the IMF riots. There's a bunch of other riots, some of which are bread riots that aren't called the IMF riots because they're not really sort of like directly involved with the IMF.

And this raises the question of what the fuck is an IMF riot. And the answer is that, unfortunately, to understand why people are throwing Molotovs through bank windows, we have to talk about banking a little bit. I have talked, I guess, at length, yeah, I apologize, but we will get, we will get back to the riots, damn it, I promise, we just have to do a little bit of banking. So yeah, I've talked extensively on this show about the crisis of the 70s, and you know, the short version is that in a thing that is completely unrecognizable today, the global economy collapses, inflation skyrockets, countries across the global south start taking out these

adjustable rate, they've been taking out these adjustable rate loans, and then suddenly their interest rates spike and they start defaulting on these loans. Here's free markets and food riots talking about it. Although the causes of the crisis run deeper, by the 1970s, many smaller nations began to feel the strains of insolvency as a result of a worldwide recession, successive oil price shocks, declining world commodity prices, and accelerating debt service obligations. So basically, like if you're a small country, right, the price of everything you need to buy like oil is going up, and the price of what you can sell, which is like commodities

like copper, tin is collapsing. And these lead to what are like these massive, what are called balance of payments crises. And so we should be talking about what a balance of payments crisis is, and this winds up being really important here. There's this story about Che Guevara, like literally right after the Cuban revolution. He goes to the US, and he's in this meeting with a bunch of bankers. And he's trying basically to get Cuba's gold reserves and Cuba's foreign exchange reserves out of the US.

The US doesn't steal it. And what's funny about it is all the bankers who are talking to him, all of them report afterwards like, wow, this guy talks like a banker, not a communist. And specifically, the reason they were like, oh, hey, this guy talks like a banker is that he knew what balance of payments was. The short answer is that a balance of payments crisis is when there's more money flowing out of the country than there is coming into it. And the result of this is that you run out of money, and particularly the thing you run

out of is American dollars, which is the thing that you need to like buy oil. So you get these countries that are massively in debt and they run out of money. And the only thing they could do is turn to like, it's turned to the International Monetary Fund or the IMF, who like the only description of the IMF that I have is that like, they're basically like, if the cartoon Bank of Evil from Despicable Me like ran the entire world economy, they, you know, so the IMF shows up to these countries and is like, lol, lemau, eat shit. And they force these countries to implement like, in order to get loans, they force them

to implement what are called stabilization programs because of the quote, conditionality of the loans. They have all these like this really technical, boring, like, neoliberal, like legal language for it. So like, this is all sort of banker speak for if you want another loans, you can buy food, you're going to have to rob every single person you know, and hand them and hand us all your money. This eventually becomes known as structural adjustment programs, there's all of this sort

of technical language disguise what's going on. But what's actually going on is that in order to pay off, in order to pay the bankers for these loans, they are taking food for the mouths of children. Yeah, here's a more technical, I guess, explanation of what's happening here. Asterity programs include stern measures or shock treatments that trigger market mechanisms to stimulate export production and increase government for exchange reserves. So according to the theory, currency devaluation make third world exports more competitive in the international market, reduced public spending, curbs inflation and saves money

for debt repayment, privatization of state owned corporations generate more productive investment and reduce public payrolls, elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign investment lures more efficient export firms, cuts in public subsidies for food and basic necessities help to get prices right, benefiting domestic producers, wage restraints and higher interest rates, reduce inflation and enhance competitiveness and import restrictions can serve for exchange for debt servicing. So this has winners and losers and the losers are like everyone in the country that's happening to this and this is pretty close cross class like these policies, they hurt workers, they

hurt peasants, they hurt small shopkeepers, the middle class is annihilated, just like people who are consumers who buy goods and even the sort of like the local capitalists just get screwed by this. Because what the IMF is doing is forcing everyone to have lower wages, taking massive benefit cuts and massively spiking the price of food. And you know, I once again remind everyone that this is explicitly what the Federal Reserve is trying to do to us right now, like this is the kind of stuff that they're talking about in order to curb inflation is to just make the pay everyone less, make everyone

take benefits cuts and then increase the price of shit. So the winners of this are like six bureaucrats, international investors and like a class of like absolutely horrific large agricultural landowners. And this, this has about the effect that you would expect it to between 1976 and late 1992 some 146 incidents of protest occurred reaching a peak from 1983 to 1985 continuing to the present without attenuation. Now the authors who are writing this right, they're writing this in 1994 so when they say they continue to the present without attenuation they mean 1994.

The thing is, the last one of those riots ended like a week ago. Yeah, yeah, they're still, they're still going. So anyway, and these, these riots are slightly different than those, the sort of like classical bread riots, right? Because they are about the increasing price of food, they're also about the increasing price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or cuts to services, stuff like that. Here's, here's a quote about like what these things actually look like. Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible

for the depredations. Marches and protesting crowds converge on major thoroughfares and government buildings such as the Treasury or the National Bank or the Legislature, the Presidential Palace. Leaders attack supermarkets and clothing stores where fuel and transportation subsidies are part of the austerity package. Buses and gasoline stations are burned. The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks on travel agencies, foreign automobiles, luxury hotels, and international travel agencies, or not

that too, but also international agency offices. And you know, this is going to sound familiar from last episode, it turns out that just like the 18th century people, the attacks of these things are very targeted. The sort of like forms of resistance have changed over time because you know, this is now, we do have modern political organizations, right? Like we get general strikes, you get, sometimes you get just noble bread riots, sometimes you get these just things that are like large protests and then they turn into riots. And what's interesting about them is that these are very sort of, these are very sort

of cross class movements, right? You have your sort of classical sectors of the urban poor, you have like particularly in the global South, you have your shanty dwellers, you have unemployed youth, you have small street vendors or like a crucial sort of element of these things. You have like just your guy selling cigarettes on the street. You also get like parts of the industrial working class, you get sometimes you get unions, a lot of times you get students, you get like public employees, sometimes you get professional groups.

One of the interesting things I was reading about this, I've read like a few books in this era who were talking specifically, and this is in like the 90s, right? We're specifically talking about professional groups in Sudan. And it's like, it's like, okay, it's 1994, people are talking professional groups in Sudan backing rioters against the government. It's 2019, people are talking about professional groups backing protest against the government. It's like, it's, I don't know, like there's this extent to which all of these things, the IMF riots have just been happening over and over and over again for about 50 years.

And a lot of the elements are incredibly similar. One of the other things that's going on here is that these protests are driven by mass urbanization. Typically, austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price hikes resulting from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services, proclaimed by the government as a regrettably necessary reform urged by the IMF and international lenders as conditions for new and renegotiated loans. Five deaths in the first Peruvian protests began a pattern of violence.

Peru remained a hotbed of austerity protests with students and workers demonstrating against increased food prices in 1997 followed by, followed in 1978 by a march of public employees over state layoffs. This protest, though cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding office buildings, was dispersed by police tear gas. So like, that's, that's a very sort of, yeah, yeah, like we, I mean, this is, this was happening, this was happening in Peru, like last year, right, actually, was it last year or was it earlier this year?

I don't know, time is fake, and that's actually like the other thing I sort of startling about this is like the places that riot are still the places that are rioting in like an enormous number of cases. It's the same places. Sometimes it's the same people. I think probably the most famous protest of the sort of era is, it's called the Caracazo, I'm pronouncing that extremely badly, but my apologies, in Venezuela, which is a reaction to a 1989, like 50 to 100% increase in train and bus fares.

And there are, these are like massive riots, at least 100 and probably like a couple of thousand people are like gunned down by the army. And three years later, a relatively unknown colonel named Hugo Chavez tried to overthrow the government that had carried out the price increases, Chavez, you know, Chavez is better known for his other works, but he's the sort of tie between the IMF riots and the sort of next phase of political resistance to this stuff, which is called the anti, which is like known as the anti globalization movement in the sort of the 90s and early 2000s. And the thing that's interesting about these things is that, I don't know, the IMF riots

don't go very well. Like either they lose or at best what they were able to get was like temporarily stall some of these reforms, and I say like reforms, quote unquote, like the sort of neoliberal like slashing benefits, if they were able to pause them a bit and then they would sort of get restarted after people left the street. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, people started winning Argentina is sort of famously forced to like tell the IMF to fuck off and they default on their loans after this like enormous autonomous uprising in 2001 that like very nearly overthrows the government and

forces out like five heads of state. There's the whole sort of pink tide in Latin America, the IMF gets like driven out of a bunch of countries in East Asia. And then 2008, the entire world economy collapses, which it turns out is bad for everyone. And this does this does two things for our story. The first is that like, countries are suddenly going broke again. And because they're like just completely broke, the IMF is just back and is able to sort of enforce programs on places like Greece and Spain.

And the second thing it did was set off an enormous wave of bread riots and uprisings. And I think like most people, if you tell them that 2008 set off like an enormous wave of like protests, they're immediately going to go, oh, you mean the air was spraying. And I am talking about that, but that's actually not specifically what I'm talking about here. There's, there were like immediately in 2007, 2008, immediately after there was another massive wave of bread riots that ever like just everyone is completely forgotten unless the thing that you do specifically is study bread riots. Here's from here's from the piece called a political economy of the food riot.

In 2007 and 2008, the world witnessed a return of one of the oldest forms of collective action, the food riot. Countries were protests occurred range from Italy, where pasta protests in September 2007 were directed at a fail at the failure of the Prada government to prevent a 30% rise in the price of pasta. To Haiti, where protesters railed against presidents, prevails in an impassive response to the doubling of the price of rice over the course of a single week. Other countries in which riots were reported, including Uzbekistan, Morocco, Guiana, Mauritania,

Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina. And some commentators have estimated that 30 countries experience some sort of food protest over the period. Now we've been talking a lot about like food consumers in this because that's mostly the people who are involved in bread riots. But you know, as was happening in 1700 with the sort of original stuff, like this whole time this is going on, there's this sort of massive shift in the global food economy

happening where, and this has been happening for a long time now, but it's sort of it's been accelerating the last about half a century, which is that the number of people who are like peasants and who produce food for themselves has been massively declining and people are getting forced into cities. And this means that there's, you know, there's been a number of other things that have gone along with this. There's been this massive increase in like cattle production, for example, you get all these monocultures.

And another thing I think I've mentioned before is the World Trade Organization's like agreement on agriculture, like outlaws agricultural subsidies for the global south, but you know, the U.S. is still allowed to have like farm subsidies, which means that, you know, when you enter these free trade agreements, you get all of this like enormously cheap food from the U.S. has dumped into all these other countries. And you know, if you're a Mexican farmer, suddenly you can't compete with all of this food from the U.S. because the food from the U.S. is cheap because the American government subsidizing it, but the Mexican government can't.

And this just like absolutely annihilates any attempt by a country to maintain food security by like producing food for themselves, and this sort of class of like self-sufficient peasant farmers who'd been, you know, they support themselves by producing their own food and selling to the market, these people just can annihilate it. And they get forced into what's called sort of casualized labor, you know, the later versions is like Uber, right, but they're forced into gig work, they're kicked out of sort of the normal economy, and you know, because they don't have sort of fixed contracts or, you know, a lot of people are working with no contracts at all, they're enormously

insecure. And once these people are forced into the labor market, like changes in the global economy can make them like almost immediately unable to afford food. Because you know, like if the less sort of economic security you are, the more you're affected by price increases, which is obvious, but it's worth saying because it dictates a lot of like who does bread riots, and yes, and so governments are not entirely like blind to this, and they're concerned that they're going to get overthrown. And so you see a bunch of governments trying to respond with sort of price stabilization

stuff. I think the most famous example of this is that like the Egyptian army like literally controls like an enormous number of Egypt's bakeries, and they like directly run them, and they directly run them so like you control the price of bread to try to like stop revolutions from happening. But in 2008, they just kind of stopped working. Here's a political economy of the food riot again. Over the year between 2007 and 2008, the 130% increase in the global price of maize and

the 75% increase in the price of rice, with similar price increases in soybeans and other major food commodities. Yes, there are these massive food price increases, and this, you know, this does the thing that massive food price increases does right there's there's there's immediately enormous riots and there's this cycle that happens where the protesters, you know, the protesters immediately blame the government for the crisis. And then the government is like, well, it's actually not our fault because, you know, it's happening because of things outside of our control.

And the protesters are like, Oh, it doesn't matter who we elect. They do the same things. And like, they're both kind of right. Like the government is just like fucking these people. But it's also true that the sort of like the whole food system is designed to take like the means of food production out of the hands of like the workers who need the food and putting them in the hands of like, you know, enormous corporations. And as people in places like Sri Lanka, which we're going to talk more about later, continually

emphasize, like this this food sovereignty issue is as much as a political issue. Like it's an incredibly political issue and it's as much like what's at stake in these bread riots as the sort of IMF and austerity stuff. Okay, this is probably a good place for an ad break, but I can't think of a transition. But yeah, you know, who isn't allowed to eat is the products and services that support this podcast all actively starving to death. So get these deals now while you still can. And we're back.

So all right, now we're going to talk a little bit about the Arab Spring. We're not going to talk in a normal amount about it because that's a whole thing. But if you've been following like the stuff people have written about the Arab Spring, there's an enormous number of people who spend like a lot of their time arguing about whether or not it was actually sparked by food prices. And you know, you'll get a lot of analysts who argue that like food prices in Tunisia where the air spring starts like weren't really higher than normal. And what you're seeing instead is like, well, it's not actually food prices.

It's just that there's a generation of people who've been farmers but like can't support themselves anymore, who've been forced into like fighting non-existent wage labor in cities. And like that is part of what's happening. But I think there's a sort of like fundamental misunderstanding of what causes a bread riot. Right. Like, you know, as you talked about in like in the first episode, one of the things that causes bread riots is it's not actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them.

Right. What sets off bread riots is people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve. Now obviously, like if the price of bread increases by 200%, you're going to get a lot of people going like, fuck this, I worked my ass off and now I can't feed my family. We deserve better than this. It's time to riot. But sometimes even if my prices are stable, you can get a thing where everyone like, you know, the amount of bread is bad, everything is expensive and one day someone wakes up

and just goes, fuck this, I deserve better and they do a bread riot. And this is the case and when that kind of thing is happening, right, when you're dealing with, you know, what, like moral economy stuff and you're dealing with, with this gap between like what people think, like, like what people think their life should be versus the fact that their lives are just absolutely terrible. Even if you like decrease the price of bread, that's not actually necessarily going to like stop people from rioting. And if you look at like Occupy, for example, too, like, you know, that's also happening

in this period, like what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly the price of food. It's the sense that like, yeah, I've been screwed by, and I've been screwed by the ruling class and I deserve better than this. And this is, this is what you see in Tunisia and one of the things what do you see in sort of Tunisia and Syria is that like a lot of the uprisings, like they have this huge sort of rural core with, with this population, this huge population of people who've been kicked out of the agricultural sector. And you know, and like that, that is a bread riot, right?

And it's a bread riot in the sort of double sense of like, it's the people who are involved, who used to be involved in grain production and now can't be, and then also that like, you know, people, people have hit this sort of expectation gap thing. And what I think is sort of interesting about this is that these bread riots, these rural bread riots are like, they're the closest thing we have to sort of the classical 20th century revolution, right? Like that's one, that's the thing that causes, like the 20th century revolutions are the first generation of people who are like, but maybe the first like two or three generations

of people who come from the countryside into the factories or the people who do revolutions. And but the thing is, this is, this is, this is the 21st century, not the 20th century. Like if you get kicked out of your farm, there's, there's no job in a factory. Like you're just unemployed. And you know, and this changes the dynamics of sort of everything. And I think, okay, like people like broadly know the course of like the Arab Spring and the 2011, 2014 wave of uprisings, they happen, they get crushed largely. But there was another wave of these sort of riots, protests and uprisings that started

in Haiti in like, in mid 2018 over this massive fuel price hike. And here is a partial list of places that like people have like, rioted in, in large numbers since 2018, Haiti, Sudan, Algeria, Honduras, Chile, Iraq, Hong Kong, Iran, like four times, Lebanon, like three times, Columbia, like three times, a couple of things happened in France, there was Puerto Rico, there was Papua, there was a, there was Indonesia we're in our second Ecuador one now, there was Catalonia, like people rioted in the US, there were massive indigenous roadblocks like in Canada, a Yukimedia Compa went up, where there was stuff in Secatra, like there were two different ways of protesting India,

there was like Belarus, there was Kazakhstan, there was Kyrgyzstan, there was Uzbekistan, there's Mali, there's stuff in Nigeria, there's stuff in Libya, like there's stuff in Sri Lanka we're about to get to. This whole thing has been happening like everywhere and it's been intensifying in the last, in the last sort of like three or four years. We're now basically in like year four of this cycle and, and you know, obviously like every single one of these protests has their own like local political conditions and like a lot of these aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread, they're just about

sort of other stuff that's happening. But like, like of the uprisings that I mentioned, like something like 15 of them are directly about the price of food or the price of like transitive fuel and we're going to talk a little bit about sort of two of the most recent like protest waves. We're going to talk about Ecuador, we're going to talk about Sri Lanka, because they're, they're two very different kinds of protests, even though they're both kind of red riots, or at least they're both very much the modern equivalents of it. But they look very different and there's just, I think, I don't know, I think there's like

interesting reasons why. Yeah, so we're going to start with like, with Sri Lanka. On a very basic level, Sri Lanka, it has a giant balance of payments crisis. This is, you know, sometimes like this is the sort of like large scale political version of famines, right? Like there's plenty of food and fuel in the world. But the government Sri Lanka does not have dollars to buy it with. Now, the reason the government doesn't have dollars to like buy fuel with is because the

government is basically like an incredibly corrupt dictatorship that keeps like importing luxury goods it didn't need. And they did a bunch of like tax breaks on rich people and suddenly the government was broken. Everyone was like, wow, how did that happen? It must have just been the pandemic. And it was like, no, you gave all the money to rich people. And then.

Like as the crisis sort of went on, they the government decided to ban fertilizer imports. And so this meant that people couldn't get fertilizer. So it's like farmers just didn't plant food because yeah, that's a curious decision. Yeah, it's like it's one of those days you look at it. It's just like, like who thought this was a good idea? Yeah. What was the positive end of that game plan here? I mean, like, okay, so like I think what they were thinking is that like fertilizer cost

dollars, right? We're running out of dollars. So we're going to stop people from spending their dollars like on buying this stuff so we can keep more dollars in the economy. But like, what are you, what is your long term plan here if you don't have like anything to get dollars with or and you also don't have food? So this to the surprise of exactly zero people, except I guess the government of Sri Lanka causes a food crisis and a food shortage.

And this is a kind of classic like this is the kind of classic like situation in which the IMF we intervene in the 70s and they're intervening now. And you know, this is a classic like struggle against this starting, right? You have the ruling class blowing up the entire economy by like fueling debt money into pointless infrastructure projects. And now they're doing these like massive austerity measures are trying to get loans to the IMF. This is you know, this is this is this is this is this is stuff we understand that we've seen before.

But this is also this is also a food sovereignty problem, right? The Sri Lankan government has just completely screwed their farmers, which means they have to import even more food. And you know, the result of this is months and months and months of very impressive sort of clock cross class protests with like basically every social sector in the streets. And that's both a good thing and also a thing that is kind of a mess. Because you know, like there was civil war, the civil war ended like less than a decade and a half ago, right?

So you have people in the streets from sectors who like do not like each other at all. And I don't know, you know, you get the thing that happens here, right? You get these moments of like incredible solidarity and then moments of incredible like what the fuck are you guys doing? And you know, like one of the things that happens a lot in these protests, like in all protests like this is like, okay, the protests are like pre-tame for literally months, right? Like it's just people doing protesting. And then cops and people like allied with the government started attacking the protesters,

at which point people like burned down the house with the ruling family. They start throwing people. I think people probably saw the videos people like throwing cars of like government ministers in the rivers, which was a good time. And like, yeah, like that stuff was, you know, a direct reaction to sort of like the government's violence, right? You know, okay, I can't give like a full like detailed political history here because like dear God, it is incredibly complicated and I don't understand it very well because you

know, I don't study Sri Lanka. If you want a good account of this, Rohini Hensman's political dimensions of the crisis in Sri Lanka is a really good sort of like short like look at what's going on here. And this is a sort of like, this is, you know, this is a broader trend in like all these protests, right? Like every single bread riot takes place in its own unique context. Sri Lanka, for example, like Sri Lanka used to have the world's best and largest like mass Trotskyite party, like they were the Trotskyites is like the only place on earth.

The Trotskites had like a real like mass political party and they were like a part of the real political process. And then they like sold out the working class and entered a bunch of governments that like did terrible stuff. And you know, okay, that's like a local context doesn't happen anywhere else. But you know, every single one of these states, right, is embedded in global capitalism and that means that every state is affected by the sort of like broader economic trends and sort of bureaucratic structures to hold everything together.

They're affected by the IMF, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank. And the thing that this means is that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize with each other and reaction to sort of broader like economic forces. And the product of this is weight is the sort of like periodic ways of uprisings. And so to close this out, we're going to talk about the most recent of these, well, it might actually not be the most recent of these by the time this goes up. But yeah, yeah, we're going to talk about Ecuador. The situation Ecuador is very different from what's happening in Sri Lanka.

The biggest difference, I guess, is that instead of sort of like waiting for conditions to get bad enough that like an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously, which is kind of what happened in 2019 in Ecuador, there's a very huge protest there. But they were larger spontaneous. But instead of like waiting for it, people were just like, what if we just called one of these? And by people here, I specifically mean the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador or Conaí.

And you know, okay, okay, as we've seen through this whole sort of thing, right, like bread riots, like adapt to the political organizations around them. And in Ecuador, we're dealing with a quintessentially modern form of political organization, which is the Indigenous Confederation. And I guess I should sort of like preface this a bit with like the specific form of Indigenous Confederation in Latin America that emerges in this period is like a different thing than older ones, because there have been Indigenous Confederation for a long time. This is like a, this is a very specific like political thing that emerged across Latin

America in sort of the 70s and the 80s, really, really started showing up in the 80s as a result of like a lot of things, one of which was like how shitty the old like Marxist-Leninist vanguard groups like were on Indigenous issues. And one of the, one of the groups that forms in this period is Conaí. And Conaí is one of the world's most militant like Indigenous federations. And since they're founding in 1986, they've called half a dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments. And I think they knocked off like three presidents, which is a pretty impressive track record.

And on July 13, 2022, faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods and a like really shitty like far-right government, they stage another one. And this is another sort of, I don't know, the thing is interesting about this is that it's, it's part general strike, like part street protest, part riot, and part just like mass march from the, from the sort of periphery of Ecuador to the core. And by periphery and core, I mean, in the sort of metaphorical sense, like it's a bunch, it's a bunch of Indigenous and peasant groups from all over the country just like marching on and descending on the capital, Quito.

And this is a, this is a complicated process. Like, you know, okay, like the left everywhere has like political divides and mostly they're kind of nonsense in a lot of ways. Like, okay, like there's ideological divides and there's personal divides and whatever. But like, Ecuador's left has, has real political divides. And these aren't, these aren't like sort of petty ideological, like personal stuff. Like they're like, they were caught under the sort of previous like old, like leftist pink tight governments of Rafael Carrera.

Like there were like soldiers and cops who are beating the shit out of Indigenous ecological protesters. And you know, this means that like, yeah, you know, okay, so, so Carrera is like parties running for president again, or is Carrera is not running, but Carrera's party is like running in an election, right? And you know, this means that like, yeah, okay, like maybe you're both leftist, right? But you know, there's a lot of people who are like, oh, fuck no, like I'm not voting for these guys.

These are the guys who like sent the army, I guess, or anti-mining protests. And so, you know, the thing, the thing that's interesting here is that like, like these protests don't even pull together the entire Ecuadorian left. And there's like other stuff going on here too, like there's some of the unions that went on strike in 2019, like don't go on strike this time because of some political stuff that's happening. But the thing about Kona'i that's really impressive is that they're still organized enough and they still, like they're organized enough that they're able to just take control of parts

of cities. And they have a lot of allies and supporters amongst their students and workers in Quito. And this means that when the government makes this enormous mistake and arrests Kona'i's like kind of newish leader, okay, this guy's name, this guy's name, I guess in Spanish, it's like Leonidas, this guy's name is Leonidas, he's the head of Kona'i Citizens Federation. And he's been a protest leader, he was a protest leader in 2019, that's how he got elected to like head this organization. And they arrest him on day two of the protest, and this is a catastrophic mistake, the protest

just like explode. And you know, by like a week in, I think that the government's claiming they were doing $50 million a damage a day, which I'm not actually sure I believe that because governments and corporations do this too when they're talking about like losses from like strikes, they tend to overemphasize how much damage is done because it makes them like look better in the press and it makes the protesters look worse, but they're able to damage like significant parts of the economy. And by June 30th, like they kind of win, basically the government's forced to negotiate with

them and they don't get all of their demands, but they get price decreases for like fuel and gasoline, which is like a huge part of why this purchase happened in the first place. They get bans on mining and drilling in indigenous protected areas, they get like strength and price controls, they get like rural loan forgiveness, like interest rate decreases, they get subsidies for farmers, they get subsidies for families, they get, they manage to get the government to like declare a state of emergency, a health emergency over COVID, it's like, this is, this is impressive stuff. And you know, and the other part of this is that they're like, okay, the agreement is

that we will stop protesting if you do this. And if you don't do this, we're going to do this again. Cool. So yeah, I guess, I guess might sort of wrap this up. There's, there's an American proverb that is really common among sort of like American China watchers, which is that I, so supposedly the Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity. And it's like not true.

As like linguistic and anthropological analysis of China, that that's not what, that's not what the characters mean. But everyone, like everyone in the US, like political establishment, like believes this, right? And, you know, but like as an analysis of China, it is completely useless. As an analysis of the US, of the American psyche, it's incredibly valuable, right? Because this, this is the way the American ruling class thinks it's, it's every single crisis is both a danger and an opportunity.

And that's something that we in some sense also have to do because that's, you know, these are the sort of situations that we're in, right? Red riots are a thing that just, they happen, right? They will continue to happen. They have been happening for thousands of years, like presumably they will happen for thousands of more years. And there's no use sort of like either pretending that they don't happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments like for against them because they just happen.

And the question that we're, that we're faced with is what are we actually going to do about it, right? Are we going to set them out? Are we going to side with the state and repressing them in the name of sort of like stamping out color revolutions or like providing order or stability or like protecting small businesses? Or are we going to, you know, take you to the streets and fight alongside them to sort of break the system that creates them? And this is the second question from Pierre is if we're going to do this, how?

And what we've seen from Ecuador in the past month or so is that if you take the fight to them and you are sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the question now, as our food prices continue to increase, as food prices are only going to continue to increase, what are we going to do? Yeah, that, that's all I got. I have, I have a single question. Yep. What are we going to do?

Well, I'm kind of bummed we never brought up our good friend Pete Buttigieg in his bread, his bread price fixing or deals. Yeah. I mean, that, that, that's kind of a sign of just like how kind of like, I guess you could say masculinized like our culture has been that like people didn't ride over that. Because like that is a thing like if, if, if, if Pete, if you send Pete Buttigieg back to like a late 1700s Fretts village and he tries to do this thing, like he does a systematic like bread, bread price fixing, right?

Like all of these people would have been getting hit by rocks. So yeah, do that again, I, yeah. Do that again. Wow. Do that again. Just bear in, just brazen incitement. Yeah. Yeah.

It's great. Well, that is it for us today. We love to incite. Thanks folks. And next time go incite yourselves. Welcome to it could happen here, the podcast that's increasingly about things that are actually kind of already happening of, and today it's going to be, it's going to be one of those.

It's going to be about in the kind of the uptick in rhetoric around queer exterminationism that's happened. Most of the stuff is what this is, is discussions and legislative proposal and rhetoric that was really kicked off last month during pride month, specifically because of the Roevee Wade ruling that really opened the door on a few not good possibilities. But because we're going to be talking about some more grim stuff today, we're going to we're going to open with something slightly more funny. And that's friend of the pod, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

Now with me today is it's Chris and James. Greetings. Hi. So, Peterson, he got, he got really mad at Elliot Page and now does not really have a Twitter account, and it's pretty funny. And a few days after he was banned for continuing to misgender Elliot Page, he released a video that can only be described as a supervillain monologue as a part of his new partnership with Daily Wire Plus, the hit new streaming service.

And just because I think it's funny, we're just going to, we're just going to play a few clips of this, of this evil supervillain monologue because it's really funny. And then it'll circle back to kind of our topic towards the end. So, speaking, speaking of friend of the pod, Peterson, here's, here's our, here's our, one of the clips that you've probably already heard if you're, if you're terminally online, but it's incredibly funny. If I am required to acknowledge that my tweet violated the Twitter rules, what rules you sons of bitches?

Ah, good old, good old Peterson. You know, the thing I've always been sort of like that clip in particular is like, I, I don't know if, if I was trying, I don't know if I could emulate just the, it's sounding like you've edited together 16 clips. I know, right? My tweet violated the Twitter rules, it's like, it's, his speech pattern is so bizarre. And also like in the, in the video was like nine minutes long, like proceeding that line, he explained what rule he broke around mis-gendering and harassment, so like he, he explained the

exact rule, ah, but we always get more Peterson if you ask for it. Not yours, woke moralists. We'll see who cancels who. Ah, extremely funny. He's actually sneering as well. If you watch the video, like his whole face just, yeah, he is, he is, he's, he is going all in on the bit. He's doing like Ozymandias, but hammed up.

It's frankly impressive. This is, this one's also, also a decent one. I am employing this awkward and impossible naming style because it is now apparently mandatory and I'm probably doing it wrong nonetheless as you're doing it wrong is the whole point of what has been made mandatory, but also I'm trying to make a point. I've essentially been banned from Twitter as a consequence. I say banned, although technically I have been suspended, but the suspension will not be lifted unless I delete the hateful tweet in question and I would rather die than do

that. That means that you have a healthy relationship to the platform of Twitter. There's also this great clip of him talking about how like, I'm actually happy how my Twitter account is gone now. Twitter is insignificant in the final analysis and you're like, what the fuck does that mean? What final analysis are you talking about? What do you, what do you mean the final analysis of what? Like what is?

Oh, it's, it's pretty funny. There's, there's two more clips from this rant that I want to do, which kind of are going to get more to the heart of our issue today. Great. They're, they're not great. They actually are kind of, they kind of suck. So without further ado, here's our good doctor friend. And finally, with regard to the final phrase, criminal physician, I must say that I've had

some post-coital, so to speak, regrets about that phrase. It is clearly the case that the surgical operation performed by the butchers who butchered Elliot slash Ellen was legal. So was it criminal or not? Were the operations undertaken by the fascist physicians who carried out the Nazi medical experiments legal? Yes, under the laws of the time, but were they criminal? I'll leave that question up to you to answer.

So that's pretty gross for a lot of reasons. One, the kind of historical context of using Nazis to compare to your own transphobia is a little dicey when you consider how, what the Nazis did to trans people and to like queer books. Yeah. He's advocating for the Nazi position here was, yeah, great stuff. But there's been so many bans on queer books just in the past two years. The library association tracked almost 1,600 books that were challenged in 2021.

The highest number since the organization began tracking book bans in the past 20 years. So talking about the Nazi scientists, they're like, his historical context, obviously, is incredibly lacking or he's just a grifter. I think, honestly, he's just kind of, I think he's just kind of lost it. I think, I don't even think he's fully a grifter. I think he's just kind of not understanding what's going on anymore. Because you can watch interviews and stuff where people can try to use reasoning and logic with him and you can watch his brain start to process it.

But it's just like otherwise he just doesn't think in any sort of logical manner or put his words or his stream of consciousness into any historical context. He just says what he wants and he's used to people just taking that as a fact. He's used to regurgitating bad Joseph Campbell and people be like, oh yeah, you sound smart. No, he's actually not. But man, the whole Germany-Nazi scientist experimentation thing is incredibly, incredibly frustrating. I don't even know what else to say about that because even that line you could focus on

for a while, compare how the history of medical documentation of transness and the Nazis, how that's such a big thing is that the Nazis destroyed so much medical research on gender transitions losing decades and decades of research that we're only now starting to regain. Incredibly gross, but there's this one last clip I wanted to play of our good doctor. And are we degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner? I think the answer to that may well be yes. So that's not great.

He really is like just advocating for the Nazi position every turn. Yes, he is just continuing to advocate for fascistic reasoning, fascistic views of decadence and degeneracy in so much as it is a threat to civilization and a threat to Western society. And then he goes on in this clip to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine because the U.S. is helping Ukraine, which makes Ukraine degenerate by proxy, so Russia is doing a war on degeneracy. That's his argument. So that's his level of logical reasoning, which is funny, because if you've ever heard any of the radio clips of just like Ukrainian and Russian soldiers yelling at each other

and it's just both of them calling each other gay over and over again, it's just like really like we should bring back that level of discourse to America. We're going to take a quick break and then we will come back to talk about our other really close friend of the pod, Matthew Walsh. So stay tuned for that. Oh, God. Okay. I have I have one question for everyone here.

What what's how how woman what what is what is that featherless biped. Okay. Behold. So when we're talking about Matt Walsh, obviously last month, he released a pretty poorly made is transphobic documentary that was just a clips of him getting owned by like actual doctors for not understanding like basic ontology and medical reasoning. The documentary was just a other friend of the pod, JK Rowling just expressed support for the documentary.

So if that's if that's not an indicator that like Turfism is just like a direct preamble to open fascism, I don't know what is because I mean, Matt Walsh jokingly describes himself as a fascist, but that's because his his beliefs actually are fascistic. Like he said, it's one of those jokes that only is funny because everyone agrees on the central premise. Like it's that it's that it's that type of humor. So like JK Rowling just endorsing an open fascist. So I'm not going to talk about the documentary in depth here because it's not that good

and it doesn't really make any points that need to be refuted. It talks about how like it talks about how like how puberty blockers are sterilization drugs, which is is is not the case long term. When you're on them. Yes, you cannot you cannot do that because it's obviously inhibiting your your hormones. But once you go off puberty blockers, you can procreate again, which which also I just I just want to take a second here to look at this position, which is that OK, so puberty blockers are sterilization things, right?

I like this. OK, so this is their arguments and sterilization. Right? Who are you giving puberty blockers to? Children. Why the fuck do you care? Well, I mean, like, it's like, well, yeah, I mean, they're arguing, it's like, I don't know.

It'll make them it'll make them permanently sterilized. It's like it's basically like you're castrating these kids by giving them puberty blockers, which no, that's not how that works. You're you're just arguing in bad faith. It doesn't matter. I don't want to talk about the documentary in length because it's not interesting enough to talk about. But I will.

Is this a documentary real quick? Is this the one where he like goes to like quote unquote, the country of Africa and asks people. Yeah. And then Paulie translates. Extremely racist. Yeah. Yeah.

Great to see J.K. Rowling like known non-racist lining up behind these essentialist tropes of Africa. Yeah, the creator of Kingsley Shacklebolt, Joe Chang, just the most cringe. Yeah. That's what we call a rich white woman moment. Yes. All right. So, but we are going to talk about some other things Matt Welch has been doing, specifically

how he has increased exterminationist rhetoric into his discussions around trans people. So we're going to open by talking about detransitioners. So the vast majority of real detransitions, which are very rare. Like there's very few of them, especially considering there's already very few numbers of trans people. Yeah. Isn't it like some 1% or something? Yeah.

It's very, very few. But the vast majority of people who do make the choice to detransition are usually due to experiencing aggressive transphobia and the idea of the detransitioner has been inflated and used as a straw man to attack the trans community just by and large with many documented cases of TERFs or far-right activists creating like fake sock puppet accounts pretending to be detransitioners to write horrifying but fictional stories. That happens a lot. There's a really famous case on Reddit of an alleged detransitioner who has found out

to just be like an alt-right troll. And this all really sucks because the people who do detransition because they realize it's just not for them are generally pretty rad people who continue to be very much pro-trans because they do understand the fluid nature of gender and gender expression through this entire process. But and anyways, when quote tweeting an alleged detransitioner expressing regret of medical decisions that they made, Matt Walsh said this quote, we can't just oppose the transition of children.

Yes, that's particularly evil, but it's also evil to do it to anyone of any age. This young woman was 19, a legal adult when she was mutilated. Does that make it okay? Obviously not. Put it another way, it should be illegal for doctors to do this to anyone of any age. It should be illegal for anyone of any age to transition period. So this demonstrates the jump from no one, like the rhetoric of no one should transition until they're an adult to no one should be allowed to transition at all.

And it came just as quickly as the trans community was telling you it would. This jump is not a big one. It is very easy to say no hormones until you're 18 to saying no hormones at all. And that's what we're entering into. Walsh's rhetoric is increasingly exterminationist and eliminationist, just saying that all of his preferred policies would result in the total prohibition of trans identity and the criminalization of any gender-affirming care. Because people are fundamentally opposed to having any agency of your own body, whether

that's hormones or whether that's abortion. All of these people get mad just when they see someone with colored hair. They don't like someone's ability to have bodily autonomy. That's one of their core politics. And you see this a lot, especially when it comes to like trans men, because there's this notion that their bodies exist in service of cis straight men. Anything that gets in the way of that is an attack on cis men in general and all a patriarchal society.

It's very much like regular misogyny, but with an added bonus of transphobia. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo made a tweet a few days ago with a picture of Elliot Page pre-transition with a caption that says, this is what they took from you. It's like this notion that their bodies belong to you, a cis man, and by them choosing to change their bodies as they see fit, that's an attack on their body's access to you. It redes a whole bunch of misogyny. It does a whole bunch of really bad transphobia. It's a really gross package, but it hits on a lot of points of like this type of patriarchal

conservative brain. I think this even carries out into like hatred of trans women as trans women are seen as predators. They hate trans women to protect cis women. It's all of this like possession. It's this possession of the body of a female, so you need to protect it against the creepy trans women. It's all of this idea of owning women's bodies is essential to a lot of these ideas of transphobia. We're going to see a lot more stuff about how it's going to change from no hormones,

no transition until you're 18, to no hormones, no transition until you're 25, to no hormones, no transition at all. This past year, we've seen many proposed felony health care bans for trans youth. Good bills have passed in multiple states like Alabama, which means that it's going to forcibly detransition teens across the state. In Missouri, there's a similar bill in the works titled the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act, which currently applies to individuals younger than 18, but Missouri physicians and health care providers under the bill would be prevented from recommending gender-affirming

care to patients who are under 18. There's already been discussion in legislative sessions to extend the bill past the age of 18. While debating the bill seeking to restrict access to gender-affirming care, some lawmakers suggested that the medical interventions like hormones be withheld from transgender and non-binary individuals until they're 25 years old. During a public hearing for the House Bill 2649, a psychologist, Lori Hayes, testified that she believes young adults under the age of 25 are unable to fully comprehend the

traumatic and drastic and irreparable, quote-unquote, changes to their bodies that they will undergo if they receive gender-affirming medical treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapies. Also while testifying, Hayes, the psychologist, said that she supported conversion therapy, so that's surprising to nobody, or it shouldn't be. It also takes those people to the point where they're not necessarily eligible for their parents' health care, right? So I think 26 is the time when you age out, so again, it's a backdoor prohibition on transitioning for a lot of people.

Yeah. Yes. It's just trying to stop it at all. You can't take their word for it. They just don't want you around. That's it. They want you to kill yourselves, or they want you just to go away or not be trans. That's what they want.

I'm going to do a few, just a journal of American medical associations found that gender-affirming health care, including puberty blockers and hormones between the ages of 13 and 20, was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression, and 73% lower odds of suicidality. Another study published last year by The Trevor Project found that among transgender non-binary minors, hormone therapy associated with nearly 40% lower odds of recent depression and suicide attempts. So they just want to ban the things that make you more likely to live, right?

They just don't want you around. That's the actual message. So back to just kind of speaking of just not wanting you around, we're going to do some updates on Protect Texas Kids, the extremely transphobic, openly Christian fascist, there are words not mine, group based in Texas who organized a lot of events to harass either drag shows or harass Pride events last month. Its leader, Kelly Neidert, that's what I'm going to say it, tweeted a few weeks ago, quote, let's start rounding up people who participate in Pride events.

Huh, I wonder what she means by that. I wonder what that means. Shirley doesn't mean she just wants to kill all gay people. Oh, oh it does, okay. Another tweet from the main Protect Texas Kids account was, today's protest went well. No children seemed to be in the drag show, but there were a bunch of adults wearing mouse ears and watching the men dressed up as Disney princesses dance around. Totally normal and not weird, right?

So it's obviously not about protecting kids, right? Like that's not the focus, that's not the focus of their tweet, it's not the focus of what they want, right? Protecting kids quote unquote is a cheap excuse just to want to hate gay people and want gay people to go away. That's all it is, it's worth kind of retreading the same ground here, but man, it is still frustrating how many people fall for the bit. It's not about protecting kids, it's not about saving kids from groomers, you can look at

all of the sexual abuse in evangelical churches, Catholic churches, Christian summer camps, whatever, it's not about protecting kids, they don't give a single fuck. It's about wanting gay people to go away. Now both Kelly Neiderts and Protect Texas Kids accounts which they used to organize their Christian fascist events, both of those got banned in mid June, Kelly has got banned for saying let's start rounding up people who participate in Pride events. But this extends beyond Texas, this extends beyond twitter.com, right? Obviously these people were just using Twitter to organize, so they already extended out into

the real world, but it's not just Texas either. See, I think it's a congressional candidate, Mark Burns, who's a pro-Trump pastor, was running for South Carolina house district. He called for the execution of LGBTQ and trans people by using grooming rhetoric, and then he laid out exactly how executions could legally be done. So this type of like state enforced genocide, let's play a clip. The LGBT transgender grooming our children's minds is a national security threat, because it is ultimately designed to destabilize the Republic, we call the United States of America.

That's why when I'm elected, I don't want to just vote, I want to start holding people accountable for treason to the Constitution. I am going to push to re-enact HUAC, HUAC is the House of Un-American Activities Committee. It was a real committee that was formulated back in the 50s, and it's a committee that we should re-enact that starts holding these people accountable for treason. We need to hold people for treason, start having some public hearings, and start executing people who are found guilty for their treasonous acts against the Constitution of the United States of America, just like they did back in 1776.

You know what, South Carolina? This is our guy. No. That was an amazing, the way he misspoke and called it the House of Un-American Activities. It sounds like a fun place. So that's not ideal, is it? That kind of sucks. Yeah, that seems bad.

Yeah. That was really out there. He's genocide advocating. It's just, it's just, it's trying, they're trying to mainstream the political ability to advocate genocide, right? And some of them, it's not fully catching on yet, right? We're on the on-ramp to this. The South Carolina pastor was defeated by the incumbent representative, William Timmons,

in the GOP primary for the state's fourth congressional district, but Pastor Mark Burns still received 24% of the vote. So that's still a lot of people, that's still a lot of people voting for that. And that number, I don't think it's going to shrink. Yeah, and like, it's also, it's also worth noting that, like, everyone loses, like, it is so unbelievably hard to beat an incumbent in primary, like, it just, it's, yeah, so like, like, even if he was just a normal guy with, like, regular politics, he would have lost that election, so.

Still, yeah. Yeah. So it's not actually a referendum on his popularity, like the popularity of what he's saying, it's... 24% of the vote. Yeah. It's worth noting that, like, even here in Southern California, right, where we're supposedly, like, very liberal, we had a candidate for sheriff's office who is the, was a deputy city attorney and was endorsed by the Union Tribune, just openly spewing, like, transphobic

groomer stuff at, at public meetings and getting endorsed by the local newspaper. They rescinded their endorsement later, but this isn't just like a red state thing if people think that that is that. No, that's, I would say that'd be a lot more common than people who run for sheriff who generally tend to be more conservative because they're running for sheriff. Yeah. True. All right.

Well, let's, let's have an ad break and then we'll come back to talk about, wait, talk about Roe v. Wade and, and the attack on future rights, including the ability to have same sex relationships. Oh, wow. What a fun time we have today. All right, we are, we are back. So after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, there was an immediate push for anti-gain, anti-trans-legal challenges using the same legal logic against the right

to privacy based off of the, the traditions deeply rooted in our nation's history, quote, unquote. So this was like undoubtedly going to happen, right? We've been, we've been proposing that this was a possibility for a while, but it was definitely made worse by Justice Clarence Thomas, front of the pod, who argued in a concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should, quote, reconsider its past rulings, codifying rights such as the right to use contraception, the right to have a same sex relationship and same sex marriage, invoking Griswold Lawrence and Oberfeld, three cases

having to do with Americans fundamental right to privacy due process and equal protection. As wrote, quote, we have a duty to correct the error regarding these established in those precedents, which pretty grim, pretty grim framing there, because that's a bad sign. And we are already seeing stuff like this in effect, actually, we don't need to wait for the Supreme Court to make rulings states are starting to do this exact thing. In an ongoing Alabama lawsuit that cites Dobs overturning Roe v. Wade about medically detransitioning all trans teenagers, there is this deeply threatening turn of phrase, quote, no one adult or child has the right to transitioning treatments, not deeply rooted

in our nation's history and tradition. Ha, ha, interesting how they put adult or child there. Isn't that, isn't that intriguing? Yeah, and it's also fun how the deeply rooted our nation's history thing is now just sort of like, here is the word that you say to let you do fascism, it's like, oh, hey, do you know what is deeply rooted in our nation's tradition and history, shooting congressmen. This is the thing that has been done many times, like, I mean, again, like this, it's like, this is the whole, like this whole thing is just like, it's so, the whole thing, it's

so incredibly sort of nakedly transparent and cynical. And like, this is, you know, it's the standard fascist thing, right, we're like, we're gonna create some sort of mythical past, and then we're gonna like resurrect whatever fucking things existed back then, it's like, oh, hey, what actually existed back then? I don't know, people tried to kill the government all the time. They're really, they're really playing from like the lower keys to traditionalist framework here. They're, they're doing all the bits we thought they would do.

It's not great. Late last month during the end of Pride, Texas Republican Party unveiled its updated official opposition on LGBTQ issues, defining homosexuality as quote, an abnormal lifestyle choice, unquote, and also opposing, quote, all efforts to validate transgender identity. The party's new official stance on LGBTQ issues was unveiled during Pride month. And as advocates fight against record number of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in states across country this year, more than 340 bills, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBTQ advocacy group on the legal front, thousands of Republican activists met

at the party's biennial convention in Houston in mid-June to agree to the party's platform on a range of issues, including the rejection of the 2020 election results and a call to repeal the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was an act to prevent discrimination against Black voters, ah, this is, I would say this is a mask off moment, but they've never had the mask on in the first place. People, people, like that's, that's, that's, that's a specific one. That is a thing, like, like half of the Republican Party's platform has been people suing about the Voting Rights Act for like 50 years.

It's not actually a mask off. It's just that they're doing it louder than they were doing it before. It's a section titled Homosexuality and Gender Issues had the party stating that LGBTQ people should have no legal protection from discrimination and, in fact, suggested intent to ensure people's ability to do hate speech and hate crimes. Part of the 40-page resolution reads, quote, homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin, and we oppose any criminal

or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith conviction or belief in traditional values. Ha. I just, I just want to put it on the record here that, like, the number of, a number of my friends who have been attacked, like, in the last three months is, it's a lot. I got, I got called, I got, I got called a faggot for the first time in the streets of Portland a few months ago. Yeah, it's great.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's accelerating. It's, it's going, it's, it's, it's going. Um, but yeah, I mean, specifically, I think a lot of the, the last part of that resolution there about, you know, opposing any civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith. I think that's, that's probably definitely a referencing steadfast Baptist church, the church that just opens, that openly advocates the genocide of queer people, uh, which we've talked about in our, in our last City of Hate episode.

Yeah, I think, I think they're also trying to go back to, like, the whole, like, cake bullshit thing. Oh yeah, obviously. Like stuff like that. It's like, it's, yeah. We, honestly, we are so past the cake problem now, because now they just want to, just, yeah, now they just want to, they just want to do like mass, they just want to do mass genocide.

Like I'm so over cakes, like, and in the trend of increasing the age barrier of gender-affirming healthcare into adulthood, the Texas Republicans called for the ban of gender-affirming healthcare, including the distribution of puberty blockers or hormone suppressing therapies and the, uh, and, uh, the performance of gender-affirming surgeries to anyone under the age of 21. So that is the new Texas Republican official position, is that these things should be banned for, uh, for under the age of 21. And that's not a, that's not a hard cap. They're going to keep raising that cap as often as they can.

And as proof, I will offer up the past 35 minutes of episode, like, everything we've said in the past 35 minutes is supporting the opinion that that cap, they want it to go up. Yeah. I'm sure they also simultaneously advocate for, like, heterosexual relationships, age of consent to just, to drop. Oh, yeah. Like 12, 12-year-olds.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, speaking of, speaking of Texas, near the end of June, uh, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, uh, who sent his office home in the celebration of the overturning of Roe V. Wade, said that he will defend Texas's anti-sodomy law if the Supreme Court revisits Lawrence v. Texas. I'm going to play, uh, extremely frustrating clip here. Here's a fun time.

I'm sure you read, uh, Justice Thomas' concurrence where he said that there were a number of other, uh, of these issues, Griswold, uh, Lawrence and Ogafell, that he felt, uh, needs to be, uh, looked at again. Uh, obviously the Lawrence case came from Texas. That was what outlawed sodomy. Uh, would you, as Attorney General, be comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed sodomy, that questioned Lawrence again, or Griswold, uh, or gay marriage, uh, that came from the state legislature to, to put to the test what Justice Thomas said?

Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of issues here, but certainly the Supreme Court has stepped into issues that I don't think there was any constitutional provision dealing with. They were legislative issues, and this is one of those issues, and there may be more. So it would depend on the issue, and depending on what state law says at the time, and what was overruled. But just, just for the sake of time here, you wouldn't rule out that if the state legislature passed the exact same law that, that Lawrence overturned on sodomy, uh, you wouldn't have

any problem then defending that and taking that case back to the Supreme Court. Yeah. Look, my job is to defend state law, and, and I'll continue to do that. That is my job under the Constitution, and, and I'm, I'm certainly willing to support that. So, first of all, in, in this clip of Ken Paxton, he looks like a zombie. His, his, I don't know what's going on with his face, but his eye, his eye keeps twitching in a way that looks really uncanny.

He looks like, he like, look at, look at this man's face. Look at what is going on. That's an unfortunate pause. No, he looks like that in motion too. It's not an unfortunate pause, he just looks like, there is something going wrong with Ken Paxton. We need to get to the bottom of this, but also all of that stuff about make, uh, enforcing laws against, uh, sodomy, making gay sex illegal.

They, they don't want gay people to fuck, is what they're actually saying, um, and if you do, they want to send you to jail, um, so that's something that Ken Paxton wants, wants to do, um, wrapped in very flowery language about defending the laws on record, that laws that you are enforcing, therefore you're making the laws in effect. Um, ha, so one, one aspect of this that I want to touch on again before we close out, in our, in our city of hate episodes about the Christian fascists in Dallas attacking drag shows and steadfast Baptist church, uh, and even in some of the stuff that we've gone over in this episode, right?

There's a lot of talk about like government approved extermination, um, whether that be like for treason, for un-American acts, executions based off biblical law, rounding up people for degenerate or deviant behavior, arresting doctors for performing gender-affirming surgeries. There's, there's a lot of like talk around like the government's ability to legally genocide people, um, but the other aspect of this is like the vigilante justice angle of people wanting to just do physical violence themselves. And there's a way that these two things can intersect in a really interesting way. I'm going to play one, one last clip here.

You know, some teachers pushing sex values on your third grader, why don't you go in and thrash the teacher? You talk to a normal person, it's kids about sex in kindergarten. You get beaten up, you should be beaten up, please. If I was a parent and my fifth grade daughter had had to sleep and shower in some kind of cabin at some summer camp that I paid money to send my child to, and there was a man calling himself a woman sleeping in her cabin, my husband would have beat him into the ground. Where are the men actually standing up against these men who think they are women that are

trying to compete in these female sports, shouldn't put up with it anymore. You need to intervene, you need to show up to the sporting, this is not happening actually. There is almost nothing that can be done that is, that is over the line to stop this. It's disgusting. There was a time in this country of just a little more decency where if someone even voiced the idea of taking your kid to a drag show, they'd be arrested. They are under qualified to have children, they should have their children taken away from them because it's child abuse.

So that's a lot of stuff. But it fluctuates between talking about people taking this into their own hands in a very obviously misogynistic and transphobic way. Again, it's about the access to, protecting access to the feminine body. And then a lot of other stuff around the government arresting people and such. It's about the mix between doing stuff yourself in a form of vigilante-ism or eventually advocating for the government's ability to do this. Now we've covered a number of incidents of violence or things that were escalating to

the point of that right before it stopped across the Dallas area. We talked about stuff in Boise, Idaho, with Patriot Front. We talked about the proud boys who stormed the library outside of San Francisco. I think I talked about most of those across a few of the City of Hate episodes. Then there is other incidents outside of just those cities. In Atlanta, a youth justice group was forced to cancel their rally in support of trans rights after an organizer received a specific, quote, vulgar death threat. In Kalima, Washington, a school was put on lockdown after an anti-trans student threatened

a mass shooting following a broad student walkout in support of a trans classmate who had been assaulted. People graffitied pervs work here on an elementary school in Ventura County, California, following a local right-wing papers story about a third grade teacher who affirmed a trans student's name and pronouns. In the lead up to Pride Month, an anti-LGBTQ activist named Ethan Schmidt Crockett vowed to hunt gay people and trans people and their allies at target stores. Following the store's decision to celebrate Pride, he made the same threat a month before.

In June, he attended the counter protest of a pro-gun control march for our lives demonstration carrying an AR-15. In Kiel, Wisconsin, schools were forced to shut down and go virtual after bomb threats were made in response to the district's investigation of anti-trans harassment by three students. Something I've been thinking about the past few weeks is that even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, multiple states enacted laws for vigilante bounty hunters to do the work of the state that the state wasn't legally allowed to do yet, directly, and they were getting regular people to combat and intimidate providers into not doing abortion procedures.

We're already seeing an increase in physical attacks targeting queer people, and I think many more regular people are waiting for the state government's permission to do the same thing. We don't need to wait for the Supreme Court to say, gay sex can be made illegal, right? States can already start doing this stuff now, and there's already people waiting in the wings, and as soon as they get the go ahead, they will jump at this opportunity. I'm going to play one final clip that is pretty, pretty grim. I just saw a man tell me in public that he can't wait until he's legally able, until

he's legally able to hunt me down. I just saw a man in public. I just, I can't wait until he can legally hunt us down. This is not okay. This is not okay. So that was a queer person who lives in Oklahoma talking about something that happened to them last month. And I try to, when I make these episodes, I try to not just lay out a whole bunch of

bad things. Be like, here's a problem. All right. Bye, everybody. Because that sucks. But also, I don't know what the solution here is, because this sucks. The California House and Senate just passed bill SB107. This bill would provide many protections for families fleeing states like Texas and Alabama.

It would protect them from extradition, from out-of-state investigations, and from out-of-state custody judgments based on providing gender-affirming healthcare. The bill is currently in review by the California Committee on Appropriations, and then it would need to be signed by the governor. If your state doesn't have a trans-sanctuary law on the docket, maybe it's time to ask your representative about that, preferably maybe when they're out at dinner or at church. But also, even getting to the point where we're making plans to flee to other states, when trans people are forced to make plans to flee out of country, when you're investigating

what kind of citizenship you can get based on your ancestral family history, once we're at that point, it's really hard. In discussions with queer friends the past few weeks, we've been having more and more conversations about that, more and more plans about when things really do fully break down. Where do we go? What do we do? It sucks, because there's so many people who live in states like Oklahoma, like Texas. That's people's homes.

That's where these queer people are living, and they shouldn't be forced to leave. That shouldn't happen. We have great folks like the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, which I think are providing a really good example of how queer people can work together to start doing community defense in your own areas, to say, no, this is our home too, and we're going to fucking walk around with rifles to defend it if we have to. Obviously, not everyone mentally is able to do that, but there's other ways to get more connected to your local community to strengthen queer areas inside states where these things

are happening. The other thing I see a lot with queer people that makes me really sad is that fighting the state, fighting these types of big homophobic institutions who want to kill us, that's hard and scary. We feel so powerless. We want to feel like we have any agency. We want to feel like we have any power at all, because there's so many people with power who are hurting us, and it's hard to actually fight back against those.

We feel powerless. We want to feel like we're able, so instead we turn on other people who are within our own communities, because it's easier to attack people who are like us. It's easier to do that. It still gives you a sense of having agency, but they're trying to murder us all. Personal disagreements on politics or whatever aside, it would be really nice if we stopped just doing nonsense, fighting with each other, and doing dumb click drama, dumb discourse. They're trying to kill us.

Can we not? Can we not do that? I know you want to find some way to push back on something, so you feel like you have an ability to do anything, and doing it against the police, doing it against your state government, doing it against the Supreme Court, that's much harder. It's easier to do it against a friend of yours or someone who you used to be friends with. It's so much easier, but that's not helping in their attempts to just do genocide. I think making plans to get out of where you are if you have to, making plans is necessary

sometimes. I've thought of this. Even me in the Pacific Northwest have had many thoughts about that. It's also very important to start strengthening your relationships with other queer people in your communities and starting to put together ways to work with them to make a show of force and say, hey, we're here to stay right now. You can't scare us out right now, because there needs to be some way to combat it, because these people, they're trying to be regressive, right?

We are already at a point that we progressed far enough that they are scared of how much progress has happened, so they're trying to turn the clock back. Our challenge is to keep the change coming and push back against these people who are trying to hold on to the dead 20th century, right? The fear of change and the fear of the future is driving their return to the past. We don't need to just run away, because we should be winning this fight in some ways, because we already hold the ground that they want to take away from us. So yeah, bad stuff is coming, but just because bad things happened in history doesn't mean

they need to happen again. There is ways to intervene to stop this. Should you keep your passports renewed? Yes, you obviously should, but we don't just need to run away, because we actually have ground to stand on here. Yeah, and I think one thing that's also important to remember is that the people who got us here were facing way, way worse odds than we are. People who had to do this, yeah, and so the job that we have is incredibly intimidating.

It is also easier than the stuff that has already been done. Right, we already got to this point facing extremely harsh conditions, and we already got there, I don't know, it's always struggling to try to find ways to think about this that gives you a little bit of like, you know, it's just like, it's so easy to be a doomer, it's so easy just to say, we're all fucked, we all need to move away. That's the simple solution, but there's most simple things that are also usually incomplete and wrong, so just trying to find other ways to think about this problem, because we don't need to tell queer people to run away, and you don't need to tell them they have to fight

either. Queer people can make their own decisions and offer their own resources and start operating in a network that helps the survival of all of us in increasingly challenging times. And I should also say, like, non-queer people, like, look, the defining characteristic of this moment is that there is a silent majority that supports queer rights, and if the only way that we actually lose this is if that majority does nothing, but if that majority moves, if the cis people who actually believe in this stuff and if the non-queer people who actually believe that we should have rights and we should be able to live our lives, do

stuff, we will fucking crush these people. They will be remembered as a fucking grain of dust in the sand that was crushed by the tide of history, and we can do that, we can destroy them, we can make this moment in history a incredibly brief blip where people are like, oh, hey, that wasn't it weird when Homophobia came back for, like, three years and then it was just gone again? That is in our power, we just have to do it. Yep. All right.

Well. So, strengthen community relations, stop doing nonsense in fighting for no good reason because you want to feel powerful, put that effort into actually fighting the people that are trying to hurt you, or put that effort into making friends. That does it for us today. That was my episode on the increase in queer exterminationism. Yeah, see you on the other side. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things that could happen or

in today's case are about to happen. I want to talk to you today about the Friendship Park, which exists between San Diego and Tijuana. If you haven't spent time at the border, it's difficult to understand how, despite getting bigger and uglier every year, it feels at once omnipresent and non-existent. Friendship Park was always one of the places where the border loomed, but it never quite managed to beat out the tremendous feelings of goodwill you could experience there on a Saturday morning. On a piece of sand next to a steel fence that demarcates the end of the United States.

Borders exist to control us, not to protect us, and this is never more apparent than it was at Friendship Park, where you could watch grandparents meeting grandkids and dreamers checking in with their parents. At Friendship Park, a half-century-old institution that allowed family divided by the border to meet across the French, the border certainly didn't make anyone feel safer. But over time, people who had never set foot on the two miles of sand in Imperial Beach that many families walked across weekly to be together made laws that would make it even harder for those families to be together.

For decades, the park was the only place these mixed immigration status families could come together. People flew from across the US to meet relatives who were trying to make the crossing north to join their friends and loved ones. It was an emotional place, but most of the time it was a happy place. You could see kids having parties on the Mexican side, and sometimes concerts would take place with the bands split between two countries with playing one tune. On the Tijuana side, the fences covered in murals.

At moments, it felt like a small victory over the pointless cruelty that happens here on a daily basis. The park itself was opened by Pat Nixon in 1951. At the time, she said, I hope there won't be a fence here too long. Since then, the US government has built a secure fence in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, then a supposedly more secure fence following 9-11. Then it built a secondary wall in 2009. In 2012, a gate was installed to allow people to enter at certain times and weekends and

meet their families separated by just one barrier. Now, there are plans to replace that secondary wall by building a 30-foot wall under the pretense that the current structure is unsound. This new wall, made to the Trump design but built under Biden's instruction, will not have a gate, and the last place in the country that families could touch and heal will be gone forever. Customs and Border Protection blocked access to Friendship Park in February 2020. Having arranged that year, 4th state officials temporarily closed Border Field State Park,

the larger park in which Friendship Park is nestled. Since then, Border Patrol has not opened the gate that lets people unite briefly with their families. Their claim and influx of migrants has prevented them from having the staffing required to open the park. But on weekends, agents are posted up right by where the park gate is anyway, in case people try and make the crossing without permission, in order to see the families that many of them have been separated from for over two years.

Throughout those two years, I have crossed to Tijuana to report on the growing number of people who come from around the world, from Haiti, from Central and South America and Ethiopia, and recently Ukraine, to name but a few countries. Despite the heartbreaking stories of danger, fear, and loss, and separation from the people they love, they haven't been able to file a silent claim due to the Trump administration's spurious use of public health laws to severely and illegally limit asylum. I don't have time here to explain the entirety of the migrant protection protocol in Title 42, and I don't really want to either because the justification behind them isn't what's

important, the cruelty they manifest is what's important. Joe Biden, who came to office promising a kinder approach, has defended some of these policies in court with his Department of Justice, and a particular cruelty of Title 42, which allowed authorities to expel migrants who arrived at U.S. land borders, has persisted, despite Biden's recent change of heart, because several states managed to sue successfully to keep it in place. In the midst of all this, more and more people have been separated by the border. Now, the Biden administration is looking to permanently close the wonderliland of hope

that remained on a beach at the end of America. Obviously, a park with a massive fence doesn't solve a broken system, or make the cruelty any less cruel. But it was a place for healing, and kindness, and love, and families, and now that place too is under threat. I cut up with Robert LeVar, a friend of friendship park, to talk about the park, the threats to it, and what you can do to help. Robert, would you like to start off just by introducing yourself and explaining sort

of where you fit in the Friendship Park world, and in the world of the border more generally? Absolutely, James. My name is Robert LeVar, and I'm part of the Friends of Friendship Park Party Leadership Group. The reason I'm so involved with Friendship Park, and why Friendship Park is so important to me, is because I was actually one of those family members that at one point in my life I was deported, and the only way that I was able to see some of my family was through the border wall there at Friendship Park, in particular my son, who is active duty military,

and because of his military status, you know, I was not able to come across the border, or it was very difficult for him to secure authorization from his command to be able to cross the border, and therefore the only type of visit that I could have with my son and my granddaughters was through that border wall. So first hand, I understood very well the importance of allowing on the weekends, at least for a few hours on the weekend, that opportunity for families to be able to meet there at Friendship Park. Yeah, so perhaps we should explain for people who aren't here in San Diego what Friendship

Park is, right, or perhaps what it was in, say, 2019, before it was shut. Absolutely, prior to COVID, Friendship Park is a by-national park separated by a border wall, actually by two border walls, on the southwestern tip of the United States bordering Mexico. It's a border between Imperial Beach and Tijuana Beach, and Friendship Park is actually a strip of land inside Borderfield State Park, and that strip of land is in between two border walls, border fences, if you may say so, and that park is considered to us Friendship Park, which is the area where persons, families, mixed status families from both sides of

the border with me, but it wasn't only a place for families to meet, it's also a place for people of good nature of the United States and Mexico to be able to meet, and also extend their friendship between the two countries and the two communities. Back almost 51 years ago, this is the area that then First Lady Pat Nixon actually inaugurated as International Friendship Park, and actually went as far as cutting a barbed wire or having the Secret Service cut the barbed wire there at the park, so she could reach across to the Mexico site and hug the people of Mexico because of the sentiment, the feeling of that friendship between the two countries and her very famous words that she wished that there

would no longer be a fence here to separate these two great countries, and of course we know that 51 years later, almost 51 years later, that has taken an opposite course of direction, where we now have two border walls, plans are to erect two even higher, uglier eight walls to divide our two great countries. Yeah, so perhaps again, I think people have a very, the way that people see the border when they don't live on the border is very different to the way we see the border when we live on the border, right? And I think part of that is in this understanding of walls and fences and barriers and the various

things which we have already along the border, right? So maybe you could give us a little sort of potted history of the different, I think you're right, they're secure fences, right, that were built through the friendship park and across the sort of San Diego-Tijuana area. Right, well, you know, again, for the longest time, the only fence that used to separate the two countries was that strand of barbed wire, however, after Operation Gatekeeper 911, it was decided to build a sturdier fence, and then in 2011 the secondary fence was erected and at that time the threat of the park being closed again because of the advocacy of Friends

of Friendship Park, it was negotiated with Border Patrol that the park would continue to remain open with a limited access of at that time 25 persons at a time on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 o'clock in the morning to 2 o'clock in the afternoon. That second wall was erected when the federal government claimed an imminent domain from the state of California and acquired that piece of land, which is now considered the enforcement area and to us is the area that we better know as Friendship Park. And so what's the, there's a threat to the park now, right, there's a new threat and I think people, again, might not have realized that we're continuing to build, board a wall,

board a barrier, board a dyke, it's sometimes called depending on what part of the country you're in, but can you explain how, despite Joe Biden having signed this executive order saying what he claims saying not one more mile of wall, how are we still having this threat of building a bigger, uglier wall? Right, and you know, I think that's precisely the question that Friends of Friendship Park are asking, that why is it that if President Biden has stated that he would not build one more inch of Trump's border wall, all of a sudden now has decided to finish the construction of Trump's border wall.

This is a question that we all asked and it's part of the petition that we have reached out to Border Patrol as to the inclusion of the public and in those plans on continuing the replacement of that wall with 30 foot bollard fencing. Yeah, and that 30 foot bollard fencing, that's what people will be familiar with as the Trump wall, right? That is correct. Something that, you know, the fencing that exists right now, you know, it's there and I guess even though we may not like what it is and what it represents, you know, but it

is there, but now to go even further and further desecrate our park with two 30 foot bollard style defences just completely obstructs the aesthetics of the park, desecrates our park. Yeah, and so yeah, with this sort of further threat to the park glooming, you touched on it earlier, but I'd like to go back to like what the park means, especially to families who are separated by the border, right, and can't cross to see each other. Oh, absolutely. You know, when the park was open on a weekend basis, you know, we would have families, you know, for example, grandmothers that had never met their grandchildren, you know, meet their

grandchildren for the first time right across that border wall, you know, mothers that hadn't seen their kids in 20, 25, 30 years, you know, the joy of being able to at least see them across that border wall and just, you know, a couple inches away from them. And even though, you know, nothing could pass through that barrier, the only thing that was able to pass through the orifice there on the wall or the fencing was the tip of your finger, which is why we kind of created what we call the pinky kiss, because that's the only thing that would reach across and that's the only way we would be able to hug and kiss our loved ones on the other side of the border.

Very significant, you know, something that, that we hope more people would understand is that, you know, by having the park open and families allowed to be able to visit across that fence, it would allow people, even though it's not the best scenario, but at least it would give people, it would give families the opportunity to remain being a family, to have a little bit of contact with their loved ones, something very important. We keep hearing about reasons for, you know, border walls and more tech and security and so forth, because incursions, well, to us, this is one of the reasons why, you know, we have more incursions, because people get desperate from losing contact with their

loved ones, that they're willing to risk their own life to be able to reach their loved ones. That's why you have increased in people trying to swim across a border wall. That's why you have people reaching out to further points in the desert trying to reach their loved ones. That's why you have people climbing some of these 30-foot walls and falling and, you know, gravely injuring themselves, because you get to the point that your family is everything in your life, and you're willing to risk your life to reach that family.

When Friendship Park was open, we had a lot of conversations with a lot of people that came to the park to visit their families, and in speaking to them, they would tell you that, you know, being able to see their families, their loved ones, and sharing those moments together with very comforting and very energizing and motivating to continue to fight, to search for a legal opportunity to be able to reunite with their loved ones. Yeah. And I think we should point out that, like, since 2020, since the park has been closed, it's not just the park being closed, which has created, like, a hostile environment for

people seeking asylum or seeking to reunite with their families in the United States. We've had the Migrant Protection Protocol, which is better known as Remain in Mexico, and we've had Title 42, sometimes called Catch and Release, both of which do the same things that you say, which is increase the amount of people who cross in high-risk areas and increase the danger to migrants, chiefly. So there's this perception, I think, that things changed in January 2021, but they didn't, I think, for most people, certainly people I've met trying to come to the United States to be safe.

They still can't, and as you say, they still can't see their families. Perhaps we should also mention that, like, sometimes we talk about Friendship Park being binational, but it's more than that, right? I think it's not just people from Mexico who come to meet their families at Friendship Park. There's people from all around the world who are unable to come to the United States but are in Tijuana, right? Right, absolutely, and, you know, it's not just, you know, families that gather there,

it's friendships, it's an opportunity for people from any part of the world to be able to make a connection, make a friend, right across that border, while without actually having to cross the border, if for whatever reason they may be, they cannot come across to the Mexico side. The park is all about friendship, that's why, to First Lady Pat Nixon, we're so important, the dexonation of the park, in consideration of the great friendship that existed and has always existed, and you know what, no matter what happens, that is going to continue because in particular San Diego and Tijuana, we really want community.

There's a tremendous population in San Diego that have relatives in Tijuana and vice versa, and it's not only, you know, the family but commerce, you know, we're one community, and we're another, you know, people are going to stay connected, always figure out different ways to be able to remain connected and have that friendship, and I think part of the reason for that is because, you know, a lot of people see that border fence, and they see a barrier, but we see that much more than that barrier is the barrier in our heart, and you know, the people of our community, that barrier doesn't exist, the only barrier to us is that fence. The barrier in our heart does not exist because we have respect for each other, and we consider

ourselves friends in one community on both sides of that border wall. Yeah, yeah, definitely, I think it's, yeah, the border exists a lot more sort of on the ground than it does in the community here, and I think so many thousands of people cross every day, it's really odd to have it presented as this hard, impenetrable thing, and then it's also just an annoyance and a reason that we sit in our cars for hours trying to cross north. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about, because there's a friendship park and then there's the southern side, right, Parque de la Amistad.

What's the official sort of setup in Mexico with regards to the park? It's a little different from the US, right? Yeah, well, you know, the big difference on the Mexico side is like our Pastor John Fannis said, on the Mexico side is one big party, you know, one big friendly, happy atmosphere just like what you would expect to find in any park where families gather on the weekend and now, you know, during summer vacation, even during the week, you know, a bustling beach city with a magnificent friendly park, family oriented, a family friendly park where people go to enjoy a beautiful park, unfortunately, our friends on the US side cannot enjoy the

park as much as our friends on the Mexico side do because of these limitations on the park. Yeah, it's a shame, like you said, it's very contrasting, like the US side is kind of difficult to get to and it's only open certain hours or it's not open at all post. We should explain that, right? So it was closed in 2020 for COVID and then if I understand right following that it remained closed because Border Patrol were understaffed, they claim. Right, that is what we have been told at Friends of Friendship Park, originally that

it was closed because of COVID and the understanding was that when the COVID situation was over then that their plan was to reopen Friendship Park, however, now we're being told that because of a lack of personnel that they're not able to staff it accordingly to be able to open it. You know, you touched a little bit earlier on the MPP program, you know, if there has been increasing incursions into the US, a lot of it has to do with the asylum process that has been halted for so many years, for the last couple of years that, you know, forces people in desperation to take their life at risk and try to gain entry into the US.

You know, it's not that difficult to understand if you're living in a country where crime and violence is widespread and you have a choice whether you leave your country and travel three, four thousand miles to reach some kind of safety to protect the life of your loved ones, of your family. You know, you're going to, if you risk that, you're going to risk your life trying to get across it and protect your family and if the only way you can do it is by jumping over that fence or swimming around that ocean, you know, that's what we've seen happening and a lot of that has got to do with the asylum process that has been shut down and continues

to be shut down. People are going to continue to try to save their life and their life of their family. That's why we're hoping that the asylum process can be restated as an international law requires calls for it and that would definitely show a decrease in incursions. Again, you know, a lot of these incursions are people trying to reach safety for themselves and their loved ones. Yeah, and it's been a very difficult situation in Tijuana for a lot of people, a lot of people who've arrived since MPP started, like for a while, people were camping at the border

crossing, right? But in town, like at Pedwest, then they got cleared. Yeah, it's also sort of forcing all these shelters and non-profits in Tijuana to saddle the burden which they do a very good job with largely, but this, you know, where this massive richest country on earth and we just could have sort of shut the door at the minute and saying, like, you're not welcome. Right, that is absolutely correct. So I know that you've been doing some events at the Friendship Park, right?

You've got a concert coming up. Could you tell us about that? Yes, absolutely. We have a concert coming up for our 51st anniversary and the headliner for the concert is a gentleman known as the father of Mexican rock and roll, which began here in here, I'm saying here, which began in Tijuana, Mexico, Javier Bates, and, you know, what is really neat is that Javier Bates was actually the mentor of Carlos Santana and, you know, we all love the music of Carlos Santana, incredible performer, well, he had his start with Javier Bates at one

point here in Tijuana, Mexico, I keep saying here, I'm in San Diego, in Tijuana, Mexico, and you know, Javier is an icon of rock and roll music and of Tijuana and, you know, what I think is really special about this concert is speaking to Javier, you know, his ideals are very much along the ideals of what Friendship Park is all about, and, you know, friendship puts a smile on people's face, and that was something that Javier told me personally. I love to play my music because my music puts a smile on people's face and I like to make people happy. That's great.

And, you know, that's the whole idea behind Friendship Park, to make people happy, to have people enjoy a beautiful park, enjoy their families, enjoy the friendship across the border that we have. Yeah, exactly, and I think it's very sad. The whole sort of canard is very sad, right, like the idea that we don't have, we have enough money to build a giant steel barrier, but not enough money to open this place up for, you know, a few hours a week for people to see their families and enjoy themselves, enjoy that time together.

It just seems almost, like, pointlessly cruel, I guess, which I don't know, sometimes a lot of the immigration system seems pointlessly cruel to me. Yes, absolutely. When you separate a mother from a child, that is cruel. When you won't allow a mother and a child to even be able to gather for a couple hours a week separate from a barrier, that's very cruel. When you don't allow people of good nature, of good will to visit, even though it is across a barrier, that is not good.

Yeah, I think it's important that people across the country, like, obviously, like it can be really difficult to care about everything, right, like, it's a pretty difficult time with Supreme Court decisions and seemingly sort of nonstop mass shootings. It's a difficult time for everyone, I think, but like, I think it's important that people realise that the border is where a lot of these policies get tried for the first time, right, these things which, like, if we look at the way that, like, privacy of people living on the border has been eroded for a very long time, and that's happening to other people. It happened in 2020, right, it was a border patrol drone that was flying over Minneapolis

during the protests. And so if people want to push back and to show solidarity and support, how can they support the park and how maybe can they support the people who are stuck in Tijuana and want to cross but are not allowed to cross because of MPP or Title 42 or restrictive asylum legislation? Right. Well, you know, what we're asking people to do if, you know, you're in the Southern California area, you know, Rain or Shine, we go ahead and continue having events at Friendship Park on the US side like our bike rides, our native flora workshops, our border church on Sundays

at 1.30 in the afternoon. We invite people to come and join us, come and join us on a bike ride, come and join us on border church and show your support for the need to continue the work that had been done for so many years at Friendship Park in support of our bi-national families and our bi-national community. Also very important, contact your congressman, contact your senator and if you're in California of course your California senators, assembly persons, we need to urge them to advocate for Homeland Security, for the Secretary of Homeland Security so they may understand

the importance of the Friendship Park offers not only to the families but to our communities. You can secure a border a lot better through friendship than through border walls that at a given moment can be breached as we have seen they have occurred. The strongest security that anybody can ever have is a good strong relationship on both sides of the border. Yeah, I think that's very well said. So if people want to come to Friendship Park, can you just explain how they would get to one of these events and where they have to go?

Absolutely, what I would recommend is follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram accounts, Friendship Park and also our website FriendshipPark.org where we have information on all the different events on our border church and this way you can join us on the US side or if you want to come to the Mexico side, it's wide open, you can go directly right to the monument area where you can enjoy this great beautiful monument to commemorate the demarcation of the two countries. You can enjoy it either way but we do like and we stress people to come out and join us on the US side so that, you know, we're not forgotten so that this beautiful piece

of land on Borderfield State Park, known as Friendship Park, is not forgotten and not only that, you know, enjoy the beauty of the park. We have a beautiful park there, Borderfield State Park adjacent to Friendship Park. Seeing that very few people are being taken advantage of lately, we've had quite a few more visitors out there, horseback riding, bicycling, a few families out taking a dip in the ocean but this is a beautiful beach that we have there on the US side and welcome, you know, our community, San Diego to community to come and enjoy this well and, you know, as you come and enjoy it, you support our efforts to demonstrate the need to keep our

park open. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very, yeah, it's not hard for people to help and I hope they will. How long do we have, do you think, how long do we have before they break ground on this new wall? Right. So we're not sure how long we have, we were told that it was a matter of weeks, does that mean two weeks, three weeks, it's hard to say but we know that it could happen at any

time and lately we've observed several crews out there doing surveys and such of the area so we know that it's any moment they should be breaking ground and we hope that before that ground breaks that they will consider our request and, you know, for public support for public input as to what the park should look like, you know, give that consideration to, you know, if you're going to replace walls to make sure that, you know, that gates are allotted so that these visits can continue because we understand there's no provision at this point for any kind of gate for, you know, for person access, for people access into the area.

That of course tells you that there's no intention of continuing at one point to open the park for the visits and of course that's extremely concerning. Yeah, it's better for people separated by the border. Okay, so just to finish up, can you give us those social medias and web addresses again where people can find you and help? Sure, absolutely. The website is www.friendshippark.org, the Facebook, you can find us under Friendship Park.

You can also find information under Order Church. Great. All right, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk and it's a busy time for you. You're very welcome. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today. Thank you. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of

the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.