Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 47

Episode Date: August 20, 2022

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

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

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about things happening that are bad and occasionally good, but all have to do with the fact that we're living in a society whose norms are crumbling as the environment also crumbles and political violence and a bunch of other horrible things become more normalized. Trying to figure out how to not die ideally and occasionally how to thrive.

And to that end, I have a guest today who has been working lately on how not to die in the face of things getting increasingly violent and aggressive out there. I want to welcome Jessica Keckler to the program. Jessica, how are you doing today? Doing great. So, Jessica, we are as listeners to the show and observers of just basic reality in the outside are aware. We're kind of going under or living through a period of panic and concerted aggressive attack on the rights and ability to exist of transgender people. Has it like, has never not been a problem as long as there's been, you know, Western civilization, but has increasingly been a problem the last year or so? Yeah, it's really wild because when you take estrogen, when I start taking estrogen, it took like 10 years off of my face as far as age goes,

but then in this past year, I think it's put back 5% on it, you know? Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Like, it's stressful as hell out there. There has been a surge in violence, not just against trans people. Obviously, we've talked about it in other episodes. There's been a surge in violence against Asian Americans, against LGBT Americans, but transgender people are much more likely than almost any other group in the United States to be attacked. And that has been increasing reality for a lot of people. And you are one of a number of folks in that position who have been increasingly talking or who have found yourselves thinking about the necessity and value of being armed in order to defend yourself from that. And I want to talk a little bit about your background there and kind of what, how you kind of came to deciding that that was something that you wanted to not just do personally, but advocate for other people to do.

Yeah, I went through, well, calling it Libertarian Spaces, it was many years, but, you know, and I collected a bunch of guns and, you know, I was like, oh, cool. But then after I sort of worked through my childhood trauma and stuff, I, you know, started to feel a lot less threatened about things and I just sort of, you know, just sort of lost interest in them for a while. But then a friend of mine, Kendall Stevens was telling me about a time when she was attacked in her home by a group of trans folks and just beaten almost to death. And that next morning, I reapplied for my charity permit. Yeah, and this is, I mean, this is a story I was not aware of. I was aware, broadly speaking, there have been a number of attacks, including a number of fatal attacks in the last couple of years on particularly trans women. There was the murder of West Philadelphia woman Alicia Simmons in November of 2021, Shantay Tucker and Hunting Park in the fall of 2018 and May of 2019. Michelle Tamika Washington was shot to death in North Philly and this is all like local to you.

Oh, and also Dominique Ramay Fells was murdered in June of, I think, 2021. And yeah, if people want to look this up, there's a couple of different articles. I'm looking at one on Billy Penn with the title. After surviving a brutal attack, Kendall Stevens wants to help trans people citywide. And yeah, it's a it's a fucking harrowing story, you know, after surviving a number of different attacks from from like people just kind of targeting her because she's trans. She was attacked in her home by six of her neighbors, while her goddaughter, who was 12 years old watch, it's a fucking horrifying story. So you like, did you find out about what had happened like directly from her? Like, how does this kind of information?

Yeah, I was I was at a there's a local trans group where we just, you know, get on zoom and talk. Yeah, it was one of my first meetings. And actually, I think it was the very first. And she just told this whole story. And I was just, you know, it's like, I always had this feeling of safety. But then it's just, I realized, like, oh, that's, you know, like being white, I'm a little safer. But it's just like, it's, we're all, you know, we're on danger. Yeah, it's a matter of like a small number of degrees.

It's not. Yeah. So you're, you're, you're trying to deal with this and you're, you're communicating. You've got this group where you're all sort of like chatting about, I'm guessing just kind of like safety stuff. Like, hey, here, you know, we should all be kind of keeping each other informed and trying to talk about what's going on. Yeah. This is a thing for Philly. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. I mean, we mostly just shoot the shit and just, you know, talk things over and stuff like that. She was, yeah, something had come up and she recounted this whole story and it was just, it just really made me go like, oh my God, you know. Yeah. So you kind of are in this position where you own firearms, you're comfortable with them, you've been using them for a while. And number one, you get your permit, right? Like that's kind of the first thing you do.

And then I'm guessing you start to think like, well, there's not a lot of other people that are in this kind of group I'm in that have this experience. Is that kind of like where the, yeah. Right. Because, you know, because when I would talk to people before that, they would just sort of say like, yeah, I can see where you're coming with that. And, but once the attack started, I'm, I heard a lot, I've heard of a lot more people going like, yes, I need to do that too. You know. Yeah. So I kind of want to know, because I mean, what we're kind of building to is you've been, you've been putting together a class for trans folks in Philly to go to to learn

about how firearms function, the legality and legal concerns about being armed and like the steps they might need to go to if they decide to do that themselves. How does that idea kind of come together for you to actually like put this class together? Okay. Well, I'm a member of the SRA, the Socialist Rifle Association, and they have classes they call Gundamentals. And it's just sort of an abroad overview, just sort of every, if you've never picked up a gun before, it will tell you, you know, it'll give you just information on, you know, everything you need to before you use it. And I thought it would be a good idea to just have a trans, just a class with just my trans friends and they were of course open to it and it went really well. And I plan to do more in the future. Yeah.

Um, so you kind of, you're going through both sort of the basics of here's, and this is kind of a thing I think about a lot. I recently carried out a class for, I don't want to be too specific, but at risk individuals in my local area, that was a mix of, and I was not the one doing the stop the bleed portion primarily, we have people who are medical professionals, but it was a mix of a stop the bleed class and like a firearms familiarization class. And it was not from the perspective of like, hey, people need to be strapping up. So here's how to get a gun. But it was from the perspective of, hey, there's 400 million firearms in the United States, whether regardless of what you think about the legality, you should have a basic understanding of how they function and how to, since you're all adults, render a weapon safe. Right. We, these fake bullets snap caps. So I would explain how an AR and a handgun works. And then we would have everyone take turns, kind of like we had with the stop the bleed portion, you know, where you teach people to use a tourniquet, we would have everyone take turns, arriving to the weapon, putting the weapon in their hands without like flagging everybody or putting their finger on the trigger, and then dropping the magazine and clearing it. And a lot of folks, the thing they expressed was like, as people who didn't necessarily want to be armed themselves, felt like I would, I had never got, I never knew how to like, ask to have this experience, because normally when you're in the room with a firearm, it's because like, maybe you're going to go shooting with somebody or something.

So if you're not seeking out that experience to actually go to a range, it's kind of hard to sit with a gun and just understand the basics of how this thing functions and how to render it safe. And so there were a lot of folks who, who particularly were like, seem to be grateful for just that experience to kind of like reduce the mystery around it and gain kind of a functional understanding of just the mechanics. Yeah, it was, yeah, the class was really good. I hadn't taken it before, but it's, you know, it shows like, they went through like the anatomy of a bullet, the anatomy of a gun, how it worked, how to do it safely, how to, you know, like the four roles of gun safety, legal things, and it was just, it was a really good course. Now, so you take this course, you know, you're in communication with these friends, you're dealing with like this constant drumbeat of attacks. You decide it's time to put together a course for people. How do you kind of work out what the syllabus is going to be for this? Well, if they're all, they have the whole class set up already, I just sort of had just had a version just for my trans friends. Yeah. So what, like, what did you kind of add to that or alter to that in order to like, prepare it for this? Oh, um, not much. I just, it was just, I just thought they would be more comfortable in a class with just us.

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. And it also, do you think it helped that like, this isn't, because you know, the Socialist Rifle Association, you're attending that class, you're kind of like, attending a class put on by an organization that has been both armed and political kind of in its name, which maybe infers a little bit more commitment to something than the class kind of you put together on like a political level? Yeah, it's not as hardcore as you might think from the name. It's just, it's mostly, they have the Gundamanos class, they have the Stop the Bleak, the courses kind of, you know, this kind of thing. And I think they, there's three discussions too. I haven't gotten to any of them. Yeah. And so you've, you put this thing together and the thing that you mentioned earlier when we were talking about this is kind of a discussion on like, like the, the, the, the particular legal concerns that trans people seeking to arm themselves might have in your area. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that because obviously when we talk about gun legalities, it varies wildly from state to state. So nothing that either of us say in this should be construed as legal advice for what you should do in your own area. You're going to have to check that out yourself. But yeah, I'm interested in what you saw is kind of worth putting in that. Well, the, I mean, the big addition to bring up is that if you're not, if you don't present as your assigned gender at first, they could, the person who's running the check could say, Hey, this person is coming to me in a disguise, you know,

and you could in future, if you try to get a gun in the future, that could be on your record and people could use that to deny you. Really? I had never heard about that. So that's like an actual, I mean, obviously, like when you file the form 4473, and one of the problems I know from just talking to friends that you encounter is that like if you're, if your, your gender does not match, like what's on your legal documents and stuff, you have to write what's on your legal documents on the form because it's a government form. Although the 4473, which is the background check form does now allow you to put in non binary, if that is like, but you still have to have it on your legal documents. And we're mostly used to that for everything else. But it's just the fact that they could specifically target you. Yeah, I was actually unaware of that as a specific problem, like that you could be accused of like showing up in disguise to do what's called a straw purchase, you know, which is when you illegally buy a gun for somebody else, I didn't realize that was a yeah. So were there kind of other things to like keep in mind there like because I'm particularly, I'm sure we have a lot of folks listening who are in this same headspace right now. Because again, things aren't getting a lot less scary out there. I mean, I can say just within the last couple of years, probably around half of the people that I shoot with on a regular basis are trans just because like it's the the you're the folks who are being kind of most directly targeted and have the least institutional support. Yeah. And we have like people in Congress openly calling for executions. And it's just yes, that's a feeling. You know, it's like, yeah, something I've ever experienced before. But it's like, yeah, you have like nationally famous politicians just saying like, yes, we need to kill every one of them.

And it's like, good Lord. Yeah. And that's the thing like, you know, I think we talk a lot on the show when we do talk about being armed. And I just talk a lot my personal life about like, sort of where what the left should be doing in terms of like a gun culture and like the kind of pitfalls that need to be avoided is obviously the solution to like the discrepancy of arms in the left and the right in this country is not to recreate what the right wing has because what the right wing has is like vicious and insane. Oh, it's garbage. It's bad. We don't we you don't want that. But and so obviously like one of the things that I tend to think of as as silly as like the the folks who are and I don't think this is a particularly large jump but you do get people who are kind of look at being armed from like and then we're, you know, this is so that we can, you know, be the new Red Army insurgent type thing which I think is a less realistic use case of firearms on the left than the police are not going to protect our community. There are a shitload of people with guns who hate us.

And, you know, honestly, like one of that when I think about like, what are the threats that are realistic and what are the threats when we talk obviously to show that we're on. The way they're the way they're doing the, you know, you have like Tucker Carlson saying like, oh, another weekend by Mar and, you know, making all these things and they they're sort of like all these trans people and like someone should do something wink, wink. Yeah. Exactly. And that's the what we're on a show right now that started out as me talking about Hey, I think people who are I think the threat of massive civil conflict in the United States is higher than people guess and that broadly speaking is mainstream now there is a strong mainstream understanding like standing that some sort of civil conflict is possible. It's still when people talk about it primarily in the terms of like this big civil war type thing which I think is broadly speaking probably pretty silly. And not silly is the breakdown of expectations of social mores and things like you can't show up in a big armed group and start killing people that you have on a list who are our folks that you have decided because they're trans because whatever are your

enemies. And like one of the things that I'm kind of concerned we're going to see at some point in the future is a fucking mob gets spun up and go and take out some people on their list. I'm not sure what that list is going to be. But you know, there's a couple of people who pay attention. There's a couple of broad possibilities as to who would be targeted. And then local law enforcement say we're not going to choose to do anything about this. And again, this I'm not coming up with this because this is like a bleak. I know you are well aware of this. But like we had an abortion clinic burnt down earlier this year and I think it was Kentucky and the police refuse to investigate it. Right. Like this kind of shit already happens, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it was for a while. It was like, OK, well, they're not really going to do that. And then it's like then they started coming after our kids and just like I almost didn't survive my adolescence. So I know just how much pain those kids are in. And yeah. And then it's like, OK, then they got rid of rivers away. And it's like, OK, they're not they're not just posturing anymore. I mean, the no, they're like, you know, hey, someone should do something was bad enough. But then it's like, OK, they're really they're on a tear hair. So you're you're put together this class for folks who I'm going to guess most of them had not. Number one, didn't have much experience with weapons prior firearms prior to this and probably also had not prior to, you know, the last year or two thought that they would ever be someone considering purchasing armaments. I mean, some of them said that, you know, they grew up, you know, in rural places and grew up with guns and stuff. But I haven't touched them since they were kids.

Right. Were there any kind of like specific questions that you got that you you found were interesting or kind of like surprising? Like I'm kind of interested in sort of what sort of things people had to ask? Not in particular. I think everyone was just sort of just trying to learn everything and all like that. Yeah. Were there is there kind of a has there been sort of like any further discussions about like, well, what comes next, right? Like after the sort of basic class, people decide to start purchasing like firearms. Step two is like train in order to use them like functionally, right? Like it's not a kind of thing you can just have. The next step from the group of friends that I have, I'm planning to, you know, go to a range with them. And I mean, we have to sort of find what ranges are most friendly. But yeah. So we're going to do that and just see how it goes with everyone. I mean, I know that where I am, one thing that people will do is, you know, you'll have folks who will kind of go out and be kind of a little guinea pigs for like, is this gun store a friendly place? Like, right? Like, is this a place we can go and buy weapons and not and have people like respond? Well, is this range a friendly place? And then kind of will spread that to the rest of the community that like, hey, this is a safe place to shoot to this is a safe place to buy. Do you have you guys been kind of like setting stuff up like that?

No, not yet. But that's that is the next step. Yeah. Yeah. And when it when it comes to like, just organizing for the increasing hostility that that people are facing, has it has it kind of pushed you to do anything more formal with like the communications groups you have in terms of like, you know, I need I might need I'm going on a walk at night. I need somebody to be able to like call or something like that. I'm worried I'm being followed. Like, is there has this been the kind of thing that you've been like setting up more in the way of precautions around so much because most of us just live in the city and we're we're usually pretty okay with them. Or have, you know, friends nearby, you know, nothing so formal. Yeah. I mean, which is yeah, I think how most people kind of do it. What do you sort of like watching out right now? What is kind of, I don't know, the thing you're you like, do you have anything sort of on the horizon that you're sort of looking at as, you know, if this happens, then I'm going to expect this to happen and like, you know, maybe we need to do this be time for some kind of more formal plans. It's hard to say. I'm just been sort of just watching all this horrible stuff unfold.

Everything happens so fast. Yeah. I mean, you know, like I said, I didn't think they're going to get rid of row. So it was just, I just I don't know what's coming next. I'm just realizing it's like, it's so serious. It's actually getting to the point where I'm just sort of seeing myself just trying to make amends with people in my past and it's like, you just you just take a step back and look at yourself like, oh, wow, it really is getting bad that I just subconsciously I'm just thinking I should make peace with some of these people. That's pretty bleak. I mean, I'm struggling for like something more positive to say, which I'm not sure is the is kind of the right impulse, but it is sort of like, we're all kind of like grappling for one of the problems is that the scale of the threat, I think is or the reality of the threat is very clear to people, right? Whether you're kind of a centrist dim and you just see like, oh, shit, there's actually like a lot of like militia type folks with guns talking about a civil war and they almost to go for Congress. This is a real threat. Or whether you're, you know, a trans person or, you know, an indigenous person or a migrant or something, somebody who's, you know, here in the country in a less than legal fashion. And you're seeing like, oh, there's specific threats against groups, people like me and they're being more organized and more attacks are being carried out.

The reality of the threat is, I think, clear in differing degrees to everybody. What's not clear is the scope and the shape of it, right? So we know there's a lot of like armed right wing assholes talking about violent shit. We don't know is are they ever going to get their shit together, right? Like enough to do so, like into what extent and in what areas, right? I think on that is, I think that, you know, it's like the enemy is strong and weak at the same time, of course. But I think with us, they're really, they really don't expect any resistance. And I think that if, you know, if they start meeting resistance or seeing us with that, like, hey, we have same rifles, you know, you know, I think that might, you know, hold them off a little bit at least. I think that's generally like, if you're kind of like, I don't know, thinking about it from that, from the perspective of like, and kind of a soulless, like, top down view of this is just a strategic thing. Like, what are the, what are the best ways to oppose this kind of like right wing and surgeon force? Well, like, obviously, one of them is not to like hand them ground, right? Like, don't, don't, don't, don't do the thing that you see a lot of people in the left doing, which is, oh, they're coming for, you know, trans people.

Well, that's not, you know, there's been a lot of like, very ugly talk on certain chunks of liberals on the left of like, well, you know, if we defend these people, that's going to be bad for us in an electoral sense, you know, and like, this is something that gets you votes in small, exactly. Hillary Clinton just fucking came out and said this, right? It's like, I think, like, I think historically is a bad strategy, you know, if you're just looking at what happened in history, obviously, I think it's immoral. And I also, yeah, I think that you are right in that the only reason that they're this scary right now is because for the better part of 20 years, a little less than that, but this really started to accelerate after Obama got elected. Every time the far right has like pushed for something and like made a stink or started making threats, people have backed off, right? And even outside of, you know, threat specific communities, there was shit like the Mayak report, which is in like the mid of Obama's term, the Homeland Security put out a report about the growth of the domestic militia movement. And they like made a big, they flipped out about it. And we're like, look, they're saying that if you have a Gadsden flag, you're a domestic terrorist and all this stuff. And the Obama backed off and fired all of the people in the federal government who were like watching this shit, which we can talk about the degree to which it's ever reasonable to hope that the feds are going to do anything about this. But it's an example of this. You get scared that opposing these people is going to be bad for you politically. And so you make a craven political decision to seed ground to them. And then they get more dangerous, right? And so the Democrats have just been doing lately. I mean, just yeah, left several decades really. It's such like a minefield to talk about being armed and being armed responsibly in the context of 21st century United States because there's so much to

juggle, including the fact that we have basically nearly weekly massacres and stuff being committed by people who go and pick up a gun from, you know, a sporting goods store or whatever. But yeah, and they're almost all fascist with the history of violence towards women. But it is like, I think when we are talking about what it is, the actual importance on both an individual level of being the importance on an individual level of people who are in threatened communities being armed is that they cannot trust the police or the state to take any actions to protect them. And we see that because they get thrown under the fucking bus every time somebody comes. My friend Kendall said after her attack that the police just sort of dismissed her. They just sort of like, oh, you know, it's just sort of dead. Yeah, they like misgendered her just like to complete, you know, this interest. And yeah, and obviously like this is this is the thing you don't have to there's a bunch of numerous other stories of that. And then on the other end of things you have like most of these people, one of the things we have in our corner as like scary as the the insurgent right is as most of them are fucking cowards. And when they get opposed when somebody shows up and throws down. Usually they fucking it's one thing if it's like a street fight, right, because people don't tend to get killed in street fights and you can make a lot of money filming videos of it. When fucking when when people start pulling straps, you know, like it gets really different really fucking quickly.

And in general, we've seen in Portland, there have been a couple of these folks shot in defensive shootings. And it's part of why that's kind of stuff doesn't happen as much as it was in 2018. You saw that shit happen in Denver and it had an effect on the intensity of rallies there when these people are, it would be irresponsible to say that it's like good when this happens. But when they suffer consequences for trying to hurt people, it scares some of them. It's a classic bully thing really. Yeah, if you stand up to them, they'll realize. Yeah. Yeah, I this is just kind of turned into us sort of talking about the ethics of community self defense. But I think it's something I think it's important to talk about. And I think it's also important to kind of reclaim from this kind of masturbatory fantasy of becoming a minute man or whatever. And also this masturbatory fantasy of like, this is something this is a thing I do as like part of my identity as opposed to like this is a thing that I do in order to defend my ability to continue to be who I am.

Right. I'm not I'm not a radical. I just want to be alive. You know, if I'm not if I have to detransition, I will not want to be alive. And that's that. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. Well, did you have anything else you wanted to get into where we're talking today, Jessica? No, I think that's it. All right. Well, do you have anything you wanted to plug any place you wanted to kind of direct people? Well, there's the SRA, because that's if someone wanted to at home wanted to do their own thing, the SRA would probably be very receptive. I'm sure there's other organizations. Yeah, there's John Brown Gun Clubs and stuff and other organizations that don't have names. And on a personal level, I well, I make bondage hollers and paddles called bondage robot. It's an Etsy store. It's bondage hyphen robot dot com.

Excellent. That's right. Yeah. So bondage robot dot com. Check that out. You're also on Twitter. Do you want to direct people? Yeah, it's That's where I found it. Yeah. Jessica Klashnikov just figured it out. You'll see it. All right. That is going to be our episode for the day. Everybody stay safe and, you know, think about the ethics of community self-defense. It's important. Oh boy, it could happen here and it seems to be happening more for the last couple of days.

This is a podcast about how everything's looking pretty bad these days. And in particular, right now, we're here, we've got the whole team, not the whole team, we've got 70% of the team here to do a round table discussion about the thing, you know, the thing, the thing that happened this last week that is still the main thing happening, which is the FBI rated President Trump's house. And now all of his fans are declaring war on the FBI, which is so far been, let's all be honest here, pretty funny. But everybody's also a lot. There's a lot of worry going on. There's a lot. The folks have documented, we'll talk about this that like discussion online of civil war and civil conflict has like exploded to new heights over the last like four days or so. So yeah, we're going to talk about all of that but but here's here's here's the team we've got Garrison Davis James Stout and we've got Christopher Wong, and of course, me, Sophie, how's everybody doing today. I'm doing great. Magnificently. So where's where's where's everybody's new civil war counters at who here feels like we're closer and who here feels like we've gotten further away.

Well, it's definitely gone up. It's definitely gone up a little bit. Yeah, temperatures a little higher, for sure. Yeah, I mean, we're still not really around the averages around j6. No, it's it is it's it's the highest it's been around like the Biden administration. Yeah. I just made some ceramic armor purchases is where my web where my current civil war counter is at. Yes, I did just get another set of rifle plates. Got some side plates.

Yeah, you know, you know who had body armor is the guy who single handedly attacked that FBI field office in Ohio with a nail gun and then died in a field. OK, before we get into that, Ricky, can we can we talk about what the fuck is going on with that guy who like lit himself on fire in his car and rammed into the capital barrier and like. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, like that might have just been a suicide because yeah, maybe we don't seem to have any clear evidence that it was political. Yeah, it's just it's just like a really weird like. I don't know that that's that's a kind of thing that feels like if it was happening five years ago would have been like a major news story. And when I was trying to find news stories about it. So the first thing I did was OK, I googled DC car attack and I found a different DC car attack.

And then I go DC shooting and I found a different DC shooting. And like if you combine the two, it's just like, oh, this is we're living in a great time. This isn't even the first not even the first person to drive their car into a capital police barrier. You get out and start shooting, right? This is this is the United States. It's just something we do here. It's an approved method. I mean, it just it does kind of seem like it was just a suicide.

Like that one was just a political suicide. That's what the capital police are saying. He was 29 years old, didn't appear to be targeting any members of Congress, fired shots into the air before taking his own life. No officers shot their weapons. It was very, it was very quick. Yeah. OK. Yeah, it is interesting.

There's a chunk in this one. Because he is he is no Ricky Schiffer. Yeah, the DC story is sad. The Schiffer story is yes. Super funny. Much more funny. Having gone through, I mean, so this is obviously you have Donald Trump get raided by the FBI and then less than two days later, you have this guy show up outside of an FBI field office, try to force his way through or try to break through the bulletproof glass with a nail gun,

and then winds up in an hour's long standoff before being shot to death by the FBI, which is very funny because he. So I guess the thing about this that's unsettling that that colleague of ours, Jason Wilson pointed out on Twitter, and that I think is worth noting is that while this kind of thing is extremely American and very common. The thing that is kind of unsettling about Schiffer is that he's not he's he's just he's he's straight up normal Maca, right? Like he's not from any of the there's no evidence that he was kind of like dipping into these other subcultures that are more explicitly like terroristic in their nature. Law enforcement says that he may have ties to proud boys, but yeah, we'll see. He was at J six, you know, so I'm sure. But I mean, it's what it is, is a guy who is a normal Trump supporter, getting radicalized.

Well, Michael Trump, I guess, in the. Yeah, I mean, I mean, he was ultra to the extent of what he did a few days ago. And he was on social and like he he was. Yeah, but that's that's not that irregular. Like if you watch the most recent Jordan Klepper video, there's people doing like, like regular ass people saying things that are way more absurd than what they were saying two years ago. Yes, like the reality has become so detached for a certain sect of like Trump lifers. And it's just impossible to pry them away to the point where they ineffectually attack an FBI office with an L gun. And dying to shoot out hours later.

And Schiffer, I mean, one of the things that you might compare a little bit to Schiffer is, you know, there have been particularly during the Trump years, there were a couple of attacks on ICE facilities that were kind of like acts of desperation from people who were politically radicalized by the things happening, but also felt like there was kind of no hope of taking any sort of useful action other than being an individual going out and attacking ICE. And I think this is a lot more similar to that in terms of the headspace of the guy that it's similar to, for example, like the Nazis shooting up like an El Paso fucking Walmart because they want to stop white genocide. Like this is this is a guy who was like purely radicalized by mainstream conservative media and the president's social media network. He was directly radicalized by President Trump as opposed to like finding Trump funny and then like winding up in some some fucked up places online that radicalize him. And that is unsettling, even though it's again pretty funny what happened to him.

I think both of those things can be true. And I think we have to take joy in the times when individual MAGA dudes use nail guns to try and attack the entire FBI. He really he really thought that you could use that bulletproof glass can't be broken by bullets, but you can use nail guns to just really. Well, he thought that this gets to what the communities that he was kind of radicalized and he thought that because there's a lot of like normal gun YouTube videos where people will like is the thing on like gun YouTube is people will take different kinds of firearms or other weapons and different kinds of materials and see how the two interact together. Right. Like do what happens when you shoot a bullet at this? How hard it is to get through bulletproof glass? What are ways in like he certainly figured that out because of because there are some specific videos people pointed out that are likely the ones he watched where like there are ways that you can kind of damage and take the.

You can gradually like make bulletproof glass fail by using a nail gun. There are ways in which you can do that. It just doesn't happen to be a way it's something you can do while you are standing in front of an FBI field office without getting shot to death by the FBI. Before before he before he died, he posted a few messages on to truth saying, well, I thought I had a way through bulletproof glass and I did it. If you don't hear from me, it's true. I tried attacking the FBI and it'll and it'll mean I was either taken off the internet. The FBI got me or they sent the regular cops. To be fair to this guy, he did successfully manage to shoot a nail gun at the FBI office. The FBI weren't the ones who killed him. Like he actually got away from that, which is highway patrol.

Yeah, he also called for people to prepare themselves for combat in the days after the FBI search. And that we must not tolerate this one along other posts around people urging to kill FBI agents on site and be ready to take down other active enemies of the people and those who try to prevent you from doing it. All that kind of rhetoric. And there's like, sorry. Yeah, I like the on site thing. Like we all have this kind of joke about like people dressing like feds, right? But it's very funny that he thinks that maybe they're coming out like men in black or something. Yeah. Yeah, he's not going to be looking for like like feds and Patagonia, which is what they actually were. Yes, yeah.

Look, if you see if you see a Patagonia vest that is either a federal agent or an Amazon executive, and either way, you should be frightened. Either way, on site. Stand by. Just such a generous interpretation that they'd take him off the internet for the crime of like trying to shoot up an FBI office. They did, James. He's not online anymore. That's true. Although, although like kind of bluntly posting about the terroristic attack you carried out on the FBI in like as you are actively dying.

I know as he's doing it. You have to say the man had the soul of a poster. He had the soul of a poster. He had the soul of a boomer. Well, I think it's interesting because there's lots of mass shooters who kind of have poster brain, right? He's not doing it for the post. Yeah, no, no, no. He just has poster brain.

This is just sort of like... It is separate from someone doing a specific like memetic attack, like an attack to entice memetic violence in the future. This was just his form of communication in his regular life. And it was the Ohio State Troopers that pursued the vehicle. Yeah. But I think that that does point to something that's kind of bleak about this, right? Which is like the extent to which the way this kind of politics functions is by having like, you know, social media becomes your entire like social sphere to the point where it's like, what are you doing in your last moments as you're like running away from the cops?

You're about to shoot. You're like, well, we're going to post. Yeah. Got to send out a truth. It's that scene from love, actually, but it's not true anymore, right? Where they're like talking about what people did in 9-11 when they were stuck in the towers and they like called loved ones and told them they loved them. Not this guy. No.

He left it on true social. This guy, this guy didn't have people. Ricky Sheffer. No. I mean, so there is one of the things that people have been asking again is in the wake of this massive surge in right wing people talking about how it's time to have a civil war. And one of the things you did see is like, as soon as Trump got raided, fairly like mainstream MAGA figures who tend to be more careful in terms of their language than like the radicals talking about like, it's war. You know, now we're at war, which is a cold civil war. And most of them, like Stephen Crowder, we're doing it to sell t-shirts.

But that's still, that is an escalation in danger, right? Because with that rhetoric that becomes common, again, you're going to have more Ricky Shippers. And I'm sure that was part of like what was going on in this guy's head is, okay, well, if we are in a cold civil war, then I'm not going to just sit back and let the FBI destroy the only hope for Western civilization. I've got to fight back. Yeah. And that's, that's what happened. And if you're, if people are asking kind of like, what is about to happen, what is coming next? I don't think the thing to worry about is like, you know, two sides taking up arms and suddenly fighting a big civil war. That is, that is not, I think the realistic threat model.

But I also disagree with the folks who are like, look, it's just going to, it's not going to be a problem. You're going to get a couple of like lunatics carry out attacks, but it's all going to be fine. I know what is happening is we are normalizing the language of political violence and normalizing that violence is the only resolution to our political problems. And that has gotten normalized for roughly 30% of the voting population of this country. That's, that's where they are. And that is intensely dangerous. It is not, I don't, I don't think, and I think partly you could, there's, it's not entirely bad stuff that's come out as a result of Trump getting raided. Some of it is, is positive because we are seeing that a significant number of like the media people are scared of that to a degree and peeling back.

There was an interesting thing that happened just today, the article came out that apparently Trump reached out to Merrick Garland and asked him how he could lower the temperature. And it's, it's interesting. And Garland is who for the listeners who does not keep up with the attorney general. So the, the, the president of the FBI, effectively, that's not how politics works. But let's just say that and make the people online who pay attention to the way the government works very angry. But so basically what it seems like Trump is doing is saying, hey, I recognize that like things are bad and scary. And the, the political temperature is like at a boiling point. I want to try to use that as leverage to work things out with the DOJ. So you could see this as a couple of minutes. You could see it one as potentially Trump being just actually concerned about the rhetoric because they shooting more would not be a good thing for him.

You could see it as Trump being kind of manipulative and trying to use like, oh, well, this is now the fact that my supporters are scary and carrying out terrorist attacks is a way in which I can utilize leverage and like exercise power over the government. And it's kind of a bargaining chip that I have in my fight with the FBI. Or you could even see it as potentially evidence that he actually is scared of potential prosecution because maybe this is him kind of that maybe this is a show of desperation. It's really unclear at the moment what it is. I can tell you I've read a couple of right wing that the New York Times is the one that broke this story and they're they're reporting on it is pretty straightforward and mostly focuses on the like claims made by Trump's legal team about like, you know, how they attempted to comply with the requests to bring in classified information. But the right wing media coverage of this has been really different and has shown it as like Trump is just sort of desperately, you know, trying to trying to be reasonable. And, you know, the Justice Department just isn't willing to talk to him.

It isn't really to work with him at all. And that's kind of the way it's being spun right now. There was that pro Trump protest in DC, which got no one to show up because it was either canceled or a whole bunch of like forums or image boards or for my blogs told people not to go because they thought it could be a trap. And I think stuff like that happening in DC might still take a long time to recover after J6. But stuff that's happening in other capitals and other places and other now FBI offices is is much more concerning. And I think more localized shows of support for President Trump or support for just whatever the current thing is is probably going to it's going to continue going with some image of militancy. You know, right, whether that's Hawaiian shirts showing up with guns outside the FBI office, which you've seen in Arizona just in the last couple of days. Yeah, yeah, literally yesterday as we record this when it comes to actual like so one of the reasons people have been concerned about Civil War stuff is and this is not unreasonable is the fact that you have had Republican officials,

including some state level elected officials, particularly in Florida saying some pretty wild shit, including like a state congressional candidate talking about. We need to basically kick the FBI out of the entire state. Governor DeSantis needs to exercise it like the basically saying that DeSantis needs to use Florida state law enforcement to stop the FBI from investigating the former president. And were that to happen, that would be a big deal that would be like that is the kind of thing that could lead to a massive civil conflict right because vaguely speaking stuff like that is what cause is what started the actual shooting in the last Civil War is state saying we are not recognizing the authority of the federal government we're not doing a thing that the federal government tells us we have to. There's something like there's a lot of support from MAGA folks for this Ben Collins, who does I think for NBC was posting the other day. A lot of like different Trump Q forum sort of posts where people are saying hey, Don Jr. We know you look on the site you should cross the Rubicon and, you know, somehow get DeSantis to use Florida law enforcement to attack the FBI. Pretty gnarly stuff in those posts now I don't think that that means there's actually I haven't seen evidence that there's much political over that and in fact, one of the things people are saying is that it looks like there's a decent chance DeSantis cooperated and helped the FBI

wants to be president. Because DeSantis wants to be president that he's actually like on board with this because he wants to fuck over Trump. Yeah, that is scary. And that is I think a more realistic threat model than the idea that DeSantis might have the Florida state troopers start shooting at the FBI. As funny as it may be to watch Florida law enforcement shoot at the FBI. That would be pretty funny. I know, I know. I don't think DeSantis will do that because DeSantis really wants to be president, which is just another scary possibility and that would honestly be less funny to watch. It's, it's like, it's not great overall. It's a it's too great. It's two not great sets of choices here. Yeah. And I think if we're looking at like what the actual kind of mass civil threat is, as opposed to DeSantis declaring a secession or something, and the Trump states trying to declare their independence, I think the actual threat is that this could damage Trump that he doesn't run into Santos maybe is and this is very unclear, by the way, if you look at the polling, it's extremely unclear as to whether or not DeSantis would do better than Trump in a national election right now.

Yeah. But some of the polling does suggest that even as unpopular as Biden is right now, he still has a sizable lead over Trump and any headway because that people fucking hate Donald Trump, right? He's not one of the people who was on the verge of attacking an FBI building right now. You don't like him, even if Biden has not done anything to help you, at least in your mind. You know, then, then, and so that is kind of the bet that DeSantis is making. And I think what scares me most about the rhetoric we're seeing right now, less than the fact the idea that like Florida is going to declare war on the fucking DC government is the threat that the rhetoric will stay at this heightened level. And you're already seeing the thing that scares me more than talk about like we should succeed is talk about like, well, when we're back in power, we're just going to send the FBI after everybody that is that we considered enemy. Let's let's let's raid them all, you know, and that's the thing that scares me. And that's the thing that I think could actually lead to the highest loss of life. Because that part and then obviously, like in terms of like bringing it back to what we to stuff we talk about on the show, a DeSantis presidency would be extremely hostile to queer people way more so than Trump. And that would be varying on some very dangerous and very unshaky ground.

And I think in the short term, too, there's there's another danger there, which is that like, we see this kind of militancy from the right, like, spreading more and more into just the other campaigns that they're doing. And so, you know, we start getting attacks of gender clinics, we start seeing more tax and abortion clinics. And I think that's as possible. And I think also, like, another thing to be thinking about is looking at what happened in 2020, where, specifically around the anti lockdown stuff, you know, you just we just had a whole bunch of armored people, like, occupying capital buildings. And it worked, it was incredibly effective, right, like there is like the the the the net result of that and the sort of like resulting political campaign from it is that like the entire Democratic Party has decided that it just doesn't like it's not even going to talk about COVID anymore. And like the CDC is just like pretending it doesn't exist. Yeah. And so like, like, that that that strategy, like, the thing is, again, like, the actual policies, like stuff like I don't like stuff like like vaccine mandates for teachers is like a 64% approval rating, right? Like, the actual like, everyone doesn't die from COVID policies are popular. It's just that like this sort of, you know, getting getting getting getting getting a bunch of guys with guns to go into a capital building and then yell about it is enough of a political threat that they can they can force the Democrats to back down. And yeah, there's I think there's I think there's a non zero chance they start trying to do this other things as for trying to do this with, like, hey, if you're going to have gender clinics in your state, we're going to start occupying capitals again.

And you could see the fact that one of the things that is unclear that makes it hard to tell if so it is unclear as to whether or not the Biden White House knew that this raid was happening, like and who knew there are definitely reports that some staffers found out about it on fucking Twitter. I have to you have I have to assume that the president was aware of it. And, like, it was probably hint that he to some extent pushed for it. I would have trouble believing that he did not because it's the FBI raiding a former president right the FBI has a lot of power, but I don't think that's the thing that the feds just do because right like I think yeah you have to have Garland on your side and if Garland is, you know, directing this to some extent and like I'm sure Biden is aware, and that might be and the FBI director that Trump appointed. Yeah, yeah, Chris Ray, who sucks they I mean, obviously they all suck everybody involved in this sucks. There was a great post someone made right after the raid that says look, I want to make it really clear, the FBI cannot do good things, but they can do funny things. This is extremely funny. And I just like that specifically some of the some of the crimes around keeping classified documents and this specific FBI director are both things that either Trump signed into into law or he appointed himself. Yeah, it is very funny. I have been talking to people who have had security clearances and understand some of that and like the shit that they got from his house and those 11 boxes or whatever is the kind of thing that like does not get fucked with and the way that Trump like fucked with it like yeah it's it's I mean the fact that the espionage act is in play is pretty shocking. As is the fact that Rand Paul is now calling for the espionage act to be dissolved which like I'm not against based

incredibly based Rand Paul. It is really it is really it is a thing to watch everyone go like you know defund FBI abolish FBI just because power gets used against one person one time and you're like oh this power only exists to hurt minorities why is it being used to hurt me or someone who I who I look up to. There's a discourse on the left right now that is like should we be working with the right to defund the FBI or whatever and here's the thing in my opinion. No, you should not work with the right on any of this stuff because they don't want to get rid of the FBI they want to take the weaponry and power that the FBI has and they want to like deploy it differently but they still want that power to exist right so no you can't work with them on that however if they start actually trying to remove the espionage act then absolutely we should vote to remove the espionage act. That's fine like just like if they actually vote to reduce funding to federal law enforcement that's fine but that doesn't mean like you you act as if they're legitimately fighting against any of this stuff but when it comes to so I think that there's some potential evidence just the fact that this raid happened that shows that maybe there are folks in the Biden administration who understand the stakes of the fight and are taking it seriously because this is and we'll see how it shakes out it's all still too early to know if like anything more serious than his house being disrupted is going to happen but like if they really throw down legally against Trump in this way to try to stop him from being able to hold office again and to try to actually punish him for his abuses of power

that's potentially a pretty smart move if they have the stones right that's a big question is like are they going to back down because the right start threatening to shoot things up so like the scary thing potential here is that the right wing starts howling about how they're going to do a bunch of murders over this and so the DOJ backs off and the right is like well what if we just threatened to commit mass murder anytime something we don't like happens maybe that's how we win politics now. The positive with this is that like the way fascists succeed historically is because people who are not fascists are not really willing to fight them and so the fascists go for it. And everybody else backs off because they're scared of having a fight right. So if this shows that there's actually some teeth within the Democratic Party to throw down that's potentially assigned that like they've started to recognize where the stakes are. That shouldn't be taken as too high of a possibility I'm looking at a post from David Froome. Famed centrist idiot who's talking about how he thinks the DeSantis nomination in 2024 quote represented a much better outcome for the whole country than a Trump return. Maybe his manner or record but he's a recognizably normal US politician.

If defeated he'd go peacefully like first off great incredible that that's where we are right now that you're like yeah well he's a fine. He would be a fine candidate for the Republicans to run because he wouldn't try to overthrow the country if he lost. Number one not certain about that but number two yikes again if David Froome is saying something he's wrong right that is that is the rule of David Froome. He's one of those kind of like thinkers in American politics or whatever he's saying is not right. In DeSantis like right now is like very openly like getting his people in position to take control of the Florida like to take control of Florida's like election procedures. Like yes this guy assaults Attorney General it's like he's like very openly trying to do a guy's name Kelp who rigged the election in Georgia a few years ago. Yeah yeah yeah he's like very obviously prepping to do that and it's like I'm sure it'll be fine he seems like a normal enough guy. Yeah we'll go peacefully.

I do want to just read before we close out read a few things that how how the FBI and how the DHS have been talking about the threats that they've been seeing. Because how the kind of institutions of power talking about these same things is worth noting. Yes they released a memo saying that there are threats quote occurring primarily online and across multiple platforms including social media sites web forms video sharing platforms and image boards. The FBI and DHS have observed an increase in violent threats post on social media against federal officials and facilities including a threat to places so called dirty bomb in front of the FBI headquarters and issuing general calls for civil war and armed rebellion. So yeah they said that they're they're looking at they're looking at threats through like specifically in identifying proposed targets tactics and weaponry. And you know it goes it goes on to talk about the targeted for people in like the judicial system law enforcement government officials associated with the Palm Beach search the targeting the federal judge who approved the search warrant. And the FBI has also observed the personal identifying information of possible targets of violence such as the home addresses and identification of family members disseminated online as additional targets. So in terms of like what like the attack surfaces on these types of, you know, image boards and social media sites.

Even before before Schiffer did his attack he posted when they come for you kill them be an American and not a steer. And think other kind of thing is that could be at play and things that are worrying me as stuff develops, not they're worrying me not because they're convincing. They're worrying me because they don't need to be convincing deceptively edited photos and videos have gone viral across social media over the. The past week following the search while guest hosting Tucker Carlson tonight on Fox News, Brian Clemede showed a fake image of the judge who signed off on this on the search warrant sitting beside. Is it Glycean Maxwell? How do you say her name? Gis Lane? Gis Lane? That's how we're genuinely at it. No, it's Gis Lane. Gilan Maxwell. So, you know, showing this, you know, quote unquote meme while not saying it's a meme just showing the picture on Friday, a fake video purporting to show another Fox host, Sean Hannity, arguing with Florida governor Ron DeSantis over the definition of what an FBI rate is. But that discussion never happened. This was spliced together footage from years apart in different interview segments. Hours after the video went viral on Twitter, the platform did place a manipulated media label.

And yeah, it's it's it's this kind of stuff that is going to be, you know, in terms of like, you know, trying to prospect trying to like prospect what the next few years could be depending on who the who the president is. What types of like media is going to be popular? How this is going to kind of impact the temperature politically and how people take in information and how people are willing to turn information into action in terms of taking out violence. How often these little small things are happening is it's this it's could be the start of a of a thing that becomes a much bigger problem very soon. Yeah. I think maybe like in terms of the temperature rising, we should discuss just really briefly these other sort of more or less baseless or sort of wildly off base conspiracies around law enforcement that we've seen on the right, like in the last few weeks. Do we do we want to talk about those do you want to talk about those separately. I'm not sure what you're referring to. So there's, there's a couple of things that have happened that have sent like the the right pretty sort of crazy in the last few weeks one is the in the inflation reduction act.

There's this is part where they say they're going to hire 87,000 new IRS agents right. Yes, yes, a large part of that is replacing the massive amount of IRS people who are about to retire. And the rest of it is getting them back up to sort of where they were a few years ago. It's not like they're going to actually three pandemic levels. Yeah. Yeah. So there are like 70,000 I think half of them are supposed to retire in the next five years. They want to hire 87,000 over the next 10 years. So that'll get them up by 2032 to where they were in 2019 or whatever.

Yeah. So it's not what it's portrayed as, but that combined I think with the ATF visiting a guy's house, which I know garrison and I saw memes about in his crazy little conservative newspaper that we that we came across when we were reporting on a story. And the ATF reclassifying some thing as the things that are called AR pistols, which you probably don't need to explain other than saying that they're a work around for federal firearms or is that fair? Yeah, there's a bunch of different. There's a bunch of kinds of guns that you're not supposed to be allowed to have without a special tax stamp, which is like a whole additional legal process in order to basically make sure that poor people can't own certain types of specific firearms. And there's workarounds where things function the same way as those guns that are normally illegal, but they aren't technically that and the FBI or not. And the ATF is about to crack down on some of that. And so, yeah.

Yeah. And the sort of combination of these things has led a lot of figures on the right, you'll see it in that thread. I think Robert shared it and I shared it of like these dozens of tick tocks talking about civil war that came out the day after Trump was raided. They talk a lot about IRS raids and about people coming for their for their guns and their short barreled rifles specifically, which I think is the combination of these things leading to this sort of again. Like if you misunderstand each of those three things completely, you get to the conclusion that the IRS has hired 87,000 armed shock troops and they're coming after your AR pistol, which it's not true. But that narrative has definitely been sort of spread around. And again, it's not exactly decreasing the temperature. No, I mean, just I think today Trump was on Fox News Digital and he said, people are so angry at what's taking place, whatever we can do to help because the temperature has to be brought down in the country.

If it isn't terrible things are going to happen. The people of this country are not going to stand for another scam. So I wonder what he meant by that. Oh boy. Yeah, I guess like the other thing that I mean we kind of touched on but I think is like important to understand is the extent to which like Trump is kind of a singular figure in his ability to actually get a bunch of people to do a thing. And like I think that like that power I think is reduced. Since you know I'm like he's like he's not present anymore right like it's reduced since J6. Yeah, since J6 but like, you know, he still has the ability to mobilize like ability to mobilize parts of the right that like you're sort of like weird neo Nazi guy like can't. Yes.

And yeah, like you know, like he seems to be aware of this and he seems to be aware that like, you know, he can use his either uses the bargaining chip or uses to sort of like threaten people. But yeah, like that that's a real thing like it is a real thing that there's an incredibly large part of the country who like, if Donald Trump told them to like, go die for him a Normandy beach or something like they probably would. Yep. Yeah, the FBI and DHS and their memo also warned that the 2022 midterm elections in November could be seen as an additional flashpoint in which really will continue to escalate threats against perceived ideological opponents, including federal law enforcement personnel. So stay tuned. It should if people haven't realized by the way it was Breitbart who named the FBI agents. Yeah. Didn't bother to Google what their jobs were they were like what is what is this acronym stand for no one knows it's very secret. Yeah.

Well good. We seem to be in a nice place then. It's going well. Yeah. Yeah, start organizing now. The best time to start this was yesterday. The second best time is now. The third best time is tomorrow.

And don't don't let them take how funny this is as well. Funny. There is another lesson here, which is that like, there is an enormous amount you can get away with politically as long as it's funny. And like, frankly, we have we have not been utilizing that to know the left and like anarchists in general have forgotten how to do good funny shit for the past 10 years. And we have to bring it back. Yeah, it is. This is we've been given a precious gift and how funny this is and you we have a couple of responsibilities and one of them, of course, is to to organize in order to be prepared to counter increasing like attempts to impose an authoritarian violence on us. But another thing that it is response that we have a responsibility to do is laugh at how funny this is and make sure that other people don't forget how funny this is.

So go out into the world and remind somebody that a fucking Trump nerd tried to take on the FBI with a nail gun and an AR 15 and died in a fucking field in Ohio, because that's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Andrew of the YouTube channel and tourism and I'm here with. Oh, it's me. It's Christopher. Yeah, we're doing what we're doing. We're doing another episode of beat and Andrew. This is the pod once again. It is too early in the morning for anyone else to be here, which gives us ultimate power by too early in the morning. I by the way, it's it's 11 Pacific time. But yeah, there is there is no prayer of anyone else being around for this. So we are now in control here. Haha. Yes, we're doing we're doing we're doing the maniacal laughs. We're doing the podcast. We're doing the podcast.

Welcome. Welcome. To finish the story, the soldiers story that is quasi Balagoon's life and legacy. We last left off as part of the New York City Panther 21 trials, quasi was put in jail at the same time he was also developing his political identity in a way and recognizing some of the issues he was having with the Black Panther Party and particularly after the East Coast West Coast split that occurred. quasi as we as we covered last time was born Donald reams, but took on the identity of quasi Balagoon due to his recognition of his afterness of his self through his experience in the army, through his experience in London connecting with the black diaspora and through his connections with the political example. And so Balagoon, alongside that personal recognition and political recognition of his anti authoritarian politics, also comes to see himself as someone who is at war with the state and as such. Once in jail, he sees himself as a political prisoner as a prisoner of war. While in prison, the Panther 21 were incarcerated in a variety of jails in different boroughs of New York City. But Balagoon, Lumumba Shakur, and another defendant Kwando Kinshasa, they were all incarcerated at the Queen's House of Detention, and they organized an uprising that took seven hostages, including a captain, five correctional officers, and a black cook, pulling them from October 1st to 5th 1970. The slogan of the multi ethnic takeover, which by the way is pretty unheard of in prisons where black, Latino and white inmates come together.

This slogan was all power to the people, free all oppressed people. And so their primary demand was for speedier trials. And in this process, Balagoon again developing his anti authoritarian politics, slowly, you know, throwing towards what he would come to define himself as decided not to play a vanguard role in this decision making process in this uprising. Even before he formally declared his commitment to anti authoritarian politics, his primary concern was consensus for all inmates in decision making, including access to food being brought from the outside. And so that sort of consensus process also helped build his identity. The prisoners, they formed committees to coordinate the uprisings, and they agreed to release two hostages, the black cook and one of the prison guards, as a sign of good faith. Eventually they had to release all the hostages and they also suffered abuse and charges from the uprising. It was sort of a failure. But Kwase didn't see it that way. While he was disappointed by the outcome, he believed that the power the inmates felt by holding the state of bay for that, you know, limited moment was a valuable experience. It was a learning experience. As an organizer, he saw the uprising as growing pains to those who believe that oppressed people would rise up and seek justice. So as we can see that even with losses, their lessons to be learned. And this isn't unique to just this one moment in history.

In fact, we can apply it to more recent events, such as with the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. It's easy to be nihilistic, nihilistic, probably isn't the best. Uses him cynical and say that, oh, well, the uprising was a failure, millions of people got up and protested and nothing came out of it really. And yet that in combination with the coronavirus pandemic brought people together to establish programs of mutual aid to get involved in organizations in their local situation to connect with people to radicalize themselves and radicalize others. It was not a loss, you know. I mean, I think there's there's an extent to which even if it's extremely hard to tell in the moment, there's there's this way in which like participating something like that just sort of permanently changes you. And I think I think also in the sort of context of the prison uprisings, right, like this is like this is by no means like the last prison uprising that's going to happen in this era. And so I think like, I don't know, it seems like one of those moments where it's like in in the moment, it's like, oh, we failed, things look bad. But like when in this sort of like broader historical sweep, it's like, no, this was like an early uprising in a period that is going to be sort of like an early Tom and Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's something that can be really hard to like, like, especially in the moment, it can be really hard to sort of like see that because it's really easy to sort of like look narrowly at what your one struggle is doing. And then, you know, but yeah, if you have this sort of like, you know, if you have the ability to sort of like see back through history, you can watch how stuff like this just sort of like has this massive effect on consciousness in a way that people in it even have a lot of a hard time seeing. Yeah. And so that's why, like I'm emphasizing the first part, it's really important to develop this perspective and to study our history, you know, radical history, we could learn both, you know, put things into focus into perspective and also look at the specifics of how things played out. So after Baldwin's experience in the Panther Party and the repression of the New York chapter, he realized that the party was being turned away from its grassroots organizing of the black masses and the issues that affect them most, the daily survival, the housing, the education, police abuse. You realize the state was using its incarceral system as a tactic by rounding up these organizers by infiltrating the party by charging people these high bills and such.

It turned the party focus away from liberation to fundraise and for legal defense. And so he realized he could not continue the fight could not continue on this front that he needed to survive and contribute underground to build a black liberation army as a clandestine freedom fighter. As a miracle from the previous episode, Baldwin was severed from the case of 13 of those who had been arrested originally to face charges in New Jersey. And after the acquittal of most of his comrades, Baldwin pleaded guilty to the charge that he and an unidentified person did attempt to shoot police officers, making him the only one of the 21 original defendants to be convicted. However, on September 12th, 1973, Baldwin would escape from the New Jersey's Rowe prison shortly after his conviction for armed robbery in New Jersey. And then eight months after his escape on May 5th, 1974, he was again captured, trying to assist a fellow Panther Party member and defendant, Richard Harris, who was escaping custody. They were both apprehended after being wounded in a gun battle with correctional and police officers. And so what I find interesting about that he risked being recaptured so he could free Harris and that's solidarity right there.

He was so willing to sacrifice himself to help his comrades. That's admirable levels of commitment. And even though he was imprisoned and was disillusioned with the Panther Party, it never discouraged his involvement or commitment to revolution. While incarcerated, he began to explore anarchist politics. He received and studied literature from solidarity groups like the Anarchist Black Cross, which is an anti-authoritarian organization that provides material and legal support to political prisoners. And I remember when I was reading this, I recognized that name, Anarchist Black Cross, the ABC. I know that because they also helped Lorenzo Combo Irvin to be released from jail. They also provided him materials when he was incarcerated.

And so kudos to them for that, you know, helping to connect these people and connect these ideas. Yeah, and the Anarchist Black Cross, if I'm remembering my history right, like has a really, really long history of doing this, going back to like... I mean, I know they were negotiating like the releases of like political prisoners in the Bolsheviks. I don't know. I didn't know they went that far. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, if I'm remembering... And that just goes to show you might not see yourself as doing anything that meaningful or understanding books to prisoners. In reality, you're building foundations here and, you know, the people who you influence can go on to influence so many more.

So many others. So anarchism ended up providing Balakoun with a great analytical lens to some of his critique of his experiences in the Panther Party. When he looked at, you know, the works of like Emma Goldman and others and applied them to the Black Liberation's struggle, he began to ask questions about how his comrades were going about revolution, how by allowing these hierarchies to develop in their organizations, they had weakened their resolve and their fighting capacity. It's like, as he says, the cadre accepted their command regardless of what their intellect had or had not made clear to them. The true democratic process, which they were willing to die for for the sake of their children, they would not claim for themselves. And so what Balakoun wanted was a democratic process that would be established from today, that you would have a certain system now,

and then you would wait until after the revolution to set up a different system. It's like that whole connection of means and ends that, you know, anarchists keep going on about. He realized that they needed this democratic process to unleash their evolutionary potential, the masses, and not make them prey to new oppressors. The only way to make a dictatorship of the proletariat is to elevate everyone, to deflate all the advantages of power, and only an anarchist revolution has that on its agenda. One of his inspirations was a fellow clandestine freedom fighter, that being Italian anarchist Erico Malatesta, who exhorted that revolutionary struggle consists more of deeds than words. He had a lot of different political figures and radical anarchists, but especially those involved in insurrection,

especially those like Erico Malatesta, who was also one of my personal favorites. So in reading that, I found that to be a fun connection. Yeah, he's so cool. Yeah, yeah, he really is. I see why Zoe Baker likes him so much. Another influence of his was the Spanish Revolutionary Jose Buenaventura Doruti Dimash, who organized the anarchist guerrilla movement Los Giusteros the Avenger once. Like their name, Los Giusteseros, were thought to be involved in political assassinations against, you know,

repression and guerrilla raids on the military forces of the Spanish dictatorship. So people like Italian exile Severino Di Giovanni and other anarchists like Sacco and Vincente. So Di Giovanni was known for his campaign of bombing as armed propaganda and solidarity with executed anarchists Sacco and Vincente. Doruti and Giovanni both engage in expropriation of capitalist institutions as a means of supporting the revolutionary movement. And keep that point in mind, expropriation of capitalist institutions. It's a code Mickey Mouse. It's a surprise tool that'll help us later. All right. Another influence was of course Emma Goldman, who is another advocate of revolutionary armed struggle,

who supported her comrade Alexander Bergman to assassinate a wealthy industrialist, who believed in free love, which really resonated with Balgun because I'm not sure if I've mentioned it in the previous part or not, but Balgun was an openly bisexual man in the 1970s, 1960s, 1970s. And so that commitment to free love that Emma Goldman had really resonated with him. Balgun also recognized, continues to recognize that black people in the United States were an internal colony of the U.S. And so the black liberation struggle as a national liberation movement. So we got to identify with the new African independence movement. The provisional government of the Republic of New Africa, the PGRNA, was founded in 1968, March 1968,

at a conference of 500 black nationalists who declared independence from the U.S. and demanded five states in the deep south, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as reparations for the enslavement and racial oppression of black people. New Africa was designated the name of this new free nation. And at this time, Balgun began to ideologically unite the political objective of the PGRNA for independence and took on New African as its national identity. As he says, the U.S. has no right to confine new African people to red-lined reservations and we have a right to live on our own terms on a common land and to govern ourselves free of occupational forces such as the police, national guard, or GIs that have invaded our colonies from time to time. We have a right to control our own economy, print our own money, trade with other nations. We have a right to control our education institutions and systems where children will not be indoctrinated by aliens to suffer the destructive designs of the U.S. government.

His position for black self-determination was also combined with an anti-capless perspective. The New Africans would enter workforce where they are not excluded by design and where wages are not controlled by the ruling class and their wealth. So I think this distinct self-expression is very important because it was a key aspect of his political journey and how he saw himself. The Afrofuturist abolitionists of the Americas, which is a black anarchic radical collective based in the U.S., they coined the term, I believe, black anarchic radical in order to group and account for the different anarchic identities that black people have identified as. So you have Anacatas, you have black anarchists, you have new African anarchists, and then people would just go by bars. And so at this time, I think, as a new African anarchist, Balgun was definitely ideologically set apart from the black Marxist Leninists and revolutionary nationalists at the time, who wanted to seize state power from the white power structure of the U.S.

And he still desired a land for black people to achieve self-determination, even as an anarchist. He wanted a space for black people to build a society based on anti-authoritarianism and freedom. I believe he was really unique at that time in that regard. Like other bars, he also recognized the importance of national liberation, like Ashanti Alston. He began to recruit soldiers for the Black Liberation Army and converts anti-authoritarian and new African politics. While in Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, he formed a political study group with Black Liberation Army members and Black Panther Party members and started to shift their perspectives on anti-authoritarian politics. And so that political education behind bars became the main vehicle of recruitment into the BLA.

Another member of the BLA was Ojori Mutalo. Another fairly, I would say, somewhat obscure, but still iconic, black anarchist. And when he was providing his testimony concerning Balagun's influence on his transition from Marxist Leninism to anti-authoritarian thinking, he said, In 1975, I became disillusioned with Marxism and became an anarchist thanks to Kowasi Balagun, due to the inactiveness and ineffectiveness as Marxist Leninism in our communities, along with the repressive bureaucracy that came with it. People are not going to commit themselves to a life-and-death struggle just because of grand ideas someone might have floating around their heads. A few people will commit themselves to a struggle if they can see progress being made similar to the progress of anarchist collectors in Spain during the era of the Fascists.

Like his teacher and comrade, Ojori Mutalo identified himself as a new African anarchist prisoner of war. Balagun would escape again from Raleigh State Prison in New Jersey on May 27, 1978, and rejoin a clandestine network of BLA soldiers in alliance with white radicals in solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement. This ideologically diverse network of insurgent militants would own as the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, or RATF. And so there was a strategic alliance under the leadership of the Black Liberation Army that consisted of people of all sorts of different identities. You had Muslims and Revolutionary Nationalists and Anti-Imperialists and Communists, and Balagun was one of the few, if not the only anarchists in this whole organization. And so even though he was critical of Marxism and nationalism, he decided to join the comrades he loved and trusted in a common front against white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism. Me personally, and I have a video on my YouTube channel about it, I am not a left unity advocate, never have been.

However, like I say in the video, there is still solidarity to be had on certain topics and issues, and an important aspect, an important component of solidarity is trust. And so Balagun clearly had trust in these comrades in order to work with them. It can't just be this broad sweeping thing where you say, oh well unity is solidarity, unity is solidarity, and there's nothing to back it up, there's no sort of connections or bonds to show for it. And of course he did have political friction while in the RATF, his comrades, he saw his comrades as a bit rigid, a bit too rigid in their views while he considered himself a free spirit. And his comrades, despite the ideological differences and his sexual orientation, still respected him because of his commitment to revolutionary struggle, because of his history of sacrifices. And so the Black Liberation Army and the RATF continued to carry out the climate-signed work of arms propaganda, of expropriations of resources for capitalist financial institutions, and for assisting comrades in escaping from incarceration. At this time, there was an increase in white supremacist paramilitary activity, including the Gokuliks' land, including the KKK. And so the RATF as an alliance helped the whites in that organization, helped to gather intelligence on these right-wing white supremacist activities and their connections with the U.S. military, while they also engaged in expropriations.

To obtain resources so they could build the capacity to resist the white supremacist groups, because these violent acts that the KKK and these other right-wing groups were doing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were murdering Black children, Black youth in Atlanta, Black women in Boston, and in Alabama. And so they were committed and organized in doing something about it, militant commitment to doing something about it. The RATF also were involved with the escape of Asata Shakur, one of the most iconic of the Panthers, and also the attempted Brinks expropriation in Nyack, New York. Shakur was wounded and paralyzed from a shootout that they had with the New Jersey State Troopers and had to escape the scene. And as someone considered the soul of the BLA by the FBI, her capture was seen as a very significant event. And even though she never fired a gun, even though she was paralyzed, she was convicted for the murder of two state troopers who were killed in the shootout. And so she was sentenced to life plus 65 years. However, Bedinga, Balgun, and two white allies, as a armed group, facilitated the escape of Shakur from Clinton Correctional Institution for Women in New Jersey on November 2nd, 1979. And I believe she's still in Cuba to this day.

At the same time, the BLA was also trying to expropriate $1.6 million from a Brinks armed truck in New York City on October 20th, 1981. And in the exchange of fire that resulted from that attempt, one Brinks security guard and two police officers were killed, and three white radicals and one black man were also captured. Eventually, although he was laying low in New York City in a Manhattan apartment, the Joint Terrorist Task Force did eventually apprehend Balgun. And so once again, he found himself in prison. But they did manage to successfully expropriate some funds from financial institutions, going back to 1976. And those funds that they were able to take were utilized to support the development of an underground infrastructure, to support families and political prisoners, to support political activities and institutions with the Black Liberation Movement, and general freedom struggles on the African continent. That is solidarity. After his capture as a new African anarchist prisoner of war for the third time, Guasi spoke out to the movement for the first time. Again, identifying himself as a new African anarchist. He spoke to the public about his politics and wanted to make his attention clear.

He acted as his own attorney in the Rockland County trial where he was charged with the armed robbery and the murders of the Brinks guard and police officers. And so he wanted to make an opening statement. And so it went as follows. I am a prisoner of war. I reject the crap about me being a defendant and I do not recognize the legitimacy of this court. The term defendant applies to someone involved in a criminal matter. It is clear that I've been a part of the Black Liberation Movement all of my adult life, and I've been involved in a war against the American imperialist in order to free new African people from its yoke. He wanted it acknowledged that his armed actions were politically motivated to win national liberation, to eliminate capitalism, imperialism, and ultimately authoritarian forms of government. And of course he was sentenced to life imprisonment, yet he continued to speak to New African and Black Liberation forces and to anarchist gatherings through public statements. He advocated continuously for the building of an insurgent movement, the building of autonomous communities.

At a Harlem rally for the imprisoned New African freedom fighters, his statement was read, that we must build a revolutionary political platform and a universal network of survival programs. In another statement he said, where we live and work we must organize on the ground level. The landlords must be contested through rent strikes, and rather than develop strategies to pay rent, we should develop strategies to take the buildings, set up communes in abandoned buildings, to invacant lots into gardens, when our children grow out of clothes we shall have places we can take them. Clearly marked anarchist clothing exchanges, we must learn the construction and ways to take back our lives. He wanted to challenge people to move from theory into practice, to define anarchy in the real world, to show the masses, models of delivering war to the oppressors and of building a better way of life. Unfortunately, although he struggled long in prison and continuously advocated for the black liberation movement, for the anarchist movement, he died in prison on December 13, 1986 due to complications related to AIDS. So although he's not in a mainstream discourse, he's still recognized and respected in some black, new African anarchist and queer anarchist spaces, because of his efforts in that time, because of his self-identity in that time.

I spoke about him briefly in my video on black anarchism and the research for that video is how I discovered him in the first place, and I was surprised that he wasn't spoken about so much, considering his influence and his efforts and his... And I hate to do this to history, to do this kind of great man things history, but Devan was like a main character. He was there for the New York Panther 21 Trials. He was like dropping rats in Congress. He was facilitating the escape of a satish, a career for crying out loud. He did so much in his short burst of freedom, and I can't help but respect that. He stood out most places he went, and I can't help but admire that. In 2005, the Malcolm X grassroots movement, which is a new African activist organization, declared its annual black orca celebration dedicated to quasi-Ballagoon. And in that celebration, they also highlighted the need for awareness of the AIDS virus in Africa and among the African diaspora. A couple radical hip-hop artists such as Dead Pres and Said Malik have also mentioned Balagoon's name, but his name is still not commonly used enough.

Not as much as other black revolutionaries like Huey and Shakur and Mutulu Shakur. And his collectives have also recognized him, have republished his works, have put his writings in newsletters and his trial statements and tributes. And yet, he's still not well recognized. The Quebec Collective Solidarity issued a collected works of Balagoon's trial statements, essays, poetry, and acknowledgments from comrades titled A Soldier's Story, which you can find on the Anarchist Library. And in fact, that Soldier's Story is where I drew from for the script for this two-part podcast episode. I think that his efforts, or not even to mention his sexual identity being a vehicle to challenge homophobia within the broader black liberation movement because he showed himself to be committed to the cause and he exposed people who may not have otherwise been exposed to it. You know, the validity and humanity in our queer comrades. He will forever remain remembered and saluted by certain revolutionary nationalists, radical anarchists, and queer liberation forces.

He will forever be seen to me as an iconic maroon and I can only hope that this podcast helps his legacy to live on and encourages and motivates and strengthens the resolve of people to walk in and suppress people to build a revolutionary program, to challenge capitalism, to challenge racism, wherever they find themselves, no matter their circumstances. And that's about it. This has been Soldier's Story, the life and legacy of Quasi Balagun. I'm your guest host for this episode of It Could Happen Here, Andrew of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. You can find me on YouTube.com slash Andrewism on Patreon.com slash St. Drew and on Twitter.com slash underscore St. Drew. Yeah, this has been It Can Happen Here. You can find us at Happen Here pot on Twitter and Instagram. There's other close-on stuff. You can find that too. And yeah, dedicate your life to overthrowing capitalism and imperialism. All power to all the people. Peace.

Hey, it's It Could Happen Here, the podcast. The thing that's happening here is that once again, like a bunch of random American politicians are going to Taiwan. And this time they didn't announce they were going, apparently, because announcing they were going last time went great. Yeah, this is what we're talking about today. And with me is James. Hello, James. How are you doing? All right. I'm wonderful. And I'm splendid. Oh, okay. So we have to talk about Taiwan. And I think, like, people who've listened to me on this show for a while know that, like, so, like, okay, a lot of my family is from Taiwan. I don't like talking about Taiwan very much. I think I've talked about Taiwanese politics in detail exactly once on this show when I was forced to for the Liguana Woods shooting. And like, I would really prefer not to. Like, it's not something I particularly enjoy talking about, which is, you know, a big part of what we haven't. But unfortunately, I can't continue not to talk about it because the American left, and this is true of not just the American Constitution, the British law.

This is true of the left kind of writ large is being systematically lied to about Taiwan by a group of incredibly malicious nationalists who are attempting to rally support for their, like, incredibly violent and bizarre imperial delusions. And unfortunately, it's working. So I'm in instead of that, I'm going to give what I'm going to call Taiwan 101. And I'm calling it Taiwan 101, even though this is going to be like an hour long, because this is as far as I could cut this whole thing down. Like, Taiwanese politics is genuinely complicated as part of the reason I like talking about it. And people who are giving you simple answers to what's happening in Taiwan are lying to you. This is as best I can do. And this is this is like the length of a bastard episode. So nice. I'm excited. Yeah. So welcome to Taiwan 101. The beginning of Taiwan 101 is that Taiwan is a series of islands off the coast of China. And yes, there are a bunch of islands. Nobody talks about this, like, because again, 90% of the people who talk about Taiwan, like couldn't find their own ass on a map.

So, you know, there's a bunch of islands. There's one big one that there's several, like a lot of smaller ones. Now, one of the sort of fundamental principles of not just being on the left, but like being a decent person is self determination. And, you know, self determination on a very basic level is that people have the right to choose how they want to live. And in a more immediate political context, they have the right to choose how they want to organize their government and who they do and don't want to be ruled by. So, okay, what are the actual numbers in Taiwan say? Well, okay, we have recent polling from the National Chang Chi University's election studies center, which says that a grand total of 6.6% of Taiwan's population wants unification with China. The overwhelming majority of people in Taiwan 81.2% want to just maintain the status quo, which yeah, I guess I should. So the status quo right now is that like China claims that it is the sole legitimate government of Taiwan.

Taiwan, like, technically legally claims that they are the sole legitimate government of China. Nobody actually believes that anymore. Like, if you scoured the entirety of Taiwan, you might find six dudes in a bunker who still believe that, like, they're the real government of China. The actual status quo is that Taiwan is basically de facto a self governing polity that has elections and stuff. And yeah, everyone gets incredibly mad about this. Most people want to preserve the status quo. Inside of the 82% of people who want to maintain the status quo, you have, you know, it's like 25% basically for three different options. Basically, there's very similar numbers of people who either want to, like, decide the formal status of Taiwan, like, is an independent country as a part of China. They even want to kick it down the road. Some of them want to keep the status quo indefinitely, and some of them want to move towards full independence, like, later on.

But overwhelmingly, what people want in Taiwan is for nothing to happen. Now, if this were a sane and rational world, that would be the end of the episode, right? Taiwan doesn't want to be ruled by China, like, okay, well, that's, okay, that's the right. They have the right to self determination. That's it. Case closed. End of story. It literally doesn't matter what the Chinese government thinks about whether it should control Taiwan, because, again, Taiwan doesn't want to be ruled by China. I feel like it's a British person. I may be ought to, like, not contribute further to that discussion. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's this whole thing that exists, right, where when you force your rule on another population, it is called imperialism. Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's the thing. It is said to be bad. And anyway, the other thing is, it's still bad, even if everyone inside the imperial power thinks that it's good.

Like, if every person in the U.S. suddenly decided tomorrow that they wanted to invade Cuba, like, it wouldn't make it morally right, because people in Cuba don't want to be ruled by the U.S. Which we've done before, but... It's true, yeah. This is partially why I picked Cuba as an example, because we did this. We really did, like, kill an enormous number of people trying to... Yeah, based on bullshit that people made up and portrayed as news that was at best speculation. Yeah. But, you know, as we can tell by the fact that the U.S. has invaded Cuba, we do not live in a sane, irrational world. We live in hell. And this means that I have a talk about a bunch of just absolutely bullshit arguments that a bunch of nationalist dipshits made up justify imperialism. So, alright. This is where we start going into Taiwanese history. So, the starting point of any actual history of Taiwan that's worth a single shit is Taiwan's indigenous population. And it is incredibly important to understand from the outset, the indigenous population of Taiwan is not Chinese.

They are not ethnically Chinese. They are not linguistically Chinese. They are not culturally Chinese. They are not any of these things by literally any definition of the word Chinese you can imagine. They are not Chinese. This indigenous population is Austronesian. Austronesian people are a population that stretches basically from like... It's an enormous group of people across the Pacific, stretches from like Madagascar all the way to like Hawaii. And those are the people who live in Taiwan and have lived on Taiwan for 6,000 years. And, you know, if you read like CCP accounts of Taiwanese history, right, you'll see them... They won't talk about the fact that, again, there's been an indigenous population that has lived in Taiwan for 6,000 years. What you'll see references to are like in like the Sui and like some dynasties, people like sent troops to Taiwan.

And the CCP people will be like, oh, yeah, no, they govern Taiwan and they ruled it. It was a part of China in like ancient times, like this is all bullshit. Like basically what would happen is periodically, every like few hundred years, some Chinese leader would be like, we should send some people to that island and they went there and were like, this sucks and they all left. But, you know, yeah, and, you know, like, okay, so like these guys, they're like, okay, this thing sucks. They leave and the indigenous population continues going like, you know, goes back to do like their normal thing, right? Like this is the actual history of who has controlled Taiwan for almost this entire history. He said it was controlled by indigenous population.

But in 1624 colonial powers start getting more involved and the Dutch seized control of Taiwan. Well, okay, so the Dutch take most of Taiwan. There's a part of Taiwan in the north that's ruled by the Spanish and they do like a bunch of just like horrible, like unspeakable crimes to the indigenous population before they ran out by like basically like a fragment of the dying like Chinese Ming dynasty. And so, yeah, so in 1662, this guy whose name, okay, so he has like a name that he's known by in the west that I genuinely have no idea how to pronounce because the name that he's known by in the west, I think is a Dutch translation of his title and not like his name. It is baffling. Okay, like, I think the Mandarin version of his title is something like Gua Xinyi.

The Dutch somehow turned that into what I'm going to interpret as Koshinga. Like, it's baffling. It doesn't make any sense. Their transliteration is nonsense. But yeah, so there's this guy, you'll see his name written as like Koshinga. And he's described alternately as sort of like, you know, you'll see some description of him, which will be like, he is a loyalist Ming general. And that's kind of true. Like, sort of, you will also see descriptions of him that call him the pirate warlord, which is like also true.

And you will also see nationalists, like Chinese nationalists celebrate him as like an anti-colonial hero and call him like running out the Dutch is like the liberation of Taiwan. And like, that's not true. Like, it makes sense, which is not true. Like, I've seen people like from Taiwan, like who do stuff with the indigenous population, like I've seen them call him by Taiwan's Christopher Columbus. So this is how this is going. Wait, so we're saying that changing from one colonial power to another is not liberation. No, it turns out fascinating. Yeah, you can tell it's not that not liberation because you know, like I want to people like actually like, you know, do believe that like, hey, it's going to be less bad for us under this guy than it is going to be for the Dutch.

It is kind of less bad. Like there are a bunch of indigenous people who fight with Koshinga and like, you know, and he helps they help them defeat the Dutch. But what he does instead of like, you know, freeing the people there is he maintains the Dutch colonial system while basically just ceasing Taiwan to run his court from. And, you know, like Dutch colonial rule. Okay, so like Dutch colonial rule is over. But what is replaced by is the rule of an independent pirate warlord state. Okay, it sounds fun. I mean, it kind of is like, I mean, there's this whole.

So, okay, so the kind of background of this is that like the in the 1600s, the Ming dynasty is falling apart. The Ming dynasty had ruled China since they ever threw the Mongols basically. And but like they're they're imploding. There's a bunch of revolutions going on. They're they are in the process of getting eventually getting knocked off by the Qing dynasty, who are group of people from Manchuria, who we will be getting to in a second. Yeah. And this guy is like technically a Ming general, but he's sort of not. And he's he's doing this sort of pilot warlord stuff.

But then he like he sets up it like his own dynasty, like very short-lived dynasty there. And this is the first time that there's been like actual political control of Taiwan by any kind of Chinese entity, right? Like the the like the the weird dipshit armies that like China was sending in like the Song dynasty. Like they don't they don't actually like set up a government, right? Like they're just kind of there for a bit and they leave. This is the first time like they actually conquer the island and rule it as like a political. And even then it's kind of a half ass conquest. Like there's a lot of places they kind of just like they're just like, yeah, OK, we're just not going to bother with this.

But yeah. And you know, again, like this is the first time this has happened and it's not like the Chinese state, right? It's a pirate warlord. And his descendants get like knocked off by the Qing dynasty in 1683. And this is the first time like a real Chinese government has controlled Taiwan. Because by 1683, the Qing dynasty has finished taking over all of China or all of what used to be like the main dynasty in China. And this is the period that Chinese nationalists would point to and say like, no, no, no, really, really hold on, hold on. Taiwan actually is part of China because we conquered it in like 1683, which, you know, wow.

OK, yeah. It's like, oh, yeah, this is this is this is a part of Taiwan, China since ancient times. Yeah, this place we conquered in 1683, which ignores also again, the previous five thousand four hundred years where Taiwan was ruled by indigenous people. It's baffling nationalist brain word stuff. Yep, that has worked historically for other countries, notably this one and the one I'm from. But it doesn't make it right. Yeah, well, you'll get people arguing this is like, well, how like, how is this different from the US? And it's like, well, here's the thing, I am a leftist and I am I am capable of understanding that multiple things can be bad at the same time,

especially when they're bad in the same way. Yes. Like, wow, hey, maybe these are all settler colonies and we should destroy them. OK, but we should actually talk about the Qing dynasty a bit because a lot of what Chinese nationalism draws from is is the sort of imperial expansion of the Qing dynasty, even though the Qing are the Qing are not like a Han Chinese dynasty. They're like ethnically they're from a different ethnic group. But yeah, I mean, it's like the Qing dynasty is a Manchu dynasty ruled by the people like the Manchus out of Manchuria. But I think like, insofar as people think about the Qing dynasty, they tend to think about like the late Qing dynasty.

Like this is like, you know, like the 1800s Qing dynasty is a disaster. Right. Like they lose the opium wars. They could be by Japan. This is the whole sort of century humiliation thing has a lot to do with like Qing imperial decline. But, you know, that that's like the 1800s. The 1700s, especially in the 1700s, Qing is an incredibly dynamic and, you know, incredibly militant and expansionist empire. Here's I'm going to I'm going to read a passage from the book.

Taiwan's imagine geographies having annexed Taiwan in 1684. The Qing turned its attention to Central Asia, pacifying quote, like quote unquote, pacifying the Mongols and bringing eastern Turkestan and Lhasa, the capital of Tibet under Qing rule. The Qing further expanded its control in south and southwest China, subjugating various non Chinese peoples of this reason to Qing domination. At its height in the 18th century, Qing influence extended into Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Burma and Nepal, all of which came under the suzerainty of the empire. By 1860, the Qing had achieved the incredible feat of doubling the size of the empire's territory, bringing various non Chinese frontier people under its rule. The impact of Qing expansionism was thus was thus tremendous as the Qing not only redefined the territorial boundaries of China, but also refashioned China as a multi ethnic realm as a multi ethnic realm, shifting the traditional border between Chinese Hua and barbarian Yi. In doing so, the Qing created an image of China that is vastly different from that of the Ming.

I think I think it's really important to understand what kind of empire this is, which is to say the Qing dynasty is an incredibly brutal colonial power, even like by the standards of like the Chinese dynastic history is not pretty, right? Like this is, you know, it's an empire, right? It's an empire. It's ruled by an emperor. It kind of sucks. It's not good per se, but like even by the standards of Chinese dynastic, the Qing are incredibly militant and incredibly expansionist. For example, like Xinjiang, which is a province that the Qing conquered. So it used to be inhabited by Mongol speaking people until the Qing just exterminated them all and settled the entire land with Han and Uyghur ethnic groups. And, you know, this history points to something that's important to understand when we talk about China, Taiwan and the U.S., which is that what we're talking about is three settler colonies.

And I think people, you know, might be like, wait, what do you mean China is a settler colony? And I'm just going to read this passage from the book, Sovereignty, Frontiers of Possibility, which is by Julia Evans, Anna Genevies, Alexander Riley and Patrick Wolfe. And yes, that is that Patrick Wolfe, who is like, who is basically the godfather of settler colonial studies and one of the most important, like, academics are trying to like, in terms of like advancing the analysis of settler colonialism, like the Palestinian conflict. But here's, here's what he has to say about China. And this is kind of a long passage, but like, I want to include an explanation of what settler colonialism is because I've kind of just been tossing it around. Yeah.

And analytically, the case of Palestine reveals that the relationship between the external and internal dimensions of sovereignty is not a priority, but contingent settler colonization converts external into internal, rendering indigenous Sovereignty is either non existent or domesticated annexation does the same thing, only it is illegal. The difference again is sovereignty to annex is to practice settler colonialism in sovereign territory. The frontier is aligned in time as well as in space. Spatially, the frontier delimits unconquered native territory. Temporally, it marks the conversion of outside into inside. It renders externality a thing of the past. In the global conquest of settler colonialism, therefore, the internal and external dimensions represent the state of play, quote unquote. The ultimate prize is state formation with internationally recognized territorial sovereignty. Once the settler takeover is complete, the native realm becomes a thing of the past superseded and detoxified reduced to persisting in the settler's terms.

Since in the case of Palestine, this process remains incomplete situation can still go either or potentially any way. At the international level, this uncertainty is reflected in the ambivalent status of Palestinian sovereignty, which remains simultaneously both acknowledged and questioned. Locally, the states involved in the resolution of such international uncertainties cannot be higher. Tibet represents a case in point. Despite significant informal deference to Tibet's national separateness, its incorporation into the People's Republic of China is not seriously questioned at the diplomatic level. Tibetan representation at the United Nations remains unimaginable, yet even Tibetans might count their blessings when they compare their situation to that of Uyghurs, who, like them, are being officially colonized by Han settlers in the so-called autonomous region called Xinjiang. A Chinese appellation that could have been scripted in 16th century Europe, it means new land. Being so much more firmly domesticated within the Chinese state, however, Uyghur sovereignty remains remote from global concern. Xinjiang became a global news story, and also I question Wolf's translation of the word a little bit. I think New Frontier is probably a slightly better translation, but yeah, you can see what's at work here.

China is running two settler colonies, the internal status of which is even more internationally fucked than most other settler colonies, which is incredibly grim. I don't know why we've been so slow to see settler colonialism in these contiguous empires here as well. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think part of what's happening here, like, you know, okay, like I think there's sort of a different dynamic with looking at this with Russia. But I think with China, it's like people are just like, it's really, really hard to get people to understand that colonialism and imperialism are things that like non-white people can do. And especially like this, you know, and I think this goes back to the sort of like Qing dynasty discussion, right, which is that like, yeah, you know, the way that people on the left understand the Qing dynasty is due to the sort of nationalist lens looking at like the 1800s. And so they miss the whole part where they're doing all the settler colony stuff. But like what happens to them basically is that like, you know, it's like they're, it's kind of like the Ottomans, right, where like their empire suddenly runs into like newer, better, more violence and more efficient empires. But like, that doesn't mean that like they weren't also empires. Yeah, and then when people do work that out, sometimes like people when we talk about like settler colonialism in the US, sometimes like when folks are forced to retreat from the first position and that like that the US is not a settler colony, they'll then fall back on, well, they're indigenous empires beforehand as if that somehow justifies.

Yeah, it's like it does not. And like, you know, like, and I think it's the thing with Tibet too, where it's like, yeah, the preexisting Tibetan government was not good. Like I'm not going to defend like that government. It sucks. I would also point out that the whole we're going to stop the slave trade thing is one of the things explicitly in the in the treaty that was signed at the conference of Berlin. That was the thing that they claimed that like, that that was the thing that the European powers claimed they were doing when they invaded Africa. So like when they split Africa up between the colonial powers, so like, you know, okay. I mean, also, it's, you know, this is getting slightly off topic, but it's also worth noting that like there wasn't there was actually a communist movement like in Tibet that wasn't the CCP and the CCP killed them all. So that's great and fun. That's never happened before with totalitarian communist powers.

Yeah, it's never happened again. The sort of I think the stakes of what's happening here, I think become more clear when you understand that like, you like the US and China to like two different extents, right? Like, I don't know, like China has parts there, like there are parts of China where it's like very hard to like it's not a settler state. It's just like their states, but there are parts of China that definitely are a settler state and there's the US, which is like entirely a settler state. And then Taiwan is also to a settler state, although it's like post-independence Taiwan is the least violent of them, which is like, not like a, I don't know, you're not winning much of a price by being less violent than China and the US. But like, you know, it is true, good body count between those two. Yeah. But, you know, but I think this brings us back to like the Qing, the Qing occupation of Taiwan, which is that the Qing occupation of Taiwan is China's first of like first new settler colony.

The Qing administrators, they divide the indigenous population into you quote, cooked and raw savages. Those are their words. That literally does what I call them, like it is. Yeah. Why? Because they're really racist. Like, this is like, this is like a very old thing and sort of like, sort of Chinese imperial discourse, right? It's like, you have this difference between like barbarians and like Chinese people and like savages and non-savages.

Like this is like, this is how these people think, right? And it's not good. Yeah. Like, I don't know. I don't know, like how many more ways I can like try to explain to people who are like, who have been like, like people have been like telling the Chinese nationalist stuff for so long that it's like, this also was not good. Like, guys. Yeah. And again, if something the US has done, the UK is as classic imperialism, right?

Like we talk about civilized tribes in the US or, yeah, martial races in the British Empire. Yeah. I'm going to read a passage from Taiwan's Imagine Geography. Indeed, as Qing writers began to construct the Taiwan indigenous as two distinct groups, negative traits that had been formally associated with quote, the Taiwan savages as a whole began to be mapped on the wild or raw savages. Where earlier texts claimed, for example, that the savages, quote, by nature like to kill or, quote, were, or were, quote, stubborn and stupid. Now writers attributed these characteristics to the raw savages alone. Headhunting and notorious practice at the earlier, the earliest sources had associated with the natives of Taiwan and other Pacific islands also became also came to be seen as a raw savage practice. By the early 18th century, travel writing, travel writers increasingly emphasized a violent and murderous behavior of the raw savages.

The expansion of the Han Chinese population at this time caused an exhalation of conflict between Chinese settlers and the indigenous over land and other resources. Hostile indigenous were thus becoming a real threat to the safety of Han Chinese settlers. Although some writers blamed inter-ethnic conflict on trouble making Han Chinese settlers, many Qing literati attributed the belligerence of the raw savages to the inherent bloodthirsty nature. Ah, good stuff. Yeah, it's real, it's real, it's real classic empire shit. Like textbook shit. Yeah. And you know, you can see that there's this whole nationalist myth that like you'll read if you read modern people like talking about this or they'll be like, oh, the indigenous population that Chinese government got along.

So great. It is completely bullshit. This is an incredibly racist settler state. And it stays an incredibly racist settler state when the Japanese take over Taiwan in 1895. And the Japanese occupation is even worse than the Qing occupation of indigenous people in a lot of ways. It's a real shit show. There's a huge massacre. They do in the 30s.

Yeah. And okay, we should also mention at this point, so I've been focusing a lot on the indigenous population because almost everyone who tells the story from all sides. Doesn't talk about them ever because it's incredibly inconvenient to like everyone's narrative that there were people here for literally 6000 years. But you know, while basically since the Dutch showed up in the mid 1600s, there have been like increasing numbers of Chinese settlers and as as the Qing occupation sort of wears on the number of Chinese settlers increases and increases and increases. And it gets to the point where, you know, kind of close to like what we have today where like the indigenous population of Taiwan is like 2% of the population. And it's which is, you know, which is pretty close to what the indigenous population percent of the population of the US is, for example. Yeah. And we're going to make.

Sorry, I'm not going to. It's okay. Yeah. I'm going to talk about Elizabeth Warren. Oh, God. Oh, God. You know, actually, fucking, I will talk about Elizabeth Warren in the middle of this because I fucking go. Yeah.

Because her whole thing of like, like pretending to be indigenous was also fun because like she has a cookbook and the cookbook. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That claims both her and her husband are indigenous. And then in that is like maybe the most incomprehensibly awful like example of Chinese cooking I've ever seen in my life, which he apparently stole from like another cookbook. And it's really like just cascading levels of racism all the way down.

Oh, God. That's fine. It's all fine. All the settler colonies are bad. Their politics are also always bad because again, like being a settler colony inherently makes your politics awful because. Yeah. And representing yourself as an indigenous person to gain personal advantage in a settler colony when you are not one is ongoing act of colonialism. Yeah.

Genuinely horrific stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I do it. So having said that, so, okay, we have to talk about the Han population. There's like different like subgroups of the Han population who have different ethnicities speak different languages because Han is like a very large sort of category. And like inside of Han Chinese, there's like people who are Haka. There's a whole bunch of different groups.

And I guess the one thing that's worth mentioning is that a lot of the like, you'll hear people talk about Taiwanese as like its own language. And like that's like, there are a bunch of people who were Han but who don't speak Mandarin. And so like a lot of people in Taiwan speak Taiwanese, which is a sort of like Haka-ish language. Well, okay. What's the most technically accurate way of saying this? It is a language that is developed on Taiwan, like in Taiwan by people who speak Haka. And it's basically pretty close to that. Yeah.

And we're not going to get into super granular detail about these ways of immigration. But basically like one of the things that happens is that among these sort of Han settlers, there becomes this sort of like Taiwanese identity of like them being Taiwanese like specifically as a thing. And when the Japanese lose World War Two, the Nationalist Party or the KMT just like occupies Taiwan. But this is a real problem because again, most of the people don't want to be ruled by the KMT because the KMT like absolutely suck. If you want me to hear me like go deeper into them, go listen to my Bastards episode in the World Anti-Communist League. The short version is that the KMT is a genocidal like anti-communist death squad party run by an organized crime outfit that's led by Chiang Kai-shek. And you know, like they suck like really like absolutely horrible people. And as the KMT starts to lose the Civil War to Mao, like more and more KMT supporters and also people just like running from the war start fleeing to Taiwan.

And this develops a mass like you get these massive tension between the Han people who had already been there and the KMT and their sort of new supporters. The new sort of like settler immigrant population. And this boils over into what's called the February 28 incident or the 228 incident. Basically what happens so a KMT cop like attacks a woman who is like selling cigarettes on the street illegally because the KMT like I really also kept like they're so unbelievably corrupt. And so like they have all these like monopolies where it's like, okay, like there's a guy who has like the opium monopoly or like a guy who has like the cigarette monopoly. Right. And unless you're running through that monopoly, you can't sell like cigarettes. Yeah. And so in something that I think will be familiar to people who like like have followed the number of people in the US who've been killed for selling cigarettes illegally.

Yeah. So the cops start like beating this woman over the head with their with his pistol and everyone around them gets incredibly pissed off. And there's these giant protests and the KMT responds to the protest by shooting into the crowd. And wow. Yeah. I mean, so there's another side of this I should mention like briefly, which is that like part of what's happening here is like there's a kind of ugly like basically race riot that starts happening at the beginning of this. We're like people like the sort of like Han Taiwanese population like starts just like attacking like any random like any random people from like the KMT generation just like they find on the street and start attacking and killing. And like that sucks. It is also just unbelievably less violent than what happens next, which is at the KMT like, well, okay, so so there's sort of this race riot thing and then there's like there's a full scale revolution. And the Taiwanese population like ceases control of base of like almost the entire island, like the entirety of the main islands.

And they start demanding like democratic rights and stuff like, you know, a free press and free assembly and like the protection of the indigenous population. Although I should also mention that like, like nobody really in Taiwan, like treats the indigenous population well, like it was bad enough to like my seven year old mom was like, oh my God, why is everyone treating these people so badly? Like it's. But you know, okay, so they do this thing they have this revolution and then the KMT like just sends the army to the island and they kill something like 20,000 people in a week. Like they are like they are they are cutting people's face like they are like cutting parts of people's faces off with like knives. Like it is unbelievably brutal and this begins 38 years of martial law. The subsequent KMT police state tortures like tens of thousands of people and rules Taiwan with like an iron fist until like the late 80s. And this is where things get really messy, right?

Because up until 1942, like nobody in China like and this included both the KMT and the CCP until 1942, neither of them actually claimed that Taiwan was part of China. But then in 1942, both of them start claiming that Taiwan is part of China. Great. Yeah. And so when when the KMT flees to Taiwan, both the CCP and the KMT both claim to be a legitimate government of China and B to be the legitimate government of Taiwan. And it's a disaster. Like the KMT is nuts. Like my again, like they made my like seven year old mom sing songs about how they were one day they were going to reclaim the motherland. Oh, wow.

These people suck. Yeah. Some of them still in Myanmar or maybe perhaps not now, but like I've heard from from friends who are a little older who were there that they're a bunch of KMT like living in parts of Myanmar and tourists would go pay to visit them. Yeah, like that's that's the thing. Like, yeah, they're like they they they most of the people flee that flee to Taiwan, but like they they break in a number of different directions and there's like a bunch of weird rump states they set up. And so when they got knocked off, eventually it's a it's a whole mess. But in Taiwan, like they have this problem, which is that like, okay, so there's like water in between China and Taiwan. And if you want to get troops over it, you have to have those troops cross the water.

And this is a real problem for like an invasion. So what what ends up happening is a series. So like, okay, so you have the KMT and the CCP like staring each other down across these islands. And the product of this is what's called the three Taiwan Straits crisis. So basically, in the CCP starts selling Taiwan between in 1940, 1954, 1955, they start selling like Taiwan. And then they do it again, that 58 and like the KMT shelves them back. And, you know, there's a couple of points where it looks like they're going to invade, but then the US like move supplies the KMT to like keep the CCP from invading. And, you know, the result of this is this like I think incredibly psychologically revealing move after like the 1958 crisis.

Which 1958 crisis ends with the KMT and the CCP agreeing to shell each other on opposite days. Because and I cannot emphasize this enough. This entire conflict is profoundly bullshit and was foisted upon Taiwan by a bunch of peddly squabbling Chinese nationalists. How big is that distance we're talking about? Like they're selling shelves over there in the fifties. So it's probably not vast. Well, part of what's happening is so it's 100 miles. 110 miles.

But what's happening here is like they basically like have set up on outposts in different islands in between like the big island and the shore. So they're like they're on these islands, shelling each other like they drafted my grandpa and like sent him to one of these places. And that's and then he came back and was like, fuck this, we're out. And so like that's one of my families in the US because he was like, we're not doing this shit again. This sucks. I'm going to die for Senba. Yeah, I'm not going to be I'm not going to be cannon fodder for these like weird nationalist psychos. So OK, so what the sort of result of this though is that the KMT gets the backing of the US and the KMT becomes in Taiwan is the like the legitimately internationally recognized government.

Like of all of China from the end of the Civil War until like the 70s. Occupies the UN seat, right? Yeah, yeah. How's the UN seat? I actually we get we'll get into that and you know what we do here. So one of the things that happens here is that OK, so like the US really, really does not want the DCP to have the UN seat. And one of the things they try to do is that they offer neighbors India like the seat on like what's called. Why am I blanking on the name of the thing?

National Security Council Security Council. Yeah, the UN Security Council. They offer India a seat of the Security Council and they were is like, no, I'm not going to take this. I'm not going to take this. This is China's seat on the council. Like I'm not going to take this. And then I now repays him by invading India in 1963. Wait, is it 1960 or 1964?

This is not in my script. I am I am off. I am off script. Oh, 1962. Sorry. Yeah. So like this, this goes great for neighbor Mao just like invades and the Indians lose the war very badly. To understand why eventually China gets recognized, you have to talk a bit about like what was going on inside of the PRC, inside of the People's Republic of China.

So the CCP fights a war with the Soviets in 1969, which and this war gets called the Sino-Soviet border conflict. But like this is like pretty much a real war. Like there are like Chinese and Soviet divisions shelling each other. Like a lot of people die. Like I don't know if I've told the story on this podcast before. My favorite part of this whole thing is that the Soviets start like war gaming. Can they defeat China in nuclear war? And they figure out that they can't because the Chinese population is so dispersed that even even if they nuke all of China, they can't kill everyone. They'll lose the war and human wave attacks.

So the Soviets start developing the strategy of like having like a line of nuclear landmines across the Soviet Chinese border so that the human wave attacks can't get through. Because this conflict is nuts. Like both China and the USSR are trying to get the US to ally with them to like do a preemptive nuclear strike on the other side. Like it's crazy. Amazing. And this like completes the Sino-Soviet split. And the US like really, really wants to make sure that the Sino-Soviet split sticks. And so the US starts negotiating with China basically to bring China into the...

Well, okay, there's two ways of looking at it. One is that they just want to separate like, you know, the Chinese from the Soviets. The other way of looking at it is that they want to like bring China fully over to the American side of the Cold War. And I think the latter approach actually works, right? So in 1979, the US recognizes the CCP as a legitimate government of China. Several months later, China invades Vietnam in defense of the Khmer Rouge, which the US was also backing. So, yeah. And this is where we get into some more diplomatic bullshit.

Okay, so China maintains something called the One China Principle. The One China Principle holds that the CCP is the only government of China and that it rules Taiwan. The US has something called the One China Policy. The One China Policy is, it does not take a stance either way on who the government of Taiwan is. What it does is it acknowledges that China claims that it rules Taiwan. And you will see nationalists lie about this constantly. They will say things like, the US recognizes Taiwan as part of China under the One Child Policy. Blah, blah, blah, action is a violation of the One China Policy.

And that's not true, right? What actually happened is the US technical term for this is called strategic ambiguity. And so they have this thing like they don't formally recognize either side as a legitimate government of Taiwan. They recognize that this is what China says about Taiwan. They don't actually recognize, but they have no formal position on whether the CCP actually rules Taiwan. What they have is a recognition that China believes this. And again, this is all diplomatic bullshit. It's partial of why I hate talking about this because, again, the lives of literally tens of billions of people

are being governed by diplomats doing that kind of shit because it sucks. Yeah, so that's the One Child Policy thing, which is not, Jesus, the One China Policy, which is not the same thing as the One China principle. Yeah, and so all the while while this is going on, the CCP and the KMT are in this massive race to see who can kill the most communists. The CCP kills about a million communists in the Cultural Revolution and then invades Vietnam to kill even more communists. The KMT, not to be outdone by their former comrades across the border, the KMT is training desk walls in Honduras and helping the Guatemalan government do the Guatemalan genocide. It's really grim stuff.

And the product of this ideology, the product of this whole thing is the complete ideological collapse of the Chinese Communist Party as like a party that does communism and then the political military collapsed with the KMT. So it sort of has already stopped by the 80s, but by the 1990s, the CCP substantively has stopped being a communist party by any sense of the word. They're just capitalists and they're out there making money. And by the late 2000s, even like, you know, there had been a faction of what's called sort of the Chinese New Left that had thought that like they could, you know, they could, you know, this is still a communist party. We can still change China from the inside.

And those guys are like liquidated completely, like they're just gone. And, you know, and so by, you know, and by like now, right, like it's just, it's just, it's just capitalists. And meanwhile in Taiwan in the 80s and 90s, there's, there's increasing resistance to the KMT's like one party, like Desquad, like one party state and their whole Desquad, like reclaim the motherland politics. Everyone like starts to hate them. And this is where things get really weird, because on the one hand, the KMT is incredibly anti-communist. But on the other hand, they are the political faction that wants to tie Taiwan to China. And this means that like, you know, as they're sort of like ruthlessly suppressing communist and leftist,

they're also like vehemently independence. And so like they kill a bunch of anti-independence organizers, which is like, not, not, not, not how anyone like talks about this conflict because it's too weird. So in, there's always sort of weird political things going on. In 1987, the KMT ends the martial law that they'd had been enforced since the February 28th incident. And the KMT like disarms, right? They disarm. They're not as in like, okay, the KMT used to be a party that would like assassinate people for writing unauthorized,

like assassinate Americans on American soil for writing unauthorized biographies of like Chiang Kai-shek. And they kind of stopped being that like they disarm. They're not really in the drug trade anymore. Caveats don't quote me on that. But like they're, they're not the party they were in the 80s. Right. That's sort of the important thing. Like they, they, they, they lose in one party dictatorship.

And you get the sort of transition to democracy that ends in the first free presidential elections in Taiwanese history in 1996. And this, like right, right before this, you get the third Taiwan Straits crisis where the president of Taiwan like goes to the U.S. And China reacts to this by having an enormous tension temper tantrum and like starts doing military exercises. Like they start like simulating an invasion of Taiwan. They start like shooting rockets like at the coast. Like jet. These rockets are land like just off the coast. And oh, it's edgy.

Yeah. And this ends when the U.S. moves like two carrier groups into the Pacific and the crisis ends. But like, okay, there's a few things I would say here. One is that like, okay. So on the one hand, this is the CCP having a temper tantrum. Right. On the other hand, like it really, and this is the thing that I think most Americans have never experienced. Right.

Because the U.S. is not a country that like gets attacked. Right. But having another country firing missiles at you fucking sucks. Yes, this is true. Psychologically, it is awful. Like we saw how insane the U.S. went. Like the like the first time it had actually been attacked since like World War II when 9-11 happened. Like, you know, you saw how just absolutely batshit the U.S. goes.

Right. Like, yeah. Okay. If you are a person in Taiwan, right, which like a lot of my family is, and you are constantly having another country shooting rockets at you, like it sucks. Like, and I want people to like, like sort of just like think about that for a second. Because like, I think a lot of what how this crisis and how this whole thing is talked about on the left is as a sort of like abstract thing. That's like, you know, it's a set of abstract principles, right?

And not stuff that's happening to real people who are like watching missiles fucking fall into the ocean. Right. Like and watching another country like preparing to kill them. And this sucks. One of the other things that's worth noting here is that like part of what's going on in terms of the hardening of China-Taiwan relations is Tiananmen Square happened. And the reason this matters is that so one of the things that like stabilizes I guess relations between Taiwan and China in parts is the fact that I they're both incredibly economic closely economically connected to the U.S. And this is because all of China, Taiwan and China are all capitalist countries. And so they're ruling classes are all completely interdependent.

Like people people talk a lot about Pelosi like investing in a bunch of like chip manufacturing companies in Taiwan. And that's true. But she also has a bunch of investments in China because again, capitalist single ruling class, they all they all they all all of your logistics lines run through each other, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I will insert a note here that is not in the script that anytime you hear someone talk about like the U.S. decoupling with their economy from China, they're they're full of shit. Do not like everything they're saying everything they're about to say is a lie. It does not happen. It has not happened. It will not happen.

Like they're lying. Yeah, this is important. Yeah. Even at the height of Trump's bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. Like there was kind of an attempt doing it didn't work because like, you know, you could. There are some things you can offer to Mexico, right, but like most like China, China has a unique combination of a like a really good energy grid for the most part.

I mean, OK, there have been times where it's gotten over tax, but like it can compare to most other developing countries that has a really good energy grid. It has a population in which I actually doing union organizing is illegal. And it has a population that, you know, like gets forced to work incredibly long hours, right? Yeah. And the combination of those three things makes it makes it, you know, a place where if you're an American capitalist, if you're a Taiwanese capitalist, and that's actually part of this, too, is that like part of the reason there's so much like hatred for Taiwan. It's a China among people who you wouldn't expect it to be is that like there's there's a lot of people in China whose only experience of Taiwan is working for like fucking Foxconn and like working just in hell conditions for like for a Taiwanese capitalist. And, you know, and that that's very easy to transform into nationalist sentiment and it sucks. But yeah, you know, like, OK, so like the US has an incentive to stabilize US-Chinese relations in part because it's economically like tied to both of these countries.

But when something goes really wrong in US-China relations, like, for example, after Tiananmen, we're, you know, I think it's also worth noting like from the period like basically from when China invades Vietnam and even a bit before that, from when China invades Vietnam in 1979 up until Tiananmen, US-China relations are really good. Like the US is seen as like an ally against the evil Soviet evil empire. And, you know, but Tiananmen makes things go really badly because like the only thing an American ally can possibly do that will sour the American press on them is to shoot a bunch of students in front of the American press corps. Like that that's literally the only thing you could possibly do like you can you can do actual genocides and the US press corps won't care. But if you shoot a bunch of students right in front of you, they will get very mad. And, you know, sometimes we've avoided doing that in Myanmar. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's it's it's grim.

Lots of lots of yeah. But, you know, the consequence of this is like, yeah, when something goes really wrong in US-China relations, you get China starts doing Saber rattling at Taiwan. And the effects of this on Taiwanese politics and also just sort of what's been happening inside of Taiwan is really weird. So the KMT who have been again like the militantly anti-communist party for half a century for half a century are suddenly the faction that once closer ties with the CCP. And the product of this is that the KMT and the smaller like hardcore pro-unification parties become known as the Pan Blues. The Pan Blues are the people who like want close relations with with China and don't want close relations with like the West. It's like the US, etc, etc. And their opposition group is a progressive opposition groups, which are composed of the groups that oppose the KMT's military dictatorship.

And these groups form, well, okay, they form a couple of parties. The big part, the first party they form, which is the biggest one by far is called the Democratic Progressive Party or the DPP. And the DPP and its allies, which include some leftist parties, I think like the Green parties in this coalition. There's also these like smaller, like radical pro-independence parties. They became known as the Pan Greens. And this is like to this day, this is like the main dividing line in Taiwanese politics. You have the conservative Pan Blues who favor closer relations with China and the Pan Green Progressives who favor like closer relations with democracies. And also, I think importantly, the the Pan Greens had this kind of like, are the people who are in favor of like, they're being a distinct Taiwanese national identity. And the Pan Blues are kind of more suspect of that because again, like, you know, they're based as the KMT, right?

They want closer ties with China and closer ties with China means not having like a distinct Taiwanese identity that's separate from China. And OK, I'm enormously oversimplifying this and people who are experts in this will like this part of it will be like, it's more complicated than that. And it is. This is the simplest explanation I could give you that people will understand. Like, I was like, I was debating whether I even wanted to talk about like the Pan Blue, like closer ties with China versus Pan Green, like closer ties with the West thing at all because it's confusing. And people probably won't remember it. But I mean, you know, if you want to understand Taiwanese politics at all, like this is the line you have to take. No, I think it's important to at least throw out the terms that people are going to hear if they're going to engage in any discussion beyond like what has has tweeted. And I'm going to also like, I'm going to like lay my cards on the table so people don't understand my political position on this. And my political position is one that pisses off literally everyone, which is that like, I'm not like a DPP supporter, like I'm not one of the sort of like progressive like groups.

I'm not in the sort of like, I'm not really kind of like in the sort of like how one independence camp, I'm not really like a DPP person. I don't know, like, but I'm also not a KMT person, like because the KMT are capitalist reactionaries. But I also like, okay, like, I'm going to do my critique of the DPP and then I'm going to sort of walk it back a little bit. I think Taiwanese progressives in general are way too close to the American security state for me to want anything to do with them. And the ones who aren't like, okay, the Taiwanese left, like Jesus Christ, get your shit together. Taiwan's most famous anarchist is literally a government minister. This is how fucked the Taiwanese left is like, like, like these people. Oh, God, I mean, enormously frustrated by it.

Like, people couldn't develop like a left. The people couldn't develop a national class analysis. You beat them over the head with a copy of capital. And okay, like, I think like Taiwanese progressives will point out, and I think this is fair, that it's very easy to criticize, like, allying with the US when it's not your ass in the firing line of Chinese rockets, which is true. It is much easier to criticize the US when the rifles being put in your face are American rifles than when it's, you know, Chinese soldiers pointing Chinese rifles. And this is a big part of why Taiwanese politics are so fucked. Things get reduced to this sort of like democracy versus authoritarian US versus China, like Taiwanese identity versus Chinese identity to a lesser extent, like binary. But it's like, okay, like my family is Taiwanese, but like I was born here.

I grew up here. And you know, I know, I know what American democracy looks like. It's the army hiring Eric Prince to slaughter Iraqi civilians and Baghdad. And, you know, I also know what, you know, I have a bunch of family in China too. I know what Chinese authoritarianism looks like. It's the CCP hiring Eric Prince to build trading bases for mass internment camp guards in Xinjiang. Like, you know, okay. And the only actual like political solution that will ever get anywhere is to fight both of them.

A position that is extremely unpopular literally everywhere. And like, you know, I think they're like, the progressives have a good argument that, you know, this isn't this isn't aligned. They have the luxury of taking, right? Because they have an immediate enemy and they're going to do whatever they have to to not get invaded. And that means allying with people who like I want to overthrow and see liquidated as a class. And like, I understand why they think that I also am not them. So yeah, this is this is me laying my cards in the table. And I think also like this goes back to the whole sort of like settler state question, right?

Which is the sort of unresolved political question in the US, Taiwan and China. Like no actual major political force has like committed itself to destroying the settler state and returning indigenous sovereignty like two indigenous people. And you can't have like any kind of libertarian politics in a settler state without that. But on the other hand, like, okay, the actual politics of Taiwanese indigenous people is really complicated. Like it doesn't work in the same way that like indigenous politics in the US does, for example, like different. I mean, and this is also true in the US, like different tribes and different relations to sort of indigenous nationalism, like. And another thing that that's true about the that that that that that's true about Taiwanese indigenous people is that a lot of them vote for the KMT. And they do this for a couple of reasons.

One of which is because the KMT has this like really, really powerful and eccentric patronage network that they've been running for literally like basically since they got onto the island. They've been running this patronage network. And this allowed them to do like real incredibly intense and powerful base building in indigenous communities, right? Like they're like the GDP are the people who like distribute like, okay, they have like a center, right? And you go there and they give you like food, right? Like this is the place where you get your like sesame oil, right? And then also there's the second layer of the patronage network, right? It's like if you want to get a job, you join the KMT.

And so they have these they have these really deep sort of political roots in that sense. And then also the KMT does this thing where they're like, hey, look, the DPP is doing settler nationalism. Like, hey, these are the people who colonized you like fuck them. Like you should ally with us instead, which is true. Like it is true. And like, I think, I don't know, like Taiwanese progressives kind of like tap dance around this. But like, yeah, like it is true that the sort of like Han Taiwanese identity is sort of settler nationalism. But like also this is true of the KMT as well. Like the KMT are also a settler nationalism.

Like, you know, like they conquered the island and ruled as, you know, okay. And you'll try you'll also see people who will take this argument and try to argue that indigenous people voting for the KMT means that indigenous people support China invading Taiwan. And this is just comically wrong. Like they're just they are lying to you. Like indigenous people in Taiwan, like literally everyone else in Taiwan do not support being ruled by China. And the argument that a Chinese occupation of Taiwan is somehow less of a settler state than the current system is just like comically propaganda bullshit. Yeah, China. Yeah, that's not being kind. Yeah, I'm going to get into like this a little bit too, right, which is OK.

So like I've been trying to be fair and balanced here, right? Like I have been giving you my critique of Taiwanese, Taiwanese progressivism. This is going to piss off a lot of people. But like having said all of this, China invading Taiwan would be really, really, really bad. Like I cannot emphasize enough how bad this would be. Like, OK, so Taiwan is like a regular settler bourgeois democracy with like all of the sort of good and bad things about bourgeois democracies, which we're all familiar with, right? Like we understand what it what a settler democracy is. To be fair, the modern Taiwanese government is like infinitely less violent than the modern American government.

Like the prison population in like relative to the population in Taiwan is like, I think it's like an eighth of what the American prison population is, right? Like it's not like, you know, OK, it's like Taiwan is not like a sort of like Taiwan is not a socialist state, right? But it's also like, you know, better than the US, which is an incredibly low bar that like you could trip and fall over. But like, you know, OK, it's better than the US, you know, it's closer to like Sweden or something in terms of violence. But I think it's also a good comparison because Sweden also has an indigenous population called the Sami and all Swedish leftists will studiously never admit that they exist or talk about them at all. So OK, again, this is not a stateless class of society, but it's also like like since the KMT has been disarmed, like this is not one of like the world's great purveyors of violence, right? Like it's not the US. China, on the other hand, is a ferociously reactionary capitalist settler to tatership. And this is something that Americans have very little experience with.

For a long time, people argued that, OK, like if China, like if Taiwan became a part of China, Taiwan would get some kind of relationship similar to what Hong Kong has where like there were free elections and union organizing and free speeches legal. But you know, 2019 happened. Yeah, right. You know, it was even in Taiwan, like even in Hong Kong, right? The extent to which like, you know, like union organizing and free association and free press existed or like. And again, like Hong Kong also, and I want to point this out, like the CCP has been strengthening this the entire time they were there. Hong Kong is the only place on earth where corporations have the right to vote and they vote for the CCP. Like it's so OK, this is this is great. But you know, 2019 happens, right? And guess what? Now Hong Kong has national security law, which allows the government to rescue literally for posting on Twitter that you don't think that China should control Hong Kong. Secretary of Secretary for security in Hong Kong, Chris Tang said earlier this week that criticizing the government with the intention to provoke quote, hey, attention to provoke hatred quote between the classes was a violation of the national security law.

A position that if actually like that, that if actually like this, if you take this position, this would outlaw in its entirety. All socialists organizing in Hong Kong, because again, anything that attempts to provoke hatred between the classes is illegal. Yeah. And you know, some panacea of liberal democratic distance within the PRC. Yeah. And this is this is the modern thing like, you know, I mean, again, like, like people, people talk about this a lot like Hong Kong is one of the world's most neoliberal cities. And the CCP has taken it over and oh, hey, guess what? They're they're they're living out the neoliberal dream of making it illegal to try to do any like try to do like class war stuff. One of the things that happens immediately after national security laws that it's used to destroy China's China's independent trade union federation. And this brings us to like the sort of class perspective on this. Independent union organizing in China is illegal.

And when I say it's illegal, I don't mean illegal in the sense of like jaywalking. We're like, OK, if someone if like a cop sees you jaywalking, they might arrest you. Like, if you try to do independent union union organizing in China, men will show up to your house in the middle of the night and you will disappear for three months until a video of you with two very large men standing just out of camera range appears in which you can't you're organizing and apologize for your crimes. Like to get a sense of the level of oppression we're dealing with here, two Chinese leftists named Lou Yu and Li Ting Yu recorded and published a series of protests. Like they basically they had they on the Chinese social media, like they posted this like record basically of strikes and protests that were happening in the country every day. So really all they're doing is they are documenting the strikes and protests that are happening and collecting data about them and posting it. In 2016, the police showed up to lose house, put a bag over his head and dragged him away to a dragged him away to a jail cell. Lou spent four years in prison. Li got two years and the two of them never saw each other again.

This is what happens if you literally just report on the wildcat strikes that are happening. Someone will put a bag over your head and you will go to prison for four years. Like it is it is like the situation for organized labor of any kind of anyone trying to do union organizing in China is unbelievably dire. Now China and this is what I'm talking about here is an independent union organizing China has an official trade union federation. The trade union federation China has such a fucking joke that is literally a matter of academic debates like their academic papers arguing about whether or not it even actually counts as a union. And this has been true since the late 1950s when the CCP decided that, oh, hey, this trade union is there to represent the party and not workers and its role is to mediate between the, you know, to mediate between the party and workers, not actually to, you know, like represent them when they like when they have disputes with their bosses. So yeah, like they don't like they don't they don't go on strike like ever like they they they they they they exist as like another part of the party state the goal of which is to make sure that bosses keep making money. If you try to work outside of it they will arrest you.

Now Taiwan is not like a shining workers paradise right the sort of vaunted semiconductor industry that everyone talks about is run by a bunch of workers getting the ship burned out of them by vats of acid. But conditions for the Chinese working class are even worse. Counties wages are higher. Taiwan is better workplace protections. Again, you can legally organize unions. Meanwhile, in China, there are famously suicide nets around Chinese factories because working for these places is so fucking awful that people would literally rather kill themselves and live in it. And, you know, you can ask why is this happening. And the reason it's happening is that a lot of the stuff that is literally the worst fucking nightmare of the American left things like your boss owning your apartment is just standard practice in China.

This is just this is just what it's like to be a worker in China, your boss owns your fucking apartments. You have literally hundreds of millions of people who live in these tiny like they're called workers dormitories, which again often literally owned by like the owner of the factory they're in. You get like when I say like workers dormitories right it's not even like it's not even like an American dorm building right where like you you know you have like your own room. Like it is like yeah, like it's a bunch of people sleeping in cots like like sleeping in bunk beds with like a fucking bucket next to them to go to the bathroom. Like it is it is horrible. You have like like the I talk about this a lot in this show. But again, like literally there are payday loans integrated into delivery apps. Like this this is the level of capitalism that China is.

I'm not going to like I'm not going to like argue that it's worse in the US. I think they're bad in different ways. Like there are there are there are like the US is incarceration system is like, you know, like one of the great human evils in the entirety of human history, right? There are things that like the US is worse at like the Chinese police are a lot less likely just fucking murder you like, you know, but like yes, but like China, it sucks to be a worker in China. Like it really sucks. And I can't emphasize this enough because I don't because people don't really understand this. Like they like people do not understand that again, like the normal Chinese schedule is called 996. You work 9am to 9pm, six days a week. This is the normal schedule. Most a lot of workers like that that that again that that that's like an average schedule.

Most people work more than this 996 is 70 hours a week. Right. Like it is it is it is a shit show. And yeah, if it is Taiwan, if China invades Taiwan, the conditions of the Taiwanese working class are going to get worse. That is just a fact. Like imposing Chinese law on Taiwan would strengthen the power of the capitalist class and weaken the proletariat. From an indigenous perspective, which we've talked about this at length about, you know, we've talked about at length how the Taiwanese system is not that good. But, you know, it's not like it's a settler colony, there's some representation, but you know, it's not great. It is much better than the CCP system.

The CCP's line on ethnic minorities is that if you're an ethnic minority in China, you're going to work in a Han factory. You're going to pick crops from Han own fields. You're going to dance and smile for Han tourists. If you step out of line, you will be dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night and sent to a fucking camp. There are, you know, like this is the thing that Americans sort of have similar experiences with. It's like, you know, you have immigration raids. You have raids on homeless encampments. But it's not that and that that's like, you know, that that's a kind of experience that is somewhat similar to what it's like to live in Xinjiang.

But like, it's not exactly the same. Like, I know people whose families are just fucking gone. Like, the police showed up in the middle of the night and their families are just gone. They've never seen them again. Like, they're just gone. No one knows where they are. No one knows if they're even alive. They're just vanished. And if you think that this isn't going to happen to Taiwan's indigenous population, the moment they start talking about self-determination, you are incredibly bafflingly, hopelessly naive.

And, you know, like, there's a lot of other shit that you can point to, right? Like, for example, Taiwan has gay marriage and China doesn't. Like, the degree of press censorship, just like social media censorship in China that doesn't use some Taiwan is like absolutely absurd. Like, you know, I think like most like some people talking about press censorship in the U.S. are like almost always right wing shitheads who are complaining about like they yell a bunch of slurs. Like in China, a very common thing that happens is like someone will be posting about a corrupt local official and then every single post about it will get deleted. And if you try to post it, the guy's name, your post won't go up. And then any emoji that people were using in association with the corrupt local official like get blocked and you can't use the emojis anymore.

And like, you know, and like, it's almost like the level of censorship is almost comical to the extent where like people don't believe. Yeah. Like in the U.S. like don't like, you know, when people talk about like, like, oh, the Chinese government isn't really banning guys who look too feminine and gay guys from appearing in media is like, no, they are like there. I think I think it was a Beyonce concert. There was a very famous like very funny thing that happened like a few months ago where there was this concert. I think it was a Beyonce concert. No, it was. I can't remember who it was.

But like, so there was a stream of it in China and there was a guy, there was a censor who was like putting like one of those grey out censored bars like over the singers clothes because they were they were considered too explicit and she's just like moving this like dot of like censorship thing across the stage trying to fall like this is the level of bullshit that happens here. Like it's not a thing that like the U.S. really has much reference for because like we don't experience like this is not a thing that you don't experience in the U.S. Like yeah. Sometimes I like to think about these things in terms of like, like, like all people talk about all world and Huxley as these dystopian novels, right? And perhaps people don't read those novels, but they love to quote them. And like in all worlds, we have like a system which like keeps you quiet by pushing you down, right? And in Huxley's we have a system which keeps you quiet by keeping you happy with drugs and such.

And like it's important to recognize that it both things can be bad by the material conditions and the day to the life of people, especially marginalized people in one society can be markedly better. Yeah. Well, and I think also like yeah, like I think as we're like the ways in which the American like there are similarities, but like yeah, like there are lots of ways in which the sort of Chinese system and the American system are differently bad. And that breaks people's brains because you get a lot of like you get you get a lot of Americans who were convinced to become convinced that like China has a socialist paradise. And there's a Chinese version of this where like you get international students who come to the U.S. the first time and see an election and they like lose their minds and are like absolutely convinced that like American democracy is like the only table political system and they read Hayek and they like lose. They just like they become the Chinese version of tank use which are like weird, neoliberal people. And it's like, no, like I know actually in fact none of these things are good. Both these societies are just like not good to live in in any way.

And I think that there's another thing I should mention here, like why all of this sort of like bullshit posturing is happening between the U.S. and China right now which is that like on on the American side, like Biden is trying to distract from the fact that the country is falling apart and there's a bunch of fascists trying to take over and like, you know, like all of this bullshit is happening. China is trying to distract from the fact that they have 19% youth unemployment right now and that like there are there are like cops dispersing people doing runs on banks because it finally looks like a Chinese housing bubble is about to crack. Like, it's, you know, the sort of nationalist stuff is like for China in the U.S. it is this sort of game that they play that has a lot to do basically with pacifying their own internal populations. You know, for everyone in Taiwan, like it's not a game. And that's that's the thing I think I want to close on which is like the single most important thing here is that there is no way for China to take control of Taiwan except by war. 94% of the population does not want to be ruled by China. 82% of the population of Taiwan wants to status quo.

If you try to force how Chinese rule of Taiwan, the only way to do it is by war. And seizing and controlling seizing control of and occupying a place with 23 and a half million people is going to be a bloodbath. There's no other way to do it. Even if you are, I just want to leave this as sort of a message to people who like who don't agree with me on this, which is that if you've gotten to the end of this and you genuinely believe that Taiwan is part of China. Are you willing to watch your family get burned alive for that principle? Because that that that is what you are asking us to do. You were asking us to watch our families die for your belief about lines on a map. And if you are not willing to accept the consequences of your belief personally, if you are not willing to see your family get obliterated by a fucking rocket, then don't push for it to happen to us. And yeah, that is that that is Taiwan 101.

Please, for the love of God, stop doing this bullshit. I don't want my family to fucking die. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's very well said, mate. I think a lot of people are so detached from the underground consequences of their like theoretical on Twitter.com positions that it can be very easy to be incredibly callous to people who have loved one's skin in the game. Yeah. And I think I think this is the part of it. Like, no, like 99% of the people on Twitter are posting about this. They have no stake in this whatsoever.

It doesn't matter to them. If everyone on time, if everyone who lives in Taiwan died tomorrow, it would have no material effect on them whatsoever. Right. Like the worst thing that would maybe happen to them is it would be harder for them to get graphics cards. Yeah, come back to losing your entire family. Yeah, like this is this is this is 23 million people, an enormous number of whom are going to die if this thing happens. So, yeah, like, unless you are committed enough to this to kill your own family, then fucking stop posting about it. Because that like, if you were not willing to materially accept the consequences of your own position on yourself, then you shouldn't have it. Yeah, especially when you're pretending to be a leftist.

Yeah. Yeah, this has been a good happen here. Yeah, don't don't have a Chinese invasion of Taiwan happen here. Yeah. Overthrow your local settler colony. Yeah, settler colony lives most bad. That's the official stance of. Yep.

Actually, I'm not sure if we can legally, I think we can legally say this is the official stance of cool zone media. I'm pretty sure we can't legally say it's the official stance. Yeah. Maybe cut that down. We'll say, yeah, here are cool zone media. We don't endorse settler colonialism. Yeah, don't do it. War is bad.

Don't rocket cities. Yeah. Welcome to a good happen here, a podcaster. We occasionally have introductions and mostly we have this and yeah, that it's the podcast things fall apart. Things come back together again. They fall apart again. We put the back together again. Yeah, you know, you know the drill.

Yeah, and with me is James. Hello, James. Hello. And speaking of things falling apart, we're talking today about the what it looks like when the sort of the interconnectivity of the American judicial system comes apart under the weight of dueling abortion laws. And with us to talk about that is a lot of people who have written a lot of very good stuff about this. So with us is Alejandra Caraballo, who is a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School Cyber Law Clinic, where she works on the intersection of gender and technology. Hello. Hi.

Welcome to the show. We also have Michelle McGrath, who is a public defender in New York City for like almost a decade and specializes in bail and parole litigation. Michelle, welcome to the show. Hey, happy to be here. And finally, we have Yfka Pierre, who is a senior litigation counselor where she works at the intersection of reproductive and criminal law. And she is on cases where folks are criminalized for their pregnancy loss. So Yfka, welcome to the show as well. So y'all have written, actually, I don't.

It occurs to me that it's been long enough. This is still not published yet, right? Yes. So it's basically, we submitted it to CUNY Law Review and we're waiting for edits. We expect our law review article to be published in December. But we've basically created a TLDR that we collaborated for Slate. So there's a 1200-word article on Slate that you can read that kind of condenses down our article from like 25,000 words, as much as we can do. We were graciously provided the long one.

And so we read the long one. We're going to talk about it because, yeah, it's a really interesting look at... I don't know. There's a lot of sort of points of... Okay, so I guess we should re-run and talk about what this actually is, which is that one of the things that's been happening in the last... I mean, basically since Dobbs is a series of questions about... Okay, so it's a series of questions about what happens if you are in a state where abortions are illegal and you go to another state and you get an abortion there. And, yeah, there's lots of jurisdictional questions here.

And, yeah, this article is a very, very sort of in-depth and really interesting look at it. And I guess... Okay, I want to jump into this at a kind of weird place, but I wanted to start with... One of the things that's in this article that I haven't really seen much discussion of is about the way that the sort of safe harbor laws that states have been setting up are being... Well, okay, the way that they can potentially be in the way that previous safe harbor laws for immigration stuff were sabotaged by the fact that all of the cops are sending all of their stuff to each other. So, yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that. I guess it's like a lead into it. Yeah, I mean, with respect to specifically how all the law enforcement is talking to each other, I think Alejandro might know a little more with respect to that.

But when it comes to the way these laws are being written, they really don't have the kind of teeth that sort of the politicians are spinning to the public. They're sort of letting folks think that, well, we would never, we in New York would never send you to Texas for anything related to the criminalization of a pregnancy loss. And because of the way the law of extradition works in the United States, which is actually a constitutional law, it's going to be hard in a lot of ways for them to resist that. And so we have our article that's talked about a little bit in actually great detail about how they could actually craft the laws that would be a little bit different. Yeah, I think one of the things that, you know, this just this past week, there was the story that came out of Nebraska, where Facebook provided the DMs of someone who is being charged with, you know, it wasn't even charged with like, like there wasn't a formal charge of like committing an abortion, like the person that was being charged, it was like disposing of a body like, and basically hiding a body. And so Facebook like released a statement was saying like, well, we weren't told that this had anything to do with an abortion. And like, that's the exact problem, right, is that when states are going to seek extradition, they're going to bring charges that have probably nothing to do with it in the immediate like on its face to do with abortion.

It could just be like, you know, they can repurpose all kinds of laws, like endangerment of a minor, right, like they can do all these things that like would ordinarily like never apply. Never apply in a pregnancy, but they can just kind of do it just to bring charges. And so, you know, my colleague who's unfortunate here, Cynthia Conte Cook has written about this excessively about like the criminalization aspect. But in terms of like how, you know, these these safe harbor states, you know, these laws, like, are going to be very difficult. I think it is just really what we're dealing with the effects of surveillance capitalism, right. So like, Facebook turned over these DMs. Facebook has been in the process of moving to end to end encryption, which basically would have made this impossible to do in the first place, because it would have been similar to signal. But what Facebook did is because they realized that they would have lost access to data around people's messages and what they're talking about, they made it optional instead of by default.

And so, most people who are not very tech savvy or very familiar understanding of, you know, who has access to the messages and whether the government can get access, they might not know that they can set this to end to end encryption. And so, essentially, like in pursuit of profit, Facebook doesn't enable this privacy feature. But this is the exact same kind of stuff, right. So like Facebook has access to this data, but there's also this whole shady system of data brokers that gets access to all kinds of data. And that's exactly how I think what you alluded to when you asked this question about ICE having access to basically all this information on immigrants that states had swore they would never share with federal immigration officials. Like ICE has basically built this entire shadow system where they're purchasing data about driver's licenses and all this stuff, basically by purchasing it on the open market. And that bypasses all kinds of formal data requisition requests, warrants, subpoenas, all those things that would normally be required because it's just freely available. So, you know, suffice it to say, as much as these states may want to protect things on that end in terms of data, it's going to be incredibly hard to do so.

And I think the previous efforts around safe harbor for immigrants and asylum states and things like that, it's just going to be really hard to enforce and practice. However, on the extradition side, when like criminal charges are actually brought that there is some things that states can actually do to help protect folks who are caught up with any kind of abortion related charges in their states. I just also want to jump in to say that the system works the way that it works because nobody's monitoring it. So when we're talking about law enforcement officials that are talking to one another and getting information through very informal means, right? Things that probably by the book would take a warrant to go from one place to the other just takes Marcy calling over Janice that works at the other system and getting something faxed over. Even if they're not doing it out of malice, it's just, oh, this is out of convenience. It makes life a lot easier to get information from this place to that place. And folks have these informal systems that are set up that even when the law says that they cannot do it, if we don't have safeguards that I hate to say go after people because it seems so carceral, but like that protects what the intent of the law is. It has no teeth, right? If your law doesn't stop Marcy from calling Janice and getting information on someone that they're not supposed to have, then your law doesn't matter. It's kind of a nothing sandwich, right? And I have plenty of thoughts and stuff to say about the criminalization when we get there later because that's a lot of my work.

But I think that gets to what Michelle and Alejandra and what Conti who's not here have found is just, you got to have something more than nothing sandwiches, something more than something that seems good on the surface and doesn't actually help the people that we want to help. And I want to sort of help folks sort of understand how this plays out on the ground. So in the article we give an example, right? So maybe I've got a New Yorker who gets prescribed a medication that would induce abortion and, you know, they bring it to their friend in a state where that's criminalized and they give their friend the medication. The pregnancy ends, maybe the person is concerned and they go to the hospital. Quite often nurses and doctors are part of the criminalization process. And so, you know, maybe they call law enforcement official based on this information, they get a subpoena for that person's phone. So now they're in the phone and they can find out, well, they got this medicine from the New Yorker. Well, now the person who took the medication perhaps is charged with homicide, right? I think what's key here is that they're not necessarily going to be charged with abortion.

Maybe they're charged with homicide, they're charged with infanticide. And guess what? The person who came from New York is now probably going to be charged as an accomplice. So now we have a warrant for a homicide for the person in New York. Because of all the national databases that we have, the NYPD, any of the law enforcement in New York is going to see, oh, that New Yorker's wanted for homicide. Let me go get that person. And so when then that person comes in front of a judge, even though New York is saying or Connecticut is saying, you know, we're not going to give any resources to extradite someone related to the termination of pregnancy. Well, they're just being brought before law enforcement in front of a judge who sees that they're wanted for homicide, right? And so on the ground, these laws don't have anything to stop them. And so we've sort of suggested things that involve immediate right to counsel. People need to be released for extradition. And we can talk about some of those more.

But I think it helps to sort of give that example to see how it's happening, how it would happen in real life. There's something else I wanted to sort of talk about with this, because one of the things that on the sort of surveillance front has been the way in which like what we're seeing now is sort of the combination of like a bunch of the types of surveillance that have been inflicted on a bunch of different groups of people. You have the anti sex worker stuff, you have the surveillance stuff that's been used because immigrants, you have the sort of post 9-11, like, I mean, this is where the sort of fusion centers come from is the sort of like post 9-11 security state buildup. And then you have the stuff that's been used to go after activists. And I think that's been really interesting to me to sort of, I mean, incredibly like depressing too to watch has been, yeah, like, I don't know, like I remember like, one of the things, these fusion centers where like all of these sort of like law enforcement agencies like share information with each other, like, I don't know, like I remember in 2020, like, they were like sending one of my friends tweets around, because that was one of the things they were doing to like go after people during the protests. And like, I don't know, I was interested in this question of these fusion centers because it's this, I don't know, it's this real sort of like, it really seems like the sort of like the next step of where all of this stuff goes is, you know, the fusion centers becomes this place where it's really, really easy to bypass the law because, you know, all of the stuff is just getting shared anyways. And it brings up this other problem which I was interested in, which is about like, to what extent can the state even control law enforcement?

Because like, okay, like law enforcement are those like cops in general, very reactionary, there's, you know, if you go back into the history of the anti-bush movement, there's a lot of them being like aided, bedded by the cops. And I was wondering, I don't know, what you think about, like, what do you even do if the cops just decide they don't want to follow the law at all? And they're just, you know, they're just going to keep passing information on no matter what you do? I think Alejandra and I probably differ on views about where things are going next, probably just because of the nature of our work and the things that we're dealing with the most. So this is going to be fun. So I actually think, so yesterday, two days ago, whenever this airs, however many days ago, one of our colleagues at If When How, my colleague Laura Huss, who's brilliant, has been working on this research project for like the last two years, tracking cases of when folks are criminalized for self-managed abortion. Why self-managed abortion? Because that is the abortions that were happening outside of clinical spaces, right, that were, there were always questions about who can be criminalized for self-managing their care. There weren't as many protections in the law for a lot of helpers and things like that in self-managed care. So when her and her team looked at this data, what they found was that the biggest risk of criminalization didn't actually necessarily come from external forces looking at big data, right, but was actually cut like the hell is other people, because what they were finding was that nearly the majority of cases of folks coming to the attention of law enforcement was coming from medical professionals.

So I want to say I have the numbers in front of me somewhere. It's, well, so it's something like 45% of folks that were reported to the police were reported by some sort of medical professional, whether that's a doctor, a social worker, a nurse or whoever that was at a hospital when they were seeking care or they were getting prenatal care at some point when they found out they were pregnant, that's how they came to the attention of law enforcement. Another 25, 26% of those folks that came to the attention of law enforcement came to people that they told information to that they entrusted, whether that was a family member, a partner, a former partner, whoever the heck, right. So what we're finding is that the vast majority of people that came to the attention of law enforcement was because of folks like actual people that had the information. And then that turned into them being individually targeted by police, and then that turned into their data being mined on their actual physical devices, not like big brother down, but small brother up, right. When I certainly think about kind of how big data can be used and manipulated and like absolutely messed up to do a drag net of folks that's always kind of a possibility that's swimming, but I think the immediate possibility is like, how do you protect your individual data on your individual devices, what safety plan do you have in place about how you use the internet wholesale because I'm a lawyer I can't tell people to commit crimes but I can tell people to be very careful about how you manage your devices and how you manage information.

Who do you tell your business to full stop right because that's how folks are coming to the attention of law enforcement but can the laws control cops I think what we generally see is like probably not. But will the courts respond to cops that work outside of the law. I think the lawyerly awful answer is it depends on the jurisdiction that you manage to find yourself in. Yeah, I think because just hit it right on the head. You know, it's cybersecurity or weakest link is always the human element. So like, that's always going to be the biggest concern right like who are you telling about any of this like who knows about it. Especially like with gender reforming care in Texas like one of the one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Texas like one of the trans boys like that that was like, you know, found out about, you know, Governor Abbott's letter to like basically equate gender as child abuse attempted suicide and then one was taken to the hospital. The hospital staff then made a report to like the department of. Yeah, so I mean this was all in the ACLU's lawsuit. And it's like, it's just insane right so like that's exactly the thing like the biggest risk is always going to be the human element like you're like the doctors, the nurses, your friends like family members, you know, and it might even be people like you deeply trust you just never know and so that's always going to be an aspect but I think one of the biggest risks as well is, is that the amount of data that we have now, like even if that can't be used like in a proactive way to like target people on the back end like once you do have that kind of friend

turning you in like, all of a sudden they have intent they have like all of these things from messages they have location data they show exactly where you were at what time, like it's just like the perfect surveillance system that basically makes like any kind of reasonable defense nearly impossible right like they can show where you were who you talked to. And so, like, I think the best tweet that I saw about this is from from someone who works at digital defense fund and they're basically like there are actually might not have been them I just remember it was just like there, there is no conversation about criminal activity there is only conspiracy, like basically it's like anytime you're chatting about any of this stuff like it's basically like that that in itself can be potentially considered like criminal conduct and like that can be used like as intent and like all these things and like in prosecution so like there's all those aspects and I think just answer your question like more broadly on on like what police can be done like, like to be honest like as an attorney it's like been very very frustrating seeing qualified immunity just being like increased right so so basically there's been no appetite by the courts to like, like remove this doctrine or whittle it away actually it's like being rapidly expanded especially the aspect around federal agents right and now like there is some can you explain sorry briefly just what what that is for people who don't know. Yeah so qualified immunity basically means that you can't bring a civil rights lawsuit, particularly what they call like a 1983 lawsuit which is like the federal statute that allows you to bring civil rights lawsuits against state and federal individuals for any kind of civil rights abuses and it's everything from like discrimination on basis of race to basically, you know, the cop beating someone, you know, within an inch of their life so basically any any kind of civil rights violations so it's what's called like a 1983 case which is

like the citations the actual law that like dates back to the 19th century like it's part of like the Ku Klux Klan act which like so this is a long running like civil rights statute that really gained prominence in the last 60 years. You know, it so basically what qualified immunity does is it basically says well if it wasn't a clearly established right when this abuse or violation of your civil rights happened, the officer or the government official it can't be held like liable for it. Basically like, and the way that they do it is very strictly interpreted so it's like clearly established right so it's like, well it wasn't clearly established right that you weren't supposed to be able to be beaten with a baton like, and it's just like what like it's some of these really crazy I'm not an expert on this by any means but like I've, you know, come across a few and it's, it's absolutely insane like how how like narrowly they'll oftentimes like define what like clearly like it's not like, you know, broadly defined right of like maybe police should be beating people. But, you know, and I think it was even crazier is that this law or there's an upcoming law review article by this professor that I was just came across the other day, and like apparently, there is a whole provision of 1980 of the section 1983 that has been omitted from the federal register for a hundred and like 40 years, basically like a clerk omitted a section, and this law like this, this, um, like the sorry article basically uncovered this omission that should have been a federal passed in Congress. I'm like, but hey, if you weed it wasn't a clearly established right, Alejandra, so does it really apply? I know the one that I'm like haunted by that I read about that was that was one of the qualified media cases was like, there was a guy who got on fire by a cop with a taser. And the courts ruled that because they're because there hadn't been a prior instance of someone attempting to do like that, you don't have a clearly established right for a cop dot like you on fire with a taser. Yeah, you know, you can sky burn to death because again, you got lit on fire with a taser.

Yeah, I like because he because there wasn't a clearly established thing. It's like this is like this is like the worst. Like, yeah, the secret is it's never it's never clearly established. Like, like mostly folks lose these lawsuits. And I mean, this is where, you know, I think folks need to recognize. And I say this very much as a lawyer that the law is not at the end of the day what's going to save us like, yeah, collective organizing and working together to keep each other safe is because the law is not designed to hold police accountable. It is not designed to keep people out of jail. In fact, it's designed to do the opposite, right. And I think we're going to see a whole lot of folks start to understand how criminalization works in a way that they may not have realized before. And to your question, like, as a public defender in New York City who spent many of those years in the Bronx, like, no, the police are not accountable to anyone and they continually do unlawful things all day. And this is part of one of the solutions. And again, all of these are stopgap measures so that people have time to plan and plot and organize and and and do what they need to do. But is that in these states that are saying, Oh, we're not, you know, we're going to keep state resources away. No, no one shall use state resources to move someone for any of these, you know, criminalization of pregnancy. But we imagine that law enforcement is generally a rather conservative group of people will simply disagree with that law and probably at times do things anyway, right. And sure, we can file a lawsuit later, but that's not really preventing the harm in the interim right like someone's going to be incarcerated. All of these things are going to happen. And so one of our proposals is that it should be crystal clear that any, any state actor who does participate in such extradition can be sued individually, they will have none of this qualified immunity, it will not exist. Now, listen, this seems very reasonable to me and to us, but do I think it's something that a legislature will actually

pass. I'm not particularly optimistic about most of our proposals on this, because it will mean a lot of other folks who will not be criminalized in addition to folks who are criminalized for abortion. But so so I do think that that that does police. We have a problem with rampant police impunity in this country. And it will show up here, just like it does in many other sectors. I think sometimes when we talk about criminalization of abortion wholesale, for folks that have not been working in and about repro, it feels very new. Like this is something that we need to kind of like gird our loins and prepare for but folks that have been working in the RHRJ movements reproductive rights, health and justice movements. We have been talking about criminalization for a long time. And the reason that we've been talking about criminalization is because it's been happening for a long time. So I was talking about my colleagues research that the preliminary info just came out. So when she was combing through all of these like different clerk's offices all over the country, she unearthed like 61 cases of folks being criminalized for self managed abortion in 26 states. Now, we only have three states that have laws criminalizing self managed abortion left on the books. So holy crap, the fact that there have been prosecutions in 26 states when only I think at the time that some of these cases were about like five or six states had these laws on the books tell us that prosecutors are very, very creative in the ways that they go after people. So the likelihood of always seeing abortion written at the top of the warrant is going to be low.

And then in some states, we are going to start seeing it because they are going to if they haven't already criminalized abortion wholesale, any kind of abortion, right? All abortions are going to become self managed because folks are not able to get clinical care. So it's it's not new. And I think that's one of the things I want to make sure that folks understand that they're like criminal defense attorneys can and can deal with this because it's just the same messed up ways that they charge people in a variety of other cases. But I think the shock and awe that's hitting some folks who the criminal legal system doesn't move within their lives is I need folks to get out of shock and all quick and get into work mode, because some of the things that I'm seeing on the internet while we're talking about how hell is other people and how we can protect ourselves in our communities. Some of the ways that folks are talking about this on the internet shows that they're not people that have had the impact of the criminal legal system necessarily touched their lives, right? Like folks that think they're doing OPSEC on Twitter by like, if you want to get a manicure, you can come to my state and I'll pick you up for your manicuring. That's when we talk about how cases get put together on the back end. I think Michelle can probably speak to this too, like as a public defender when you're seeing how when you have a very motivated prosecutor, a cop that actually knows how to do their job and the information that they're able to gather when they investigate. Yes, they will pull your tweets. Yes, even if it's not your case, they will pull your tweets and connect that person that got their abortion to the tweets that you put online to show that they intended to go to your place to go and get an abortion. And then try to use those things to prosecute them over here. So even if you're willing to take the risk with your own life, if you're trying to help people, don't put them in a position that they can be harmed by some of the things that we say out loud.

Because if you're living in a state where you're not afraid of criminalization, but the person you are trying to help is in a state that and they have to go back to somewhere they can be criminalized, you got to think about how you're protecting them. That's my soapbox rant. I think that's really valuable. Actually, this like we saw a lot in the Trump administration to this like legal constitutional magic that like the Seth Abramson, the Twitter thread guy, right? Like it distracts from useful organizing and mutual aid because people are just like, well, if this and this and this and this and this and then like, I understand this and no one else does. And this is a special secret. And then if we do this and turn around three times and go through the wardrobe, then Donald Trump will be impeached. Or, you know, I can give you a safe of safe access to reproductive health care rather than just doing the work. And I think another part of what was going on here and this has been something that like, you know, if you talk to people who've been doing this, like, okay, if this is the thing you genuinely want to do, there are people who have been doing this kind of work for decades and decades and decades and they know largely what is safe and what isn't and what stuff is effective or not. And the way that this sort of like, like the kind of sort of like, hey, I'm going to go do this on my own. I have never done this before. I don't know what I'm doing, but here I'm going to sort of signal that I can do this thing like go talk. If you want to do this, go talk to the people who have been doing it for ages and go support them because like, you know, again, like the reason the reason we're here in the first place is because that this whole like, the entire right to abortion has for literally decades been supported by just a really tiny number of incredibly underfunded and understaffed people and organizations.

So like, go help them, don't like, strike out on your own to boldly get you and everyone you're working with arrested. Yeah, I think, you know, some of that is, you know, I think some people have some good intentions, but my God, like that energy could be spent in so much more productive ways and it's kind of unfortunate. I think that the worst aspect of it though is like the tech bros coming in and being like, I'm going to save this space with crypto, we're going to create a DAO and like distribute funds and I'm like, oh my God, like I'm just sitting here like, you know, because this is something like, you know, I've looked into a lot of the students like this earlier this year, like, you know, how payment transactions could be used. And basically how there's basically almost no security with with payment transactions, right, like, like if you're using Venmo, which in and of itself has like a social media function like, you know, you can see when your your friend, you know, Joe is like getting brunch on Sunday. And like, you know, they could, you know, if you're not sending that to private by default like that, that's already a problem but basically like, you know, they can get access to those records pretty in a much easier way. And, you know, one of the things we started to look at like towards the end was like, oh, you know, as you know, at some students being like, well, can you can use crypto and can you use like Bitcoin? It's like, you still have to interact at some point with a financial institution and they can tie these things back. It is not that exceptionally hard, especially like now it's been shown that like coin basis is like cooperating with the feds and basically acting like a giant honeypot. So like, I just I fundamentally wish I like people just like realize that like technology is not going to save us here. Like, it can help if used wisely and creatively, but don't think that like you're just going to like do this one little neat trick like as James was saying and then suddenly we're going to fix this because it's not right like this is going to take

a million different solutions with a million different people doing all the little things they can to push back and like that's one of the things I think we we tried to be very helpful about in our papers like look, none of this is a silver bullet we're just trying to provide some concrete solutions that states can take and some steps that they can take. But we realize that nothing is ever going to be perfect to solve this kind of Pandora's box that's been opened by Lido and all these like right wing reactionaries on the court. So I guess speaking of things that are not silver bullets will not save us. Um, yeah, I guess, could we get a bit more into looking at what the sort of like because like a lot of this article is talking about, I guess, the the the the the history of extradition and how that's sort of been understood and interpreted. And so I guess I was wondering, yeah, could we go into talking about what the sort of legal stuff is going to look like when it like, you know, if we start getting these large showdowns between like states with like actually sort of, you know, if states actually start trying to have sanctuary laws that are like have teeth and are good, what is that sort of what is that going to look like? Yeah, so this is a kind of part that I focused on in the article and so basically a lot of people aren't aware about this because it's not really a contested area of the Constitution but basically when the Constitution was drafted and ratified it contained what was called the extradition clause. And basically what it said is that, you know, all the states have a duty to turn over fugitives from other states that have been charged with the crime and have fled into the states is the United States is kind of weird. It's a federal system. So like every state is still considered kind of its own sovereign in some ways in a very like quasi sovereign way. And so there was a question about, you know, since all criminal prosecutions basically, especially at the inception of the United States were done at the state level, you know, what

happened when somebody crosses and across state lines like how are we going to handle that and so basically this was, you know, one of the drafts and initially they tried to set it at a higher bar like to be like high crimes and misdemeanors similar to the impeachment clause. And, you know, they whittled it down to it and basically made it very applicable to set all crimes. But it really did not get much play until basically in the 1840s when obviously the tension around slavery picked up right so you had enslaved people escaping to the north and the south being very angry about that and wanting the north to return the escaped enslaved folks and the north be like no and Congress tried to figure out a way to like Thread some kind of needle but made it 10 times worse and put us on an accelerating path towards civil war by passing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and a bunch of radical abolitionists in the northeast were like we don't ever want to comply with this right so like Vermont passed this bill called the Habeas Corpus Act which basically created all kinds of legal procedures so that southern bounty hunters wouldn't just come into the state and just kidnap, you know, the first black person they saw because they assumed that they were being an escaped enslaved person rather than a free person and, you know, and it was trying to stop that kind of issue of kidnappings and also just not to comply with this, you know, the institution of slavery because there were people who had escaped slavery and more in the north so it was causing all kinds of tension and while like the Vermont law was never fully tested it did like create a lot of incendiary back and forth between like the north and the south and the press and it was really interesting like reading some of these old like newspaper articles from 1850 because it was like basically the press in Richmond and the press in Boston like taking spads at each other and it was like the 1850 version of shitposting because there were like one person was just like this is nullification made easy

and like basically with like it's just it was the most surreal thing like if you know if you get a chance when our full article comes out in December there'll be some some highlights from that in the footnotes but basically what it really got tested was in 1861 the case started in 1859 though it's called Kentucky v. Denison and so what essentially happened is there was someone who aided an enslaved person escape Kentucky and get to Ohio and basically the governor of Ohio was an abolitionist and was like I don't want to comply with this right and I do not want I don't believe like this is a crime because this is not a crime in our state and the attorney general of Ohio basically wrote a long legal memo stating that this this is a crime not known to the laws of civilization or man so basically you know they find it went all the way to the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Taney also notable for Dred Scott decision so like absolutely just terrible court like they were this came I think about like three weeks before the Civil War so this was like I think it should like March of 1861 so it basically like three weeks before Fort Sumter got like sacked by by the self but basically what it did was is that it said states actually can't utilize any discretion in extradition so like the governor of Ohio can't say like I have concerns by human rights and that this isn't a crime in our state right there's not this dual criminality analysis and we're concerned about human rights all these things so the Supreme Court basically said no states don't have that discretion which you know but they essentially split the baby by by then saying federal courts can't issue a writ of mandamus which is basically an order for a government official to do something they said that federal courts couldn't do that to a state governor in extradition so basically it means that like states don't have discretion but federal courts can enforce it so therefore it's just a non issue right

fast forward 120 years and we get to a case called Puerto Rico V Brandstad which basically somebody committed murder in Puerto Rico led back to Iowa and then was sought for extradition back to Puerto Rico and there's a huge element of racism here because you know they were concerned that a white man couldn't get a fair trial in Puerto Rico which is just deeply offensive and so they were and there was also a question of like territoriality right because Puerto Rico is a territory I wasn't sure if like they had to comply with extradition clause and so essentially the Supreme Court said yes federal courts can comply with or can issue a writ of mandamus to ensure extradition so essentially what it did was it partially overturned the Kentucky v. Dennis in case but upheld the central country and basically said states have no discretion so what does that mean basically that states can't really stop the extradition of someone in their jurisdiction even if they have extreme concerns right so if you have like let's say Michelle's example earlier someone who sends their friends like abortion pills from New York to let's say Texas right and Texas is seeking extradition in New York's like well that's not a crime here so we don't want to extradite you know the states can typically be hard pressed but there's kind of two kind of or there's one major issue with like the extradition part right it actually has to apply to someone who's it quote unquote an actual fugitive meaning that they had to actually be present in the state when the crime happened and the commission of the crime can't in itself create what's called constructive presence you have to be corporally present in the statement you have to be physically present you can't just like the commission of the crime doesn't constitute that so in this instance you know the person who says a pill in New York technically like constitutionally does not have to be extradited right like they can contest that the problem is as Michelle pointed out is that you know the

extradition causes it exists today is pretty much almost entirely just a formality that is waived basically almost every single time and so the courts the like the state attorneys the district attorneys even defense attorneys might not be familiar with that and might not know that that's something that they could potentially contest or it's even something that they can that it's a potential constitutional issue right and so that's one of the things that we focused on as a potential solution is to ensure that people who were not present in the state where the active occurred are able to mount a challenge to the extradition you know it creates all kinds of other problems because there's still federal extradition meaning like if you leave this the country and come back in like border patrol could potentially get you we still don't have a clear understanding of how that necessarily would work you know and because that's never been a question that's like fully resolved so you know that basically that you know at the end of the day like we want to make sure that like folks are aware of that but like the folks that like leave Texas right so like if you committed abortion you were charged in Texas and you go to New York like New York is not going to have very many options to protect you from being extradited back to Texas and so you know one of the things that you know I fundamentally believe Kentucky v. Denison was wrong was wrongly decided on the sense that state shouldn't be able to have a concern around human rights because it essentially acts as a one way ratchet where the states with the most regressive anti-human rights criminal justice laws get to have like get to dictate that over all of the other states similar to how slavery like the southern states were trying to enforce the institution of slavery on northern states that had that had abolished slavery decades ago so it's a very complicated issue and again I I reach back to that slavery analysis because not because I think that you know so the slavery and abortion should be compared directly but because it's like this is fundamentally the last time where

you have criminal laws that are so different between states like one states human right is another state's capital crime like you can't get further apart than that yeah and I wanted to just clarify for folks if I drove the pill to Texas then I would have committed the crime in Texas and New York could extradite me and I what I also think I'm sort of here is the what happens on the ground right so if you to be clear while as Alejandra correctly points if I just mailed it to Texas then they have the warrant while we're sorting out this extradition warrant I am very likely incarcerated and the sorting out of the extradition warrant will probably take 90 days so just because I think folks get confused with this a lot just because something is illegal doesn't mean or your lawyers arguing it's illegal doesn't mean it just magically stops or the process ends and so this is something where we think that really there should be a basis to contest your extradition on a human rights ground on two grounds either there is no dual criminality that is this is not actually a crime in the other state interestingly here handing someone a prescription pill in New York is actually a felony whether or not you get money for it most folks don't know that you smiling because she also was a public defender in New York City because it blows your mind you're like wait they just handed it to them there's no money exchange yeah that's a felony drug sale so we might have dual criminality New York might actually say you did do a crime so I will extradite you which is why we think there also needs to be a human rights defense and this may also extend to well we're not going to extradite them to Texas because they have the death penalty and we think that is a clear contravention of human rights maybe we can extend it to prison conditions I don't know how that far that goes again these are

things I don't know they'd be likely to be codified but if we're actually dreaming up the world that we think where this could work like I as your attorney should be able to come in and say there's no dual criminality this is in contravention of human rights and once I mount that defense then the court is bound to release you while we sort that out and and that is sort of our vision another thing that that Alejandro mentioned the the Vermont law in the 1800s and one of the things that said was you could get a jury of your peers in in a situation like this there's no jury in an extradition case but the idea of course is that a jury is going to say this is morally wrong I don't care what the law says we're not sending this person back to enslavement and the idea here is if you input a jury in and you assert a human rights defense perhaps the jury will say no we're not sending you so these are these are a lot of ideas that we've been coming up with so what we're doing the plan there was jury nullification yes it absolutely was it absolutely was jury nullification love love love love love love love during nullification I anybody with the law review that's listening to this let me write about jury nullification for you and I feel like I have been wanting to explain jury nullification on this show literally since the like I asked to do an episode on it the first week yeah call me back for the next one so I there's something that I don't want to be lost and that's the idea of like people don't necessarily know what they're being charged with in the state that's asking for them to go back because there's not really a requirement that that so for an extradition like thinking through what you actually need like the bare bones of an extradition it needs to be like a piece of paper that signed by the governor but not necessarily the governor of the state but

somebody with authority to ask for you to return back and that's in essence it right just like a piece of paper signed by somebody that says XYZ birthdate XYZ did a crime in our state give them back to us right Oh they don't have to say what crime not really a requirement it usually says it but it doesn't require a probable cause affidavit which I think is really the more important part it doesn't require you to prove that there is enough to charge them with a crime in the sending state right so we're saying that's a bare minimum change that we can make to laws to make the state that's asking for you to use your resources to put somebody in a cage and then put them in a traveling cage to bring them to our cages and I keep saying the word cage because I don't want us to move away from what like prisons and jails actually are it's like bars and cages and boxes right so it doesn't really harm the system doesn't really tear y'all apart to say and here's what they're being charged with and the reason why because that would be the bare minimum for someone to be charged for a crime in New York you would need to have probable cause for the arrest and then a judge that's sitting on the bench gets to say I don't have a probable cause for this person to be charged next court date you know and but we don't have that with extradition we just trust that the wheels of bureaucracy are turning the way that they need to holy crap that can harm so many people so we're just saying hey make them down so maybe a judge that's sitting in Illinois can look at this warrant from Missouri that says we want XYZ back here because of the self managed abortion and then they can see whether or not Illinois new fancy extradition law which they haven't written up and I'm sure they will applies right I think that's a minimum that we can do and as much as I crave shaking systems and tearing them apart I don't think that's going to be a thing that does it but it might you know have you all ever played Mario Kart you know when you're

driving and you're able to throw like the turtle shell or the banana that might be the banana that might slow down the process of somebody kind of getting dragged along on this course well and I think I think there's like there's another thing that that would do to which is that that buys time for community response because like you know if we go back to sort of the ice stuff it was like well yeah okay like ice raids weren't stopped by the sanctuary laws the thing that like did slow them down was massive community response yeah I think I think that's very it's certainly I've seen that happen here like in San Diego it wasn't any of our performative democrat laws it was people getting out into the street yeah I was gonna say there's but it's also like in the UK in the last couple of months there's been a lot of really really impressive community defense things and like cops showing up and like just entire communities and neighborhoods showing up with the cops just like running away and it's been it's been incredible to watch and you too can also do this but performative democrats keep giving us good laws like give us something give anything like a nub of a thing that folks can hang their hats on I just don't want any politician out there to think that they're absolved from the job of protecting people

yeah well and I think I think again the thing with these laws right is like you you actually like with this extradition stuff like I don't know how like I don't know how you would even like try to stop it unless like because like you don't know like I mean I like unless unless you're gonna commit to try to stop trying to stop every person who gets arrested which I think is like a noble goal but like there's no we don't have the capacity for that like if we lived in a world where we could do that like the world will be much better and the state would be running for its life but yeah it's like like it seems like a thing that like it gives like it gives time for the law to act more importantly it's like it gives time for us to act and that that's absolutely one of the most important thing is it's buying time for people to organize and people to be able to push back and also creates a higher barrier right like at the end of the day like these systems are still made up people and people are incredibly lazy and often times like the police and other folks like don't want to have to deal with like engaging and going with like an extradition request because the actual process for dealing with that is actually very onerous like they have physically go to the state to pick them up and they have to like do all these things right and so what we're doing is like we're suggesting is like make it even harder like make it absolutely hard for them to go through this and actually have to litigate in courts and like bring all this stuff and just basically like so down the

process and raise that kind of barrier to entry on it but you know I think it's like I think that's you know very important to say is like you know the community defense aspect cannot be overstated because at the end of the day like laws are just words on paper right like it's the people that give them the effect and the power so really what we need is like people say like this is morally wrong right like we're not going to prosecute people for exercising their bodily autonomy and engaging in a fundamental human right and so you know one of the things I've been heart and bias you know like Elm Fort John Brown Gun Club in Dallas like what they've been doing like protecting houseless folks like under the overpasses like they show up and like you know in Texas they can open carry and like the police don't want to deal with them so they're like buying a few more days so that the Dallas police doesn't come in and sweep you know the only belongings that these people have and like that in and of itself brought so much attention that like brought so much scrutiny to Dallas PD's action so like is that kind of community defense and I think it also harkens back to how these extradition issues like prior to like the Civil War worked out it wasn't necessarily like these formal systems and Vermont that like stopped you know escape just like persons from being returned back to the south it was like entire mods of people coming and like being like you're not taking this person out of our town and if you try to you're not going to leave here like as a whole person I guess is probably the best way to put that down shoot your local bounty hunter yeah and so like essentially like that that's how it worked right and like you know at the end of the day I feel like you know I don't want to do anything kind of violence but like it like

really what it means is like when people show up and they physically put themselves in the way it makes it so much harder for the like this kind of wheel of injustice to continue and so that's really what it's going to take and like you were mentioning with like the with the ice raids and everything like that like it took people it's sometimes physically putting their bodies in front of ice fans to stop them from driving away and like chaining themselves to stop and like that's the kind of like nonviolent like direct action that I think is like going to be like needed yeah and I think folks seem to have figured out that their district attorneys are elected and the person bringing the fugitive case which I don't think I've been crystal clear about is the district attorney so then you the police officer is going to go to the district attorney's office and and that is the person who's going to bring the court case to help facilitate sending the person and I know in New York recently has seen a number of successes of folks organizing around individual people would be saying you need to drop these charges this conviction got overturned you should not be continuing with the case this person is this or for whatever reason folks are organizing around right and so if we can create some delays whereby the person is free right because this is the key thing we don't want people incarcerated incarceration in of itself is extreme violence right so if the person is not incarcerated then we can sort of delay this process and organize around pressuring whoever needs to be pressured particularly the the two slick Democratic politicians who say they're against all of this stuff but then at the end of the day are they going to ignore the homicide extradition warrant like that's where the rubber meets the

road are you going to do it or not right and and and I think that's a much harder question when it comes down to that for them because well it's a homicide warrant right and and so that's where they need the pressure because all the wild ideas go out the door in that moment yeah I think like I think that's the thing with with these people is like ideologically like they don't care enough to do it do it but if you but you can force them to care about having a job yeah well it's not even just so much that like there are long established ways of putting pressure on people and systems that can force them to do things they don't want to do and yeah go do that because we're going to need it frankly I think part of this is also destigmatizing work right because when we have kind of these big divergent ideas when we find ourselves at the split of like good versus evil right like slavery versus not slavery bodily autonomy versus not bodily autonomy sometimes the good guys compromise to the point that we get ourselves to this position later on down the line and what we can do is kind of galvanize community response and also civic engagement by forcing folks to take a look at the laws that we so rely on and questioning why does this thing exist this way why is this process moving that way someone that didn't know that folks facing an extradition warrant like often have to make the decision at an arraignment am I going to wave my right to extradition and wait for them to come get me because they said that takes 30 days for them to come and get you but if you don't wave it's going to take 90 days for them to come and get you so you'll be sitting there longer and that's a decision that you need to make kind of like in that moment if we're talking about extradition in normal conversation we're moving forward to a place where we're destigmatizing and frankly demystifying what the criminal legal system

really looks like in the nuts and bolts and might end up with better conversations and better output for folks in the future it might end up with you being able to talk about jury nullification and having like and not having it be kind of like a shaking the table conversation because frankly these are all like civics it's civics it's rights it's things that are written in the Constitution that governs us where the cops don't need to know the law but we're all expected to right so it takes all kinds it takes all responses for us to just get to the place that's better than the stop gap that row had been giving us for the last 40 some odd years and I'll say like the one thing that does terrify me in this end is like or I guess like really concerns me is like what Ron DeSantis just did in Florida in Hillsborough County like I grew up in Hillsborough County so I'm from there so it's like like the twice elected state attorney there was just suspended because he said he would refuse to prosecute crimes related to abortion and gender for me carry like also refuse to like prosecute trans people using the bathroom right so like these kinds of things and DeSantis just like sacked him right an elected person that like reflects the values of that County and so like that that's the other thing to be aware of it's you know like even when you do exercise that power and like say like this is our as a community these are our values on like who we should be prioritizing in the criminal justice system there are still people out there that will will try to circumvent that in a very authoritarian and autocratic way and so you know I think it's not just who you're voting for your local DA it's who are you running for governor who are you running for like you know these people that have broader powers over this. I wanted to briefly talk about this because I know like it was proposed at least by my representative the.

I think it's being like bandied about as a solution and it doesn't seem like it is but this my body my data act. Which I was trying to read through it little earlier it seems like it allows people to like sue tech companies for selling their data that leads to their prosecution I don't know if you're familiar with it but maybe we could just discuss a little bit what. No okay alright I mean so I'm I'm not familiar but based on what you just said right I think there's this and I really think it goes back to what you go is saying about folks just like not not fully understanding precisely how the criminal legal system just like runs over people. Okay great so I can sue the tech company after the police have put me in a cage and convicted me based on the date like like okay I mean great maybe I'll have a lot of money in my commissary my family will have enough. Like funds to come drive and visit me at whatever state prison they've got me locked up in right like like this is where we have to step back and think or is this is this thing actually preventing the harm. Because I think a lot of times folks are just like we can sue them or we could get back at them and I also want folks to remember that just making something illegal does not prevent harm right and. We had a whole nother conversation about criminalization as a solution to anything which I think it is not but but just on on the face of what you've said to me that doesn't sound like a solution that if I wouldn't feel adequate to me. And also thinking about how cases become cases from what we know it's not again it's not coming from big data down right for the most part it certainly can happen but really what's happening is violations of people's fourth amendment

cops being able to access things on people's actual devices oftentimes without warrants oftentimes by not fully explaining that people have the right to say no. And I'm sure Michelle has had clients that were like oh they just took my phone how many times have we heard that right they just took my phone and started going through it a police officer that does that is not going to write in their report and I just took his phone without any permission it's always permission was granted it was in plain view I saw it from the street I smelled it as he was walking by like the laws that are being created are not actually responsive to the harm that folks are experiencing in a way that actually prevents it that we need to kind of push back at our legislators and say. It's great. But is it responding to the thing that you're saying it's responding to because yeah shout out to people being able to sue big tech for selling our data without our permission bet but is that going to prevent prosecutors from going after folks that have abortions. Probably not because even in the Nebraska case that Alejandra mentioned at the top of the hour that was a warrant that was signed by judge it was a search warrant that was provided to Facebook that didn't say the words abortion on it that didn't say they were going after someone for abortion and had I think the words like abuse of a corpse or something of that nature on there and for them it was wrote what they normally do bureaucracy search warrant stamp here's the data that you're

looking for a law that prevents folks from selling your data doesn't prevent that from happening. Something I think a lot about those one of my sort of like former political experiences was back in like two I think I think this is happening which is in 2013. Right after the revolution in Bahrain. So okay so the revolution in Bahrain Saudi tanks roll in they crush it they kill a bunch of people. And the government starts doing this crackdown the way the government does the crackdown is they go they go to Facebook and they take stuff those on people's public accounts and then they go to Facebook and they ask them for information. And Facebook turns it over and you know the government just goes through and finds everyone who is at a protest and starts arresting them. And you know Facebook was just like hmm and like that if you know if if if if if if if if they if they will if they will comply with a literal monarchy who has had a second monarchy send an army across the border in order to crush a bunch of protests like they're going to comply with the US and they're going to keep doing this stuff to you. And so yeah I was like I like even if you can sue them they're still going to cooperate with the US government because.

Yeah they have a great financial interest in doing so big tech doesn't give a fuck about you. Yeah I think folks again as Eve was saying like because saying it was just so like this is wrote this is what they do every day this is not that serious or that deep to them and I think we need to start asking bigger questions. Why do we have a system where it's so easy for the government to just like come in and have a subpoena signed like the subpoenas are easy to get like we have these mechanisms are all in place. And that's what I was sort of saying earlier is that I think folks who haven't been paying attention to this who are all of a sudden like wow how is this happening oh my goodness. Well these are the machines of mass incarceration that we have spent a few decades really building up and so now when the person the people you're sympathetic with start to get criminalized all of a sudden. We're very shocked and listen however you got here great welcome I'm glad folks are here. And saying like wow this is a problem and I want folks to think the if the abortion context in the self managed abortion is your entry point. I hope it is not the end point I hope that you are thinking bigger about how did all these systems get here who do they serve and and.

And I hope how do we dismantle them because it's it's not just this select few people group of people that we should care about I think it's all the people who are who are exposed to this on the daily. So yeah that's my soapbox. I always wonder how many judges have refused to sign a search warrant that's like a big wonder of mine I don't judges don't hang out with me obviously for a lot of reasons but if I were to like just whisper in my ear real quick how many times have you ever said no to a police officer that comes to ask to swear a warrant in front of you have how many times have you found there is no probable cause dude like. To be fair there there are there have to there have to be a certain number of times where they're trying to go after another judge. Or they're trying to do that. After other judges. I don't know it's got to have happened once.

Like that there has to have been one time where a cop was like this judge pissed me off I'm going to go raid his car or something. Never never that I can probably that I can think about never happening but I just wonder how many times has somebody said we are going to go search for drugs and XYZ house in this specific neighborhood that a cop that a judge just says huh you don't have enough here try again. It doesn't happen. Yeah. I told him federal court maybe maybe you know they turned down one out of twenty five but in state court are my experiences. It's it's it's again it's routine yeah how things go. I mean one of the one of the things I came across when I was not dealing with particularly judges issuing warrants but one of the things I did when when I was looking into the payment app issue this past spring.

Is you know I talked to a former prosecutor and was like you know what is it like to get documents from or data from like Facebook and Instagram or Metta whatnot or like Twitter or any of these other places. And they were just like. Oh we just send a request like we don't even like it's basically an administrative subpoena and they just like hand over everything like. It's basically just like so routine oftentimes especially if it's coming from a district attorney's office or law enforcement. Like often times these companies just like casually hand over stuff all the time especially when it's like dealing with low level drug stuff or any kind of like issues like that. You know they like to say oh we're big on on civil rights and stuff like that and making sure your data is protected in reality like. There's so many requests around this stuff and that just you know the only time they ever maybe make a stand is when a case is higher profile and it may damage their brand right and that's the only time they actually ever care. On the defense attorney side it's hard as heck to get your clients records for things yeah like so hard so so hard you're looking for information on a Facebook for somebody that's incarcerated that might get them out of jail.

And they don't remember their password you don't know how to get into their stuff and it needs to be not a screenshot because that you might not be able to get that authenticated and admissible in court. And it is so hard when you're working on the other side and not in law enforcement to get data and information. But on the flip side when it comes to like people's medical information which comes into play in a lot of these cases because we're at this intersection of bodily autonomy and health and the criminal legal system. We've certainly seen in cases where folks are having a medical emergency and cops are able to just go and do a bedside interview with somebody that's coming out of surgery still drugged up right. They're able to just go up to a charge nurse and being like so how's he doing and they're getting information. That's wild because I have had requests for my clients medical records with signed HIPAA authorizations returned because I signed with blue ink instead of black ink. It's not wrote it's not wrote when it's not coming from law enforcement sometimes and that's kind of the wild thing there's this assumption that folks in law enforcement have a right to all information at all times forever. And that's where things get rubber stamped and that's the stuff that we're not really looking at to have large impact on how people access their rights.

I was just as we were talking about like Facebook knowing everything about you and loving the cops. I was like reminded of Foucault's panopticon and like this idea that you'll start to internalize discipline because you never know when you're being watched right. And so I wondered like if obviously like when Foucault talks about it the idea is that you will do you act like you think the state is watching because the state could always be watching. Therefore you have to act like it is watching. And like it's we're not there yet right. We're totally there. Have you not heard the FBI in your phone joke. The FBI on my computer like I hope he likes my makeup today we're totally there like I think there's an assumption that we're all being watched.

I don't know if sometimes I wish our clients thought they were being watched more because sometimes people put too much on Facebook. Let me not keep myself from that because I am very much included. But yeah so like that's what I wanted to ask right like how do we not. We don't want people to listen to this and do crimes but like how should people act in their interactions like in a way that is like I guess. I don't know that makes them less vulnerable to like these very obvious object fails I guess. I have some resources. So that if when how we have this thing called the repro legal helpline it's repro legal helpline.org. It's also a warm line with the phone number that people can call and ask questions like what are my rights when it comes to my abortion myself managed abortion and on that website we have digital tips about how do you protect yourself and sanitize your digital space just for safety as a whole not to hide information from everyone but how do you move and prevent and minimize your risk.

What does harm reduction look like to you. We also have the repro legal defense fund and that exists for folks when they are actually being criminalized to pay for things like bail. Help out with attorneys fees help out with expert fees. So there are folks that are working on this stuff that exists as resources and there are resources out there. But I would tell folks to really think about who are you telling your business to when you share information is that information that's necessary for treatment that you're being asked. Just because we're used to being in spaces where there is a power imbalance about sharing all of the information that's asked of us. And I think when it comes to spaces and times where we're more vulnerable to state actors causing harm to us being mindful about what questions are you being asked and is that question necessary for you to be able to receive care or services XYZ. And it sucks to have to put work on the back of folks that are already being oppressed by systems it's absolute trash and I fully recognize that it's it's messed up.

But when we're thinking about what does harm reduction look like I think that's one of those things that we have to keep in mind. And harm reduction also looks like folks knowing generally what the law is and being able to advocate for themselves in those spaces. I'll just add from my side from like kind of just from a cyber perspective it's you know just in general ways like there's nothing that's going to be bulletproof or a silver bullet in terms of always protecting your privacy but like the quicker ways that you can have at least make yourself generally safer is use apps like signal for for chatting also use like auto delete features you know don't don't keep like years worth of text messages and stuff like that. Additionally, you know, don't use biometrics, because you don't have a Fifth Amendment right for self discrimination for biometrics right so so long long reason why that is in the courts. Use a password, don't use a short pen use password I know it's annoying I know it's like you know a fingerprint or face like unlock is like much more convenient but you know if you are at high risk or you worry about this stuff and you're concerned about your privacy like use those things because they can't compel you to do that generally. You know the other things is the Yuki app EUKI which is a sexual health app that has a lot of information about you know reproductive issues. It also has a menstrual tracker but it's all encrypted client side, they get no data and it has it prompts you for password and pin to open it.

It also has resources for self managed abortion and how to safely handle those. And yeah you know just generally you know anything you put out there on social media also like be careful like what you put out there like stay to end and end to end encryption. Use VPNs if you can you know that these are just kind of like general stuff like nothing is again ever going to be foolproof but there are some small steps you can take to at least increase some of your protections. And on my end you know you have a right to remain silent you should use it and thanks to the Supreme Court you have to say I want to be silent in order to invoke your right to be silent you cannot just be silent. So you I would advise people to say I want to be silent and I want a lawyer those are the magic words. I also want to hold that being captured by police officers is a violent experience and a scary experience and sometimes asserting your rights can provoke more violence and so people do what they need to do to stay safe in that moment from the law perspective saying I would I want to be silent and I want a lawyer are the things that invoke all of your constitutional protections. And the police may lie about whether or not you said that later so you know say it as many times as you need to but those are really the only things you should say which is a lot easier said than done but that that is the thing that folks should do if they do find themselves in the custody of law enforcement and also if you're on the street. Ask if you're free to go and if you're free to go please walk do not run away there's also a case about that.

God hate the cops. Well thank you also much for joining us on this this has been really great and yeah don't talk to cops. Would you like to plug anything before we leave with don't call to cops. Yeah I can just draw my personal side you can follow me on all socials on Twitter and Instagram at sqeer underscores like. Portmanteau of Esquire and queer as ESQ you are underscore and also I have a podcast called queering the law or talk about a lot of these issues as well so if you want to give that a listen. Don't follow me on social media because all my stuff is closed but I would recommend that folks follow at if when how on all socials because we're always providing up to date information on what's actually going on with criminalization and self managed abortion and resources from you know community partners that are on the ground local that are doing the work so if folks are looking to get connected I would say reach out to if when how and we can usually point you in the right direction. You could follow me on Twitter but I don't really remember what my handle is so what I would suggest that you do pretrial detention and bail litigation is really my heart you got folks locked up and they haven't even been found guilty. Not that anyone should be locked up so donate to your local bail fund if you don't know who that is.

There's a lot of orgs national bail out the bail project there's a lot of places you can find that but growing five 10 $15 at your local bail fund will get someone free because you can purchase your freedom here in 2022 America so do that. Yeah thank you so much that this has been it can happen here you can find us in places don't talk to cops and yeah if there weren't any cops you couldn't make things legal. Hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visitor website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.