Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 68

Episode Date: January 28, 2023

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 iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there listeners, this is producer DJ Daniel. The following episode was recorded before the horrible events in Monterey Park. The team will release an episode addressing the situation once more details have emerged. Thank you and enjoy. This year is the year of the rabbit, so I feel really happy about that. I feel really pumped for this year, yeah exactly. So I'm good, I'm good.

Having new cat is an amazing way to start any year. Yes, yes, I agree. This is very exciting. Do you know what else is very exciting? Transitions. Please. They pay me to do this, for some reason. Alright, this year we're going to talk about Chinese restaurant syndrome and the whole anti-MSG craze.

Yes. That's always been so big. I grew up in a diverse area in San Diego, but we would always go to Fa regularly. And the no-MSG was all over the menu and everything. It's like this thing that... I mean in every restaurant I went to basically, it was just like, come to us, there's no MSG. I was really curious how it started, because growing up I was like, okay MSG is bad, I guess. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I feel like it wasn't really as intense where I was growing up, but that was like... I don't know, it was a very white suburb. People were still freaked out about MSG, but the Asian restaurants didn't talk about it ever. I don't know, but it was still very sort of like... I remember I would go to eat dinner with white families and they'd be talking about MSG and I was like... Right, yeah. It was a hot topic for a good amount of time. Yeah.

Having now talked about MSG for a bit, we should ask, what is MSG? Yes. And the answer... Okay, so MSG stands for monosodium glutamate, which is... It's just a salt, basically. It's salt with glutamate in it. It has a bunch of umami in it. I'm going to read this thing from Kenji from Sirius Eats because every single article that starts about this has like this exact paragraph in it.

So I'm just going to read it instead of try to rewrite this paragraph that everyone's written. I respect that. I respect that. MSG is a sodium salt of glutamic acid, an A amino acid. It was first isolated in 1908 by Japanese biochemist Kikue Ikida, who was trying to discover what exactly gave dashi, the Japanese flavor broth with komba, Japanese giant sea kelp, its strong savory character. Turns out that komba is packed with glutamic acid. It was Ikida who coined the term umami, which roughly translates as savory, to describe the glutamic acid and other similar amino acids.

Until that point, scientists had only discovered the other four flavors sensed by the tongue in the soft palate. Salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. By 1909, pure crystallite MSG extracted from the abundant kelp in the sea around Japan was being sold under the brand name Ajinomoto, roughly element of flavor. The company exists to this day. Now, keep that in mind. That's going to be important to the last part of the story. But you know, in the meantime, you know, around 1908, once this is discovered, it turns into this sort of enormous industry. Here's from a pretty good men's health article about it.

By the 1940s, a number of American companies were producing MSG domestically for the consumer. The most famous being Accent. Okay, there's like, it's spelled Accent, but it's spelled A-C-A-P-S-F-E-E-N-T. A-C-A-P-S-F-E-N-T. That's not that. Yeah. No. No.

You lost me. Yeah. Accent, which was advertising is a bleak place. Yeah. That's a different episode, I think. Maybe it's part of this one too. Partially. Yes.

Also partially in this episode. But yeah, the most famous one being Accent, which was advertised as pure monosodium glutamate that, quote, makes food flavors sing. Various food magazines and community cookbooks featured the additive as an ingredient in the likes of fried chicken wings and barbecue sauce recipes. In 1969, 58 million pounds of MSG were being produced in the US per year, says food historian Ian Mosby, PhD. For an entire generation, the ingredient was presented in a dizzying array of food products.

Breakfast cereals, TV dinners, frozen vegetables, baby food and soup, produced by beloved brands such as Campbell's and Swanson, which today offer foods products free of MSG additives. And, okay, if you think about this for a second, it's actually really weird that MSGs thought of it as a Chinese thing because, like, okay, MSG, all told, has only been around for, like, a hundred years, right? Yeah. And it's heavily used in the US for, like, 30 or 40 years. Like, it's not in...it's not really in China for that much longer than it's in the US,

and it's used in just, like, a bunch of American food. How did that start? Do we know how that association started and continued? Yeah, we'll get it. And it mostly has to do with, like, it has to do with restaurants, and it specifically has to do with the part that we're getting to about this letter, which is weird. I will say, like, there are a lot of Chinese families that, like, just use MSG for, like, their cooking.

Mm-hmm. My house never did it because we're lazy, and most of our cooking involves, like, as few ingredients and prep as possible, so we just, like... I think it's also really in Vietnamese food, I feel, like, uses it a lot, too. That was my first association with it, so I just associate...I mean, because I was, I don't know, 14, I just was like, okay, this is Vietnamese. But that's really interesting to just know, like... Well, it's originally Japanese, too.

Yeah, I mean, it's Asian. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, but, like, it is just interesting. Like, people in the US were just, like, I don't know, it was in everything. People in the US were also just using it to cook food. This is also a thing that, like, people in China use a lot, too. So, it's not that, like, Chinese people don't do it, it's just that, like, the moment everyone got it, they were like, oh, my God, this makes our food taste better.

Yeah. We should use more of it. Of course. I mean, I'm assuming once it got demonized, it was like, oh, this is a Chinese thing, but I don't know for sure. Yeah, yeah. I will be patient. Yeah, so this is, in fact, the next thing.

So, nobody really cared about it until 1968 rolled around. Wow. So, for those 60 years, MSG was like, flavor, cake. Yeah, I wouldn't just use it. Nobody, yeah. Yeah. I'm forgetting where, I'm going to read apart from this journal article, and I've forgotten to put in what journal it's from because I'm a hack and a fraud.

I think it's the journal Natural Health, 60% sure about that. That sounds right to me. Yeah, sure. It's from, it's from some journal, some doctors wrote it. Well, in the spring of 1968, Dr. Robert Homan Guo wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine asking the assistance of the journal's readership in identifying the source of the phenomenon that Dr. Guo labeled the Chinese restaurant syndrome, CRS, numbness of his back and neck palpitations and general weakness after he consumed meals in Chinese restaurants.

Dr. Guo hypothesized that the source of his syndrome might be a reaction to the soy sauce, the cooking wine, the high sodium content of the food, or to the flavor enhancing monosodium glutamate, MSG. Within two months, the journal received a flurry of letters from readers who had noticed a similar phenomenon after eating restaurant prepared Chinese food. So this is the start of this whole thing. And there's one thing I need to point out right away that is in almost every single article about this that is wrong, which is that this article says that he's talking about

Chinese food, which is true, but very specifically, and this is going to be very important in about 10 minutes. I don't know, 10 minutes. It's going to be important soon, which is he specifically has a thing about how this is about Northern Chinese food. And you know, there's something that everyone sort of misses. The other thing that's interesting about this is that, you know, he says it could be MSG, but you know, he's treating MSG exactly like all of the rest of the other stuff that's

in the food, right? He lists soy sauce, he lists cooking wine, maybe there's too much salt, right? He's not really doing an MSG thing, but everyone who reads this immediately focuses on the MSG. Okay, so before I started researching this, I had heard that this whole letter was actually fake and was actually a prank. And you know, this is a thing that's like, it's kind of like, okay, so the story behind this was that it was supposed to have been a prank by a white guy named Dr. Steele who

made it up as a joke. And this is the sort of like a folk, like, okay, so this story is not true. The story I'm about to say is not true. It turns out this letter is actually real, but there was basically a story that went around that it was this guy named Dr. Steele who had made it up as a way to get published in a journal for like a bet, because like Dr. Steele like claimed responsibility for it and that got out to researchers. But it turns, yeah, and so for a bit, everyone was like, oh my God, this whole thing was

started by a prank, but it turns out that's also not true. So this American life figured out that Dr. Robert Homenko is a real guy. Dr. Steele had pretended that he said that he made it up the name. It's not true. There's a real guy. Dr. Steele was family and his colleagues and all of them were like, oh no, Gua, like wrote this thing. And interestingly, there's a lot of racism here too, because Dr. Steele had claimed that

Homenko, which is, okay, so this is where things get weird. I'm saying Gua, because that's how you actually pronounce it. It's spelled H-O-M-A-N-K-W-O-K. Whoa. Yeah. Okay. So this is some. That's not what I thought.

Yeah. So this is a Widge Isles bullshit. The previous attempt to sort of Romanize Chinese was to think of Widge Isles. It is the bane of my existence. It's dog shit. Hi. This is Mia in post. I made a mistake here.

K-W-O-K is actually the standard Cantonese spelling of Gua. Sorry about that. I am a dipshit who does not speak Cantonese. Yeah. Enjoy the rest of the show. They heard someone say Gua and were like, this is K-W. I was like, no, no, it's not. Please.

That's so, that's bad. It's literally the worst. That's bad. Like if you ever, you know, sometimes if you're looking at Chinese and you'll see something that's just spelled really weirdly, like, or for example, like the way that Chiang Kai Shek is spelled is actually like, like it is actually a Widge Isles thing. Like there's a whole bunch of like things that are like that. The remnants of that.

Yeah. Yeah. You can find. I don't know that. That's, I mean, that explains a lot. Yeah. And part of the other thing that's happening to you here is that like, so, and then this is also going to be important later.

Gua is a Cantonese last name, but it gets really, really confusing really quickly if you don't know what's going on because if you're reading a word that's in Chinese in the U.S., it could either be in Mandarin or in Cantonese and it also could be either written with the terrible Wage Isles one or it could be in Pinyin, which is like the one that's actually sort of usable. But Dr. Steele, because again, the way it's written is H-O-M-A-N-K-W-O-K. And Dr. Steele claims that he wrote it to be like human crock of shit. Like ho man crock.

Yeah. Excuse me. I hate Dr. Steele. People believed him. Yeah. Well, he's dead. So fuck him. Yeah.

I don't know, that's so disgusting. Yeah, like this is so racist and it's like, you know, but people believe this for a while because, I don't know. But okay, so eventually people figure out that it's not true and I'm going to read something from the This American Life piece where they talk about how they figured out that it was actually like that H-O-M-A-N-K-W-O-K was like actually a real guy. And when you read the original letter, there are details that seem more likely to come from her father.

He says, ah, Kuo's father. Then from Howard. Howard Steele is the doctor. Like when he said he moved to the U.S., which the real Dr. Kuo did, and how he's very specific, the syndrome happens with northern Chinese food. In the 60s, how many white guys in Philadelphia could have made that distinction? Also, H-O-M-A-N-K-W-O-K is an actual Cantonese name. What are the odds that Dr. Steele threw together random sounding Chinese syllables to arrive

at that? So, okay, I read that and I had a revelation. I cracked this case, wide the fuck open. I figured it out. I figured out what was going on with this letter. Okay, so. I'm so excited for this. This is okay.

I've been hyping this up for like hours. I'm so excited. So, some BTS of this. We have like a group chat essentially and I wasn't sure if I can make this recording. Then Mia dropped that bomb being like, I have this big breakthrough and I was like, I got to be there. I just got to be there. And so, I kicked James out because James couldn't make the time I could make.

And so, here I am. I apologize. I have not told Shereen what the breakthrough is. No, I am very excited to hear. Yes. Okay, so H-O-M-A-N-K-W-O-K is Cantonese, right? And he specifies in this letter that this is about Northern Chinese food. My thesis right here right now is that this whole letter is actually about Cantonese

anti-Northern sentiments. This is a whole-ass thing in China. So, Canton or like the region that was called Canton in the West is like where Cantonese people are. This is like, this is the very south of China, right? There is a whole-ass thing in China that like people from the North, people from the South hate each other. It's actually very weird.

So, my family is like half from the North, half from the South. And like when my mom was growing up, she would like get made fun of for how she like rolled dumplings. Because people were like, oh, you rolled dumplings like a Southerner. And she's like, it is a whole fucking thing. It's like people hate each other. Yeah. I mean, how would you know those intricacies?

You know what I mean? Unless you were from there, like had history there. Yeah. There's a thing that's persisted in the US, too. You still run into this stuff. There are definitely Cantonese restaurants where you probably shouldn't speak Mandarin. This is still a thing. It's not really talked about very much because it's kind of an internal Chinese thing.

But the one place you actually really got to see this, you got to see this during the Hong Kong protests in both sides. Because there's a strain of the sort of like, there's a strain of Chinese nationalism that's very sort of like, it was doing this like really virulent sort of like anti-Southern racism from, you know, you get this from a lot of the Chinese nationalists on the CCP side. There's another faction of like the Hong Kong protesters whose like thing was like, we're not actually Chinese because we're not like the Northerners who are communists and like

evil, which is really funny because like, you know, like, okay, if you run through the actual history of communism in China, it's like, okay, like, one of the one of the largest communist like strikes that ever happened was in Hong Kong, like, sure, fine, but you know, but obviously like, I'm simplifying all of this enormously because it's very complicated. There's a lot of regional shit that's going on here. Yeah. So your thesis is that the person that started all of this was like me, like from the south or like just like, yeah, yeah, I mean, that is, that is, yeah.

That is definite. Like that is, that is like the like, that is the most Cantonese ass name I've ever heard. Like that guy, that guy, that guy is definitely from Southern China. And yeah, my thesis is specifically it's this Cantonese guy going, hey, fuck those Northerners. I hate their, I hate their asses. I hate their food. Their food ain't shit. Wow.

It makes me sick. But because, because this is the US, the subtlety of this gets lost and everyone just runs with it as like Chinese restaurant syndrome, even though I, this is, this is, this is my theories and this is, this is like, this is like kind of semi-obscured like Chinese like internal grudge making. Yeah. That's the origin point. Like knowing the origin point makes a lot more sense now, to be honest.

Like why would it just be some random like, why would he specify a region? Like a very specific region that that's just, I don't know. I don't know. That, that, that, that's my theory. I, I could be wrong about this, but all, it fits with all of the details. Yeah. It checks out, it checks out, I think. Yeah.

So, okay. All right. So, so this, this letter happens and there's like a flurry of letters for other people talking about this. And okay, I want to talk about why this got picked up the way it does. I'm going to read a bit more. This is still in 68. Yeah.

This is, this is still in 68. I'm going to read from, every single article in this also goes exactly the same way. So I'm going to read from the men's health version so you get this section of it before I talk about why it's, I think like not sufficient to capture what was happening. Mosby describes the late fifties as a time of heightened anti-Chinese sentiment. By the 1960s, domestic and international politics had shifted towards a fairly clear anti-communist agenda. In fact, he says, during this time, anti-Chinese sentiments was, were so widespread and accepted

that most Americans didn't consider their apprehension to be racial bias. Now, this is true as far as it goes, but we need to go to ads and we'll come back from ads. I will tell you what else was going on during that week. Hell yeah. All right. And we're back. We're back.

We're talking about how this like letter to like a journal in New England suddenly became an entire like national American thing. Okay. So the way this happened is that this got picked up by the news. Now there's a huge New York Times article about this and that article is published on May 19th, 1968. Now, Shereen, do you know what else was going on in May of 1968? Oh no.

I've heard a lot of shit went down in the 60s. Yeah. So this is, this is right. This is like smack dab in the middle of May 68 in France. This is, this is like one week after the night of the barricades, um, three days before this was published. The situationists who are like this like ultra left student organization who, who, who at this point are occupying their Sorbonne, like they, they have fully taken control of their

campus. They have run the cops out. They have run the administration out, um, three days before this is published, the students at the Sorbonne reacting to a factory occupation that they heard about send out this famous communique calling for the occupation of all factories in France and like it fucking happens. Like the workers in France take control of like a huge portion of France's factories. Like the Renault factories are under control of the workers, um, like by, by, by this time like this is happening, right?

The police have like the police are fighting them, but they're losing, um, two, two days before this article is published, uh, the Sorbonne sends this to the Chinese consulate quote, shaken your boots, bureaucrats, the international power of the workers councils will soon wipe you out. Humanity won't be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist. Long live the factory occupations. Long live the great Chinese proletarian revolution of 1927, betrayed by the Stalinist bureaucrats. It goes on and on.

Like this, this is what they're sending to the Maoists. Right. Right. Like that, that is, that is how far left these people are. Like they, they, they are, they are telling the Maoist, shaken your boots, bureaucrats, the international power of workers councils will soon wipe you out. Like it is wild in France. That's so intense.

Yeah. I mean, the fact that this is happening all, during all that, that's a, that's not, that's not something, uh, I don't know. That's no one to know. Yeah. No one to know. It's, it's really important. I, I, I have never read an article that actually puts this together and I just think it's not

just that going on, right? Like, you know, if you look at the situation in France, they are a week and a half out from de Gaulle, who is the president, literally fleeing the country because he's so convinced that they're about to lose the country to communism. Like, well, I should say, when I say communism, by the way, part of that message to the, to the Maoists is down with the state on the revolutionary Marxism. So like that, that these are, these people are like, these people are Marxists who have gone like so far left, they've essentially become anarchists.

It's, it's wild. I mean, you know, it also was happening like the, the, the prog spring is happening during the middle of this. Um, this is also like, this is a month after the Holy week uprising in the US, which is so after MLK was killed, there were these like probably the most intense riots the US has ever seen, like even, even like even more so than like the ones we saw in 2020, the Holy week riot, like there were like, like there were, there were like, like thousands of paratroopers were being deployed to like kill rioters.

Yeah. Like nuts. Yeah. Like that was, that was probably the closest, like some of the closest the US has ever had to just like actually having a revolution, the government losing control of the entire country. And like, and while, while this article is coming out, like there are still, even in May, the, the, the, the Holy week uprisings in April, but like even it, like even in May,

there are still people on the streets fighting the cops, like while, while this article is being written and you know, if you look at the, there's something about 68 curse on that entire year. I mean, it's wild. Like May 16th, like that, that year is just the year like the entire world went through. I mean, there's like, like, like they, they, I can't remember if they actually successfully over through the government. They like almost over through the government of Pakistan, like a whole bunch of students

get shot in Mexico because they were trying to bring down the government, like it's everywhere. There is all this stuff going on, um, and you know, also the other thing that's happening is we're, we're two years into the culture of revolution. And it's kind of interesting because by, by 68, we're kind of into the backlash phase of the culture of revolution where most of what's happening is that the sort of various rebel factions that formed in 1967 and 1966 are just getting like slaughtered by the sort of like state factions. And it's more, it's, it's, it's the culture of revolution.

It's really complicated. Like by, by, by this point, the sort of like revolution part of it has like kind of calmed down and it's more the state in its sort of new form taking control. But you know, if you're living through this, right, it looks like the culture of revolution happens in, in, in, uh, in 66, then it is 67. And then suddenly there was a cultural revolution happening literally everywhere. And this is the context of the MSG scare, like kicks off in, right? It, it starts in like right in the middle of arguably the two most radical months of

the entire 20th century. Wow. Yeah. And, and this is, this is the kind of shit that starts like just an absolute mania in the American mind that is powerful enough that like 60 years later, it's still around. I mean, it feels like the, it happening as such like a, a manic time. Like people are probably already like kind of feeling that energy, right? Yeah.

It was like, it was directed everywhere, even at this article. Yeah. And I genuinely think if, if this had happened two months later or two months earlier, I don't think, I don't think there would have been like a big scare about it. Like it might have been a thing that stuck around for a bit, but I think the fact that the end, the New York Times article came out exactly like in the middle of May 68 and that like the original one comes out like right before the, like the original article like it's set to the thing comes out like a couple of weeks before the Holy Week up

rising. I think it was the fact that it was exactly in this moment where everyone on earth is, if you're living through this, like this is the capital or revolution like has come. And you know, and that, that shattered everyone's brains. Like, I don't know. I want to, like do people remember what it was like, like when, like when like the height of 2020 was happening? Like just how sort of wild, like it was just psychologically.

I'm telling you, there was like an energy, collective, strange, I mean, like obviously it's different than I was in 68, but I really do agree with you. Like if it happened in January, I don't think it would be a thing, you know, like, yeah. And you know, I, so the other thing that's interesting about, about this whole sort of like Chinese restaurant syndrome is that you could actually track it spread like across other countries by sort of like moments of like peak anti-Chinese like sentiment and also anti-Japanese sentiment to a lesser extent, because that, that, that sort of replaces the anti-Chinese stuff by the time you get into the 80s and 90s.

But well, not replaces, but it's like, it's like the, the, the dominant mode of like, we have a person we need to be afraid of in East Asia. Right, right, right. But there was an interesting, okay. So if, if, if you, if you look up, like if you're looking for you like medical stuff about Chinese restaurant syndrome, one of the things you will find is a case report of the Indian Journal of Critical Medical Care from 2017 claiming that they were treating a patient who got Chinese restaurant syndrome and like couldn't speak because the, the thing

in the back of his throat had like inflamed and you know, and they had this whole thing about like this, this is like, this is like a serious disorder and they, they, they specifically cited that letter to the editor from 68. Wow. The power of that. Yeah. And you know, what, okay, so if you look, what, what was going on in, in India in 2017 and it turns out the thing that's going on is like a giant rise in anti-Chinese sentiment

culminating in the 2017 Indian Chinese border incident where do you remember when all those guys you're like beating each other to death in the mountains with sticks on the border? Yeah, I, I do vaguely remember that. I've just associated many times with my life and especially post pandemic, my brain is broken, but I do vaguely remember that. I had kind of forgotten about it and then, and then I, I looked at this article and saw us in 2017, I was like, wait, hold on, hold on, wasn't that, wasn't, didn't, didn't that happen in 2017?

And it's funny because like, yeah, rise, rise again, suddenly Chinese restaurant syndrome reappears. Wow. It's, it's really, it's really incredible. It's, it's, yeah, it's an incredible set of brain worms. Um, I just, I mean, this is definitely not on topic, I guess, but even just seeing like COVID being blamed on China, like there's always like a, like a way for ignorant people just to point the finger at China, which is really fucking shitty.

It's so shitty. Yeah. It's, yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's sort of like, like one of the things you sort of need to have a national project is that in order for you to be, in order for you to be like a nation, you have to have a, you have to have an other, you have to have people who aren't part of the nation. Right.

The US does this pretty effectively, they have, they, you know, they can have this sort of rotating cast of people who like aren't like from the nation, right? Yeah. If you want to stay in, there are people that need to stay out. Yeah. But sometimes it's with Mexico. Sometimes, sometimes you get it with sort of like, like internal subversion from like black people or like indigenous people, but yeah, you know, they have this rotating cast.

China's always one of the ones that come back to you because it's just big and there's a lot of them. Yeah. And you know, that makes it really easy to do. For whatever reason, people are easily feared by it. Like, I think it's just like it's unknown and maybe people don't understand it very well that don't look into it themselves and want to fucking be educated. But for whatever reason, people fear it so easily and it's so bizarre.

It's so bizarre. Yeah. It, it sucks. Oh, yeah. Okay. So we're, I'm going to do an ad break and then we're going to talk about more of this stuff because it keeps going and we're back. All right.

So obviously we're dealing with sort of anti-Chinese sentiment and anti-Japanese sentiments as you know, anti-Japanese sentiment escalating as the 60s turned into like the 80s and 90s. But there's more going on here. Part of the reason, you know, back, back, like this in theory could have been about like soy sauce, right? Right. Like there's a lot of things that they could have picked out of that to be the sort of thing everyone thinks about, but they picked MSG.

And part of the reason they picked MSG is that this is the period when people start like figuring out that food additives exist. And people tend to get really sort of touchy about it. And actually Ralph Nader, famous, yeah, so he's around in the 60s because he's old as shit. Yeah. Yeah. And he's, you know, okay.

Like I give him credit for like, he has probably saved as many lives as like any other American, single American you can name by being the guy who like lobbied to have seat belts in cars being mandatory. Right. Yeah. I think that was not before because the U.S. is a like truly deranged country. Yeah. He wasn't half bad most of the time.

Yeah. But, but come on, he's also one of the guys who's like the big pusher for getting the U.S. government to study MSG and a lot of other food additives in like 1960, 1969. So, you know, and like there's a bunch of other food additives that they're studying the health effects of. And on the one hand, you like, yeah, probably is good to study the effects of like food additives because like, I don't know, companies do stuff that sucks all the time. And so it is good to study with any food.

On the other hand, Wait, okay. This is going to sound really ignorant. So I apologize. What? Yeah. Where again, if you already said this, where was it found? Where was MSG found?

Is it created in a lab? Like what's the molecule? Yeah. So, yeah. But by this point, it's basically created in the lab that the first time someone was able to distill it was they did this whole distillation process from seaweed. Oh, yeah. Seaweed.

Seaweed. Yeah. But by this point, it's no worries. Yeah. No. Like by, by, by, I mean, even by like the early 1920s, I think it's mostly being produced artificially, which is why I think one's from that. Yeah.

Yeah. It makes it taste better. But like, you know, it is something that like you, like you can find it like in, in Dashi, like you can find it in like soup broths and stuff, like from seaweed. So it's, it's not like, I mean, I didn't know that I've, I've known about MSG for most of my life. And I never like, for whatever reason, growing up, we always associate it with sodium, like salt, salty.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it is right. Like it is a kind of salt. Yeah. Like, I don't know. Like people, people, people have this whole thing. It's like, oh, it's artificial. It's like, like, yeah, we make it artificially, but like it's not, it's not like it's not

a thing that you can get out of plants. It's just that we don't do it that way because it's easier. Yeah. I mean, the source of it is not artificial, but also like you're going to be a stickler on this one thing when you eat, like, I don't know, so many other drinks, so many other things. Like there was cocaine and coke. Yeah.

Like it's just, there's other things out there. Every American, like in 1969 is like buy their body volume and drinking two pounds of lead a year. Exactly. It's like- So it's like this is the thing you're going to stick on? Yeah. Well, and you know, this is sort of the problem with what Ralph Nader is doing with the sort

of like pushing the government investigation of it, is that like, you know, like I don't know how racist 1969 Ralph Nader was. My guess is that, like, I don't think that his big thing was we need to study this because it's the dirty Chinese like salt or whatever. I think he mostly just wanted the thing to study food additives. I could be wrong about that. I don't know. I haven't looked into this exactly zero percent.

But like, you know, the problem is that once this sort of racial panic is going, like you can't put the sort of cork back in the bottle, and you know, okay, so there have been a bunch of studies about this. And like, but you know, okay, so the problem with what's happening is that because of the way MSG has been sort of racialized, like, the studies don't matter. Like it just does not matter what anyone actually sort of writes about it until you get natural cultural change because the studies, the science, like, is irrelevant. They have the study to justify a bunch of things, and that's the only study they care

about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like the fake vaccines cause autism shit. Right. No. They just believe this. They have one paper that's literally a joke.

Exactly. And that's what they claim. They claim does it. Yeah. It could be 17 others that disprove it, but like, no, there's like a million others. Like that. And by the way, that study, I want to point this out. The methodology of that study was they asked parents who thought their kids had developed

autism because of the vaccine if they thought their kids had developed autism because of the vaccine. And then the parents said yes. And that's the study. Yeah. That's not a fucking study. It's not. It's a joke.

That's a poll. It's literally a Twitter poll that got published and then retracted because it was a Twitter poll. Right. Like this, this is the scientific basis of all this bullshit. I guess what qualifies as a fucking study then? Like you could, you could, I don't know. You could, you could publish fucking anything if you put your mind to it.

This is, this is, this is what I'm telling all of you, like, follow your dreams, try to get something published. They published this bullshit. So like, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to do a study. Yeah. Well, the other thing, the other thing specifically, like there's a real problem here with like, this is everything with medical studies because like you can have a medical study that you

get published with a sample size of one because it's, you found a thing and a guy and you're like, oh, I'm going to publish this. But you like medical studies, like, oh, you can just like, you could publish any bullshit and like, it sucks. But okay. So all right. Like lots of, so after this, there are lots of studies by lots of people. And like mostly what they find is they can't find any.

Okay. So there's some like initial studies that like find some alarming stuff in mice. But the problem with these studies that what they're doing is, okay, yeah, it turns out if you take a mouse and you just like fill a syringe with MSG and inject them with it, it's bad for them. Oh, you think so? Yeah. Like, oh shit.

Yeah. You ejected a mouse with peer salt and bad things happen. Yes, if you took a human being and you injected fucking a third of a cup of MSG directly into their veins, it would probably be bad for them. I guess like, okay, you know, right. And they found out the conclusion from that was basically like, okay, if someone ate like a third of a cup of MSG raw, having not eaten for like 48 hours, it would probably do things that are not great for you.

Okay. You say that about a bunch of other fucking things. Yes. I don't know if you didn't eat for 24 hours and ate a third of a cup of salt, like that's probably that's not good for you. Like don't do that. So like, you know, okay, very, very specific circumstances have to light up for you to have any reaction to MSG.

So there's a study from 2000 where they also, this is also another empty stomach study, by the way, because they've, okay, no one has ever been able to replicate like any of these results with a person eating food that has MSG in it, they've never been able to do it. They've been able to get some results if you have people eat like basically pure MSG and have not eaten any food like around it. Yeah. It's like, okay.

That's useless because the molecule at that point, it probably interacts with other things and that's, you know what I mean? Like if it's just by itself, it's not the actual, I don't know. Yeah. I'm not very good at chemistry. So I'm going to, I'll let the chemistry nerds argue about this. I did fail AP Chem. So same.

Great. Yeah. Oof. I luckily only had to take chemistry in. So I just didn't take AP Chem because I was like, I suck. I took A Chem like my freshman year and I was like, let's not do this again. I can't do this. I'm going to take physics.

Chemistry is the thing. I wanted to be a psychiatrist for a really long time, but failing AP chemistry and just experiencing chemistry, I was like, I can't do this. Yeah. It sucks. It's the worst. Okay, so the reason I was talking about the like vaccines cause autism, autism shit is that there was another thing with MSG where people were claiming that it was causing asthma.

And it, no, they had, they had another looking incredibly elaborate pseudoscience bullshit about like MSG, like getting absorbed, like getting absorbed improperly through like, like fetal membranes. That's like completely nonsense. Like it doesn't. Yeah. People, people like white people love to say that the diseases they've gotten from fucking the fact that like their, their, their air in their house is 97% CO2 by volume.

And like, and, and because, because they've decided to run an entire country by just putting fucking trucking yards everywhere. Yeah. Like, okay. It has to be a finger to point at, right? Like it can't be the environment or bad genes. You know what I mean? Like.

Yeah. I should point, I should make this clear, by the way. When I, when I, when I say, when I say that like autism, not sorry, when I say that asthma specifically is, when I talk about the bad air specifically talking about asthma, I'm not talking about autism with that, that, that, that is not what causes autism or whatever, like autism is just. I got what you mean. I got what you mean.

Yeah. And it's cool. And also fuck autism speaks. Yes. Yeah. But yeah. I want to put that on the record. That's what I mean.

I'm not, I'm not saying that trucks cause autism. They don't. Like, yeah. Yeah. So. Okay. But there's a lot of like incredibly weird, racial, very dumb, anti-scientific panic about it.

It's possible that there exists a group. So originally it was about like, like anyone who eats this will have these symptoms, right? And then over time, the argument got sort of fizzed down to there might be a group of people who in the populate, like a small group of people who are like specifically sensitive to it. And that's probably plausible. Like there's some experimental evidence that shows that there could be a group of people for whom they're more sensitive to it than a regular person.

And I don't know. Sure. People have allergies. Like whatever. Yeah. Exactly. People are allergic to peanuts and soy. Yeah.

Yeah. Like it's not like, like, yeah. It's not a thing to sort of like, yeah. I don't know. Like if you're a person who gets allergy reactions to shit, like, yeah, that's allergies, right? But like it's not the sort of like, I don't know. The panic about it is utterly unjustified. There may be a group of people who it has some effect on because they're allergic to

it or whatever. But. Yeah. Imagine demonizing peanuts because there's a group of people that can eat peanuts. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like that is, that's why. Like why would you ever do that?

To be fair, I am okay with demonizing peanuts specifically, specifically if it gets people to stop fucking worshiping that bastard Jimmy Carter, who was a neoliberal ghoul, and his reputation has been fucking just like, like his reputation has been saved entirely by the fact that every single person who came after him was an utterly deranged war criminal. And his war crime was like. Wait, what does peanuts have to do with it? Well, he was a peanut farmer. Oh, sorry.

Yeah. Sorry. This is, this is, this is the, this is, this is the, the, the, the, the deep Jimmy Carter lore. Yeah. For the real Jimmy. I'm on track now. Okay.

Got it. Yeah. Okay. But, you know, all right. So going, going, going back, I think, so this was the kind of thing that like, you know, people avoiding MSG is just kind of, had just kind of been like, like a part of daily life. Like it was just like a thing that existed in the world, but it wasn't like at a certain point it became the kind of thing that people would talk about like in conversation and like

they'll, you know, you could just get people to do anti MSG rants, but it wasn't really a sort of like mainstream political issue in the way that it had been like in like 1969 where there's, well, the other thing that happened is in the nineties, the FDA did a study about it. And the FDA was like, it's fine. Like, don't, don't, don't eat 300 grams of it at one time. Like as long as you're not sitting there like eating MSG raw out of the fucking like 10.

They would say the same thing about like high fructose corn syrup. You know what I mean? Yeah. Why? Because high fructose corn syrup has killed way more people than exactly. That's what I was thinking. Awesome. Now, now there's like a whole thing about like MSG causing obesity, which I don't know

if that's true or not. I think their studies are fucking whack, but you know, it's, it's, it might cause obesity like every other food that the U.S. has made in the last 20 years. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And one day we will do a episode about like the politics of anti-fatness because it's fucked.

But yes. Today we're doing this episode and okay, so, you know, every once in a while, the way, the way this sort of work, every once in a while, there would be a sort of like a mainstream like Asian American figure who would talk about it. So for example, there's, there's, there's a Korean chef named David Chang who talks about it and he did some like, he gave us speeches about it and the sort of demonization of it, but it didn't really get back to mainstream discourse until 2020 when our good friends Aji Nomoto, the people who made the stuff in the first place, hired a bunch of Asian

American like celebrities to do a pro MSG campaign. So they hired Eddie Huang who's like a writer and chef who's like probably most famous for the being the guy who wrote fresh off the boat. And so that they have this whole sort of campaign and this like takes off, right? Like he, he, this is, this is one of those things that was like completely forgotten that happened in 2020 that no one now remembers because this happens like before COVID like before we had the lockdowns and before, I mean, I'll be honest, I, it's, it escapes my memory.

Oh, I, I, I have no memory of this happening either, but apparently it did. I don't know. I was, I, I, I think this was still all the, I think this is while the election was still going on. So yeah, I paid no attention to this time to do the 2020, the year everything happens. Yeah. But okay. So, you know, this campaign like takes off like, like Eddie Huang's on, on NBC and did

you like the talk show circuit with Jenny Amai advocating for like, so their whole thing is that they wanted to remove Chinese restaurant syndrome from the dictionary and they had this whole like hashtag redefine CRS is like the redefine Chinese restaurant restaurant syndrome. And this is like a whole thing. And you know, and there's, there's something, okay, but this was one of the things that sort of drew me to the story because if you look at the press for this, right, it's like activist pressure, Marion Webster and like that's kind of true.

Like it's superficially, it is kind of what happened. And like, yeah, I'm glad the dictionary changed the entry to say like, this is like outdated and kind of bullshit, but like, okay. Think about what actually happened here, right? A company that makes a product hired a bunch of, a bunch of sort of Asian American, like big celebrity people to do a marketing campaign for them in the name of anti racism, which like, yes, I am glad we are addressing the racism around MSG. However, comma, I feel like it's a really sort of like, it's a really literal example

of the kind of like, pittity and listlessness of like Asian American identity and culture and politics like pre COVID, like this is this is this is this has something like early January, right? So COVID is sort of like some disease in China. Like we haven't hit full racism yet. And again, like this is not like an activist campaign, you know, I mean, like activists get on board with it, I guess, but like activism is doing an ad campaign for a company that makes salt.

Right. Yeah. It's not exactly grassroots or something like that. Yeah. And, and, you know, okay, and it works, right? Like this, this is the thing that like the Asian American community like picks up, right? I mean, sort of, I don't know, I don't remember it, but I look at looking, looking back on the articles and hashtags and stuff, it's like, wow, they got lots of tweets.

But you know, I think, I think the reason that this worked is, is because of the sort of self conception of like Asian American this is this like backstory of like, like immigrants stepping off the boat and they start a restaurant and then your kids get an education so they enter the professional class. And like, there is like, I don't know, like this is in fact, this is literally like part of the reason I was doing this also was like, this is literally what happened to my family. Like they showed up from Taiwan, they worked in a restaurant, then they opened a restaurant and then like, I don't know, like every successive generation, well, okay, I was gonna say every

successive generation got more like professionally, but like I have a bunch of doctors, but then they also produced me who's a podcaster. So I'm defying Asian American stereotypes by being more dipshit than my parents. But you know, like this has become like this single sort of cultural narrative of like what it is to be an Asian American, right? Like you see this in every single story that Asian American media like has produced in the last like 10 years, it has one plot, right? There's a family in the US, they're trying to fit in, they almost always have some kind

of small business. And then something appears that challenges their ability to like assimilate into American society. This is, and then, you know, they deal with it in that's the end, right? This is the plot of crazy rich Asians is a plot of everything I've ever all at once, the plot of fresh off the boat is the product of the fucking CW kung fu show. It is the plot like literally everything that like we produce has one plot and it's this. And the reason why is it's, you know, the reason why this is the only sort of like piece

of media that the sort of Asian American culture class has been able to produce is the reason why all of the fucking activism and ad campaigns are just like fucking we got hired by a company and we're going to talk about racism is racism is bad so that this company can sell more product. Like the reason it's this is because this is an incredibly marketable self conception of Asian American is like the conception of it as being restaurant owners is there because it's a form of culture that can be sold to white people, right? Yeah.

It's hey, look, we're different. We eat wacky food, but you can eat it too. And ultimately we're all in this for capitalism and the patriarchal family like just like you are. Don't worry. It's going to be fine. And, you know, that that really depresses me because this this is a moment that demands something else.

And I think that's why kind of like, I think that's why the sort of mainstream like Asian American reaction to like, you know, like there was there was another there was another Asian woman like who got stabbed to death like two weeks ago. And there was like fucking no coverage of it. Like nobody gave a shit. It's just gotten to the point where like this happens like six people report on it. And then everyone just sort of moves on to their life. That goes away.

Yeah. And I think the reason why the sort of like stop Asian hate shit has gotten to, you know, like it's gotten it's gets gone through the sign cycle where everyone like had the signs up and they took them down. Right. And so, you know, like, and I think the reason why it was it turned into this sort of like the organized turning this like incredibly vapid like put a sign in your store like Twitter hashtag stuff like is because of this is because what like what what it means to be sort of

Asian American has been hollowed out and hollowed out and hollowed out and sold and sold and sold for just decades and decades and decades and now, you know, like in a time when it's actually sort of like, you know, when it when it's really in danger and it's called to action, it hasn't been able to do much. Right. Well, yeah, pointing out the film and TV thing is really important because I mean, so many marginalized communities have this experience, but I think China like Asian culture in particular, I think it really people, if they're ignorant and they just see what's depicted on media,

they don't see them as three dimensional beings, you know what I mean? What they have is like a very hollow version of a human. And so I don't know, it kind of upsets me because I feel like media is the first thing people learn things from, whether it's film or TV or whatever. But yeah. Well, and also, I think it's I think it's part of the reason why like the way that those those depictions sort of obscure class where, you know, because in these things, right, like a lot of these families are poor, but they're still business owners, right?

And that that's like, like if you're a poor American as well, it's because you're a business owner, you're like a sort of struggling like American entrepreneur, and this obscures the fact that there is a massive Asian American just underclass people who are like, who are delivery drivers or work in warehouses or, you know, I mean, like there are there are groups of people who like come to the US from China, who, you know, like live in like basically completely isolated communities in parts of Chinatown where they're only speaking Chinese and they just fucking like there are people who have to do a bunch of like warehouse shit and then they leave.

And that's it, right? And these these people, this shit never you like you never actually get any kind of sort of class analysis, because the way that media thinks about Asian Americans is like this, there's one of they're either one of three things, they're a business owner, they're like a rich professional, so they're like a doctor or something, or they're like the fucking people on bling where they're just like super rich assholes, right? And that that allows I think, like a specific kind of anti Asian politics to work that like Asian people are seeing this sort of like perpetual like for an elite.

And it's like, no, I don't know, like, it's just not, you know, it's not true and it means that when you get like Asian American political movements, like the sort of stuff anti Asian hate thing, right? Like, you have like the guy who founded DoorDash, right, is like is an Asian is like a Chinese American guy, right? He's like a used to use a tech billionaire, he used to be like an email like, you know, you would have these stop Asian hate events like this fucking guy is on there like is up on the stage talking about anti Asian hate and it's like, okay, this guy has like brutally

and horribly exploited like literally millions of Asian Americans. But you know, there's there's there's there's there's no there's never going to be a reckoning with that because, you know, he's successful and he's capitalist like he's achieved the capitalist dream or whatever the shit, you know, and because because because because Asian American attendees have been flattened in this way, like, though those people are just completely invisible and it sucks and I hate it. And yeah, yeah, I, it's just, I don't know, there's nothing good I can like anything I can say to make anything better, but I think it's just, I don't know.

Maybe we can do an episode one day about like film and and TV and stuff because I think it really starts there, unfortunately, like, it's silly, but people that don't know a Chinese person will see a Chinese person on their TV and be like, that's the only Chinese person I've ever seen in my life, but I'm going to make assumptions about the whole race now. But one day I'm going to do an episode, we're going to do an episode that's entirely me shitting on Jackie Chan, people are going to get really mad at me, but and fuck that guy. That's a hot take.

He started his career as a fucking scam. That was literally his first thing was he was a scab and he's yeah, he's the fucking homophobic piece of shit. Fuck him. Yeah. Done to your parable damage. I doubt for this episode. Let's do it.

Yeah. All right. That will be it. So we are now into the part of the episode where we are teasing you with subsequent episodes. Yes. But yeah. But yeah, I, I don't know, it is a little bit upsetting how these really important

movements are just like they plateau and they become like this vapid thing like you're saying, like I think that gives people such an easy out of like quote unquote being an ally or supporting because I think they're doing something by like holding up a sign or something without really internalizing or spreading the awareness that is necessary. And I don't know, I guess the thing I want to end on also is me being pissed off at a bunch of Asian American kids in the 60s. So one of the stories you will hear a lot if you're studying Asian American politics is like, is the story that like the term Asian American was invented by these like activists

who actually were like doing a bunch of stuff in 1968, who were these like student act like this radical student activists and like that's true. But the thing you have to understand about those people is that all of those people were like, like all of those people were basically like we're third worldists. And part of the reason this whole politics collapses, well, a part of the reason part of what happened was like part of the demands of these students in 1968 of these sort of like radical student groups like, you know, they're formed to sort of like support the sort of like black radical student groups into like advocate for themselves.

But like one of their big demands was they wanted cultural studies departments in American universities and they got them. But you know, okay, so what are those cultural studies like departments, they basically just became these giant traps for radicals, where instead of like overthrowing the government, you like come do this cushy job in academia and like all of all of the sort of like old radicals like from that era, either like got regular jobs or became like I became academics right. And the other thing that happened with this politics that was reasonably was completely

unsustainable was that and this is this has been a sort of a problem with the Asian American identity, right, is that, okay, like, what the fuck is an Asian American, right? It's like anyone from like, I don't know, like it's anyone from like the like the edge of the Pacific to like, I don't know, like how far how far like, I, what's it called, like how far how far west does that go the other direction, like who knows, it's like it's like, yeah, like, I mean, this is like billions and billions and billions of people with completely unrelated cultures and languages and stuff like that and the reason they were able to do this, right, was because they were mirroring their movement off of like the third

world, right. But the problem that they ran into, and this is the problem with all the third world movements was that, okay, so the third world movement, like as a thing was, it was based on a bunch of different nationalist movements, right, like it was based on that there was going to be this like alliance between like the sort of like the rising socialist powers in Africa and the rising socialist powers in East Asia, and they were going to sort of like ally with like the rising sort of like, like the rising sort of like minorities getting power in the US.

But okay, if you look at those nationalisms, right, you have Chinese nationalism, Cambodian nationalism and Vietnamese nationalism all colliding with each other. And you know, if it turns out like, okay, so what happens if your movement is based on sort of like the unity of a bunch of nationalist movements and they go to war with each other? And you know, what happened was when China, when Vietnam invades Cambodia and then China invades Vietnam in 1979, right, that entire politics is fucked because what are you supposed to do? Like who side are you supposed to take here, right?

Like you can do this, you know, like if you're going to be like a Marxist, like a Marxist Leninist, like the probably the correct line to support Vietnam, right? But that's a mess because you know, how many people are Maoists, right? And if you, but you know, if you're a Maoist and you're fucking people just invaded Vietnam, like, you know, what are you supposed to do, right? And there was there were earlier tensions with this too, where like, like China with China was backing like a really shitty faction in Angola, who ended up being backed by the US and like South Africa.

And that caused a whole bunch of tensions between the sort of Chinese Maoists and a bunch of the sort of black radical groups because they were like, why the fuck are you guys backing these people in Angola? But you know, and this, this whole thing became a problem because all of these nationalisms are competing nationalisms, right? There was never going to be one unified third world. It was always, it was always going to end with a bunch of nationalists fucking fighting each other.

And when that happens, the Asian, like the Asian American movement, such as it was just fucking died. And you know, as a radical movement, it was just over. And so, you know, I think, I think the lesson that I would take out of this is just that like, do not build, do not build your movement based off of someone else's nationalism, because those people are going to do things because they're nationalists that are just fucked, right? They're going to, they're going to invade Vietnam, like, like the Cambodians are going

to invade Vietnam and then Vietnam's going to like, you know, like, are arguably justifiably because they've been getting attacked and because they're fighting the Khmer Rouge. But like, you know, they're, they're, these people are all going to go to war with each other, right? Or, you know, you're going to be stuck in the situation where, like, you're being forced to choose sides between like the Durg and the, and like the Marxist government in Somalia, because they've randomly gone to war with each other. So don't do this.

This has been my rant that I wanted to do about this. Because yeah. No, I'm glad you did. I'm glad that I was here for it too, because I don't know, it's good to know this stuff and I get to learn by listening to you tell me and yeah, I, I appreciate all the research that you did. Thanks. Yeah.

Yeah. And yeah. So I guess this has been, it can happen here. That's the episode? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the episode.

You can find us, uh, happen here, pod, um, uh, Twitter and Instagram. I'm at, at me, CHR3. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a chero hero 666 on Twitter and then on Instagram, just take out the 666s, but maybe I should add them because who cares anyway, thanks, bye. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup.

Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French in our newest show. We take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I heart podcast and school of humans, this is let's start a coup. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman, join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is it could happen here. My name is Jake Hanrahan, I'm a journalist and documentary filmmaker. Today you're going to hear me reporting from an undisclosed location in Europe where I met with anti-Putin Russian partisans. So right now I'm heading into the forest somewhere on the edge of Europe. There's snow absolutely everywhere, it's pitch black and it's very, very cold.

I'm headed into the forest to meet with anti-government Russian partisans. They've been launching attacks inside Russia against the Kremlin infrastructure. They've been blowing up railway tracks and attacking military recruitment centers because they want to disrupt the continued Russian invasion of Ukraine. These partisan attacks have been taking place all across Russia, but obviously over there there's a complete media blackout on this situation. So this group have come over and agreed to meet with me to tell me what's actually happening and to let people know that it's not everybody there that supports this and some people

are even taking up arms, taking massive risks to try and stop what Putin is up to. When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the Ukrainian people bravely mobilized to fight back against Putin's attack on their country. Russia's so-called three-day special operation has turned into a gruelling year-long battle where the Ukrainian resistance has been highly effective. Despite this chaos, it seems that many people in Russia have come out in favor of this brutal war. Even now with over 40,000 people killed and over 14 million displaced, there's still

large-scale support for Putin's attacks on Ukraine. This much is fact. The idea that every Russian is in favor of the war is not. Russia is a huge place with a population of over 140 million. Many people there do not support Putin or his war. Some have even taken the risk to fight back. As I mentioned, there's a quiet but highly effective network of anti-Putin partisans that are fighting from within.

They're doing this by blowing up military railways, sabotaging Kremlin cell towers and burning down war recruitment centers. All this in an effort to help Ukrainians from afar. If caught by the Russian security forces, they face torture and life in prison. Despite the risks in the last 12 months, there have been more than 80 confirmed attacks against the government inside Russia. The attacks have taken place all across the country as well, from Moscow in the West to Vladivostok in the Far East.

There are dozens of different partisan cells and lone wolves. As is with real life, the partisans have varying different political ideologies from far left to far right. For the moment though, they all share information with each other, recognizing their common enemy in Putin. One of the most organized groups is made up of militant anarchists. They're known as the Anarko-Communist Combat Organization, more commonly referred to by their Russian abbreviation BOAC.

There's two fighters from BOAC who I'd arranged to meet in a Russia bordering forest of Eastern Europe. We'd spoken weeks before via encrypted email. They told me which country to fly to and then sent me coordinates of where to meet them within a specific window of time. I drove as far as I could, abandoned the car and took off into the forest. Eventually a red torchlight emerged through the trees, cutting the silhouette of two figures.

As the two approached, it was clear it was the BOAC fighters. They were both dressed head to toe in black and were both wearing balaclavas. We confirmed things, shook hands and set off to find a spot for the interview. They led me through an underground tunnel to an area they felt comfortable with. To protect the identity of the Russian partisans, we've scrambled their voice. That voice you just heard, that's Olya, she's a female, and the other fighter the voice you'll hear, that's Dura, he's a male. Can you explain the actions, what are the main things you've been doing to disrupt Putin's

invasion? We disassembled railways, which leads to the artillery warehouse in the Moscow region. It delayed supplies to the front, so it gave to the Ukrainian people more time to prepare for the counter-attacking. The railing trains in Russia is something the partisans specialise in. They've managed to knock several Kremlin cargo trains off their tracks. Things that were destined to deliver weapons to Russian soldiers as they continued to invade Ukraine.

We'll probably never know how helpful this was for Ukrainians, but every second counts when battling for frontline positions in war. For example, if Russian soldiers were left waiting for a resupply, which was delayed because of partisan attacks, they might then be overrun by Ukrainians. This would definitely be an effective blow for the partisans. I asked the Boat Fighters why they felt the need to form such an organisation. We see that we need to create a partisan organisation, because in Russia the state oppression is very hard, so you can't use some legal methods to do some step-by-step changes.

Even if you do some so-called legal actions, anyway you'll go to the jail. We are attacking the state to make it weaker. To show people that we can do it, we as people of Russia, people of all over the world, we have this power in our hands. It's possible. Yeah, them, the state, they are small, and there is a lot of us. And the second direction which we are developing is a coordination of such kind of attacks, partisan attacks, all over the Russia.

Recently we published, I think, maybe even more than a text from many different regions. We held small partisan cells to find out how to make attacks, help them with supplies to help such small partisan groups. It's increasing. It's increasing, yeah. And they're making more and more serious attacks. For example, not a long time ago they bombed some kind of military railroad near the Ukrainian border.

So our power is not in that one small group can do, but we have a lot of small groups and all together we can change things. So you guys have been around before the Ukraine war started, or at least since the invasion started this year, but that's when you've got a lot more known, I think, online. We're seeing that you guys are actually doing attacks inside Russia and in Belarus. Very dangerous thing to do. What is it that spurred you guys on? Why are you doing this?

Why are you taking such a risk to basically attack Putin in his own country? Because it's not his country, it's our country. We can't do nothing. We can't do legal things, and this partisan attacks can make military machine of Russian state. We cut the supply lines, we attack the military recruitment centers, so the army becomes weaker and as it was very often in Russia and many other states' history, when the state lose war, the window of possibilities opens for the people of this country.

Was Boak a pragmatic, focused currently on the pressing issue of Putin's war on Ukraine? They're also looking to carve out a space for themselves in what they believe will be a wild post-Putin Russia. When Putin dies, there will be a vacuum where many other groups feel the same. Boak, in their minds, is setting down foundations already. But now, though, they concentrate on assisting the Ukrainians. And in terms of solidarity with Ukraine, are you doing this to help the Ukrainians as well or just for yourselves?

Are you in contact with Ukrainians or is this just a movement you guys are doing yourself? Of course we have contacts, we can't say what exactly contacts, but yes, we have contacts with different, and not only his organization, in all the countries as well. As well, we try to provide information for those other groups which don't yet know how to do things and don't yet have funds enough for supplies, because even gasoline costs money and they don't have money. But as well, near the start of war, our group organized a few attacks like on the mobile cell towers near Ukraine border.

As we've seen from the telegram channels, the kind of underground, there's definitely a lot of attacks, as you've said, as you've been doing. How big is your organization? Because it's hard to tell how prevalent are these attacks inside Russia? There is about two or three thousands affinity groups and everyone has a different number of members. And what about geography? As you know, Partizan's ex from Kaliningrad, west of Russia, to Vladivostok, which is east

of Russia. Almost Russia. Specifically being anarchists, but being partisans is extremely, extremely dangerous inside Russia. You're taking a massive risk doing this kind of stuff. Some people are going to see this and go like, why, why would you take that risk? If we won't take those risks now, we won't have future at all. Are you not worried? You're not scared of getting caught?

Of course we are. We're not stupid enough to not be. But it's much more scared to live knowing that you had a chance to change something and you didn't. Our people killing people of Ukraine and making a world worse and worse with every day, with the dangers of nuclear war and so on, because if we do it now, maybe we will not have the future at all. Not only in Russia, but all over the world.

People on the internet, they'll see what you guys are doing and they'll say, oh, you guys are CIA operatives and stuff like this, particularly like westerners that actually support Putin. Now, you know what it's like living there under Putin. You know, how would you address that? What would you say to those kind of accusations? I think if we would be CIA, we would act more effectively. But we act with those forces, with those resources, which we have.

We're trying to increase them, but when we say that it's time, it's a process from zero partisan attacks to the full partisan war. So if we were CIA, we would have a lot more resources than hell. Yeah, we have homemade bombs or anything we can get our hands on, not CIA material. Or even speaking about resources, which we used when we disassembled railways, we used a simple instrument, which we could be bought in a hardware store. We are showing people that they can just go to the store and buy those tools and do it themselves.

It's not just, you know, us doing some stuff with some specific materials you can only get in the dark net. Now let's be honest, it's likely the CIA are up to something in Russia, considering their past history. But personally, I believe Bauak, when they say they're nothing to do with that, I think it would be pretty unlikely that the CIA would help an anarcho-communist group when there are ultra-nationalist groups doing similar things. How do you get the information, like how do you know which railway to blow up?

We use the Wikimapia service, which provides a description for each object on the map, and everyone can contribute to it. So you just open it and you find, okay, immediate object is here, it's doing something like that, that is, it's photos, and people who did it, they didn't do it for us, they just did it because you want to share this information and you just can take it and use it. So they use Wikimapia to help plot their attacks. This I found quite funny, it's like the modern version of guerrillas gathering intel from locals about the enemy, only the locals in this case don't even know they're doing it.

Action is also a big part of their sabotage preparations. I know that anarchists specifically in Russia have been tortured quite a lot if they're captured for anything. What do you think would happen to you guys if you got caught? For sure, we're going to be tortured as well. If we will live enough because we are not playing to get caught and behind it. We don't give any information on our comrades and when you're tortured it's hard to say when you would or would not you break.

You never know how you react to torture. So it's better to prevent this by dying and fighting. Does that mean you have firearms? If you want to do a revolution you can do it without firearms. Why are you doing this, why are you giving us the interview, why do you want this information to get out there? We think that it's important that people see us not as some internet warriors, we want people to hear our voices and to hear what we have to say.

Don't want people to think that we are some shady organization but we want them to see that we are real people just like them and just like us they can do things that we do. A lot of it is online but there's definitely a perception that all Russians agree with the invasion, the destruction of Ukraine, what Putin wants to do. Obviously people like you are very clearly a small but effective resistance against Putin's policies. What do you think about that? How would you respond to that?

Is it in the country and more people against it than it would seem or what? There are a lot more people against it than it seems because propaganda shows only people who agree with Putin and many, many people don't agree and many people just silent because they are afraid to lose their jobs. If you beat a dog every day then someday it will think that I live like that, it's normal. So as we see a lot of people in Russia are also victims of the Putin's regime. At the moment they just don't think that if they speak up they will change anything. I think our main message is that people shouldn't just sit and wait that someone else is going

to do anything for them, they should take their lives in their own hands. As we often repeat, if not we then who, if not now then when. Thank you very much. With that the two partisans from Boak vanished into the forest. As Russia's war on Ukraine approaches its 12 months, Russian partisans like the ones I spoke to are continuing to disrupt Putin's war effort from within. Organisations like Boak are fighting an uphill battle but still their attacks have definitely been effective.

As we said several military trains have been derailed and the word of the partisan underground is spreading. Whilst there's next to no Russian state media coverage on this, the Russian government is clearly aware of it. Security around Russian train tracks has been tightened and a Russian court has fined the Telegram app for allowing partisans networks to share information there, not to mention the optic in unexplained fires breaking out across the country. Even though Putin's government acts like they can't see them, they know the partisans

are there. If you want to watch the extended documentary version of this reporting, go to youtube.com slash popular front and look for the documentary Russia's anti-Putin underground. Music in this episode of It Could Happen Here was by Sam Black, sees music at samblackpf.com. Indian production editing was by me, you can follow me at jake underscore hanrahan, h-a-n-r-a-h-a-n. Please do check out my platform, independent grassroots conflict reporting, www.popularfront.co. I'm Ben Bullitt, and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into

a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say, for one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing, and for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you

find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. According to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is today about it happening here. Or more particularly in Atlanta. So it's here.

If you happen to live in Atlanta, Georgia, otherwise it is still happening there. And I don't actually know much about this because like the rest of you, I have been watching from the sidelines since a forest defender was killed by the Georgia State Police. But someone who has been in Atlanta for most of the last week is Garrison Davis. Garrison. Hello. Hi. How you doing?

It's been a long week. Yeah, it sounds like it. You had just gotten back from CES when all this happened and booked the next flight and flew out and were on the ground during some of the immediate protests that followed news about the death. Do you want to just kind of take it from here? Yeah. So we're going to be putting together kind of a more in-depth thing similar to my on-the-ground

at Defend the Atlanta Forest episodes from last May. That's going to come out, but it'll take a little bit because I'm doing a lot of interviews, doing a lot of on-the-ground stuff here. But this is important enough that I feel like it was worth mentioning something a bit sooner, which is why we're recording here today, just to kind of give a 101 on what's been going on ever since Wednesday. So Wednesday, January 18th, there was a raid on the Wallani Forest or the South River Forest in Atlanta, where people have been currently staying in encampments for the past year and

a half in opposition of this upcoming proposed police training facility to be built on this same land. So Wednesday morning, there was this raid. There's a few things different about this raid. One, it seemed to be in some ways kind of led by the Georgia State Patrol. This is a state-run police that has not been in this forest before. Other raids have been coordinated between the DeKalb County Police and Atlanta Police. So the SWAT team was unfamiliar with the forest.

They had not been in there before. There was other police on site. This was an interagency thing. It does seem like there was Atlanta Police here as well. But this started at around 8 a.m. and then at around 9 a.m. we got word that a third forest defender was shot and killed by, it seems like, an estate patrol officer that they are not releasing the name of, nor are they releasing the name of one other officer who was injured and Georgia State Patrol claims that they were shot during this raid as well.

Police say... By the dissenting. Yes, police claim that they were shot by the person that the Georgia State Patrol killed. Just very little information about this. No body cameras. They have said that there is no body cam, which does seem consistent because Georgia State Patrol are not required to wear body cam. So that obviously hit a lot of people pretty hard because this is, to our knowledge, the

first environmentalist protester to be killed by police. It's the first fatality that we've had in this movement here in Atlanta. And for the record, it is still deeply unclear what happened. It's certainly not impossible that this person fired first on the police officer, but it's also incredibly important to note that there is no evidence of this that's been presented. The only evidence that the police have presented is a photo of a pistol on the ground and then they've made the very weasley worded claim that ballistic testing has shown that the bullet that struck the officer was consistent with the gun that they're saying, the individual

they killed had. And all that means is that it was nine millimeter. That it was the same caliber, right? A caliber for which there are tens of millions of guns in this country. Most ballistic science in terms of identifying bullets to guns is actually nonsense. There have been massive lawsuits about this. The FBI has, this is a bigger topic than we can get into today, but it's very shady. And all that they actually said is the cop was shot with a nine millimeter.

And hey, look, we found a nine millimeter, not interestingly enough. We have confirmed that this gun was fired. Correct. So very, anyway, no one knows what's happened. It's shady. I've, I got, I got here like less than 24 hours later. A lot of people on the ground have been kind of sharing their memories of the person that was killed.

So the person was named, their, their forest name was Tortuguita, which means little turtle. Their name that has been released is a manual. I'm just going to, I'm going to call them Tortuguita or torch. Sure. There's been people, you know, spent a lot of the past few days talking about torch remembering tort, the types of things that, that they, they advocated for the types of things that they would talk about. So we'll, we'll get into some of the more kind of specifics of that, of that, of that

later. But yeah, a number of other journalists have talked about their conversations with, with tort, including the fact that they events to a pretty principled and extensive commitment to nonviolence, at least in interviews. This is the, something they had been quoted on by other journalists a number of times. And this is something I've heard a lot of people bring up is that, is that tort was, was a believer in, in nonviolence and would, and would talk about and advocate that. The other, the other kind of angle to this, and I'm not taking a position one way or another

here, but this is something that thinks important to mention is that I also don't want to remove the agency of a person. If they did decide to do, if I, if I did, if they did decide to do this, because the other thing I've heard a lot about tort is that they always made thoughtful decisions in the meaning that they, they put thought into everything they did. They were, they, they acted strategically. They did not, they did not put people in unnecessary danger. They would not do something if they thought it would endanger other people.

They always acted with thought and that, that, that could include if you feel like your life is under immediate threat, what, what actually happened Wednesday morning, we will probably never know. We will never know the exact series of, of events and it's, and in some ways like that's, we can, we should respect tort either way because they made it a decision that they thought that was right in the moment or they were just flat out murdered by police. So that's, that's kind of the gist of, of what happened Wednesday morning throughout the rest of the day, their police continued their raid on the forest.

The last, the last tree sitter was eventually taken down like 20 hours later after the raids that someone was stuck up in a tree for over 20 hours, no food or water, police agitating them the entire time and many, all of, all the other people arrested, I think a total around seven got charged with domestic terrorism among other charges. So that's pretty significant. That is people that's, that will, and we will circle back to this, to this point a little bit later. So that is, that is what happened on Wednesday.

You know, the first few hours after the shooting, people were unsure of, of who actually got killed. It was hard, it was hard to say. Other force defenders who were in the area did report from that, what they heard, there was a pretty, a pretty quick single firing of, of guns, multiple guns going off in a pretty quick succession. There was no like one shot and then seconds later, bunch of other shots, it was all kind of one event.

This is reports from people on the ground. This is what, this is what, what they've said a lot of, a lot of people speculate that this could have been friendly fire if, if this, if this, if this other patrol officer was, was, you know, got shot, they, they, they went to the hospital. So it does, it does appear that a police officer had, got a bullet inside of them. Yes. But obviously there's a number of ways in which that could have occurred and, and I, I don't find it, I certainly, I don't think it's conspiratorial at all to, conspiratorial at all to say they

have not presented evidence, it is certainly possible that a bunch of cops wandering through the forest, somebody would have a negligent discharge, you know, somebody would just pant, you know, there's a, we just, and again, as you've stated, we just, we probably will never know precisely what happened. Yeah. Um, and that's, that, that's the feeling on the ground. One people coming to terms with the fact that we will never know a lot of people, you know, thinking that it, you know, very likely chance it was friendly fire.

Other people, you know, trying to, trying to emphasize the fact that, you know, we will never know it's, we cannot say one way or another, but it's also important not to minimize someone's autonomy, especially since they're no longer around to advocate for themselves or their actions. Yeah. Let's go, let's have a, let's have a, an ad break and then we'll kind of continue on to what happened in the, in the days after. We're back.

Garrison, please continue to take it away. So the, the late, the day of the shooting, there was a vigil before we found out who it was. There was a vigil set up at little five points in Atlanta. And then the next two days there was, uh, there was a vigil space created at Entrenchment Creek Park or Wallani People's Park. This is an area of the forest that's to, that's on like the eastern side. And this is the section that is currently, um, being sought as a, a place to expand black

hall movie studios. So this is, this is separate from the actual cop city element of this, but it's still part of the defend the Atlanta forest side of this cause this is all the same forest. They're just kind of split, um, down the middle by this, uh, by this power line cut. So this section of the park is on a section of land that's contestedly owned by Ryan Mills app, the guy who runs black hall studios. I first arrived at, at, uh, Wallani People's Park on Friday for the, for like the more public facing vigil.

And I just, just to kind of, I want to talk a bit about the park because this is such a, I think it's such a solid encapsulation of what's changed since last time I've been in Atlanta. So last time I was in Atlanta, there was, um, the Muskogee Creek people were traveling from, I believe, Oklahoma to Atlanta. Well, what, what is now Atlanta, what, what used to be Muskogee land. Um, and they were, they were like giving talks and presentations about the forest inside the section of forest that, that the defend the Atlanta forest stuff is about.

And I went to one of those events at entrenchment Creek park. It was down green trees all around. There was a nice gazebo. There was a, there was a piano inside the gazebo. People handing out food, a little like kitchen was set up pretty, pretty picturesque. It was, it was pretty, it was pretty great. So then when I pulled up to this same spot a few days ago, it was like apocalyptic. The gazebo has been completely torn down and is laying in shambles in the front of the

parking lot. Like it for everyone to see the destroyed remains, all of the, all of like the, the, the concrete sidewalks and stuff have all been torn up and it's just scattered everywhere. It's not, it's just, it's just a massive mud pit. It's, it's such a different place. Um, and you know, when you, when you get there for a vigil, the mood's not cheery, obviously. Um, there was people, you know, sharing stories of tort singing songs and, you know, building this like a, almost like a vigil shrine.

So that was like the first, the first big thing Friday night. Um, so a lot of people talked about their memories of tort and, you know, the different things they, they contributed to not just to defend the Atlanta forest stuff, but stuff across the entire South. They did mutual aid work, um, and stuff to secure housing for people in Florida. They helped defend, uh, drag shows in, uh, in Tennessee, they, they did, they did stuff all, all across the South and you know, they had, they had allies and accomplices from across the South, you know, talking about how great tort was to work with and the types

of solidarity that tort would show to, to many, many different people. So that was Friday. And everyone was kind of, I, you could kind of feel the almost calm before the storm. In some ways people didn't, people didn't really know what was going to happen in the coming days, but now there was, there was a sense of like eerie quietness. And then Saturday happens Saturday. There is this protest planned meeting in underground Atlanta, which is a spot in downtown Atlanta, kind of on the South side.

I got there for this protest, they're, uh, initially there was people from this like social organization called PSL, they, they tried to leave to March one way. Um, the crowd rejected their authority and was like, no, we're not going to go to the federal district. We're not going to go to the CNN center, uh, which are places notorious for getting kettle that, um, and they, and, and people autonomously redirected the crowd, um, north towards the, and, and north is also just so happens to be the direction of the Atlanta police foundation headquarters.

The pseudo union lobbying group that is, that is behind the big push for, for cop city. Um, before this March started, there was similarly, you know, people giving speeches about tort people, not speeches. Like people just sharing memories of tort. So people, so that tort can like live on, um, in some way. So people can, you know, know about them now that they're no longer around, you know, people from a local medic collective talking about, you know, towards, towards, towards, towards involvement in that and how much tort cared about, you know, helping other people.

So this, this, this March starts up, um, it was funny. There was a few blocks away from this March location. There just so happened to be like a single police car in the street, but like parked on the wrong side of the road. And this police car sees this March coming and it's like kind of freaking out. It doesn't know what to do. It drives in reverse for like, like two blocks trying to find a spot to turn around as the march is like increasingly getting closer.

Like you could, you could, you could just feel, you could feel the, the anxiety of the cop inside this car. He'd, they, they, they do not want to get surrounded by a crowd. Um, eventually they're able to back up enough to turn around and they, they get out. They are, they're zooming away. They do not want to be anywhere near this. And short, shortly after, uh, people arrive at the Atlanta police foundation headquarters. Spontaneously shatter, um, as, as is expected, uh, a few bank windows also get, um, get,

get broken. Uh, well Wells Fargo being one of them, RIP, yes, RIP bank windows, uh, Wells Fargo being another one. Wells Fargo is a major contributor to the Atlanta police foundation. So this happens to cop cars that are just, you know, blocks away, um, that are sitting completely empty, get there, get their, uh, windows smashed, you know, there's people, there's fireworks going off around the crowd. Um, there's, there's this one clip that I, that I saw from some, some, uh, some group

that was live streaming, um, that there was, there was a few, a few officers like stationed beside the Atlanta police foundation. And as soon as they, as soon as they heard fireworks, they again, similarly just like ran away as fast as they could. They were not equipped to, to deal with, um, to deal with us fireworks were the main thing that they seem to be scared of. So to, to, to cop cars, get their windows smashed, um, fireworks going around March continues, goes for about a few more blocks and, uh, then, uh, uh, uh, corkers notice police, police

are starting to come, uh, police are approaching, uh, approaching the crowd head on police start rushing towards the crowd, um, one, they, they tackle, tackle a few people holding a banner. Um, I think they, they, they, they, people, people scatter most of the crowd gets away. Most of the, the, the crowd splits up into, into two groups. The largest chunk is able to move away from police presence. There's, you know, people chanting be water, you know, all of all the stuff. So most, most people do successfully get away the smaller, smaller section of people split

off it on another direction. Cops follow. They are able to tackle and arrest a few, a few more people in this, in this group. In the end, it looks like there was six people arrested. Um, most, most people got away after all these arrests are happening. People start noticing something that in the background, a few, a few blocks previous to where people were marching, uh, it looked, there looks to be a glowing police car. Uh, so we, we, we look back and sure enough in, in, in Atlanta police car is up in flames.

Um, complete, completely, completely glowing, huge, huge flames. So, so as that happens, more and more cops show up. This is where like the cops now are like taking over downtown, um, you know, cops with, with a AR 15 or AR style rifles are, are going around starting, starting to do patrols. So this is like the night, the night is over at this point. Uh, now it's time for like people to scatter and leave, which is what people did. The aftermath of this is super fascinating and unfortunate, if not unexpected, uh, you know, there's been very little statements about the police killing of an, of, of, of

tortugita of, you know, an environmental activist, um, forest defender, very, very, very little statements addressing this, this matter at all. A huge flood of statements, however, esteeming to be extremely concerned that like a few windows were broken and that a cop car got torched. This, this is terrorism and you know, this, this is less, this is less than a week after Martin Luther King day. Um, this is, you know, this is the, the, the, the, the big quote was that the, the police chief a few hours later declared that, uh, breaking windows and starting fires is terrorism,

which is a wild thing for a police chief to say as the mayor stands behind nodding in agreement. It's one of the most fascist things that we've that has, that has occurred in the United States. You cannot understate like the severity of, yeah, like this, the severity of this, of this change in the types of framing by the state, yeah, to describe civil disobedience, to describe property destruction, to describe vandalism as a form of, of, of domestic terrorism is, is, uh, appalling, um, I mean, if, if this, if this holds up, then in states where

this is done, there is effectively no longer any right to protest. Yeah. And I mean, we'll get into some of the details of this in a bit, even in this, in this episode. Um, and I think the other side of this is that this is something that I've heard people talk about here on the ground is that if, if breaking windows is terrorism, right? If, if, if the destruction of inanimate objects is terrorism, what, what exactly is destroying an entire forest, like this is, this is like the juxtaposition that people are, are dealing with on the ground right now.

So the end, the, the result of this is that we got six people who not six people who were to be clear, arrested completely at random. This, this was very clear. Police were tackling anyone they could get their hands on. They were not doing targeted arrests. They were not going after specific individuals who they suspected of, of like actually doing crimes. Um, they were, they were tackling random people as is kind of usual for these sorts of things.

But they have gotten a series of ridiculous charges, um, riot arson, interfering with government property, um, and also domestic terrorism and domestic, so this is domestic terrorism, not even for people that are like in the forest, just people protesting out on the street. Um, yeah, on the street when windows were broken, when windows were broken, there's no evidence of this. Uh, the bail hearings were, uh, today as of being recorded. This is, this is Monday, but bail hearings were today.

The judge, the judge for the hearings specifically said that these hearings are not to litigate the facts of the issue. What actually happened doesn't matter. There's, there's obviously no evidence to support that any of the people arrested did any crimes. There is, there's no evidence that, that shows that the specific people arrested did anything but beyond marching in the street and that does not matter that, that, that simply does not matter.

The, the brutality is the point in this case. Um, two, two people have had their bail set at $355,000 each. So that's over $700,000 for just two people's bail. The other four people arrested were deemed to be from out of state by the judge and then thus a flight risk, including people that are just like less than 90 minutes away in Tennessee. And again, this is like where people are born. There's this, there's this, there's this sense that like people no longer have freedom

to choose where they live, that people like no longer have any freedom of movement that they no longer have the autonomy to go to, to different places. You know, this is, this is like in line with the outside agitator angle that's been being pushed by governments and media ever since, especially since 2020, this is in line with that sort of stuff. But because these people were deemed non-local or a flight risk, these people are not getting any bond at all. These people are going to be held in jail indefinitely, indefinitely detention.

Yeah. It could, this, this could literally be years, the legal system is so slow and like being held in prison or in jail for, for years with no evidence presented that you did literally anything wrong. I've talked with a lot of people, people from Solidarity Fund, which will, I guess I'll mention here at the end, and, and, you know, just people around like what they're, you know, what people are getting arrested with no evidence and getting, you know, indefinite time in prison, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to be released, like the, the,

the obvious abuse of power by the state, the, the sheer audacity and, you know, the extreme danger that if these, if these are able to, to, to stick and hold is incredibly frightening for any, any kind of future, any, any future civil rights movement at all. Like in this, again. You might say that it's the, the, the strategic use of terror in order to achieve a political end. What, what might say that? I mean, it's, we're in Atlanta, the streets they're marching on, there's banners of Martin

Luther King hanging above us, like it's, it's incredibly frustrating. The Solidarity Fund, which we interviewed on the show literally days before the, well, the episode released days before the killing of Tortuguita, but the last Solidarity Fund is providing both legal support and, and, and, and bail for people arrested for political actions. The previous amount needed to bail out people was over $100,000, which is a lot of money. And now just, just for two people, it's $700,000 more. So the Atlanta Solidarity Fund desperately needs funds to continue supporting people and

to continue resisting state repression. We'll talk about this more once I have my deep tide episodes out on this topic. But it's, it's crucial that, that if, if, if anyone cares about people's right to protest to people's, people's, you know, ability to resist state violence, that it's, it's absolutely crucial that, that people support the Solidarity Fund right now. Just today I went to another, another kind of vigil at Emory College here in Atlanta. More people were sharing stories of tort. One person was reading out a letter that they sent to, sent to their comrades in Italy who

are setting up a vigil as well. There's been a good amount of international support. I've seen vigils from Germany, from Italy. There's been, there's been events, demos, rallies, direct actions and vigils all across the United States about to defend the Atlanta Forest and about the, the killing of Torteghita. People here absolutely do appreciate the Solidarity. And the other thing people are saying is that, I mean, all of these tactics are meant to discourage people away from the idea of protesting.

And people are still needed on the ground here. This fight is not, this fight is not over. This is, this is not, this is not the end. You know, tactics may have to change, tactics may have to shift, people may have to approach things from, from, you know, different angles, but it's not over. And there's, there's people have said that there's still a need or, you know, for support rules for people on the ground or people to be in Atlanta because it's not done. I mean, I, I think there's a lot of sentiment on the left that what's happening in the Atlanta

Forest defense is probably the most important radical action going on in the country right now. And I think there's a few reasons for that. Not just the fact that the forest that is going to be torn down for cop city is a crucial part of the city of Atlanta's tree cover and that all of this ties into both the impossibility of actually combating climate change under the present system and the complicity of the police in, in making it impossible to combat that or even to mitigate it in many cases.

But, but I think what you've gotten to is probably the most direct, the most directly frightening thing about what's going on in Atlanta and the thing that's most relevant to the future of any kind of resistance in this country, which is the, the gloves are coming off, right, the, the, this is, this is not going to be the last time that state security forces use the fact that terrorism has a special place in American law and that crimes that are deemed to be terrorism open up the ability of the government to act in ways that they normally are not supposed to be able to act like that is going to be, it's not going to be just for us defenders that gets used on.

It's going to be anyone who ever carries out any kind of act of protest that has a chance of upsetting the balance of power in this country. Like that's, that's where this is headed. And yeah, it's a bummer. Do you want to talk a little bit about the, the role of the media in this? Because that is something that is, I'm certain going to be of a, we just had a thing today where some weirdo lefties on the true and on subreddit decided and someone on Twitter decided to accuse me of getting a bunch of people in Atlanta arrested for terrorism because

I interviewed them on camera. I've never interviewed anyone in Atlanta. I simply have never worked there. I'm not sure where the rumors started, but it's, it's reigniting this kind of debate about. It seems like tanky stuff. It's, it's, it's, it's nonsense, but it has reignited and I saw this on the, it could happen here subreddit, people talking about like, obviously, you know, this is nonsense,

but it is a, you know, looking at these terrorism charges, it's a simple fact that activists should never talk to press. And obviously a lot of these arrests had nothing to do with anyone talking to the media. Like folks were present at a riot and the cops were tackling folks. That's nobody but the cops' fault. But there's a, there's a, there's a conversation to be had about what is the, what is the smart balance in terms of getting PR and getting press coverage and getting word of mouth about a radical movement and the fact that doing that will inevitably ramp up pressure.

Like that is, that is a reality that when, when radical activists get attention from the media, the state cracks down. Now, does that mean that the media is responsible for the, the, the movement getting cracked down or does it simply mean that the cops judge whether or not something's a threat by the amount of press that it's getting, you know, the, the, this is, this is an ongoing like thing people are going to be talking about in a lot of ways it's a continuation of conversations people were having in 2020, but I'm interested in, because when you went over there, we had a little, a few hours of debate after it became clear that the cops had killed a forest defender

over like, okay, what's the right thing to do? Should, should garrison head over to Atlanta? Should we have some boots on the ground for this because you'd been covering it for so long? And one of the things you pointed out is that there was a call for media coverage from people who were on the ground in Atlanta. Yes, this is something I will get more into when I go in depth with this for an upcoming episode, probably, probably, probably a two-parter that's, this is a conversation that people

are constantly having in Atlanta. This is a conversation I've been having with people nonstop ever since coming here ever since before coming here, I know this is something I, I, I don't want to just parachute into someone else's city. I had conversations with multiple people before, before coming over, there's a few aspects to this, the amount of people doing stuff. And you know, how many people are in the forest, not a, not a giant number of people. There's not hundreds of people living in the woods.

There's, there's not, there's not, there's not tons of people. An intentional media strategy has been a part of this movement since the beginning, even among the insurrectionary anarchists who are here. This is, this has been something that people have been, you know, working on as, as a part of a decentralized movement, having conversations about, there's been a lot of, there's been coverage in the Rolling Stone that people here seem to be pretty happy with. Yeah. It was very, and the Guardian also published.

People have been, people have been pretty happy with, people have been pretty happy with coverage from the Guardian. There's a, people have been pretty happy with some stuff from AJ Plus. People have been decently happy with the, the work that I've done on this, but based on many conversations, dozens and dozens of conversations I have, I've had with people here. Ultimately I don't, for what, for what cops are doing in the forest, I don't think there seems to be a clear correlation between media coverage happening of stuff of, of, of, you

know, the movement and cops response to the forest. There doesn't, there doesn't, there's no linked timeline there. Cops are doing stuff in the forest because they want the forest cleared so they can build their police training, or their police training facility from what I've talked with people. The amount of pressure that has been caused by media covering the forest has not only elongated the construction process and elongated the amount of stuff that they're, that they're able to do. It's, it has, it has made it harder because this is, this, this is not a very popular

proposal, even, even before the encampments started, it was estimated that like 70% of people in Atlanta were not for this, we're not for the construction of this facility. So I think people, people make a lot of intentional media choices. That's not to say that there isn't also intentionally harmful actors who are trying to frame this as Atlanta burning down, Atlanta in disorder and Tifa taking over sections of Atlanta. That is absolutely another part of it, but there's a very, people here have a very clear distinction between, between bad actors, between people who are, you know, providing accurate fair coverage of what's going on.

And then, you know, people who are just out to profit, which is, you know, like a lot of like local TV channels. There's, I think stuff that happened on the protest on Saturday is a good example. There's this far right account that I'm not going to name, at least not yet. I might, I might talk about it in the future, who, you know, tries to collect information on, on protesters. They had their, they have someone on the ground who films. They also are really good aggregate of like random people's Instagram and TikToks or

Snapchat. So, you know, filming, filming people from unfortunate angles, local, local TV, like Fox, like the, like the local Fox news station, you know, tries to get as much a sensational footage of crimes as possible and, you know, people, people to the best of their ability will, you know, try to, try to block that off with like umbrellas if they see that happening. But you know, you can, it's, it's meh. There's definitely a clear intention that people in the movement do not want the media narratives around this to solely be decided by the state and be decided against people

who are in clear opposition to them. That is, that is absolutely something that people are putting in, putting attention in. They, they just, that's because that, that creates a lot of really, really harmful scenarios because there's the state itself is already a pretty powerful propaganda machine already a lot of local news just regurgitates state talking points, right? This is the idea of the fourth estate. There is, does seem to be a pretty, a distinction between stuff like the fourth estate and stuff like the derivative idea of the fifth estate of being more of like the people's voice

for, for, for these, for these sorts of movements. Also in that vein, there's stuff like the Atlanta people's press, which is a like decentralized media collective run by a lot of like rad people who, who, who helped to coordinate media coverage, who helped to coordinate stuff with, I mean, they have, they have worked with people, they've worked with us on our, on the, on the history of the old Atlanta prison farm. So I would say there's a lot of thought put into media strategy and not like in like a Libby like optics way, but like actual effective media strategy that will improve material

conditions and will help push the goals of the movement forward. The goal being that the construction of capacity does, does not continue. So there's a lot of thought going into that. And they, and that is viewed as another, like that, that is another wing of, of the effort, right? There's, there's stuff like the encampments, there's stuff like sabotage, there's stuff like protests, there's stuff like, you know, like very aboveboard stuff, you know, that like very, you know, like aboveground organizations will do, like, you know, write in campaigns,

calling campaigns and media strategy is another angle of this because to completely give up the public perception of what's going on to the state is seen as a bad thing. So but this is, this is absolutely a contentious topic. I think people in Atlanta have a lot of nuanced conversations about this and media stuff is handled with a lot more intention here than it has been in the Pacific Northwest. That is my, that is my subjective opinion, but based on, based on a smaller community. So I think maybe it's easier, it does seem like there's more solidarity within the community and more of a shared vision.

I would say that's true. There is the community is forced to reinforce itself. It is small enough that it cannot treat people as disposable. It needs to maintain the people that it has. And so people work through problems, people work through conflicts and ways to actually resolve it and keep going to build everyone up and make them stronger. There's a shared community space, which I've been to a few times, and I think even just something like that is so useful in being able to actually keep something that resembles

a community. You see a lot of like anarchists talk about how like community isn't a real thing. There isn't actually community, you know, and in a lot of places I would say that's true. A lot of places are just click driven, you know, a scene drama, it honestly gets towards or like interesting conflict if you don't want to use the word drama, whereas circular firing squad type shit. Yeah. Whereas here, there is such a feeling of actual community like that actually is a thing here

because people are forced to foster it. We're in the south, we're surrounded, you know, you're surrounded by a lot of people who want to hurt you, Atlanta is the most surveilled city. There's so many different police forces. There's a police force for Fulton County, the police force for DeKalb County, the police force for Atlanta. There's the Georgia State Patrol. There's the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

There's the Georgia Department of Homeland Security. There's so many people, so many agencies are involved in this. There's so much, so much outwards threats to people that you really are forced to keep people, keep people close and trust the people around you because the consequences are quite dire. So people take things very seriously and they put a lot of thought into a lot of things. Yeah. That makes sense.

I mean, that also gels with my own experience in the south, right? It's easier to find communities of people who are doing anything kind of radical because there's that bunker mentality, right? You're under siege. You're surrounded on all sides and, you know, that's very different when you go to a place where there's kind of more, like what would be in other places, deviancy is more than norm. And yeah, I guess that that is probably has a lot to do with the fact that this forest

defenses so far have been so successful in delaying the construction of this facility. Which it has. Construction deadlines continue to have been passed and been passed and been passed. It has the very least showed that something this can be resisted and significantly delayed. And at this point, they're projecting construction won't be complete for about four more years. And again, these deadlines keep getting pushed back and back. And that is really what the movement is trying to do, keep these deadlines getting pushed back and back until they just give up on the project or try to put it somewhere else.

And if they try to put it somewhere and if they try to put it somewhere else, then the forest was defended. But then there's still the stop cop city aspect of being like, yeah, it can go somewhere else. But we we don't want it there at all. And then at that point, the movement would change, you know, very significantly. But in terms of the defend the Atlanta forest aspect of this, right, the whole goal is to make to make this as an enticing as possible. And there's a multitude of strategies involved in that, including stuff like propaganda,

adjud prop media strategy, sabotage, direct action, the call in campaigns, stuff about pressuring the construction agencies, all all those sort of things. That's so much more because what you're talking about is is what we call in sort of conflict studies, a strategy of friction, right? And so much there's always so much focus on kind of these like we had in Portland in 2020, these like grand moments that are very visually spectacular of resistance. But what actually what actually wins because the state has the ability to take a lot of hits, it is a it is a durable force.

And if you're going up against a durable force, the only way to win victories is to be durable yourself and to wear away at them. It's friction. And I think that's like that's still the winning play is to keep up pressure. It's just the kinds of pressure, especially now that they've cleared out the tree sitters and stuff. And now that we've seen what they're going to do to people who are arrested at demonstrations, the kinds of friction that can be applied have to change.

Otherwise, the movement's going to get worn down before the state does in this fight. Something that tortiguita has said is that the state is very good at doing violence. We cannot we cannot beat the state at violence. The state's good. The state will probably win that game. That's that's that's the entire point of the state that it like the state has a monopoly on violence. That is the entire point.

They will win that. But there are other ways where we can see successes. We have seen successes before. So it's not over. It will probably grow and change. What actually happens will remain to be seen. But I am just I'm prepping to go through a whole bunch of my audio files and and pieced together kind of a pretty succinct deep dive.

That is it is a true a true successor to the to the original on the ground at the Defend the Atlanta Force episodes that I did last May. So well, I look forward to that. I'm sure I know everyone else is as well. Thank you for going over there and and being in the thick of it. And yeah, we'll we'll continue to cover this story as best we can, but whatever comes in the future. All right.

I think that's an episode. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say for one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads?

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Dickey App and Hear.

A podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today I am returning to my roots in the seedy criminal anarchist hacker underground, which has gotten much less seedy and somehow even more gay since I was last there. And with me to talk about this is Maya Arson-Crimew, who is most recently famous as the person who owned an airline so hard they got a copy of the fucking no-fly list, which is... Yeah, just first day things. So Maya, how are you doing being deluged with one trillion interview requests?

So yeah, it's not my first time experiencing a big news cycle, but this is certainly the biggest one yet. I'm surprised that this is bigger than the one I've had before with other stories, but I feel like becoming a transfer meme at the same time as I have a national security news cycle going on probably helped a bit. I'm very happy for Weedcat. Every single other thing that has happened to Weedcat has done that thing dirty, but I'm happy for you.

Yeah Weedcat is now just a hacking icon and I'm so here for it. Did you see it? Just like 15 minutes before we got on call, there's now a Bingle meme from the SCP Foundation on there Twitter. Oh my god. They commissioned an artist to make a Bingle meme. It has just turned into a thing now. That's the wild thing.

So good. It's not even the whole hacking story anymore. It's just the fact that I have to turn into a meme. Especially that Bingle turned into a meme because that started as a Discord intro. Like that's all it was and now it's the name of this cat. So we should explain for people who don't know what this cat is. This is the Pokemon Sprigarotto. Sprigatito?

I don't know how to properly pronounce it. Yeah, neither do I. It's Italian. I'm under no obligation to pronounce an Italian sounding thing correctly. It's fine. Yeah. It's the Weedcat. Like Weedcat and Bingle are now the only two acceptable names for this Pokemon.

Yeah, but in the blog where you went through and talked about how you got the no-fly list by owning this thing, you posted a picture of this little boy. Exactly. Yeah, I did actually take that picture while I was hacking this stuff and talking in some like small friend's Discord about it and I just posted that together with the phrase this aviation should get serious. That's why that's also in the blog. I expected that to become the meme that blows up, that this aviation should get serious

because that's just so stupid. Yeah. But I guess Bingle it is and that's funny because yeah, it was just an in-choke nonsense word and now the entire world knows about it and it's like a transform thing. It rules. It rules, yeah. So okay, I guess we should talk about what actually you did. So I am not a very technical person, I'm out here defying transcode stereotypes by sucking

ass at coding. So my understanding of what happened is you were browsing a list of servers that are connected to the internet that you can use through sort of like various search engines that do this. Exactly. And you stumbled upon the server that belongs to commute air and then they just like had a bunch of hard-coded privileges there and like AWS and it's still funny to me how like I realized what it was because I saw like there were day cars and stuff and I was like, wait, that reminds me of like mentor pilot YouTube videos because of course I'm an autistic

trans fam and binge watch mentor pilot while eating dinner. So that is the only reason I clocked it as like an aviation thing and as something I should dig into deeper because like you can imagine like while I'm going through these search results, I'm looking at like hundreds of servers in a day and most of the stuff I decided is boring or it was too easy to hack so I'm not going further because I have ADHD. So yeah, and in this case, I was like, wait, that's an aviation word. I've heard that before. So I dig a little deeper and there were just passwords there and then like two minutes

after I found that server, I was looking at like a car's messages as in like messaging between ground stations and airplanes and I was just like, yeah, this is a story and started tweeting about it looking for journalists to work with because with stories like this, I like to work with journals from the very start because I want to make sure it doesn't get wiped under the rock when I report it to a company. So I make sure that when I do reach out and get things fixed, I reach out via journalists so that the companies know, yeah, this is being reported on so they can't be like, yeah, we will fix it under the condition that you never tell anyone about our bad security.

Because like the whole point of what I'm doing is exposing like security issues, but also exposing, yeah, with a political background at the end of the day. Yeah. And I guess like another thing, I don't know how many people sort of are aware of this, but like another thing that has happened with people who have tried to go to companies and been like, hey, here's a security thing is like the company tries to like go after them criminally, like immediately, which sucks ass and is the worst. Yeah.

So from that standpoint, it doesn't even matter if I like do it like this or actually report it to them, but this way I get to talk about it publicly and like that's important. Not because I won't cloud like I don't mind the cloud, but like, yeah. And so, okay, so there's been a lot of focus on the fact that you found the no fly list on there, which is very funny. But okay, why like, okay, one of the things I'm trying to figure out, why was there why were there just messages from like ground crews to airplanes just like sitting around on this random server that's just like exposed to the Internet.

Right. So the messages weren't directly on that server, but like it's a server where they like for testing purposes, like, I don't know how much I can understand really, but where they like test the software automatically. And so there's all and because of how they configure the server, I could just have access to all the source code, which included lots of passwords. For example, for like the server that then had the ACARS messages on it. Okay.

Okay. Yeah, or access credentials for APIs that would have allowed me to update the crew on a flight. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Which like, if you think about that's almost the bigger story that I like, at least theoretically could have been able to change crew crews because like, that's the real terrorism risk. Yeah.

Like, if I'm just like, if I'm just allowed to spell it out like that, like that's the dream of any, yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, you know, you know, like I'm one of the things you were talking about when when you're writing about this was that like journalists thought that you were the one who had like caused all of the flight delays and was like, no, that was just their computer breaking. No, yeah.

But yeah, like, that was just funny because I didn't even know the thing with the FAA happen. But I was like tweeting about, oh, I have a big aviation story. Any journalist interested, it's like a security breach and people were like, wait, what did you do to the FAA? And I was like, what FAA? Oh, so that happened. Like I am still not up to date on news anymore. Yeah.

I mean, so for people who don't know what that story is, so basically the Federal Aviation Administration had a computer problem was the very, very short version. They had a computer problem and this grounded like a shit ton of flights because the huge like computer bottlenecks where if we saw this over like, like last month when there was that when all of those flights got down by Southwestern because the computer system just went down. Right. And it's the same thing except U.S. wide.

Yeah. But it's just funny because yeah, I first found the server like exactly the day after, like that was literally a day after the FAA incident. So people were rightly assuming that that was me, which it obviously wasn't. But like, it would have been cool. Yeah. It's also like, it is very disturbing to me that like this kind of stuff is just sitting there and like someone, yeah, could just like theoretically go in and screw with all

of this stuff, which is like, and then also the fact that like, there was just all of like the personal information of all of the pilots on there, like what the hell? Like that is, yeah, that is terrifying. Yeah. It is crazy how much stuff is just out there and like that's part of what I tried to show with my work is just, yeah, there is so much stuff out there and it's just waiting to be found and I both mean that in terms of like, yeah, you can find shit if you try to. But also in the sense of things are not secure, like, yeah, like all the systems are like

entire lives depend on nowadays, not none of those systems are really secure. They're entirely dependent on like one system administrator who doesn't get paid enough. Our entire like computer systems dependent like a bunch of furries, yeah, being motivated enough to do their work. So basically like the moral of the story is pay furries well enough. Yeah. And this is probably to look at everything that I was thinking about when I was looking at this, which is like, you know, okay, so like when I was like a teenager, like one of

the things that I think I was the most wrong about that I believed was like, I actually genuinely believed that like automating cars was a good idea because humans are really, really bad at driving. And then and then I had to learn to program and I had to like see scientists code and I had to I open a program and there's a section of it that no one knows how it works. And I look I look at the notes and the notes say I don't I didn't write this. I don't know how it works. This was produced.

This was produced at four a.m. on like like 700 milligrams of caffeine and that's like, yeah, yeah. On at least caffeine, if not in fact, yeah, well, these are these were astronomers. So I think it was actually just a lot of caffeine and not in fact, but yeah, like, you know, then I had the realization that the only single thing that we as humans are worse at than driving is coding. Exactly. Yeah.

We are we are even worse at that. And then the other thing we're also very bad at is labeling data, which is like the whole thing. Machine learning is dependent. Yeah. Like because like the entire intelligence of like an automotive car, like a self-driving car is entirely dependent on how intelligent the like underpaid workers in Kenya are. Yeah, get paid like two bucks an hour to label things as car, human and child, and then make

moral decisions of whether or not those should get run over. Like, yeah, like this is one of one of one of my sort of political things that I'm coming to is I think the only person people who should be allowed to do machine learning are astronomers and no one else should be allowed to do it. And even they and you know, because they have like they have a legitimate reason, which is that like they actually either doing a bunch of big data like most of astronomy is just big data analysis. Yeah.

And then B, like the analysis itself doesn't really hurt anyone. You can argue about where to bring the telescopes, but like, you're not, you're not like. Yeah. Just like anything that involves humans probably also involves AI in any way. Yeah. Yeah. Terrible idea. But yeah, I guess, okay.

Circling back around to the point I was going to make and then forgot to track you talking about AI because such is the world. Yeah, so, you know, it's really remarkable to me, like how little technical skill you need to just like absolutely own enormous corporations and governments and, you know, but the other thing that struck me about this that I've been thinking about for a while is that like, okay, on the one hand, you have how easy hacking is like, like this server stuff is like easier than the stuff that I remember back in the day, which was a lot of like people like you, someone somewhere long ago in a galaxy far, far away wrote like

a script and then you just copy and paste it into like every single text box on a webpage. And like, that's, I think like, that's probably maybe like more hackery quote unquote than just like looking through a list of servers, but like even that is like the level test of technical sophistication is so low or, or, you know, Yeah, you don't need technical skills. You just need to be stupid enough to pull it up like, but, you know, but the thing that I realized about this, I was thinking about this was like, on the one hand, the level technical sophistication you do for this is extremely low.

On the other hand, one of the sort of like, like one of the sort of trends of the wake capitalism has been distributed in digital technology, which is sort of by app, like by, sorry, which has been packing it into apps and these closed garden ecosystems and like putting UIs in between you and like, well, like you and what's actually happening in your computer has been, you know, it's been designed in a way to make a quote unquote consumer friendly, but also it's been designed in a way such that like successive generations of computer users just have less and less knowledge of how their devices and technology actually work.

Yeah, that's like, like there's that whole thing of like about how, how like younger kids don't understand the concept of folders anymore, because like that's completely abstracted away on like smartphones and problems and Chromebook in particular, which I, I, I do genuinely think we need to ban Chromebooks in schools, like just just like for the sake of human computer. Yeah, I forgot how big of a thing that isn't, yeah, it's awful, like, oh God, they're the worst. Yeah, I don't know, like at the end of today, what I wanted to say earlier about like how

easy it is to hack all the big corporations and stuff, and it's just like the answer as to why it's just capitalism. It's cheaper not to give a shit about cybersecurity, you, you, it's cheaper to just pay when you get hacked than to like secure your shit up front. Because like the only people that will really suffer is like your customers and your employees and they can forget your shareholders, they're gonna be just fine. Yeah, and you look at the way the regulatory structure works, it's like, okay, so what, what happens if you get in trouble with something like this?

Well, the government takes a cut. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Like it's literally, it's, it's literally like you can butch it, getting hacked. There is cyber insurance now. You can get insured against getting hacked.

Like, like it's just capitalism at work. I feel like one of the things that, one of the things that journalists have sort of, I don't know, and I understand why they focus on it, but I feel like there's a lot of focus in, in sort of like, in tech journalism and in journalism on sort of hacking stuff in like the really big sophisticated like Stutnix or what was the, what was the more recent one? I can't remember the name of it, but like, yeah, like the really sort of convoluted trawling program, the things that like, you know, take nation state level resources and it's like,

well, yeah. I mean, this was always the thing with like the, with like the NSA too, where it's like, well, okay. So the, the, the, the, the, on the, on the one hand, the NSA does have enough money to like spend like $50 million factoring one number, so they could break a bunch of encryption. On the other hand, like, they can just force US companies to give them access and also like, I don't know, they can, they can get most of this information because like some server admin in like a farm in like the middle of rural Nebraska, like misconfigured a file,

like misconfigured a server. So like, you know, I don't know, that's also what I find funny about the things I find because I like almost exclusively go for like the low hanging fruit because like, why would I invest more effort when I can get the really big scoops like this? And also sometimes I do kind of think about how, hey, you know, like maybe I just cut off access to the CIA. Maybe this was like how the CIA got this access. Maybe, maybe the NSA was here, obviously, most likely not in most cases, but it's just

a funny little thought of like, who did I just cut access to by reporting this issue? I will say this, like, I can't imagine that there isn't someone at the NSA and there isn't someone at the CIA whose job it is to do exactly the same thing you do and like scroll through the server list every day. Absolutely, like, like, like that's why by now I use Sumai, like, yeah, the search engines. There's show Dan, which is like the famous US one, which is why I still always say I find it on show Dan, even though by now I use my because show Dan has like half of like all US IP censored and they have an artificial delay between finding the servers and showing

them to you and have really bad search. And I'm pretty sure it's just because at one point the US government got upset because they kept getting high and so yeah, but like the Chinese are very willing to give me all the US IPs ever that they do censor a lot of Chinese IPs, though, but I think a lot of that was so I was I was trying to figure out why that name was released. But then I had this. I remembered that there was a story where some researcher did like almost the exact same thing you did to a Chinese security company and found out that they were doing guess what

exactly the same shit the US government was doing, which was using using a bunch of surveillance cameras to spy on Muslims. And it was like, well, this is great. Yeah, it's it's always like like it's always appointing and doing the same thing behind the scenes. Like, yeah. OK, so we unfortunately going to have to take an ad break. I yeah, but then once we return from capitalism, we will go back to opposing capitalism.

Welcome to 2023. All right. And we're back. Nice. Yeah. So speaking of any capitalism, that was another thing I wanted to sort of talk about, which is that OK, so like long, long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, little, little, little baby 15 year old Mia was radicalized like back, back, back, back, back when I was

overthrowing trying to overthrow my first government, it was a lot. A lot of it was being in the same spheres, a lot of sort of anarchist hackers that were in the sort of like loose anonymous fear. But you know, but by like 2015, 2016, like that stuff was kind of falling apart, like partially because of infighting, partially because of fed infiltration, partially because you know, like everyone got arrested. Yeah. At that point, all the big players have been arrested like three years prior.

Yeah. And you know, and the other thing that was going on too, I think was like anonymous, like its politics were always really incoherent. Like you had, I don't know, you had just like everyone like the thing I remember was there was a big split between like basically the fascists and the anarchists between like like over Trump specifically. Like. Yeah.

I think the thing with anonymous is just like the way it started, it started as just like a group of trolls. Yeah. It was like, well, okay. The pictures say like, I mean, it makes sense that anonymous is the way it is and has been the way it has been. I think it's still like important that it exists and that it motivates people like I have been involved with anonymous before.

There's the one thing I can talk about with like Operation Myanmar where we did like support things. That was shortly before my indictment. But yeah, it's interesting like anonymous brings people together to do operations. Yeah. And that's what they do and they can do PR for stuff. Yeah. I don't want to like talk down on them.

Yeah. No, but I think like what I think especially like when I was getting involved in 2013, it was like, like it was, it was a lot different. Like it was, you know, like it was a thing. Yeah. It was, it was, it was both like a thing and also it wasn't just like, like, it wasn't just that it was sort of like, okay, we're like, we're like trolling, trolling a government by like taking down their web pages or whatever.

Like they were actually sort of, there was like, there was real coordination between like people, like, you know, revolutionaries on the ground and like Egypt or in like Brazil or something like that. That does still happen. Yeah. That does still happen. It's just less of a public thing. Like that was what we did in Myanmar as well as where we did communications with people

on the ground where we helped them communicate among each other, where we helped them keep the internet up, even when the government tried to turn it off. Which is really insane. Other fun, other other fun shenanigans like that and also archival and that like just in case some kids does decide to read us literally every web page in the country, which is mostly nonsensical, but like, yeah. But I do find it interesting how like, yeah, there's like the 2012, 2013 generation that was mostly anonymous dominated and now we're in like this new generation where it's just

small little groups. Yeah. And I want to talk about that because it's much more decentralized. I don't know. It's weird to talk about it because at the end of the day, I inspired a lot of it, which is really weird to say. Yeah. It's so weird to say that I like, but yeah, I'm kind of part of what revived activism

and it sounds so pretentious of me to just say that myself, but like, yeah, no, it is kind of what happened in like 2019, 2020. Yeah. And like that was always interesting to me too, because it was it was very like, I don't know, like the 2012 stuff was also like it was very, very, I guess media centered in a way where it was, it was about drawing like drawing masses of people into things and then using it to sort of get media attention, using it to sort of like, I don't know, be this sort of like online, like also this sort of like online social movements in a way that

I think is very different than the modern stuff was. So this is my conception of it though, because I've also been kind of like, I don't know, I was off doing other stuff in 2019 that had nothing to do with this. So yeah, I'm curious. Well, okay. How do I put this? So I'm curious, a like, how you see the politics of these new groups either sort of as different from what came before it?

I think it's hard for a lot of the groups is hard to like, see what their politics are and some of them aren't even like there's things like lapses that aren't specifically doing hacktivism, but they're accidentally doing anti corporate activism by just making everything. Yeah. And that's like groups that are like in the way that they operate are very clear and inspired by my work that I used to do. And they're just not very like, political per se, but I still call them hacktivists because

even if it might not be their intention, they're doing activism and they're making corporations angry and wasting corporate resources. And in my book, that counts as like, activism and the fact that they in a way fight for like freedom of information, even if they might not be the goal. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like that is the main unifying factor in now is just the fight for information because like the currently like the single biggest hacktivist thing happening right now since

like 2019 is just leaking the whole leakivism thing that happened before as well. But like now that's like the main thing before it was often a lot like just DDoSing and stuff. But now we're so focused on like getting documents, getting software, getting files, getting like proof that things happened, getting fucking no fly list. It's just a very different environment where like the goals are probably about the same in a lot of ways, at least for the people who do have an ideology. But like, yeah, I feel like it's just much more focused on like releasing information into the free, which I find really great.

Like that is kind of my big fight that I try to devote myself to. Yeah. I wanted to ask also sort of just about your personal anarchism because I don't know. I like talking about anarchism and yeah, everyone has their own. I don't know. It's a difficult question and I feel my answer to this question changes like every other day. I especially find it hard because like I am like doing work in very specific focus bits

of like anarchist work. And so I don't really want to lock myself into like some sort. So it's like very fluid. I'm just like obviously against states. I'm like, I don't know. It's hard. No, no governments, no shit corporations and just like having fun with friends and being gay.

That is like. Yeah, I don't know, just some form of like queer anarchism and yeah, being gay and doing crimes. It's a it's a good it's a good thing. I guess in a way like what kind of defines me and what keeps getting me into the spotlight is that I do just kind of have like a very strong moral compass and I go by that rather by what's legal or not legal or like sure. I try to stay with him like some safe boundaries, especially now like post indictment, given

that there are definitely even more eyes on me now than before. And this podcast is definitely being played at some API. Oh, yeah, there's there's there's oh yeah. So that's something to consider. But like, yeah, I feel like I feel like that's kind of what I want to demonstrate is that like if you have morals, you can't just stick by them like no one is stopping you from doing that. They might try to, but like you can't just stick with your morals.

Yeah. And I think it's worth mentioning even like, you know, okay, like a lot of people go to prison for doing stuff like this. Some of them didn't. Like there's a like to the best of my knowledge, there is at least still one low sick guy who's just in the wind who they never got. Yeah, and like and low sec like they had a fed mole in the group and one of these people still got away.

Fuck Sabu. Yeah. Fuck it. By the way. Just just just just check real quick. Fuck Sabu. Yeah. So really don't do.

Sabu is basically the guy that the the the feds flipped inside of low sec who got everyone's at the prison. Like, like, I do have to say I kind of get why he flipped like he at that point already had a family and stuff, but like I get that it is hard. But still, you gave up your friends. Yeah. Simply do not do that. And like, like, I don't know.

And the fact that he still like has some sort of image, honestly, I don't know that it's just infosec community. Yeah, it sucks. It's, I don't know. It's interesting for sure. But yeah, I can't comment too much on that. Yeah. But there are a lot of funny jokes to be made that I shouldn't.

Yeah. The feds suck. I'm just going to say that, like, oh, God, it's it's it's it's been it's been a it's been a bad week of feds in the US to like, yeah. Yeah. Honestly, just one thing again about the TSA hack, I am so curious what's going to happen with the congressional. Yeah.

I don't know if you saw that. Yeah. Especially since like, this means that the Republicans are going to be exposed to my blog post, presumably. And I am so excited for all the slurs they can come up with. It is going to be extremely funny. I'm also very excited for like the terfs to be like, this is terrorism. See, we've been right all along.

Yeah. Yeah. I have gotten that before. I have gotten turf replies before on like articles about me where they were like, see, no, women don't commit crime. So this is clear proof that this is like, what are you talking about? This is this is my male genes coming out. It's also like, man, committing crimes.

You are British. Like do you do you do you know what people what people did so you have the right to vote like, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's the funny thing is that they at the same time also like fetishize the whole suffragette thing, having no fucking clue what that movement was like, no, no, no, no suffragette would ever horse whip Rishi Sunak.

I mean, I'm not sure if it's like no turf would ever horse whip Rishi Sunak unlike unlike the suffragettes who, yeah, exactly. I don't know. It's it's silly. I'm surprised how little harassment I've gotten on Twitter so far. If we exclude the whole bi-lesbian discourse, I am so sorry for restarting that discourse. I think me talking about that single-handedly restarted at this point, I mean, it just happens periodically like, yeah, yeah, it's just funny because like, I was just like, yeah,

this is going to get me some hate replies, but like within five minutes, I had 21 private quotes. Yeah. I mean, like, I won't make an official statement on that, which is that if you give a single shit about people calling themselves bi-lesbians, like, please let me know so I can trade lives with you, like you seem to have like very few problems going on. I would love to like have grown up in the world where like, that's like, that's the thing that you think like, I don't know, I think it's, I think it's funny how there's

people who were like wanting to follow me wanting to interact with me as like, and it is a theory and kitten who like does funny things to the US government. But then they draw the line at the specific sexuality. Yeah. It's like, really? And like, I then made like a post where I was like, sorry, I deleted that. I didn't, I don't have the energy to deal with people getting so upset over an innocent word.

And that has gotten so many, many quotes being like, yeah, and that innocent word in question was bi-lesbian. I say, if I said like the n-word or something, like, that was literally the kind of response I got. And it's just like, do you not have anything else to do in your day? Like, do you know how many people the cops killed last week? Can you please do something like, come on, and all the things are happening here right now?

Like, especially then when some of the people that come up with that are like non-binary lesbians, which if you know anything about this puriting discourse, like half of them would also like throw these under the pit because non-binary lesbians also can't exist. And like, why are you fighting for the turfs? Like that is my one single question I have through all the 14-year-oldqueers on Twitter.com. Yeah. Also, why did that discourse ever escape Tumblr? Like, that was an awful set of discourse four years ago.

Does all the Tumblr refugees came to Twitter? Yeah, but they could have left the discourse there. Yeah, but no, the world, I don't know. Twitter in the last, like, okay, like Twitter's discourse has never been good, but like in the last couple of years, it's just been getting set to be worse and it's just the same. It's not even that it's just bad discourse. It's just the same discourse every week and I'm just tired of it. And I guess now that I'm a big account, I have to have an opinion on everything.

Yeah. And also, the fun part about being trans is everyone is like absolutely razor-focused for like the exact one word that you say wrong, so they can like legitimately quote-unquote bitch on Tobiq at you and it's like, this is great. Like this is a great system that we've developed for existing with each other. Yeah, I love this. I love it. We could simply not do this.

Yeah, you can just say, like, the fact that literally, like, I was like, I'm gonna see what happens if I say bi-lesbian on an account with 24,000 followers. And the fact that it literally took seconds for people to tell me to tell all their mutuals to unfollow me because I'm highly problematic was, it was quite interesting. And someone was just like, this has completely shattered my world view. And I'm just like, sorry, if your world view gets shattered by my sexuality, you have some soul seeking to do. Yeah.

Like, like, like, like, like, actually, like, I grew up like, like, like, for some of the, for some people, me saying the phrase bi-lesbian was genuinely like my milkshake doc moment. Yeah. It was like a second, a second sexuality description has hit the towers, like, it was, oh, God, it's so like, God, it was like 5 a.m. When I made that tweet, it was just like, oh, I'm gonna get a little silly with it. And I just expected like a backlash, but not that much. It was just too much.

And yeah, like, I know it's not like backlash that matters and I should just ignore it, but it's just like so overwhelming. Yeah. I guess do you have anything else that you want to say? I don't know. I think that's, that covers like most of the things I have to talk about. Yeah. Yeah, just like, be gay to crime, hack the planet.

Oh, my God, I genuinely, it is one of my favorite things in the world that they made the movie Hackers and it was the worst depiction of hackers, but then also like, like, I was like, so I didn't watch that. I mean, okay, I watched it like, not through the first time, like, it wasn't like, like, like I was, I was like not that old when I watched it, but it was after I like first ran into Hackers. And so it took me a while to figure out that like, wait, hold on, no, hack the planet is a thing that everyone says, but that's actually because it's a joke about hackers, which I

love. See, I still find it funny how Hackers is a movie that got hacking culture completely wrong and changed it forever, because like, because like, there is, I don't know if you've ever seen that, but from like Defconn from 1996, there's a page on the official Defconn website talking about how bad hackers is and how it gets everything wrong and no one should watch this movie. And now you look at this like 20 years later, and that's just what hacking culture turned into.

Yeah, it's very funny. The most incredible thing about hackers is that someone managed to get the queerest fucking movie ever made, made by one of the biggest companies in Hollywood, and also make it about hacking, and like, it's the best piece of cinema ever, and I stand by this, like it fucking sucks in a lot of ways, but it's just, they just managed to make a movie where no one is cis somehow. Yeah, it's true. And it has Angelina Shaliyan.

Yeah. Like. So no one is cis. It's pretty amazing. I will say the two Asian characters are kind of whack, but other than that, it's like, yeah, it's a... Like, it's a whack movie, like if you look at it objectively, it's a pretty bad movie. Yeah, like there's, I know, there was, like in a lot of ways stuff in the 90s is absolutely

terrible, but also like, there was stuff you could just do in movies in the 90s that like, you can't now. Yeah. Like, okay, my example of this is, I may have said this on the podcast before, but like, so they did a like completely straight, like, modern day live adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that is like, it's Romeo and Juliet, it's exactly the lines in Shakespeare, but it's like with characters set in like, like modern times and they're shooting guns at each other. But like, what one of these happens in that is there's just like a black guy doing drag,

and it's just like a thing, like nobody comments on it, like it's just like a thing and he's having a good time. And you could not like, like people, people, people would show up to, yeah, like people would, people like, yeah, like... I wouldn't be on Tucker Carlson. Like... Yeah. Like mobs showing up in front of your house.

Like it's... Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't know. Like, yeah, if hackers came out now, we would have like, Tucker Carlson complaining about the woke mob trying to turn the kids into gay hacktivists. Yeah. Like, I don't know.

I love the movie so much, not, not because it's good, but because it's culturally important. Yes. And yeah, and the characters are like, great, like they made everyone queer somehow, and I'm still not sure whether that was intentional or not. I don't know, but I lean towards they didn't know what they were doing, and that makes it even funnier. Yeah. It makes it so much better.

And also the fact that it's like, got past like producers and everything and it was made and the queer piece of like Hollywood media I have ever seen that wasn't meant to be queer. Yeah. Like. Yeah. Yeah. Cool that we weren't on this tangent because yeah, we simply love to see it be gay do crimes, hack the planet.

This is not legally for the FBI. This is not legally actionable. This is a joke. Yeah. This is a joke. As you can tell clearly. Famous catchphrases. Yes.

From the movie hackers, which you could watch. Hackers. Yeah. In places. Yeah. You can watch it very legally on the Internet. I actually don't know if it's on any streaming platform. I don't think I watched it.

I think it is because I watched it with my family kind of recently, which was a wild time. It's probably streaming. Oh, it's it's it's an Apple TV apparently. Yeah. So it's there. You can find it there. You can find it in other places.

You can you can find it somewhere both legally and illegally. Yes. You can find it. I'm allowed to endorse like piracy on your podcast. It's we did an entire episode about how to pirate stuff. So help. Yeah. So yeah, you can find it both legally and illegally.

And if you're lucky, I'm the one seeding the torrent for you. Oh, I see. Okay. The other thing I actually should be for you. If people want to find you, where can they find you? I'm on Twitter at underscore nine crime. You and incase Twitter suspends me once again for the sixth time. I have a website at Maya dot crime you dot gay.

It rules. It's so good. It. Yes. That's like the reason I'm famous now. It's just because my website is pink. It's great. Yeah.

So this has been a good happen here. You can find us at happen here pod at Twitter Instagram. Yeah, I guess I'm at it me. CHR three. Yeah, go in, go in crime. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup back in the 1930s. A Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From my heart podcast and school of humans, this is let's start a coup. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Once again, this is the crew from it's going down, squatting the airwaves of it could happen here. On today's show, we're going to look at the growing crisis around homelessness and how the state has moved to address it with brutal sweeps and new laws that target the poor. In the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the US housing crisis deepened and homelessness grew. Following the George Floyd rebellion, Republicans pointed to a rising murder rate during the 2022 election cycle, along with growing encampments of the houseless as examples of rampant democratic mismanagement and the supposed end result of defunding the police. In reality, two years after the uprising, both funding for the police has only increased along with the number of people killed per year by law enforcement, while growing police budgets have had no impact on crime.

Meanwhile, both parties have embraced a draconian crackdown on the houseless as a slew of new laws target sleeping outside and police move against encampments even in the midst of extreme weather. But a new wave of resistance is also materializing as communities mobilize to provide mutual aid, fight for access to housing, and resist sweeps of encampments. On today's episode, we investigate the history of these struggles and how these tactics ranging from squatting to encampment defense are spreading across the social terrain as the current crisis deepens and more people find themselves out in the cold. But to kick things off, let's talk about state strategy. Just why are they carrying out these sweeps? I think one of the first things that comes to mind for me is how this behavior from like the Democrats or liberals or progressives isn't an anomaly, that their role is facilitating a capitalist state just with slightly different tactics than the Republicans, but basically they're trying to do that. What they're doing, which is basically demonizing unhoused people and sort of pushes the blame of what's going on of the failings basically of our culture onto these individuals that are unhoused rather than on their failures as like mayors of Democratic cities or whatever, and the kind of logical outcome of class based capitalist extractive society. And when they can just make it that instead of it being like a social problem that people are unhoused, they can make it these bad homeless people and their dirty crime or whatever, and just kind of try and eliminate that to protect their image. But I think it's just a way of like scapegoating a built in problem with how they operate.

And actually it's something that makes me think, especially thinking about San Francisco in terms of like precedence for this, it makes me think about the ugly laws, which for anyone who doesn't know that was something kind of in the 1800s San Francisco implemented in 1867, which was a law forbidding people who were kind of like unsightly, according to this law, to not be seen in the street. So if people were physically disabled, or they were begging or even limping, there were laws targeting them and part of it even says that anything that's triggering like disgust or guilt, is like to not be seen. And I feel like it's a really similar thing that's happening now. And so, yeah, progressive as they do this. I'm glad that you brought up ableism because I think that this ties in real real well into that. So we live in essentially like an extremely able society that says if you don't work, you die. And I think criminalizing homeless people is a huge part of that. So I mean really think about it. We have to rent our bodies to corporations, so we can get money to pay rent to landlords. Essentially, we're being paid a tax to live. But how do you force people? How else do you get people to do the drudgery that we have to do at work? If you don't like show them the consequences of that. So like if they were nice to homeless people, if they were like, oh, here's a free home, then that creates a presence of like, oh, you cannot work and have a home. So like they don't want to do that. So I mean, I think one thing that people don't talk about like homelessness is existing. I think it's like a way to like scare us into essentially doing these things that we don't want to do to live.

Because you're constantly reminding us of like, oh, you want a client, Clint? You want to go on a strike? This is what your life could be. You're going to be homeless. And not only that, we're going to make it so that you can't exist as a homeless person in this society. Because if people like if you go to New York right now, all these brunchy folks, they eat on the sidewalk. They have all these like houses built up on the sidewalk. People are drinking mimosas, but you can't have a tan. But what are these makeshift things? I mean, it goes to show you like, it's not even like the idea of taking public space. It's like who's taking public space. And if it's somebody who's not serving capitalism, you can't take a public space. The housing question to really understand the connection with Democrats and capitals under sayings of housing, we have to think about housing, you know, property structure space, right? How capitalism structure space. And so, you know, when I was thinking about this before we're recording, I keep going back to James Scott, seeing like a state, which is, you know, an amazing book and people haven't read it. Absolutely pick up a copy. But in the first, you know, couple of chapters, one of the things he talks about is land enclosure. And he's talking about this structure specifically in France in which sort of towards the end of monarchism, there was an attempt to actually create a tax regime where individuals were taxed. And to do that, individuals had to exist legally. But they didn't at that point, they existed as communities within feudalism, they pay taxes as communities, they held land as communities.

When the French government went to these towns to figure out who owned what, what they found was that every single community broke up their understanding of land differently. And that it wasn't really based on ownership is based on use. And so they had to standardize all of them to do that they had to fragment the comments, they had to sit there and go, you own this piece of land and you own this piece of land. They did that, they made maps and they went back two years later, they realized nobody was following the maps. But what they did was they started charging taxes based on the maps. And so people had to start making money on the land to pay the taxes based on the maps that have nothing to do with their lives, right? And what that was was the creation of property, right? Because when we think about property, you know, there's this fiction of, you know, stateless capitalism, right? You have like Murray Rothbard, Eingran types who were talking about, you know, capitalism can exist without the state. But really, we can see the fallacy of that when we look at the at the question of property, right? The question of exclusion from property or exclusion from space. Not only is it fragmenting public space, but we start to look at the way that all of a sudden property has to exist, right?

And so in the Rust Belt, for example, after the financial crisis, cities Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit got all this money from the federal government to tear houses down. And they were tearing down like 50 houses a day in these cities, right, for years on end. And these are cities that have people that don't have houses. And so you sit there and you go, well, why are they tearing houses down when there are people that don't have houses, right? When there's more vacant houses than there are people without houses. How can you justify tearing the houses down? And the answer was we need to create a real estate market to go. Because if you allow people to just squat, there's no reason to pay for housing. If there's no reason to pay for housing, housing ceases to be a commodity, right? Like this is actually the important part, that capitalism has to function through that exclusion of access. Otherwise, commodities can't have the scarcity necessary to allow them to be priced, right? There can't be a supply that is lower than a demand, for example, unless you artificially limit supply, right?

And so when we really see this, we can really see not just the way that capitalism sort of atomizes us, right, creates us as people who live in individual housing units, as opposed to as people who can see ourselves as living in communities. But it also really comes to highlight the relationship between the state and the police and capital, and how we have to understand capital as a content of the state. It is a definition of life that is imposed through policing purely and can't exist outside of that, right? It's the fallacy of quote-unquote anarcho-capitalism, which isn't a thing that really exists for this exact reason, right? And so when we're looking at why are Democrats engaging in techniques that involve pushing people off the streets, this is exactly why. It's a capitalist political party. They're trying to maintain property. They're trying to maintain property value, right? And this is why you see this happen in cities where gentrification is really horrible at a much faster clip than you see it in cities where there is open housing stock. That really makes me think about the beginning of workhouses in England in the 1830s and the poor law reforms.

And it goes back to what you were saying, Mara, about just that making it really undesirable to be poor, like needing a group of people who are in that position. And that workhouses were something that were introduced by liberals, progressives, you know, like this as a form of like changing the sort of poor relief system. So instead of giving people money so that they could be supported and stay with their families or whatever, people were put into these institutions where they're separated from their kids, from their husbands and wives or whatever. And it's meant to be so undesirable that you would only seek it if you were sort of desperately needed it or whatever as a way to like save on taxes for like money to people, basically. It's really fucked up. And it's like this was part of this sort of social reform progressive like project. And I think we see echoes of that in this. The other thing that I wanted to bring up is like you talked about atomizing and isolating and like how capitalism does that.

One thing that I think about specifically in New York is that homeless and campents do offer this radical idea of like what it looks like to take back a public space and to collectively like meet together, you know. And like that's the other thing that I was thinking about last night when I was high. This whole idea of what happens if we just allow homeless encampments to spread and take over, then people who are not homeless start interacting with homeless people as we do like people in the city do. Then you form these connections in these relationships and then it becomes perfectly normal for people to take over public spaces. And then what does that mean? Then we have to provide services in public spaces like bathrooms and showers because the public would start requesting and like asking for these things and more of a relationship they form with homeless folks. So I think part of the cleaning, which is what their term Eric Adams is used, which is absolutely disgusting in terms of like moving homeless people. The whole, I think a huge part of it is also just like destroying the notion that we own public spaces.

Like you do not own a public space and we want to let you know that and we want you out. So I think that really, and the additional aspect of that too is like when you look at homelessness in New York, like a huge chunk of it like black people too. So there's like a racial component of it too when you really want to add it. This whole idea of like black people are not allowed to take up space and then specifically if you're homeless, you're not allowed to take up public space. So I wanted to bring that in. It's like very much related to work, but also just related to the idea that the government owns everything and corporations own everything, including the spaces that we exist in. Well, speaking of corporations owning everything, here's some words from our sponsors. Across the U.S., in large cities, often controlled by Democrats, a war on the poor, specifically on encampments of homeless people, has been increasingly waged over the past year.

In San Francisco, the city's mayor, London Breed, recently declared it was time to quote, be less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city, an effort to ramp up police harassment of the poor and unhoused. In Portland, city officials openly toyed with the idea of forcing, quote, up to 3,000 homeless people into massive temporary shelters staffed by the Oregon National Guard, while in California, the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has pushed for, quote, care courts, which threaten to place those who do not complete state directives under involuntary hospitalization, a policy which mirrors efforts already underway in New York. Bans against camping, panhandling, sleeping in one's car have also proliferated. Last spring, for instance, Tennessee made it a felony to camp on public owned land. In Missouri, those caught sleeping on state property could now get jail time and fines under a new law that just went into effect on January 1.

Other new laws outlawed on campments in L.A. next to schools and forbid houses folks from sleeping on public transit in New York. In the progressive bastion of Asheville, North Carolina, over a dozen mutual aid organizers also now face trumped up charges of felony littering for supporting protests against sweeps of encampments. This shift in many liberal cities to criminalize, attack, and ban encampments shows just how much the Democratic party has continued to move to the right while embracing Republicans' line on combating rising crime. Instead of mobilizing the state's forces to house people beneath their most basic needs in a period of mass pandemic, in a growing housing crisis, liberal governments across the country have instead mobilized their forces to attack some of the most vulnerable. When you know more about what's driving these ongoing attacks on the houseless and how it relates to the housing crisis itself, we sat down with Gifford Hartman, a longtime radical organizer in the Bay Area and a former squatter. The movements arise, like say the George Floyd uprising, and there's some changes, there's some movement towards reforms to police brutality and things like that. But then there's kind of a backlash.

And I think right now we're kind of suffering through a backlash. And I think that's kind of a pattern that happens is there's pushback kind of penal reform, trying to rein the police in a little bit. And then the kind of the backlash means just the police have more power and they have more power to really kind of brutalize on house people. And I think we're living through that right now. I think the trends go back and forth and the pendulum has swung in the direction where right now in San Francisco there's constant sweeps of tents and house people living on the streets. There's a lot of media support given to that. And it's kind of like, as I said, the tail lags the dog and then they start doing all this stuff. And the pushback hasn't really, activism hasn't really been able to kind of stand up to that and stop it or even challenge it right now, at least what I see.

Booms happen and property values go up and vacancies go to almost zero. The cops crack down harder. And I think there have been periods, at least in my lifetime here in the Bay Area, where there's kind of a lull or there's a bottom of the trough when maybe there's more vacancies, a little bit more wiggle room. The cops aren't quite so brutal. But when things are peaking or when the economy is its dynamic kind of high points, that's where I see the repression is the worst because there's more people to complain. There's more people whose values are tied to property and who are more willing to push the cops to brutalize unhoused people. But right now it's kind of fraying because there's a lot of tech layoffs. Yet the agenda of sweeping tents and unhoused people off the streets is kind of still kind of a rapid pace.

I don't know how much longer it'll last, but right now it's at a pretty high point as we speak, the weather's awful and the sweeps haven't really stopped. And there aren't enough shelter beds to house all the unhoused folks. So it's really a crisis. It's not only just a human crisis, but it's a health crisis because people out in the cold rain are more vulnerable to getting sick and dying. And it should be the time where we're doing the opposite. We're making sure everybody's housed and it just certainly isn't happening. Even though San Francisco, the mayors have been Democrats, I believe since the mid-60s, the Democrats aren't a monolith and they're not all progressive. And even the progressive ones aren't that good.

But the ones that are in power now, like London Breed, are moderates. And they really are more believe in the police more and they believe in using police for social crimes. And when they're not moderates, it's a little less bad, but it's not better. It's just less bad. I don't know if that really makes sense. Because I don't think there's ever been a political regime in San Francisco that wasn't pro-cop. Everybody loves the cops. Everybody sees the cops as ways to enforce the social values of society, which are private property and all that.

And it just never stops. It just depends how brutal they are. And again, as I said earlier, it goes through waves. And presently, we're in a brutal wave. And the only alternative to that is a less brutal wave. And so my opinion, there's never a time when the cops don't run rapid. But right now, they're actually at the high point that they've been in a long time. And now we speak with Javier from the National Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco.

We talk about the current wave of attacks against houseless people in big cities and how they mirror historic attempts at policing and repressing the poor. The income that you need to rent a two bedroom apartment by the city's own estimation, you need an hourly wage of about $61.50 to have an apartment like that. So the income gap is becoming more evident than ever nowadays. There's a 9% increase in homelessness for every $100 increase in rent. So it's like, if healthcare, housing, education all gets more expensive, but wages don't go up, people are going to lose their housing.

So I think people need to understand and how similar we are to the unhoused population and how important it is to recognize that we should have solidarity with each other. Because if we're fighting against each other, then guess who's winning? The millionaires in the book. We're suing the city because when they do these sweeps, they're taking people's belongings, which is illegal search and seizure, and cruel and unusual punishment because the shelter that they're offering, a lot of times it isn't adequate for the folks who are being swept.

We're looking for permanent supportive housing for folks, and it's not there. And if you're telling people that they have to move across the street every day in the morning, then it kind of shows, I think, a social and kind of cultural understanding that mirrors the ugly lives people had in place, especially in America, for a long time, which is homeless people are not supposed to be seen and they're supposed to be criminalized. And speaking of things that probably shouldn't be seen, again, some words from our sponsors. From resisting sweeps, setting up autonomous warming centers, to taking over vacant buildings, over the past few years, there's been a wide array of expressions of solidarity,

direct action, and mutual aid in the face of attempts by the state to displace and destroy the lives of houses people across the US. But these projects and actions haven't come out of nowhere. Building on the radical history of groups in the Bay Area, such as the Diggers and the White Panthers, who set up free stores, grocery programs, and squatted buildings, starting in the 1980s out of the anti-nuclear movement, peace activists began sharing free vegan food in a protest of the US War budget under the banner Food Not Bombs. In the late 1980s, Food Not Bombs in San Francisco faced over 1,000 arrests for sharing free food publicly

and taking part in demonstrations. Soon another group, Homes Not Jails, evolved out of the same scene and began to open up and squat vacant housing, part of a wave of other houseless activist groups that sprouted nationwide, following the economic recession of the 1980s. Chapters of Homes Not Jails worked to open squats weekly to covertly house people, while also organizing public housing takeovers, which thrust squatting into the spotlight of the mass media.

Again, here's Gifford Hartman talking about squatting in the 1990s. There have been a wave of really successful squats in the 1970s. One group was called the White Panthers that did it in the Lower Hate neighborhood, and they were modeled on the Black Panthers. So they actually squatted, but actually created community programs for things like food distribution, they defended their squats, they fortified their squats, and that was a tradition that kind of preceded my period of squatting, but so they were both looking at the squatting in Europe, but also the previous generations doing it here in San Francisco.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1986. I lived in Berkeley for most of the beginning of the years I was here. From the end of World War II, in the 1940s, the population in San Francisco peaked in the mid-20th century, and then it went down, population decreased by 100,000. In the late 80s, there were still a lot of cracks in the surface of housing, and there was a lot of empty units, there was a lot of abandoned units, and there was a lot of ability for people to find squats, and I was part of that. There were various times where I either wasn't working or had a part-time job,

and I chose as a political act to squat, and I began doing that in the late 80s, but most of my success in squatting was in the early 90s. But then I kind of ran up against the contradiction. Groups like Homestead Shales were founded in 1992, had already been squatting, but then there was another wave of repression. So in 1992, the former chief of police in San Francisco, Frank Jordan, got elected mayor, and by 1993 he was doing something called the Matrix Program, and the Matrix Program was very much like what Giuliani did in New York,

with his zero tolerance for broken windows, which just cops would get tough on quality of life crimes, which means like broken windows and graffiti, but it also included food not bombs, feedings were attacked by the police, and squatters were even, myself included, were attacked and cleared out even in a way that was not legal. When I succeeded, we squatted covertly, and when we didn't succeed, often we were aligned with groups like Homestead Shales, where they were a high-profile group, or a media savvy, well, media savvy might be an overstatement, they were kind of had a media focus,

and the media focus was often a double-edged sword. It brought popular understanding of the conditions of the housing stock, but also it was a way for the police to be telegraphed exactly what we were doing and to come down and crack down on our squads. Homes on jails wouldn't be the last group to take over vacant homes for housing, and mid-2000s take back the land, based out of Miami, Florida, work to block evictions and move unhoused families into foreclosed homes. In the present period, various grassroots groups have organized to stop the sweeping of houses

and cabinets. Crews in Olympia, Washington, and Austin, Texas have been successful in organizing broad campaigns in Minneapolis. Groups have mobilized mass numbers to at times halt evictions. In the following interview, we speak with Christian and Post from Minneapolis on the ongoing battle with the city government and police to stop attacks and sweeps on their houseless neighbors. In the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, it raised a lot of people's awareness as to the way that our systems

and practices in our city aren't really serving us. I think there was a lot of work happening in Minneapolis, in particular before that, in regard to policing and the way that our systems do or do not serve people. And then in 2020, the awareness just grew exponentially, and because that foundational path had been laid already, we had something to go with. And we can see the direct line between what happened to George Floyd

and to the community at George Floyd Square, and the way that that also shows up in other spaces in our community, such as with our unhoused neighbors. We know that the majority of people that are living at encampments in Minneapolis are Indigenous immigrant populations or Black Americans. And so we can see that there is a specific need and also a disparity between...

And a direct through line to all of the oppression that 2020 kind of threw in the face of every person with a heart. Absolutely. And I think we started practicing a lot of mutual aid much bigger than we ever have historically in the summer of 2020. We saw lots of people getting involved that were in campments throughout the city as there was for some time because of COVID. People were able to stay outside and couldn't be evicted as easily at that time.

And we saw lots of community getting involved in doing mutual aid, and that really helped build, I think, a movement that is sort of beautifully disorganized in many ways because lots of people from lots of different walks of life coming together and showing up for each other. I think people started to become aware of the way that we are all connected to each other and that when we're taking care of each other, we're all happier. We're all safer.

We're actually able to meet needs and the resources are there. It's a matter of the will. I cannot overemphasize enough how terrible the boy mayor Frey has been since he took power here in so-called Minneapolis. He ran on ending houselessness and was in majority funded by developers during his campaign, and we've seen what ending houselessness means to Democrats. It basically means ending visible poverty and ending the lives of houseless people. Frankly, I mean, the number of evictions over the course of the last few years

has just skyrocketed, and our so-called progressive politicians love to give some money to the nonprofit industrial complex and do their private public partnership. And then when there are people who are quote unquote resistant to service, that's the phrase they love to use. They have all of their excuses lined up that they can just pull those people's houses and kick them out of the roofs that are keeping them warm and dry. And it's just been a really eye-opening thing for a lot of people, I think, to see how our progressive quote unquote establishment here

has just fully committed to jackbooth thuggery, all in the name of clearing the streets and making it so that people in their kind of four-story mixed-use condos can have a beautiful view without having to see the poverty that that lifestyle is having. You know, in the summer of 2020, there were several council, at the time council members who committed to defunding the police. However, that did not come to fruition. Since that time, there's been increases in the budget to policing in Minneapolis.

No decreases, only increases. The police haven't been able to spend their whole budget, and yet the city continues to pour more money into them. And what we're seeing happen is unhoused people come together to keep one another safe and also so the community is able to stay connected with them and, you know, will be in an encampment, and then various levels of government will come in and displace them. And so the people don't have anywhere else to go,

so they need to move to a new space together. So what's happening is not housing. What's happening is not even laying a foundation for somebody to be able to get the services or support that they may want or need. What's happening is displacement. When somebody hears about an eviction potentially happening, it becomes a situation that's, it's almost, it's almost kind of magical that people come together and it is kind of chaotic,

but it always comes together. And we end up having, whether it's people that are doing cop watch or are just neighbors, like we had neighbors show up on the first day, the day that the glory was planned to be evicted on December 28th. I can't tell you how many different people that just live in that area were coming up and asking questions and were appalled at the response from the city, because really that the quarry encampment was in a space that you could barely see it. You wouldn't know it was there if you didn't know it was there, you know.

And we're talking about, by the last day, the day that it was evicted, there were eight people there and over 150 police officers. It was bonkers and that extreme response is something that when you see it, you can't unsee it. And so we come together in what, you know, you get in where you fit in with whatever skills you have, whatever gifts you have, whatever time you have, you know, and a lot of us show up because we are people who have experienced other forms of trauma or have seen and experienced other forms of oppression too.

You can't unsee it once you do. In the last few years, mutual aid and autonomous disaster relief efforts have informed projects like HeaterBlog, the squatting of land for people displaced by climate change field fires, and the setting up of autonomous warming centers in the middle of winter. In the winter of 2021, autonomous groups across Texas also mobilized when the state's electrical grid failed and hundreds of people tragically died due to lack of heat.

Autonomous groups have also worked to directly house people. In the Los Angeles area, this has looked like houses folks taking over homes owned by Caltrans and various groups in the Pacific Northwest occupying and demanding access to hotels in the dead of winter. In Philadelphia in 2020, housing activists squatted and then won the keys to homes for upwards of 50 unhoused families in the midst of the George Floyd Rebellion. And there have been other success stories as well. In Boise, Idaho, after months of ongoing protests by houseless folks

and their supporters, the city was pushed to green light to building enough hundreds of housing units. In Berkeley, California last summer, people once again tore down the fences surrounding people's park and destroyed machines stopping the destruction of the autonomous enclave once again. In Sacramento, California, houseless people and their supporters beat back an eviction attempt at camp resolution, a parking lot which is home to people living in their vehicles and RVs. Here's two camp resolution residents, Sharon and Satara, who speak on the deadly impact of sweeps.

I think that the biggest thing is like being treated inhumanely, you know what I mean? Or rudely, or like you're an animal. They're very mean to people, you know what I mean? When they sweep you, they take people's stuff and just throw it out. No, don't matter if it matters to them or you know what I mean? Which creates mental health issues for some people because people get traumatized from stuff like that. You know what I mean? You just come in and the only places they have that they can call home or a place of shelter and

you know, stormy times like this, you know, they come and even now while it's raining and make them move and tell them, you know, they got to go, throw their things out or you know what I mean? Make them leave without it, whatever they, you know what I mean? Whatever, no matter if it's important to them or not, you know what I mean? Like I think that's the most messed up part because like I have a friend out here who lost, you know, her child's ashes, you know what I mean? Half of the people that we're at, we lose contact with and every time they sweep, that's another

half and they're just diminishing where people are, where are people going? They're just disappearing. And the further, you know, people who do need like other help with other things, health things and stuff like that, the harm reduction people and stuff like that that come out and you know, give people things they need, you know what I mean? They'll move you around, then you can't be found. People can die like that. And people die like that all the time, especially you know, when they move us around, sometimes we got to go to areas that are not necessarily

safe, especially the women, you know what I mean? Women die out here all the time. They separate us. Camp resolution was formed because this lot that we're on was part of the original siting plan and they spent $617,000 on this for a fence and a parking lot and promised folks that they would, that they were going to get them into little tiny houses or trailers so they can get back on their feet and get housing. They swept them off the lot as soon as they were finished with this, they came and

viciously swept them off the other side of the property they were on and put a fence up and promised those people and they got nothing and then didn't even bother to contact them or anything and just left those people hanging after they signed up for all the services and were denied. And my sister-in-law was one of those people and she's a quadriplegic and she's still waiting for housing and we weren't going to have another winter of her being down on the county side in the weather, in the water. So that's why we started it and we're here for safety so we can get

back up on our feet. We're human beings. Not to mention like half, more than half the camp, you know, majority of the camp, there are males that live here so please don't get me wrong but this is the camp of majority women, you know what I mean? Who out here, who live out here and you know a lot of us, you know, we're homeless but we're not, we're not bums, you know what I mean? We have regular lives like everyone else, we have family, we have friends, you know what I mean? And we take care of each other, you know what I'm saying? A lot of us have been camping right here for

years. Some of us years up against the county city, you know what I'm saying? But for every success, sweeps remain a daily constant in the United States and many attempts to push back by homeless folks and their supporters are met with extreme resistance from law enforcement. So I'm curious what you all think, how can communities continue to organize for change in the face of this brutality? Something that comes to mind is just kind of more of some things that have already been happening basically and I'm thinking of Echo Park that you brought up and

the encampment at Echo Park was really interesting to me because it was, that's a neighborhood in LA and it grew to maybe sort of two to three hundred people living there and as it went on it kind of like a sense of community developed pretty strongly there with support from people in the neighborhood too and people had set up like a garden, a community kitchen, there were like meetings, even showers near the end like it was actually kind of thriving like it was like

doing well and people were like pretty like, I don't know politicized like aware of like what's going on and talking about it and sharing with each other and yeah people coming together to resist sweeps and like threats of sweeps of the park and the response to it was one of the most like heavy-handed sort of disproportionate seeming things that I'd ever seen where they had been threatening, the city had been threatening that they were going to do a sweep and they were saying they were going to get everyone into housing, it's like this humanitarian

offer of secure housing to people but they came with like four hundred cops and like all the rest of like LAPDs full force you know with the helicopters and just like everything they blocked entrances into Echo Park to stop supporters coming from out of the neighborhood and basically yeah evicted people, fought with people and then put a fence up very quickly like during this whole thing and close the park off and that fence is still up and that's like and then what is it now a year and a half or something these years

that that fence has been up and something I think is like interesting about this example is I really think that the reason that response was so heavy-handed is because the very existence of it was disrupting this logic of like rent and landlord and stuff like people were reclaiming the public space, using it to meet their needs and this was incredibly threatening to the city and they needed to shut it down and sort of turn the park back into recreation middle-class people basically and I think you know what we've talked about already like

Tom what you were talking about with like enclosure and stuff like I really see that these sweeps like this is such as just a continuation of this in Echo Park in a really big way and what you were saying more about just like what happens when we challenge that logic being the most like threatening thing to them you know just like what happens if it was just like this homeless camp survives and then another encampment another encampment and it basically disrupts everything we know about property and rent and everything anyway so I think just more of that yeah I mean I would yeah I agree with you Sophie I think it's like more of what's happening like currently

New York there's still sweeps happening like DHS Department of Homeland Services puts up these like sweep notices and the way it works is that when these sweeps notices go up like there's a group of people who let each other know that a sweep is about to happen people show up to the people who are about to be swept I hate that word swept oh my gosh that's so disgusting what can we use instead of swept um treated badly by evil Eric Adams I don't know maybe we could use that um but anyway so like um so people will go and talk to the people who are in the encampment we're going to be swept and ask them like what type of support would you like like do you want us to help you move your stuff do you want

us to stand you know when the cops and like so the sanitation department comes usually during these cleanups and like throws away people's things and because you know if you don't serve capitalism your stuff you don't matter so definitely your stuff doesn't matter one thing that has been happening is that people have been showing up for people who are about to be um have their things thrown out and either moving the things for them or supporting them or standing in the way from in front of the police or like documenting it and I think that's like a huge way to just like show up right now if you can you sick leave block out time on your calendar at work if you know

something happening down the street like this is like something like you could do now and I think that's really important like this is solidarity that we should show and we should show up for our comrades because they are on the ground of fighting for us having housing as a human right and that's why we should show up for them and to support them another item that I wanted to bring up I don't know if y'all heard about Anarchy Robe which happened last year uh where like SRG which is a strategic response group showed up this is a counter-terrorism group showed up to get people out of a uh an encampment in Tompkins Square which was deemed Anarchy Robe I think it was like five people five people brought in SRG or counter-terrorism groups

it just goes to show you the extent to which like houses people taking a public space is a threat to the idea of property as we know it is a threat to capitalists and is a threat to landlords like Eric Adams Eric Adams is a landlord I don't know if y'all know that this the New York City mayor is a landlord if you need to know anything up to as to why they're sweeping homeless people landlords run everything and they have rats like Eric Adams because he had rats and he was supposed to pay a fine and he didn't pay a fine because he's a landlord I guess just going back to that is like yeah show up for people now like the need now is like when sweeps are happening is for people to show up in place for people and the other part of it I want to say this and this is a wild idea but I've been thinking

about it for a while what if we all stopped paying rents what if we all did what if we got together with all our friends and stopped paying rent and I know this is wild and I know some people might be like oh no Marcella we're gonna get evicted but what if we paid rent and we all thought the cops and they're trying to pay us what when they're trying to evict all of us so like that's another part of it is like showing up to people's evictions trying to come up together to come up with a long strategy because houses people right now are fighting for us to like have housing as a human right we can meet them on the other end and say actually we're not gonna pay rent as long as you're doing this because we're that's like solidarity. When I'm thinking about how to resist displacement you know

what I go back to is squatter movements that existed in Europe right like the social center movements in the 70s and 80s but also squatting that happened in the Rust Belt in the 2000s right and like what was unique about those situations like others have existed obviously but what was unique about those situations is that squatting became about more than just space it also became about autonomy and self-defense right so in those situations what would happen is in these Rust Belt squats people would like lock down a whole street and take over a house and then just that was just their space you know and the cops just couldn't get back there or didn't want to get back there and some of those squats held out for years like years and years and years and we see that in Europe too and so

what that does though is it it accomplishes something really important which I think we have to sort of shift in our discussions of this question which is that the question isn't just about housing the questions about space right and very specifically how we understand space so currently we talk about a neighborhood or when city politicians talk about a neighborhood they don't mean what I think a lot of us mean like a lot of us we talk about our neighborhoods mean like our neighbors right the people that live around the corner the old lady up the street that feeds the cats like whatever it happens to be you know like you have a community that you live in at least where I live when city politicians talk about a neighborhood what they mean is real estate they mean this fragmented space of commodified

housing where individual houses can just be slotted in and slotted out new residents could just be slotted in and slotted out and the space becomes reduced down to its physical form right and within all capitalist understandings of space that is what happens space gets reduced down to the commodification of that space right and so we're talking about that inscription into our spaces you know saying earlier that doesn't occur without the ability to get arrested for trespassing and so this becomes a fight against the police as much as it's a fight against housing because at the end of the day the enforcement of that structuring of space comes through the projection of police force into that space right whether that's passive things like surveillance whether that's active things like

sending a counter terrorism team to evict five people from a park in Manhattan and so as we're kind of like looking through this we can take some interesting sort of examples I mean the Paris Commune had a whole discourse that talked just about how they were going to rebuild the city like what is the city going to look like without property how are we going to restructure our use of space who gets to decide how to use these big public spaces right these were the big discussions that were happening the situation is international had a whole discourse on building conceptual cities and avant-garde cities and you know graffiti was a big part of that because what is graffiti graffiti is the marking of people's presence in space why do cities crack down on

graffiti so hard every single time someone puts a tag up that's a gap in police coverage is being marked literally every single time right and so when we're talking about these questions we have to push this into a question of capitalism in general but that makes it a question of the state we can't talk about capitalism and isolation from that and so we have to really talk about how our spaces are fragmented and the ways that things like even encampments or squats or things like this that are defended that are able to be sort of preserved isn't the right word are able to maintain their autonomy those become sort of the models of different ways to live in some ways right these become the places where people are experimenting with different types of living

whether it's my choice or not but these are the spaces that get eliminated because of that specific dynamic right that they are fundamentally violating the entire concept of property in their very exist and that's why we see the crackdowns happening the way that they are Democrats are just as you know complicit in that as Republicans are it's it's functionally no difference especially after the George Floyd uprising where you really see in a lot of Democratic cities them hiring a lot more cops giving them a lot more guns like doing the same stuff that that happened in more conservative cities right the gap is almost non-existent that's going to do it for us once again this has been the it's going down cruise squatting

the offices of it could happen here thanks again for listening and we will see you soon 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 visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here update in monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening 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 with like a lot of guns but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences and a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday

listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts