It Could Happen Here Weekly 43
00:00Alphabet 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.
00:35So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads packagefor 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 earththat I no longer have to share with that fascist rap bastard Chinzo Abe.And with me to celebrate this occasion is Garrison Davis.Hi.
01:12I 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.
01:45So 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.
02:24But 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?
02:57No, 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,
03:29who 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,
04:18and 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.
05:12Shinto 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.
05:55Kishi 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.
07:09And 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.
08:16To 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.
09:25So 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 startswith 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 Kantoearthquake, 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.
10:19And 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.
11:13Yeah, 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.
12:16That 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?
12:52Yeah, 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.
13:27It 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.
14:15And 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.
15:04And 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.
15:46It'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.
16:06It 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.
16:36This 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.
16:59And 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.
17:26We 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.
17:47There 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.
18:10Oh, 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.
18:22I 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 therethere were like a bunch of like they're one of the most of the reports about the injuriesthat 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.
18:48But 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 werelike, yeah, his heart stopped.And they they helicoptered him to like what Tokyo?Yeah.
19:07Tokyo.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 pretendingthat 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.
19:30His neck's been shot.His heart has stopped and they just sort of like keep it there for a pretty impressivelylong time.And that's the other thing.We know very little about what happened and why the press has been keeping the governmenthas 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.
19:55Sure.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.
20:05So like there's there's been a lot of people like journalists, people who are like supposedlyJapan 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 numberof 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'slike grandfather, Kishi, like got stabbed right after he left office, like, and he only
20:33didn'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 likeno violence happens.Like it's a completely orderly society.
20:58It'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 inlike the 70s, like through the 80s, people would charge me like army convoys with sticksand like fight them.Like this is a country that like like people they have a sort of eight shit switch thatjust 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.
21:34And 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 amendmentquestion, 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
22:06how 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 fromtheir possible connections to any criminal networks, but like I know the Yakuza was sellingguns to people in Myanmar pretty recently.So they have access to this.Yeah.Yeah.
22:26And like the the mayor who got whacked by Yakuza guy, like if the Yakuza is going to dolike, I don't know if Yakuza is going to do a killing like they like they have accessto 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 ruleout them just finding some guy and doing this thing the FBI does and it's like, hey, you're
22:48going to go do an attack now.Like it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if that if they did that as like a plausibleand 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.
23:10Just have to add a few like nonsense names to the all the people involved like Blunderbustmanand 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 orhad 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.
23:41No.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 sellinglike 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.
24:11And 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 likecake 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 aviatorsand 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 steakhousemeeting and then he got busted by the feds.
24:53But yeah, these guys were trafficking like serious stuff like surface to our missilesand 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 knowhow you describe it like a kind of like para arm of the Japanese state in a lot of waysfor 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 likea thing to like justify starting a war.
25:31So 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 LDPhas a lot of Yakuza connections because kind of partially kind of everything is Yakuzaconnections, but partially also because the Yakuza were like a sort of founding like politicalblock of the LDP in the first place.So who knows like people LDP people have gotten like attacked by Yakuza people before it couldbe that it could be something else we sort of just don't know yet.
26:05Yeah, yeah, nothing identifying this guy like I just looking at a picture of him and there'snothing 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 freedomfighters.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
26:41are 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 surprisinglydiplomatic 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 Koreaare no and North Korea are really bad and a lot of the reason why they're really bad
27:13is 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 happenedin 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 doa Taiwan angle on this because Abe is like a Taiwan supporter, but I I don't I don'tthink there's actually that much.Do you people want this to have much more geopolitical like significance that it probably
27:47actually 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.
28:07Yeah, statistically, we are we are about to do based on yeah, yeah, you wouldn't needto 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 surprisinghow little stuff like this actually happens.See, there's obviously a lot of work that goes into like preventing it, but but stillsometimes 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 moreJapanese politicians have been assassinated, the American politicians like I'm trying to
28:38think of an American politician because we are because there's a lot more American politiciansand a lot of guns, they killed they killed when they went after Gabby Giffords, theykilled 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.
29:05That'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
29:32down 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 geta 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.
30:01Yeah.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.
30:14Yeah.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 likehe was pretty close.Yeah.
30:24That 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 RahmImmanuel 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 shouldhave taken all that CIA money.This is, this is, this is now their curse.
30:56Well, I'm sure we'll talk more about these types of homemade weapons and all that kindof stuff in the future.Cause it is, it is interesting and you know, places where, places where like actual firearmsare 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.
31:16All 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.
31:28Uh, 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 ourpolitical institutions and institution whose words echo through history and carve the political,
32:11legal 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.
32:28It'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.
32:57Oh 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.
33:10We'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.
33:24If you wanted to like go further back than that, I have no doubt you could like spendprobably 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 breadriot is that the sort of the structure of the bread riot is shaped inexorably by thesort of political and economic conditions around it.And the political and economic conditions of ancient Rome are somewhat similar to us,but not really.
33:49So instead of doing that, we're starting in the late 1700s, where there are a lot ofbread 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 whata bread riot actually is because, okay, so I mean, on a very superficial level, a breadriot 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 sortof complicated.
34:20I'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 shortagesexisted.B, the price riot or taxation popularity in which food was seized by protesters, a justprice set and the lot sold.C, agrarian demonstrations in which farmers destroyed their own produce as a dramatic
34:48protest.And D, the market riot in which the crowd took retributive action against commercialagents, bakers, billers, local magistrates in the form of looting or tumultuous assemblyto 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 thespecific kind of like rural like versions of this kind of fade into the background fora couple of centuries.
35:16What'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 seizingthe bread and eating it, which is the thing that like you would assume they would be doingif they were, you know, there's a bunch of people who are starving and there's breadand they take it, right?But that's actually not what they're doing.What they're doing is essentially negotiating over price.
35:39You 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 theysell 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 wayof trying to get bakers to lower their prices.And the other thing that's about these riots is that they are, they're very politicallysophisticated and they're very targeted.There's a thing you hear a lot and if you've ever read anything about any modern riot,
36:12you will hear just people ranting about how people are destroying, blindly destroyingtheir own neighborhoods.And it's just like not true.Riots tend to have a sort of specific political focus on attacking specific targets, whichis why the first things that go up in a riot are pawn shops, liquor stores, police stationsand now stores that drink their employees badly.They literally have specific targets.Yeah, yeah.
36:40Like it's very, all of the stuff that's happening is stuff that has, it's the result of politicalgrievances 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 thebook free markets and food riots.Protesters did not rampage indiscriminately, but focus their wrath on particular individualsand 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 asresponsible for shortages and price raises, the grain dealers, wholesalers, speculators
37:15and mills.Green shipments by wagon, ship and canal bars were seized and distributed among participantsor 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 allthe 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 religioushouses, which they treated in a similar fashion.
37:39Yeah.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 arelike, 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 kindof like basic contradiction of the market, right?
38:00On 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 peopleare like buying and selling and hoarding like stocks because not because they actually needto 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 getfrom eating a piece of bread and the exchange value, which is like the bread as a commoditythat can be traded for the commodities.
38:29And you know, like this is, this isn't sometimes like, this is behind a lot of like the housingcrisis right now.You have a bunch of people who buy houses and apartment buildings that, you know, not becausethey 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 needhouses to like live in them, like don't get a house because they're being held by peoplewho are trying to get their value to appreciate.And the goal of these riots is basically to prevent bread from becoming an exchange value.
38:58That 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 inthe first place?
39:23Um, the obvious explanation, like, okay, the people are rioting because the price of breadis 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 pricesrising, 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 whatthey're actually reacting to is what becomes known as the entitlement gap, which is this
39:55gap between people, what people think they're entitled to based on like the morality andhow 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 pricescourged, 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 reallycomplicated sort of like webs of horizontal social relations and like things like networksof wives and like political organizations and sort of like alliances that happen inside
40:27of villages, stuff like that, and that, you know, and these groups sort of like reactto 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 behindit 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.
41:02And you know, the food price increases are a threat to what academics call social reproductionor in essence, like taking care of yourself, your family and your household, like makingsure 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 peoplearound you.The cynical version of it is it's social, it's re, it's social reproduction becauseyou're creating another generation of workers for capital.But because women end up doing like an enormously disproportionate amount of that work, they,
41:29you know, they, they wind up in the streets first because they're the people who are mostacutely 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 notinghere is that riots are, these, these kind of bread riots are usually urban affairsand 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.
42:02We do not have a bunch of teenagers who show up at any time to fight the cops when somethingbad 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 entrapmentyet.Right, right, right.
42:27They'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 lotabout how these are led by women and that's true.
42:47But 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 thefunniest 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 oftraditional food riots.Indeed, the number of men involved had increased significantly in the flower wars due to thechanging male economic social, including familio and political status during the Ancien Regime.This was a life of precarious and declining social economic position.
43:20This equilibrium in the family structure of political alienation, one that left them inposition 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 havemade it for a long time like essentially considered like shameful to touch women's clothing or
43:56particular, like there's certain things that like you don't wear and that you're not supposedto look at if you see someone dressed that way that are like traditional women's clothingand so a bunch of male protesters would dress that way and form up and like ranks at theprotests 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.
44:21And I think that gets at one of the things that's sort of happening is happening in thisperiod too, which is that like one of the kinds of things that generates these red riotsis 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 hasa lot of interesting effects and when those effects are riots, the stuff, the stuff thathappens is really cool because you get a lot of sort of like gender roles getting messedup.You get a lot of like social ties being broken.
44:54I guess so the other thing that's going on in this period that is, is important becauseit's sort of like foreshadows a lot of what the sort of later bread riots are going tobe about is that, and this is like the fourth theory of red riots if you sort of like gothrough your economic historians of this stuff.They're talking about basically, the late 1700s are one of the sort of key moments inlike the formation of the modern state and what this means in terms of food is that controlthe food supply is moved from these, this sort of like parentalistic like feudal statething where on a local level you have guaranteed prices and access to food and this is shifted
45:36to 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 centralizationof the military bureaucracy and the centralization of the military bureaucracy means that they'retaking more control of the food supply.Here's some free markets as food riots again, older parentalistic models operating at thelocal level and assuring a printable supply of necessaries at a low price were underminedby new national policies aimed at greater efficiency and market regulation spanninga century and more.
46:08The policies included such varied activities as enclosure, land concentration, capitalintensification of farming, proletarianization, grain exports, taxes, tariffs and other governmentefforts to regulate the food supply.Price riots were simply one expression of popular grievances stemming from this broaderchange.And this is something that's very common.Bread riots are deeply and intimately linked with the ways that the food production processis changing and specifically linked to the ways the food production process is changing
46:40because of the state and markets.But we're sort of leaning into the late 1700s and at this point something happened thatno one expected.A bread riot went completely the other direction and irrevocably changed the state and themarket 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.
47:06And 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.
47:27Yeah.And so we're in in a second we're going to talk about the bread riot that changed thehistory 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?
47:47She 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 usup and offer us a sponsorship.Yeah.Well, OK, we're going to rewind a little bit before they kill Mary Antoinette to get
48:17to how that happened.So one of the things if you read the sort of literature on bread riots, one of the thingsbread 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 couplelevels which doesn't make any sense, right?Like, OK, if you think that bread is being sold at too high a price because people aregouging you, that is political, right?And then you go out and make them do that.
48:46Yeah.That's politics.People love to say things aren't political when they don't align with like a simple politicalparty.Like if it doesn't line up directly with the kind of approved debate topics between thepolitical 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 politicalthing.
49:11Yeah.And deciding that you're not going to starve and taking bread from people is an incrediblypolitical 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 thingthis leads to is if a thing that involves bread suddenly like turns into capital P politics
49:33and suddenly you have people doing things that are like well understood as like conventionalpolitical 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 madabout 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 likeyou can argue that like historians will argue that oh, these bread riots are apolitical.
50:11That 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 isthere going to be a king, the king is still going to be pretty strong.
50:40And 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 marchon Versailles, which is where the royal family of France had been like governing France fromfor like a hundred years.And these women are really, really angry and they basically forced the royal family tocome 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.
51:14They 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 directaccess to them.But once they're in Paris and once this bread riot like brings the king to Paris, suddenlythe entire like the entire concentrated political power of the French system is now centeredin Paris and is now in a place where subsequent bread riots can actually do stuff.And this directly leads to the kings being executed.
51:51This leads to our sponsors getting guillotined.And it basically it completely cements bread as sort of like the central part of like oneof 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 Frenchworking 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 sortof extended rolling bread riot.Unfortunately for us and spoilers to everyone who has not caught up on the end of the French
52:27Revolution, 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 sortof 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 replacedby like strikes and political protests organized by unions and parties because like the therural class has been like displaced at the center of history by the industrial working
53:04class.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 becausethere's another wave of bread riots that are that are very, very conventional and verymuch 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
53:2820th century.However, scattered to the periodical literature are accounts of 20th century food riots, whichlook surprisingly like those of the 18th and early 19th century, something not expectedin modern industrialized nation states.Food riots occurred in northern France in 1911 in Britain during the winter of 1916-1917in New York in 1917 in Toronto in both 1924-1923 in Barcelona in 1918 in Vichy France in 1942in northern France throughout the German occupation.The form of protest was remarkably consistent in each and reminiscent of traditional food
54:03riots 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 likebasically 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.
54:42You can't riot with us.This is our riot.Now, yeah, the British case in particular was also interesting because this is the middleof World War One.And so, you know, this is the sort of giant presence looming over these these these breadriots.And, you know, the government sort of like the government in response to this responseto widespread hunger, like decrease these price controls on food.
55:04But farmers are just refusing to obey them.And so women in Mayport organized and the result was, quote, when one farmer said hedid 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, yellingwomen 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 thefighting.
55:31Also, the miners of Cumberland were also active in supporting their wives' efforts, bothas added bodies strengthening the crowds, but also through the miners' associationand other working class institutions.So A, I don't know, I had to include this specifically because the image of a bunchof 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 fromthe 18th century riots to these ones on a social level, where in the 1800s you're dealingwith town and peasant cultural groupings who are supporting the protest.
56:09But 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-organizedby, like, it's remarkable because it's self-organized by women, even though this is, like, the partof 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, marriedin a lot of cases to the Socialist Party, and to some extent are in it, but are sortof operating autonomously.And they do this thing where they sort of, like, they start setting and forcing these
56:41boycotts of, like, shops that are deemed to be at, like, price gouging levels and theyfight the cops and they do a bunch of stuff.And the ones I mentioned in Toronto earlier are interesting because those ones actuallydo, like, have an organization in the beginning, but in keeping with sort of the traditionof 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.
57:12Lester Golden and Tema Kaplan have both examined food riots in Barcelona in 1918, part of awave of riots which occurred between June 1917 and March 1919 throughout Spain.As in previous cases, these riots erupted because of devastating price inflation, Ithink 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 wereled first by radical Republicans and then by a small group of female and narcosyndicalists.The women's demands were simple and straightforward.
57:44They 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 thrashingthem and sending them home.Yes.Yes.It rules so much.
58:05And 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 authorityin the process, which, yes.
58:25I 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.
58:49Hey, I think, I think most of the people listening would do some hardcore spanking if they couldget 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 trousersbecause they're wearing like so much weird shit on top of it.But.Belt technology has improved tremendously since then.Yeah.
59:08However, 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.
59:27So there's one more of these bread riots that's worth talking about, which also is notconventionally framed as a bread riot, but is entirely keeping with everything I've saidhere.The February revolution in Russia, so the February revolution is the revolution thatactually overthrows the czar.There's another revolution, which is the October revolution, which is one of the Bolshevikscome to power, but that's, that's, that's a separate one.They're fighting a complete group of people.
59:51The 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 toldthem, 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 likedoing 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
01:00:24and the other bread rounds we were talking about is that, you know, the, the demandsof 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 impacton, 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 likeBolshevik slogans because part of, because a huge part of what the revolution is, isjust a bread riot.
01:00:59And that, that, that's where we're, we're, that's, that's where we're going to leaveit 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 alsointeresting.And yeah, we're going to once again prove everyone who insists that bread riots don'thappen anymore wrong, a thing that I didn't know existed until I started reading thisand I'm now incredibly mad about.Yeah.
01:01:24So 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 beautifulsongbird that eating it is a sin.
01:01:54So 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.
01:02:31All 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 thebread riot.And like in the 60s and early 70s, like I think that this, this is one of the ways you cantell that period.People genuinely thought the world was going to get better.
01:02:50It was that like they genuinely believed that like the centralized state and like capitalismcan 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 dynonickisses 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.
01:03:13Right.I get why people think that that progress was, was really going back in those yearsbecause they got, they wiped out the dynonic kisses.Yeah.I mean, you have seen Howard Taft building the pyramids.Right.Exactly.Exactly.
01:03:26Exactly.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 Marxistclass politics.And then like every single one of these people was like the most wrong anyone, like basically
01:03:56from 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 primitiveabout these people's class analysis because you look at like the brothers, Gracchi andancient Republican Rome, a lot of the shit they're saying is not at all primitive classanalysis.Like it's, it's pretty developed.Yeah.
01:04:22And 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 classsystem either.So like, you know, like, yeah, like these are, these are very, and this is something we'regoing to be coming back to a lot this episode is that the people doing this are incrediblysophisticated political actors.
01:04:44And one of the, the sort of modern version of this is in the 1970s, not only did breadriots 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, CostaRica, Guatemala, Mexico, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary,Venezuela, Jordan, the Ivory Coast, Niger, Iran, Albania, India, and Nepal.
01:05:24Were 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 themis 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 IMFriots.There's a bunch of other riots, some of which are bread riots that aren't called the IMFriots because they're not really sort of like directly involved with the IMF.
01:05:51And this raises the question of what the fuck is an IMF riot.And the answer is that, unfortunately, to understand why people are throwing Molotovsthrough 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 backto 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 globaleconomy collapses, inflation skyrockets, countries across the global south start taking out these
01:06:27adjustable rate, they've been taking out these adjustable rate loans, and then suddenly theirinterest 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 tofeel the strains of insolvency as a result of a worldwide recession, successive oilprice 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 tobuy like oil is going up, and the price of what you can sell, which is like commodities
01:07:01like 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 upbeing 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 reservesout of the US.
01:07:30The US doesn't steal it.And what's funny about it is all the bankers who are talking to him, all of them reportafterwards 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 isthat he knew what balance of payments was.The short answer is that a balance of payments crisis is when there's more money flowingout 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
01:07:56out 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 MonetaryFund or the IMF, who like the only description of the IMF that I have is that like, they'rebasically like, if the cartoon Bank of Evil from Despicable Me like ran the entire worldeconomy, 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
01:08:28to implement what are called stabilization programs because of the quote, conditionalityof the loans.They have all these like this really technical, boring, like, neoliberal, like legal languagefor it.So like, this is all sort of banker speak for if you want another loans, you can buyfood, you're going to have to rob every single person you know, and hand them and hand usall your money.This eventually becomes known as structural adjustment programs, there's all of this sort
01:08:54of 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 forthese 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 mechanismsto stimulate export production and increase government for exchange reserves.So according to the theory, currency devaluation make third world exports more competitivein the international market, reduced public spending, curbs inflation and saves money
01:09:28for debt repayment, privatization of state owned corporations generate more productiveinvestment and reduce public payrolls, elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreigninvestment lures more efficient export firms, cuts in public subsidies for food and basicnecessities help to get prices right, benefiting domestic producers, wage restraints and higherinterest rates, reduce inflation and enhance competitiveness and import restrictions canserve for exchange for debt servicing.So this has winners and losers and the losers are like everyone in the country that's happeningto this and this is pretty close cross class like these policies, they hurt workers, they
01:10:09hurt peasants, they hurt small shopkeepers, the middle class is annihilated, just likepeople who are consumers who buy goods and even the sort of like the local capitalistsjust get screwed by this.Because what the IMF is doing is forcing everyone to have lower wages, taking massive benefitcuts and massively spiking the price of food.And you know, I once again remind everyone that this is explicitly what the Federal Reserveis trying to do to us right now, like this is the kind of stuff that they're talkingabout in order to curb inflation is to just make the pay everyone less, make everyone
01:10:43take benefits cuts and then increase the price of shit.So the winners of this are like six bureaucrats, international investors and like a class oflike absolutely horrific large agricultural landowners.And this, this has about the effect that you would expect it to between 1976 and late 1992some 146 incidents of protest occurred reaching a peak from 1983 to 1985 continuing to thepresent without attenuation.Now the authors who are writing this right, they're writing this in 1994 so when theysay they continue to the present without attenuation they mean 1994.
01:11:22The 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 classicalbread riots, right?Because they are about the increasing price of food, they're also about the increasingprice 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
01:11:57for the depredations.Marches and protesting crowds converge on major thoroughfares and government buildingssuch as the Treasury or the National Bank or the Legislature, the Presidential Palace.Leaders attack supermarkets and clothing stores where fuel and transportation subsidies arepart of the austerity package.Buses and gasoline stations are burned.The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks on travelagencies, foreign automobiles, luxury hotels, and international travel agencies, or not
01:12:26that too, but also international agency offices.And you know, this is going to sound familiar from last episode, it turns out that justlike 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 isnow, we do have modern political organizations, right?Like we get general strikes, you get, sometimes you get just noble bread riots, sometimesyou 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
01:13:01of cross class movements, right?You have your sort of classical sectors of the urban poor, you have like particularlyin the global South, you have your shanty dwellers, you have unemployed youth, you havesmall 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 professionalgroups.
01:13:28One of the interesting things I was reading about this, I've read like a few books inthis 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 inSudan 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.
01:14:01And 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 massurbanization.Typically, austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price hikes resultingfrom the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services, proclaimed by thegovernment as a regrettably necessary reform urged by the IMF and international lendersas conditions for new and renegotiated loans.Five deaths in the first Peruvian protests began a pattern of violence.
01:14:32Peru remained a hotbed of austerity protests with students and workers demonstrating againstincreased food prices in 1997 followed by, followed in 1978 by a march of public employeesover 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 itearlier this year?
01:15:01I don't know, time is fake, and that's actually like the other thing I sort of startling aboutthis is like the places that riot are still the places that are rioting in like an enormousnumber 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 reactionto a 1989, like 50 to 100% increase in train and bus fares.
01:15:36And there are, these are like massive riots, at least 100 and probably like a couple ofthousand people are like gunned down by the army.And three years later, a relatively unknown colonel named Hugo Chavez tried to overthrowthe government that had carried out the price increases, Chavez, you know, Chavez is betterknown for his other works, but he's the sort of tie between the IMF riots and the sortof next phase of political resistance to this stuff, which is called the anti, which islike 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
01:16:19don't go very well.Like either they lose or at best what they were able to get was like temporarily stallsome of these reforms, and I say like reforms, quote unquote, like the sort of neoliberallike slashing benefits, if they were able to pause them a bit and then they would sortof get restarted after people left the street.But in the late 90s and early 2000s, people started winning Argentina is sort of famouslyforced to like tell the IMF to fuck off and they default on their loans after this likeenormous autonomous uprising in 2001 that like very nearly overthrows the government and
01:16:50forces out like five heads of state.There's the whole sort of pink tide in Latin America, the IMF gets like driven out of abunch 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 ofenforce programs on places like Greece and Spain.
01:17:22And 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 waveof 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 anothermassive wave of bread riots that ever like just everyone is completely forgotten unlessthe 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.
01:17:59In 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 2007were directed at a fail at the failure of the Prada government to prevent a 30% rise inthe price of pasta.To Haiti, where protesters railed against presidents, prevails in an impassive responseto 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,
01:18:30Senegal, 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 foodprotest over the period.Now we've been talking a lot about like food consumers in this because that's mostly thepeople who are involved in bread riots.But you know, as was happening in 1700 with the sort of original stuff, like this wholetime this is going on, there's this sort of massive shift in the global food economy
01:19:02happening where, and this has been happening for a long time now, but it's sort of it'sbeen accelerating the last about half a century, which is that the number of people who arelike peasants and who produce food for themselves has been massively declining and people aregetting forced into cities.And this means that there's, you know, there's been a number of other things that have gonealong with this.There's been this massive increase in like cattle production, for example, you get allthese monocultures.
01:19:32And another thing I think I've mentioned before is the World Trade Organization's like agreementon 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, whenyou enter these free trade agreements, you get all of this like enormously cheap foodfrom 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 thisfood from the U.S. because the food from the U.S. is cheap because the American governmentsubsidizing it, but the Mexican government can't.
01:20:01And this just like absolutely annihilates any attempt by a country to maintain food securityby like producing food for themselves, and this sort of class of like self-sufficientpeasant farmers who'd been, you know, they support themselves by producing their ownfood 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 laterversions is like Uber, right, but they're forced into gig work, they're kicked outof sort of the normal economy, and you know, because they don't have sort of fixed contractsor, you know, a lot of people are working with no contracts at all, they're enormously
01:20:38insecure.And once these people are forced into the labor market, like changes in the globaleconomy 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'reaffected by price increases, which is obvious, but it's worth saying because it dictatesa lot of like who does bread riots, and yes, and so governments are not entirely like blindto 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
01:21:13stuff.I think the most famous example of this is that like the Egyptian army like literallycontrols 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 revolutionsfrom 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
01:21:41the 75% increase in the price of rice, with similar price increases in soybeans and othermajor food commodities.Yes, there are these massive food price increases, and this, you know, this does the thing thatmassive food price increases does right there's there's there's immediately enormous riotsand there's this cycle that happens where the protesters, you know, the protesters immediatelyblame 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.
01:22:12And 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 likethe means of food production out of the hands of like the workers who need the food andputting 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
01:22:37emphasize, 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 thesebread 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 supportthis podcast all actively starving to death.So get these deals now while you still can.And we're back.
01:23:11So 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 whetheror 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 Tunisiawhere 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.
01:23:45It's just that there's a generation of people who've been farmers but like can't supportthemselves 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 thatcauses bread riots is it's not actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causesthem.
01:24:10Right.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 lotof 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, youknow, the amount of bread is bad, everything is expensive and one day someone wakes up
01:24:36and 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 dealingwith, you know, what, like moral economy stuff and you're dealing with, with this gap betweenlike what people think, like, like what people think their life should be versus the factthat their lives are just absolutely terrible.Even if you like decrease the price of bread, that's not actually necessarily going to likestop people from rioting.And if you look at like Occupy, for example, too, like, you know, that's also happening
01:25:06in 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 classand 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 sortof Tunisia and Syria is that like a lot of the uprisings, like they have this huge sortof rural core with, with this population, this huge population of people who've beenkicked out of the agricultural sector.And you know, and like that, that is a bread riot, right?
01:25:34And 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 ruralbread riots are like, they're the closest thing we have to sort of the classical 20thcentury revolution, right?Like that's one, that's the thing that causes, like the 20th century revolutions are thefirst generation of people who are like, but maybe the first like two or three generations
01:26:06of 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 andthe 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
01:26:38in 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 largenumbers 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 thingshappened in France, there was Puerto Rico, there was Papua, there was a, there was Indonesiawe're in our second Ecuador one now, there was Catalonia, like people rioted in theUS, 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,
01:27:18there 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 SriLanka we're about to get to.This whole thing has been happening like everywhere and it's been intensifying in the last, inthe 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 everysingle one of these protests has their own like local political conditions and like alot of these aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread, they're just about
01:27:45sort of other stuff that's happening.But like, like of the uprisings that I mentioned, like something like 15 of them are directlyabout the price of food or the price of like transitive fuel and we're going to talk alittle 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
01:28:17interesting 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 versionof 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
01:28:44government is basically like an incredibly corrupt dictatorship that keeps like importingluxury goods it didn't need.And they did a bunch of like tax breaks on rich people and suddenly the government wasbroken.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.
01:29:03Like 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
01:29:36dollars, right?We're running out of dollars.So we're going to stop people from spending their dollars like on buying this stuff sowe 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 anythingto 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 Lankacauses a food crisis and a food shortage.
01:30:05And this is a kind of classic like this is the kind of classic like situation in whichthe 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 pointlessinfrastructure 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'veseen before.
01:30:30But this is also this is also a food sovereignty problem, right?The Sri Lankan government has just completely screwed their farmers, which means they haveto import even more food.And you know, the result of this is months and months and months of very impressive sortof 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 decadeand a half ago, right?
01:30:59So 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 thefuck are you guys doing?And you know, like one of the things that happens a lot in these protests, like in allprotests 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,
01:31:31at 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 ministersin 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'sviolence, right?You know, okay, I can't give like a full like detailed political history here because likedear God, it is incredibly complicated and I don't understand it very well because you
01:31:59know, I don't study Sri Lanka.If you want a good account of this, Rohini Hensman's political dimensions of the crisisin 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 theseprotests, 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 likemass Trotskyite party, like they were the Trotskyites is like the only place on earth.
01:32:29The Trotskites had like a real like mass political party and they were like a part of the realpolitical process.And then they like sold out the working class and entered a bunch of governments that likedid 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 andthat means that every state is affected by the sort of like broader economic trends andsort of bureaucratic structures to hold everything together.
01:32:54They'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 synchronizewith 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 mightactually 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.
01:33:29The biggest difference, I guess, is that instead of sort of like waiting for conditions toget bad enough that like an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously, which iskind 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 oneof these?And by people here, I specifically mean the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalitiesof Ecuador or Conaí.
01:33:58And you know, okay, okay, as we've seen through this whole sort of thing, right, like breadriots, like adapt to the political organizations around them.And in Ecuador, we're dealing with a quintessentially modern form of political organization, whichis the Indigenous Confederation.And I guess I should sort of like preface this a bit with like the specific form ofIndigenous Confederation in Latin America that emerges in this period is like a differentthing 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
01:34:32America in sort of the 70s and the 80s, really, really started showing up in the 80s as aresult of like a lot of things, one of which was like how shitty the old like Marxist-Leninistvanguard 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 neoliberalgovernments.And I think they knocked off like three presidents, which is a pretty impressive track record.
01:35:05And on July 13, 2022, faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods anda 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 thatit's, it's part general strike, like part street protest, part riot, and part just likemass 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 marchingon and descending on the capital, Quito.
01:35:42And this is a, this is a complicated process.Like, you know, okay, like the left everywhere has like political divides and mostly they'rekind 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 leftistpink tight governments of Rafael Carrera.
01:36:11Like there were like soldiers and cops who are beating the shit out of Indigenous ecologicalprotesters.And you know, this means that like, yeah, you know, okay, so, so Carrera is like partiesrunning for president again, or is Carrera is not running, but Carrera's party is likerunning 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 votingfor these guys.
01:36:33These 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 theseprotests 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 thatwent on strike in 2019, like don't go on strike this time because of some political stuffthat's happening.But the thing about Kona'i that's really impressive is that they're still organized enough andthey still, like they're organized enough that they're able to just take control of parts
01:37:03of 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'slike 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 electedto like head this organization.And they arrest him on day two of the protest, and this is a catastrophic mistake, the protest
01:37:44just 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 governmentsand 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 betterin the press and it makes the protesters look worse, but they're able to damage likesignificant parts of the economy.And by June 30th, like they kind of win, basically the government's forced to negotiate with
01:38:17them and they don't get all of their demands, but they get price decreases for like fueland 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 andprice controls, they get like rural loan forgiveness, like interest rate decreases, they get subsidiesfor farmers, they get subsidies for families, they get, they manage to get the governmentto 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
01:38:47that 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 AmericanChina watchers, which is that I, so supposedly the Chinese word for crisis is composed oftwo characters, danger and opportunity.And it's like not true.
01:39:14As like linguistic and anthropological analysis of China, that that's not what, that's notwhat 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 singlecrisis is both a danger and an opportunity.
01:39:41And 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 forthousands of more years.And there's no use sort of like either pretending that they don't happen or making these sortof moral or tactical arguments like for against them because they just happen.
01:40:09And the question that we're, that we're faced with is what are we actually going to do aboutit, 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 stampingout 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 sortof break the system that creates them?And this is the second question from Pierre is if we're going to do this, how?
01:40:33And what we've seen from Ecuador in the past month or so is that if you take the fightto them and you are sufficiently organized, you can win.And that means the question now, as our food prices continue to increase, as food pricesare 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?
01:41:08Well, 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 youcould 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 backto like a late 1700s Fretts village and he tries to do this thing, like he does a systematiclike bread, bread price fixing, right?
01:41:47Like 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.
01:42:04It'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 areactually kind of already happening of, and today it's going to be, it's going to be oneof those.
01:42:36It's going to be about in the kind of the uptick in rhetoric around queer exterminationismthat's happened.Most of the stuff is what this is, is discussions and legislative proposal and rhetoric thatwas really kicked off last month during pride month, specifically because of the RoeveeWade 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 towe're going to open with something slightly more funny.And that's friend of the pod, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.
01:43:15Now 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 havea Twitter account, and it's pretty funny.And a few days after he was banned for continuing to misgender Elliot Page, he released a videothat can only be described as a supervillain monologue as a part of his new partnershipwith Daily Wire Plus, the hit new streaming service.
01:43:53And just because I think it's funny, we're just going to, we're just going to play afew 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 yousons of bitches?
01:44:30Ah, 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 soundinglike 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
01:45:09exact 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 goingall in on the bit.He's doing like Ozymandias, but hammed up.
01:45:37It'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 mandatoryand I'm probably doing it wrong nonetheless as you're doing it wrong is the whole pointof 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 notbe lifted unless I delete the hateful tweet in question and I would rather die than do
01:46:18that.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 myTwitter 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?
01:46:56Oh, it's, it's pretty funny.There's, there's two more clips from this rant that I want to do, which kind of aregoing 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
01:47:22some post-coital, so to speak, regrets about that phrase.It is clearly the case that the surgical operation performed by the butchers who butchered Elliotslash Ellen was legal.So was it criminal or not?Were the operations undertaken by the fascist physicians who carried out the Nazi medicalexperiments legal?Yes, under the laws of the time, but were they criminal?I'll leave that question up to you to answer.
01:47:58So that's pretty gross for a lot of reasons.One, the kind of historical context of using Nazis to compare to your own transphobia isa little dicey when you consider how, what the Nazis did to trans people and to likequeer 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.
01:48:35The 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, isincredibly 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 andlogic with him and you can watch his brain start to process it.
01:49:14But it's just like otherwise he just doesn't think in any sort of logical manner or puthis 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, incrediblyfrustrating.I don't even know what else to say about that because even that line you could focus on
01:49:57for 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 gendertransitions losing decades and decades of research that we're only now starting toregain.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.
01:50:40He really is like just advocating for the Nazi position every turn.Yes, he is just continuing to advocate for fascistic reasoning, fascistic views of decadenceand 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 heardany of the radio clips of just like Ukrainian and Russian soldiers yelling at each other
01:51:26and it's just both of them calling each other gay over and over again, it's just like reallylike 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 otherreally close friend of the pod, Matthew Walsh.So stay tuned for that.Oh, God.Okay.I have I have one question for everyone here.
01:52:01What 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 madeis transphobic documentary that was just a clips of him getting owned by like actualdoctors for not understanding like basic ontology and medical reasoning.The documentary was just a other friend of the pod, JK Rowling just expressed supportfor the documentary.
01:52:43So if that's if that's not an indicator that like Turfism is just like a direct preambleto open fascism, I don't know what is because I mean, Matt Walsh jokingly describes himselfas 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 thecentral 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
01:53:18and 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 sterilizationdrugs, 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 justI just want to take a second here to look at this position, which is that OK, so pubertyblockers are sterilization things, right?
01:53:51I 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'tknow.
01:54:03It'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 enoughto talk about.But I will.
01:54:22Is this a documentary real quick?Is this the one where he like goes to like quote unquote, the country of Africa and askspeople.Yeah.And then Paulie translates.Extremely racist.Yeah.Yeah.
01:54:35Great to see J.K. Rowling like known non-racist lining up behind these essentialist tropesof 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
01:55:01how 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 numbersof trans people.Yeah.Isn't it like some 1% or something?Yeah.
01:55:27It's very, very few.But the vast majority of people who do make the choice to detransition are usually dueto experiencing aggressive transphobia and the idea of the detransitioner has been inflatedand used as a straw man to attack the trans community just by and large with many documentedcases of TERFs or far-right activists creating like fake sock puppet accounts pretendingto 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
01:56:03to just be like an alt-right troll.And this all really sucks because the people who do detransition because they realize it'sjust not for them are generally pretty rad people who continue to be very much pro-transbecause they do understand the fluid nature of gender and gender expression through thisentire process.But and anyways, when quote tweeting an alleged detransitioner expressing regret of medicaldecisions that they made, Matt Walsh said this quote, we can't just oppose the transitionof children.
01:56:37Yes, 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 transitionuntil they're an adult to no one should be allowed to transition at all.
01:57:12And 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 ofhis preferred policies would result in the total prohibition of trans identity and thecriminalization of any gender-affirming care.Because people are fundamentally opposed to having any agency of your own body, whether
01:57:50that'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 thisnotion 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 patriarchalsociety.
01:58:21It'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 ElliotPage 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 tochange 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
01:59:07conservative 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 creepytrans 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,
01:59:46no 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 forciblydetransition teens across the state.In Missouri, there's a similar bill in the works titled the Save Adolescents from ExperimentationAct, which currently applies to individuals younger than 18, but Missouri physicians andhealth care providers under the bill would be prevented from recommending gender-affirming
02:00:18care to patients who are under 18.There's already been discussion in legislative sessions to extend the bill past the age of18.While debating the bill seeking to restrict access to gender-affirming care, some lawmakerssuggested that the medical interventions like hormones be withheld from transgender andnon-binary individuals until they're 25 years old.During a public hearing for the House Bill 2649, a psychologist, Lori Hayes, testifiedthat she believes young adults under the age of 25 are unable to fully comprehend the
02:00:51traumatic and drastic and irreparable, quote-unquote, changes to their bodies that they will undergoif 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 theirparents' health care, right?So I think 26 is the time when you age out, so again, it's a backdoor prohibition on transitioningfor a lot of people.
02:01:31Yeah.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.
02:01:52I'm going to do a few, just a journal of American medical associations found that gender-affirminghealth care, including puberty blockers and hormones between the ages of 13 and 20, wasassociated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression, and 73% lower odds ofsuicidality.Another study published last year by The Trevor Project found that among transgendernon-binary minors, hormone therapy associated with nearly 40% lower odds of recent depressionand suicide attempts.So they just want to ban the things that make you more likely to live, right?
02:02:25They 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 someupdates on Protect Texas Kids, the extremely transphobic, openly Christian fascist, thereare words not mine, group based in Texas who organized a lot of events to harass eitherdrag 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.
02:03:09Huh, 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 mouseears and watching the men dressed up as Disney princesses dance around.Totally normal and not weird, right?
02:03:42So 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 focusof what they want, right?Protecting kids quote unquote is a cheap excuse just to want to hate gay people and want gaypeople to go away.That's all it is, it's worth kind of retreading the same ground here, but man, it is stillfrustrating 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
02:04:15all 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 theirChristian fascist events, both of those got banned in mid June, Kelly has got banned forsaying 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
02:04:52the 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, wasrunning for South Carolina house district.He called for the execution of LGBTQ and trans people by using grooming rhetoric, and thenhe 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, becauseit is ultimately designed to destabilize the Republic, we call the United States of America.
02:05:35That's why when I'm elected, I don't want to just vote, I want to start holding peopleaccountable 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 thatwe 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 executingpeople who are found guilty for their treasonous acts against the Constitution of the UnitedStates of America, just like they did back in 1776.
02:06:14You 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.
02:06:36Yeah.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 abilityto 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,
02:07:02in the GOP primary for the state's fourth congressional district, but Pastor Mark Burnsstill 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, itis so unbelievably hard to beat an incumbent in primary, like, it just, it's, yeah, solike, like, even if he was just a normal guy with, like, regular politics, he would havelost that election, so.
02:07:37Still, 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 deputycity attorney and was endorsed by the Union Tribune, just openly spewing, like, transphobic
02:08:02groomer 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 ifpeople think that that is that.No, that's, I would say that'd be a lot more common than people who run for sheriff whogenerally tend to be more conservative because they're running for sheriff.Yeah.True.All right.
02:08:25Well, let's, let's have an ad break and then we'll come back to talk about, wait, talkabout Roe v. Wade and, and the attack on future rights, including the ability to have samesex 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 pushfor anti-gain, anti-trans-legal challenges using the same legal logic against the right
02:08:55to 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 wasdefinitely made worse by Justice Clarence Thomas, front of the pod, who argued in aconcurring 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 sexrelationship and same sex marriage, invoking Griswold Lawrence and Oberfeld, three cases
02:09:31having 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 thoseprecedents, 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 waitfor 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 medicallydetransitioning 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
02:10:17in 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 sortof like, here is the word that you say to let you do fascism, it's like, oh, hey, doyou 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'slike, this is the whole, like this whole thing is just like, it's so, the whole thing, it's
02:10:49so 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 gonnacreate some sort of mythical past, and then we're gonna like resurrect whatever fuckingthings 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 frameworkhere.They're, they're doing all the bits we thought they would do.
02:11:14It's not great.Late last month during the end of Pride, Texas Republican Party unveiled its updated officialopposition 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 acrosscountry this year, more than 340 bills, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation'slargest LGBTQ advocacy group on the legal front, thousands of Republican activists met
02:11:57at the party's biennial convention in Houston in mid-June to agree to the party's platformon a range of issues, including the rejection of the 2020 election results and a call torepeal the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was an act to prevent discrimination againstBlack voters, ah, this is, I would say this is a mask off moment, but they've never hadthe 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 aboutthe Voting Rights Act for like 50 years.
02:12:37It'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 peopleshould have no legal protection from discrimination and, in fact, suggested intent to ensure people'sability 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 specialstatus for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin, and we oppose any criminal
02:13:12or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith conviction or beliefin traditional values.Ha.I just, I just want to put it on the record here that, like, the number of, a number ofmy 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 streetsof Portland a few months ago.Yeah, it's great.
02:13:46It'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 resolutionthere about, you know, opposing any civil penalties against those who oppose homosexualityout of faith.I think that's, that's probably definitely a referencing steadfast Baptist church, thechurch that just opens, that openly advocates the genocide of queer people, uh, which we'vetalked about in our, in our last City of Hate episode.
02:14:14Yeah, I think, I think they're also trying to go back to, like, the whole, like, cakebullshit 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 massgenocide.
02:14:34Like I'm so over cakes, like, and in the trend of increasing the age barrier of gender-affirminghealthcare 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 bannedfor, 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.
02:15:08And as proof, I will offer up the past 35 minutes of episode, like, everything we'vesaid in the past 35 minutes is supporting the opinion that that cap, they want it togo up.Yeah.I'm sure they also simultaneously advocate for, like, heterosexual relationships, ageof consent to just, to drop.Oh, yeah.Like 12, 12-year-olds.
02:15:31Yeah.Yeah.Um, speaking of, speaking of Texas, near the end of June, uh, Texas Attorney GeneralKen Paxton, uh, who sent his office home in the celebration of the overturning of RoeV. Wade, said that he will defend Texas's anti-sodomy law if the Supreme Court revisitsLawrence v. Texas.I'm going to play, uh, extremely frustrating clip here.Here's a fun time.
02:15:57I'm sure you read, uh, Justice Thomas' concurrence where he said that there were a number ofother, uh, of these issues, Griswold, uh, Lawrence and Ogafell, that he felt, uh, needsto 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 thestate legislature to, to put to the test what Justice Thomas said?
02:16:32Yeah.I mean, there's all kinds of issues here, but certainly the Supreme Court has steppedinto 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 whatwas overruled.But just, just for the sake of time here, you wouldn't rule out that if the state legislaturepassed the exact same law that, that Lawrence overturned on sodomy, uh, you wouldn't have
02:17:00any 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 supportthat.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 twitchingin a way that looks really uncanny.
02:17:33He 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 withKen Paxton.We need to get to the bottom of this, but also all of that stuff about make, uh, enforcinglaws against, uh, sodomy, making gay sex illegal.
02:18:01They, they don't want gay people to fuck, is what they're actually saying, um, andif 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 attackingdrag shows and steadfast Baptist church, uh, and even in some of the stuff that we'vegone over in this episode, right?
02:18:44There's a lot of talk about like government approved extermination, um, whether that belike for treason, for un-American acts, executions based off biblical law, rounding up peoplefor 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 legallygenocide people, um, but the other aspect of this is like the vigilante justice angleof 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.
02:19:27You know, some teachers pushing sex values on your third grader, why don't you go inand 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 ofcabin at some summer camp that I paid money to send my child to, and there was a man callinghimself 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
02:19:59trying 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 evenvoiced 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 awayfrom them because it's child abuse.
02:20:27So that's a lot of stuff.But it fluctuates between talking about people taking this into their own hands in a veryobviously 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 eventuallyadvocating for the government's ability to do this.Now we've covered a number of incidents of violence or things that were escalating to
02:21:10the 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 transrights 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
02:21:53a mass shooting following a broad student walkout in support of a trans classmate whohad been assaulted.People graffitied pervs work here on an elementary school in Ventura County, California, followinga local right-wing papers story about a third grade teacher who affirmed a trans student'sname and pronouns.In the lead up to Pride Month, an anti-LGBTQ activist named Ethan Schmidt Crockett vowedto 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.
02:22:30In June, he attended the counter protest of a pro-gun control march for our lives demonstrationcarrying an AR-15.In Kiel, Wisconsin, schools were forced to shut down and go virtual after bomb threatswere 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. Wadewas overturned, multiple states enacted laws for vigilante bounty hunters to do the workof the state that the state wasn't legally allowed to do yet, directly, and they weregetting regular people to combat and intimidate providers into not doing abortion procedures.
02:23:12We're already seeing an increase in physical attacks targeting queer people, and I thinkmany more regular people are waiting for the state government's permission to do the samething.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 inthe 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
02:23:51he'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 themlast month.And I try to, when I make these episodes, I try to not just lay out a whole bunch of
02:24:36bad 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.
02:24:58It would protect them from extradition, from out-of-state investigations, and from out-of-statecustody judgments based on providing gender-affirming healthcare.The bill is currently in review by the California Committee on Appropriations, and then it wouldneed to be signed by the governor.If your state doesn't have a trans-sanctuary law on the docket, maybe it's time to askyour 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
02:25:41what kind of citizenship you can get based on your ancestral family history, once we'reat that point, it's really hard.In discussions with queer friends the past few weeks, we've been having more and moreconversations 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.
02:26:13That'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 providinga really good example of how queer people can work together to start doing communitydefense in your own areas, to say, no, this is our home too, and we're going to fuckingwalk 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 moreconnected to your local community to strengthen queer areas inside states where these things
02:26:52are happening.The other thing I see a lot with queer people that makes me really sad is that fightingthe state, fighting these types of big homophobic institutions who want to kill us, that's hardand 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 powerwho are hurting us, and it's hard to actually fight back against those.
02:27:17We feel powerless.We want to feel like we're able, so instead we turn on other people who are within ourown 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 stoppedjust doing nonsense, fighting with each other, and doing dumb click drama, dumb discourse.They're trying to kill us.
02:27:54Can 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 anability 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
02:28:31sometimes.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 peoplein your communities and starting to put together ways to work with them to make a show of forceand 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, becausethese people, they're trying to be regressive, right?
02:29:09We are already at a point that we progressed far enough that they are scared of how muchprogress 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 aretrying 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
02:29:47they 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 haveground to stand on here.Yeah, and I think one thing that's also important to remember is that the people who got ushere 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.
02:30:21It is also easier than the stuff that has already been done.Right, we already got to this point facing extremely harsh conditions, and we alreadygot there, I don't know, it's always struggling to try to find ways to think about this thatgives 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 incompleteand wrong, so just trying to find other ways to think about this problem, because we don'tneed to tell queer people to run away, and you don't need to tell them they have to fight
02:31:02either.Queer people can make their own decisions and offer their own resources and start operatingin 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 ofthis moment is that there is a silent majority that supports queer rights, and if the onlyway that we actually lose this is if that majority does nothing, but if that majoritymoves, if the cis people who actually believe in this stuff and if the non-queer peoplewho actually believe that we should have rights and we should be able to live our lives, do
02:31:45stuff, we will fucking crush these people.They will be remembered as a fucking grain of dust in the sand that was crushed by thetide of history, and we can do that, we can destroy them, we can make this moment in historya incredibly brief blip where people are like, oh, hey, that wasn't it weird when Homophobiacame 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.
02:32:14Well.So, strengthen community relations, stop doing nonsense in fighting for no good reasonbecause you want to feel powerful, put that effort into actually fighting the people thatare 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
02:33:06in 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, despitegetting 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 quitemanaged to beat out the tremendous feelings of goodwill you could experience there ona Saturday morning.On a piece of sand next to a steel fence that demarcates the end of the United States.
02:33:42Borders exist to control us, not to protect us, and this is never more apparent than itwas at Friendship Park, where you could watch grandparents meeting grandkids and dreamerschecking in with their parents.At Friendship Park, a half-century-old institution that allowed family divided by the borderto 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 Beachthat many families walked across weekly to be together made laws that would make it evenharder for those families to be together.
02:34:18For decades, the park was the only place these mixed immigration status families could cometogether.People flew from across the US to meet relatives who were trying to make the crossing northto 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 placewith the bands split between two countries with playing one tune.On the Tijuana side, the fences covered in murals.
02:34:47At moments, it felt like a small victory over the pointless cruelty that happens here ona 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
02:35:21meet their families separated by just one barrier.Now, there are plans to replace that secondary wall by building a 30-foot wall under thepretense that the current structure is unsound.This new wall, made to the Trump design but built under Biden's instruction, will nothave a gate, and the last place in the country that families could touch and heal will begone 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,
02:35:56the larger park in which Friendship Park is nestled.Since then, Border Patrol has not opened the gate that lets people unite briefly with theirfamilies.Their claim and influx of migrants has prevented them from having the staffing required toopen the park.But on weekends, agents are posted up right by where the park gate is anyway, in casepeople try and make the crossing without permission, in order to see the families that many ofthem have been separated from for over two years.
02:36:25Throughout those two years, I have crossed to Tijuana to report on the growing numberof people who come from around the world, from Haiti, from Central and South Americaand Ethiopia, and recently Ukraine, to name but a few countries.Despite the heartbreaking stories of danger, fear, and loss, and separation from the peoplethey love, they haven't been able to file a silent claim due to the Trump administration'sspurious 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 Title42, and I don't really want to either because the justification behind them isn't what's
02:37:04important, the cruelty they manifest is what's important.Joe Biden, who came to office promising a kinder approach, has defended some of these policiesin court with his Department of Justice, and a particular cruelty of Title 42, which allowedauthorities to expel migrants who arrived at U.S. land borders, has persisted, despiteBiden's recent change of heart, because several states managed to sue successfully to keepit 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
02:37:40that 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 crueltyany less cruel.But it was a place for healing, and kindness, and love, and families, and now that placetoo is under threat.I cut up with Robert LeVar, a friend of friendship park, to talk about the park, the threatsto it, and what you can do to help.Robert, would you like to start off just by introducing yourself and explaining sort
02:38:10of 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 LeadershipGroup.The reason I'm so involved with Friendship Park, and why Friendship Park is so importantto me, is because I was actually one of those family members that at one point in my lifeI was deported, and the only way that I was able to see some of my family was throughthe border wall there at Friendship Park, in particular my son, who is active duty military,
02:38:54and 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 ableto cross the border, and therefore the only type of visit that I could have with my sonand my granddaughters was through that border wall.So first hand, I understood very well the importance of allowing on the weekends, atleast for a few hours on the weekend, that opportunity for families to be able to meetthere at Friendship Park.Yeah, so perhaps we should explain for people who aren't here in San Diego what Friendship
02:39:44Park 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 borderwall, actually by two border walls, on the southwestern tip of the United States borderingMexico.It's a border between Imperial Beach and Tijuana Beach, and Friendship Park is actually a stripof land inside Borderfield State Park, and that strip of land is in between two borderwalls, 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
02:40:49the border with me, but it wasn't only a place for families to meet, it's also a place forpeople of good nature of the United States and Mexico to be able to meet, and also extendtheir 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 inauguratedas International Friendship Park, and actually went as far as cutting a barbed wire or havingthe Secret Service cut the barbed wire there at the park, so she could reach across tothe Mexico site and hug the people of Mexico because of the sentiment, the feeling of thatfriendship between the two countries and her very famous words that she wished that there
02:41:51would no longer be a fence here to separate these two great countries, and of course weknow that 51 years later, almost 51 years later, that has taken an opposite course ofdirection, where we now have two border walls, plans are to erect two even higher, ugliereight walls to divide our two great countries.Yeah, so perhaps again, I think people have a very, the way that people see the borderwhen they don't live on the border is very different to the way we see the border whenwe live on the border, right?And I think part of that is in this understanding of walls and fences and barriers and the various
02:42:39things which we have already along the border, right?So maybe you could give us a little sort of potted history of the different, I thinkyou're right, they're secure fences, right, that were built through the friendship parkand across the sort of San Diego-Tijuana area.Right, well, you know, again, for the longest time, the only fence that used to separatethe 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 erectedand at that time the threat of the park being closed again because of the advocacy of Friends
02:43:34of Friendship Park, it was negotiated with Border Patrol that the park would continueto remain open with a limited access of at that time 25 persons at a time on Saturdaysand 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 fromthe state of California and acquired that piece of land, which is now considered theenforcement 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 andI think people, again, might not have realized that we're continuing to build, board a wall,
02:44:42board a barrier, board a dyke, it's sometimes called depending on what part of the countryyou're in, but can you explain how, despite Joe Biden having signed this executive ordersaying what he claims saying not one more mile of wall, how are we still having thisthreat of building a bigger, uglier wall?Right, and you know, I think that's precisely the question that Friends of Friendship Parkare asking, that why is it that if President Biden has stated that he would not build onemore inch of Trump's border wall, all of a sudden now has decided to finish the constructionof Trump's border wall.
02:45:29This is a question that we all asked and it's part of the petition that we have reachedout to Border Patrol as to the inclusion of the public and in those plans on continuingthe 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 Trumpwall, right?That is correct.Something that, you know, the fencing that exists right now, you know, it's there andI guess even though we may not like what it is and what it represents, you know, but it
02:46:21is there, but now to go even further and further desecrate our park with two 30 foot bollardstyle 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 onit earlier, but I'd like to go back to like what the park means, especially to familieswho 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, youknow, for example, grandmothers that had never met their grandchildren, you know, meet their
02:47:13grandchildren for the first time right across that border wall, you know, mothers that hadn'tseen their kids in 20, 25, 30 years, you know, the joy of being able to at least see themacross 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 thatwas able to pass through the orifice there on the wall or the fencing was the tip ofyour finger, which is why we kind of created what we call the pinky kiss, because that'sthe only thing that would reach across and that's the only way we would be able to hugand kiss our loved ones on the other side of the border.
02:48:05Very significant, you know, something that, that we hope more people would understandis that, you know, by having the park open and families allowed to be able to visit acrossthat fence, it would allow people, even though it's not the best scenario, but at leastit 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 andso 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
02:49:01loved ones, that they're willing to risk their own life to be able to reach their lovedones.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 reachtheir loved ones.That's why you have people climbing some of these 30-foot walls and falling and, youknow, gravely injuring themselves, because you get to the point that your family is everythingin your life, and you're willing to risk your life to reach that family.
02:49:42When Friendship Park was open, we had a lot of conversations with a lot of people thatcame to the park to visit their families, and in speaking to them, they would tellyou that, you know, being able to see their families, their loved ones, and sharing thosemoments together with very comforting and very energizing and motivating to continueto 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
02:50:28people 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 thingsthat you say, which is increase the amount of people who cross in high-risk areas andincrease 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 Statesto be safe.
02:51:05They 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 beingbinational, but it's more than that, right?I think it's not just people from Mexico who come to meet their families at FriendshipPark.There's people from all around the world who are unable to come to the United States butare in Tijuana, right?Right, absolutely, and, you know, it's not just, you know, families that gather there,
02:51:38it's friendships, it's an opportunity for people from any part of the world to be ableto make a connection, make a friend, right across that border, while without actuallyhaving to cross the border, if for whatever reason they may be, they cannot come acrossto 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 hasalways existed, and you know what, no matter what happens, that is going to continue becausein particular San Diego and Tijuana, we really want community.
02:52:39There'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, andwe're another, you know, people are going to stay connected, always figure out differentways to be able to remain connected and have that friendship, and I think part of the reasonfor 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
02:53:43ourselves 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 theground than it does in the community here, and I think so many thousands of people crossevery day, it's really odd to have it presented as this hard, impenetrable thing, and thenit's also just an annoyance and a reason that we sit in our cars for hours trying to crossnorth.I wonder if we can talk a little bit about, because there's a friendship park and thenthere's the southern side, right, Parque de la Amistad.
02:54:20What'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 JohnFannis said, on the Mexico side is one big party, you know, one big friendly, happy atmospherejust like what you would expect to find in any park where families gather on the weekendand now, you know, during summer vacation, even during the week, you know, a bustlingbeach city with a magnificent friendly park, family oriented, a family friendly park wherepeople go to enjoy a beautiful park, unfortunately, our friends on the US side cannot enjoy the
02:55:22park as much as our friends on the Mexico side do because of these limitations on thepark.Yeah, it's a shame, like you said, it's very contrasting, like the US side is kind of difficultto 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 remainedclosed because Border Patrol were understaffed, they claim.Right, that is what we have been told at Friends of Friendship Park, originally that
02:55:59it was closed because of COVID and the understanding was that when the COVID situation was overthen that their plan was to reopen Friendship Park, however, now we're being told that becauseof a lack of personnel that they're not able to staff it accordingly to be able to openit.You know, you touched a little bit earlier on the MPP program, you know, if there hasbeen increasing incursions into the US, a lot of it has to do with the asylum processthat has been halted for so many years, for the last couple of years that, you know, forcespeople in desperation to take their life at risk and try to gain entry into the US.
02:56:55You know, it's not that difficult to understand if you're living in a country where crimeand violence is widespread and you have a choice whether you leave your country and travelthree, four thousand miles to reach some kind of safety to protect the life of your lovedones, of your family.You know, you're going to, if you risk that, you're going to risk your life trying to getacross it and protect your family and if the only way you can do it is by jumping overthat fence or swimming around that ocean, you know, that's what we've seen happeningand a lot of that has got to do with the asylum process that has been shut down and continues
02:57:53to 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 requirescalls 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 themselvesand their loved ones.Yeah, and it's been a very difficult situation in Tijuana for a lot of people, a lot of peoplewho've arrived since MPP started, like for a while, people were camping at the border
02:58:43crossing, 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 saddlethe burden which they do a very good job with largely, but this, you know, where this massiverichest country on earth and we just could have sort of shut the door at the minuteand 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?
02:59:16You'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 gentlemanknown 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 thatJavier Bates was actually the mentor of Carlos Santana and, you know, we all love the musicof Carlos Santana, incredible performer, well, he had his start with Javier Bates at one
03:00:06point 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, whatI think is really special about this concert is speaking to Javier, you know, his idealsare very much along the ideals of what Friendship Park is all about, and, you know, friendshipputs 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 makepeople happy.That's great.
03:00:56And, you know, that's the whole idea behind Friendship Park, to make people happy, tohave people enjoy a beautiful park, enjoy their families, enjoy the friendship acrossthe 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 haveenough money to build a giant steel barrier, but not enough money to open this place upfor, you know, a few hours a week for people to see their families and enjoy themselves,enjoy that time together.
03:01:30It just seems almost, like, pointlessly cruel, I guess, which I don't know, sometimes a lotof 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 hoursa 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 acrossa barrier, that is not good.
03:02:12Yeah, I think it's important that people across the country, like, obviously, like it canbe really difficult to care about everything, right, like, it's a pretty difficult timewith 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 peoplerealise 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 livingon 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
03:02:54during the protests.And so if people want to push back and to show solidarity and support, how can they supportthe park and how maybe can they support the people who are stuck in Tijuana and want tocross 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 Californiaarea, you know, Rain or Shine, we go ahead and continue having events at Friendship Parkon the US side like our bike rides, our native flora workshops, our border church on Sundays
03:03:42at 1.30 in the afternoon.We invite people to come and join us, come and join us on a bike ride, come and joinus on border church and show your support for the need to continue the work that hadbeen done for so many years at Friendship Park in support of our bi-national familiesand our bi-national community.Also very important, contact your congressman, contact your senator and if you're in Californiaof course your California senators, assembly persons, we need to urge them to advocatefor Homeland Security, for the Secretary of Homeland Security so they may understand
03:04:38the 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 thatat 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 bothsides 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 toone of these events and where they have to go?
03:05:25Absolutely, 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 differentevents on our border church and this way you can join us on the US side or if you wantto come to the Mexico side, it's wide open, you can go directly right to the monumentarea where you can enjoy this great beautiful monument to commemorate the demarcation ofthe two countries.You can enjoy it either way but we do like and we stress people to come out and joinus on the US side so that, you know, we're not forgotten so that this beautiful piece
03:06:25of land on Borderfield State Park, known as Friendship Park, is not forgotten and notonly 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 fewmore visitors out there, horseback riding, bicycling, a few families out taking a dipin 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
03:07:23park open.Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very, yeah, it's not hard for people to help and I hopethey will.How long do we have, do you think, how long do we have before they break ground on thisnew wall?Right.So we're not sure how long we have, we were told that it was a matter of weeks, does thatmean two weeks, three weeks, it's hard to say but we know that it could happen at any
03:07:50time and lately we've observed several crews out there doing surveys and such of the areaso we know that it's any moment they should be breaking ground and we hope that beforethat ground breaks that they will consider our request and, you know, for public supportfor public input as to what the park should look like, you know, give that considerationto, you know, if you're going to replace walls to make sure that, you know, that gates areallotted so that these visits can continue because we understand there's no provisionat this point for any kind of gate for, you know, for person access, for people accessinto the area.
03:08:59That of course tells you that there's no intention of continuing at one point to openthe 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 againwhere people can find you and help?Sure, absolutely.The website is www.friendshippark.org, the Facebook, you can find us under FriendshipPark.
03:09:33You 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
03:09:56the universe.It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check usout 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 slashsources.Thanks for listening.
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