Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 69

Episode Date: February 4, 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. 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. Hey everybody, Robert here. I recorded this with Jason about two days before Wizards of the Coast put out an announcement completely backpedaling on everything they had been planning to do to the open gaming license. 89% of survey of 15,000 fans said they were not happy with the Wizards deauthorizing the 1.0 open gaming license. A lot of people unregistered from D&D Beyond and a lot of people called in complaining and the numbers folks at Wizards panicked and as a result, they are completely folding on the plans to re-send or deauthorize the open gaming license.

And in fact have announced that they are making it the exact terms they use are irrevocable. And yeah, that's good. They put everything under an irrevocable Creative Commons license. So this is all just breaking, but I think it's broadly good news anytime a giant company chooses to do something kind of crummy with a piece of what I would say is actually pretty meaningful intellectual heritage. And then they get slapped down and panic in reverse course. That's a good thing. It shows a number of things, which one of which probably the most important of which is that the community of people who recognize the value in these kinds of games and this pastime, this recreational activity also fundamentally value the essence of like what is open source ideology, which is nice, like it's nice to know that the open source folks, we can still throw a punch every now and again, even if it's just a punch at Wizards of the Coast. So happy ending everybody. Happy ending. Also, the good folks at Paizo sold out of eight months worth of Pathfinder books in like two weeks. So that's nice too. Ah, it could happen here is the podcast that you are listening to right now. I am Robert Evans. This is a show about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together.

And today we're taking a little bit of a different tact in recent weeks. You've listened to us cover a wide variety of issues from conflicts in places like Myanmar to conflicts here at home in the city of Atlanta to deep dives and history and all that all that good stuff that that you know and love us for Today, we are talking about a subject that is unusually close to my heart, dungeons and dragons. Now, I'm going to guess just given the nature of our listenership, a decent chunk of you grew up playing D&D. And just because of how really shockingly suddenly it's become much more popular than it than it ever was previously and much more mainstream. A lot of you may have encountered it as an adult. There's a lot that's actually been written kind of sociologically on what Dungeons and Dragons is and one point that some people will make is that it's, it's kind of the first new game that we had that that human beings made up since like chess. By which I mean, you have had war games for a very long period of time, but the concept of a role playing game and the way that the D&D is where you're essentially sitting down with a group of people and engaging in an act of collaborative storytelling that's kind of buttressed by a system of rules. That's actually a pretty new idea. Now, now elements of this have existed forever. And in fact, kind of an interesting fact you'll run into is that in the late medieval period, a lot of jousts had role playing elements, including ones were like rulers and their their court would dress up as the knights of the round table and act in character as those nights. So elements of all of this stuff have existed for a while. But when Dungeons and Dragons kind of came together as a game for the first time, it was, it is kind of worth seeing it as something really new and valuable in the history of play and the history of human creativity. So as a result of that, I do kind of think I personally think there's something a little bit sacred about that that basic idea. And one of the things that's really interesting to me about the industry that grew up around Dungeons and Dragons is that there have always been a lot of people in it who I think feel the same way.

And I think one of these people was a guy named Ryan Dancy and Ryan Dancy was Vice President in charge of Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast for a while. And he helped actually negotiate the sale of the Dungeons and Dragons property to Wizards of the Coast when the company that had been distributing it fell apart. And Dancy was a big part of the institution in the year 2000 of what became known as the open gaming license. And basically what this meant is that the set of rules that D&D worked by at around 2000, which was, I think you would call it like 3.0, was the system in place, basically got elements of the mechanics got effectively open sourced. And so Wizards of the Coast went from what had been the previous move of the people who'd owned D&D, which was kind of to oppose people trying to make third party content using the ruled source to embracing it and allowing it to do that freely. And now I'm going to introduce our guest who is one of the people who is kind of the one of the most influential folks in what happened after this because once the open gaming license came into effect, there's suddenly this galaxy of new games and supplemental materials that people start making, which, you know, Wizards is not profiting from directly but which the hobby profits from. And one of the people who has been most influential in that is our guest today, Jason Bowman. Jason, you are the lead game designer at Piazzo and the creator of Pathfinder, which is the, I mean, it's not Dungeons & Dragons, but it uses as its base that kind of open gaming system and it's what I play when I get the chance to sit down and play a role-playing game. So first off, Jason, thank you for several thousand hours of my childhood and early adulthood spent playing Pathfinder.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me. And yeah, Piazzo kind of spun off from Wizards of the Coast, you know, back in the early days of the open game license and we were their official publishers of their magazine until that kind of came to an end. And then we started making our own game based off the open game license. Did I get all that right earlier? Do you have any kind of clarification you'd like to add before we move further into the conflict? And there is a conflict. We're not just talking about how cool D&D Pathfinder are. I think there's an interesting thing to note about games. Games are kind of weird when it comes to copyright and ownership and it's kind of why the open game license is so important, right? So TSR, the company that owned Dungeons & Dragons before Wizards of the Coast, was pretty pretty litigious, as you mentioned. But they ended up getting into kind of a bind because, you know, the game itself is one that encourages people to make their own content to kind of homebrew stuff and invent their own stories. And what it comes down to is that, you know, ultimately game mechanics can't be copyrighted. That's been long held that those sorts of things you cannot copyright. That's why you see so many versions of like Scrabble that aren't Scrabble.

Yeah, and it's why anyone can make a basketball team or a basketball league and play basketball. You don't have to get the NBA's approval to play fucking basketball. Exactly. So the open game license wasn't about giving everyone permission to use rules, which is something that could already kind of do. It was about giving them kind of a safe harbor, a place that everybody involved kind of knew that this was all OK. No one was going to be filing frivolous lawsuits and that you could use kind of direct references without having to be a copyright lawyer or retaining a giant staff. It allowed a lot of very little businesses to kind of spring up making, hey, here's my cool adventure that I ran for my group. You can buy it and play it with your group now. Little things like that. And I don't think it's for nothing that number one, a huge thing and this has become as Silicon Valley has kind of turned more mercenary.

This has become less of a thing, but a massive thing in the early history of Silicon Valley in the tech industry was the open source movement. You know, was the idea that a lot of people should be able to collaboratively work and iterate on things without having to worry about who owns the basic idea, right? You know, Linux is a great example of this. And the ideology behind the open source movement was a big influence in the open gaming license. I mean, Dancy kind of admits that himself. There's a quote where he says that like, yeah, I think we need to embrace some of these ideas at the heart of the open source movement because I think it will be a good business decision for Wizards of the Coast. It will on the whole, even if we're not profiting directly from every sort of like thing that people make off of this, the fact that it's going to cause the hobby to explode will benefit us. And I think he's been proven right in that because D&D has gone from this thing that like I got bullied for in high school to there's these massive podcasts.

There's been TV shows that are just people playing the game. Like it has reached this level I never really expected it would of like critical and mass acceptance, which has been really cool to see. It's been one of the things that I've been happiest about watching occurs socially in the last couple of decades. Yeah, you can't disagree that the business case wasn't super tight, right? The way that the OGL got all of the other game companies, many of which had their own entirely different games. In the early 2000s, they all abandoned them and started making content for D&D. And that just kind of carried forward a large swath of kind of the game industry, which is pretty cottage, right? There's a bunch of small players.

There's not a lot of large corporations in here. In fact, Wizards is by far the largest. And so you got a bunch of small game companies that are seeing this as a great opportunity to kind of play in the big pool. And a lot of them followed suit. So obviously the reason we are here today is that a Paul has been cast recently over what has up until now been kind of a lovely thing. Wizards of the Coast got a new CEO pretty recently, right? Yes, Cynthia Williams is relatively new. Yeah. And there is basically murmuring coming from the company that's like, we don't think D&D is properly capitalized.

We believe that we are leaving money on the table here. And kind of in the wake of some of that stuff coming out, they announced a series of changes to the open gaming license. And if you kind of want to take it from here and explain, because I've read and listened to a number of different folks. Saying like, well, it's not as bad as people are fearing and some folks saying like this would effectively kill a huge chunk of the hobby and a bunch of the companies that have grown up in the wake of the open gaming license. And I'm interested in your take on what what Wizards is doing here and what actually kind of is at risk. So, yeah, I think you've clued into the start of this, which was in early December of last year, Hasbro earnings call. Cynthia basically came out and said D&D was under monetized. And they had been spending the entire previous year really proliferating Magic the Gathering, which is their other giant brand, and kind of really making a lot of money, like talks of like it is a billion dollar brand.

And as a result, you know, there was kind of some murmurings and some rumblings going through December, talking about a new version of the OGL Wizards themselves came out on December 21. So just a few days before Christmas and said that a new OGL was coming and that it had notes in it about royalty reporting and, you know, mentioning that folks won't need to pay until later. And that, you know, really this new license is only going to be to make books and PDFs. So they said this on December 21. And the royalty part of that is was really quite challenging because it said if you make over $750,000 a year, you might have to pay a sizable percentage of your gross profit, like 25%. And that's terrifying. But when you're talking about a business and this is not the gaming industry does not run on huge margins. No.

No. Unless you're like making Warhammer models that you're selling for $120 for a piece of plastic that's tight. Yeah. The margins are pretty tight. So saying like past, you know, 750K, your company with however many employees has to give a quarter like that, that'll sink people. Yeah, I think a lot of companies, the larger ones couldn't sustain that. Right. I mean, I think saying pay 25% of your gross over 750K just basically means make sure you only make $749,000 that year.

I do think that that is that is a real, real dangerous thing to a lot of these businesses. Now, for a lot of the content creators, this is never going to matter. But I do believe that part of this was, you know, seeing gigantic multimillion dollar kick starters happening and kind of going where is our thought. Yeah. We want a piece of this. Yeah. And the answer to that is that like, you know, it's problematic just crediting the creation of D&D solely to Gary Gygax. But like the people who came up with and play tested and made D&D a thing.

And then the people who iterated and changed and evolved it from, you know, the original game to A D&D in the years of Thacko to 3.0. Like, like morally, outside of like what I think is justifiable in corporate law and stuff like morally. I think it's fucked up to say that like some company forever gets a piece of that when what it is is like human beings coming together to try to figure out the most efficient way to run an engine for storytelling. I don't know. It's fucked up to me to think about it this way. So they announced this alteration to the open gaming license. And I'm going to guess those were some dark days at the PSO offices. So yeah, you know, most of us at Paizo at that point in time, we're kind of on vacation.

And we kind of just filed it away and we're like, okay, well, it's a draft and they're just talking. So, you know, we get to back, you know, from our break and it's the beginning of the year. And this is now January 5th is when a bombshell article drops on Gizmodo by Linda Kodega. And they really laid out kind of what was in this proposed license, apparently having had portions of it leaked to them. And, you know, it confirmed a 25% margin, but maybe only 20% for kick starters, which then got confirmed by someone at Kickstarter on Twitter. And it also included a bit in there that there was a clause that said Watsi could, was it to the coast, could use any of the content you create under the license for free, never having to make pay royalties to you, never having to give you any credit, they could just take your work. And they phrased it in such a way that it sounded like it was, you know, well, just in case we make something similar, we don't want to get sued.

But yeah, and we're talking about just to clarify it for people, we're not talking about like, if you introduce mechanics, because again, that that's not what this is. We're talking about if you create characters, if you create, if you build stories, they have a right to utilize that story that you've made. Things that are actually copyrightable, right? Stories, ideas and expressions are copyrightable. You know, but rules aren't. So that, yeah, that drops on the fifth. And on the ninth, the full draft document leaks. And you've got streamers and influencers reading it live on YouTube. And this thing just starts to snowball. And from the ninth forward, things start moving very quickly.

On the 10th, a number of major kind of third party publishers, these are folks who print with the OGL announced that they were not going to go with that. And one of the largest ones, you know, announced, yeah, I'm not doing that at all. I'm going to create my entire brand new game. I'm leaving all of this behind. And the fervor on social media turned into basically a firestorm. And it's really a sign of how much more, how many people both love and play versions of this game that there was so much media attention from like major media organs. Like this, this was not just, you know, those of us who are into gaming, you know, freaking out over this change that Wizards of the Coast has made. This was like, I mean, I was seeing it everywhere, very few things have like broken as widely in my media ecosystem as this.

There was an article, there was a story about it today on NPR. So there was another one, there was one other important aspect in the leak that I think is really important. One is that the new OGL could be canceled at any time with 30 days notice. And they were claiming that they were deauthorizing the previous OGL, which up to this point, everyone kind of assumed was irrevocable, right? It had, it has clauses in it that say, if we ever put out a new version of this license, you can ignore it and continue to use this one, right? But it uses this word in there that says you can continue to use any authorized version of the license, never minding that the contract doesn't mention how you might deauthorize a license. So this draft of the OGL says that they're deauthorizing the previous version, which puts all of the work of the past 20 years into doubt. And at this point in time, the fans are revolting, right?

There are a lot of folks canceling their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, which is kind of their in-house character generation tools that you pay a monthly subscription for. And things really start spinning out of hand to the point where D&D actually has to respond to it and pull back and kind of retreat from this and saying, hey, we're going to answer your questions. What you saw was just a draft, you know, and that was never supposed to leak. But it was at this point in time that we actually launched our own license. We had been talking to some of the other publishers, and by that, I mean, we piezo, to create a brand new safe harbor for folks to publish under. Now, it's not going to be owned by us. It's going to be owned by a law firm that actually drafted the first OGL. But you started to see this giant fork happening where a lot of folks are just abandoning ship.

And I mean, what do you think this means? Because obviously Wizards has already announced a new version of the OGL beyond like the one that got leaked, and I think are kind of in damage control mode. Do you think this is something that like there is any way for them to pull back from? Or do you think that kind of the inherent instability of the OGL now that they're kind of making these claims that, well, we can actually change the deal anytime we want? Has that sort of irrevocably altered the ground? I think that they've damaged a lot of people's trust in them, right? I think over the past few weeks, especially when they went silent and then, frankly, the first retraction was really kind of awkward and filled with kind of like, well, we didn't lose. We won. This was great.

Now we learned how to make a better license, right? They're clearly stepping back, stepping back, stepping back. And their most recent step back, which just happened, you know, on the 18th, so, you know, a week ago or so, basically said that they were going to release the core of the game to Creative Commons. And their new license was going to be irrevocable and last forever. But it still contains a lot of kind of poison pills, things like we are still deauthorizing the first version of the license. And we have this morality clause that says if we find your content offensive, we can just kill your license without. Yeah, which is fucked up because I mean, I don't think I need to explain why that's fucked up. That puts that puts a lot of the most creative kind of projects to at risk.

Like I got that's that's ugly. I mean, I don't think anybody in this industry wants to see any, you know, deeply offensive problematic content. But there's a lot of stuff that is, frankly, a lot more marginal and explores, you know, issues of the human condition that folks might want to explore in a game. And who's to say that someone at Wizards might go, well, sorry, that's offensive to me. You don't get to make it. I don't think anybody wants to invest their creativity and risk their business on what someone they will never have met thinks of their work. Yeah, the problem is not that like, I want is the most offensive role playing games I can get the problem is like, well, who determines what offensive is and it's a bunch of lawyers and businessmen at Wizards of the coast. At least that's the worry, right?

Like, not necessarily that that's how it would work out, but you just you get no guarantee. And this stuff, this stuff evolves over time, right? You know, what what is fine today, maybe problematic tomorrow, we learn those things and we evolve from them and we change. But I don't think anybody wants to have kind of the this, you know, axe hanging over our head of like, well, sorry, that's now offensive. So we're going to kill the entire license. Yeah. So where are we? Where are we now?

Like it looks like piezo y'all are moving forward with the ORC along with a number of other people. Can you give me an idea of what that's going to look like? Because one of the things that that does concern me is. And this is a very selfish concern, but like I grew very comfortable with, you know, 3.5, which is essentially the machinery that underpins pathfinder. And it's one of those things like if I didn't play again for 20 years, I could probably sit down with the material in my head and run a campaign just because so much of that stuff is burnt into my brain. Are we like, what is the mechanics kind of underlying the ORC and how is it going to be different from what we've we've gotten used to? So I'll say this, we're in the very early days. Yeah.

And what what's happening right now is we are, you know, in coordination with a number of other publishers, working with Azora law and they are the people who wrote the original OGL and had, you know, fully intended for it to be a perpetual license. And we're working with them to create kind of a rules neutral license that the entire game industry can use to share work because there's there's like a lot of nuance that was in the OGL that allowed different companies to share creative work together. And a lot of companies used it as kind of a bridging license, even if they weren't using Dungeons and Dragons at all, they would just use the license as a framework to kind of exchange ideas. And that's what we want the ORC to be. The ORC needs to be a license that allows everybody in the game industry to open up their content and share work with each other and iterate and expand and grow. That's our real goal. And ultimately, we are not going to own it. No one's going to own it. We're actually going to try and find it on profit to administer the license going forward so that we don't ever have to worry about this again. Nobody wants to go through what we've been going through for the past three weeks.

So that's kind of that's kind of one half of it. The other half is what happens to Pathfinder. And obviously, you know, when it came to Pathfinder second edition, we rewrote the game from scratch and it is now fully our game. It's something we own and we control. So we feel pretty confident that we're just going to keep on rolling with with Pathfinder. And ultimately, you know, we don't actually believe that the previous version of the OGL even can be rescinded. So I guess we'll see how that plays out. I can see this having an overall positive outcome just in that. If we get this new kind of thing that creators can use as a core point to branch off from when they're when they're making games,

that's actually under solid legal footing that isn't kind of reliant upon the whims of a publicly traded company. Then in the long term, you know, that is in the long term, it's it's it's better for creators because it's more like the way things were for the first 20 years of the OGL. Do you I mean, like what do you see as kind of some pitfalls and sort of trying to trying to make this this happen trying to move things in this kind of more productive direction? Well, I think you can always, you know, kind of fracture, you know, vulcanize the market to the point where where everybody has such a small slice of it that, you know, no one can really get the kind of numbers they need to succeed because you're you're right. It is it is a pretty small industry. The margin on, you know, printed media isn't exactly great. But I think a lot of these companies do have the numbers to survive. I think that right now, everybody's trying to figure out how to replace parts of what has just been lost.

Everybody's trying to kind of go in their different directions right now. And some of that is going to be really good because I think we're going to get a lot of really great games. And I'm excited to see them. Yeah, but I do think that I think one of the worries just for the industry is that they kind of all had one flag they were rallying around. And now everyone's running in different directions and hoping that after all of this shakes out, everybody has kind of enough gamers to support a community. I think it's going to work out. I think that there's a number of standouts happening already. You know, MCDM and cobalt are obviously racing to do things. There's a bunch of kind of known players in the industry, us, cobalt, chaos, him, green, Ronan, all of them are pretty big companies positioned to kind of have good player bases with great games and mechanics underneath them.

So I think the big loser here is frankly with the students of the coast, they, you know, up up until, you know, the end of this year or the end of last year, they were undisputedly the largest game company in the industry. They were the biggest game company in the entire tabletop roleplaying game industry, and that's still true today. But there's a lot of cracks in that armor, and it does make me wonder how it's going to fracture out over time and how many of their fans, many of which never heard of Pathfinder, never heard of, you know, these other game companies called Cthulhu and stuff are now suddenly exploring these games and, you know, frankly, the wealth of smaller Indian zine games that are out there. And they're going to play right now. And Watsi has just told their fan base, hey, go check it out. It's interesting because it kind of speaks to something that I've always loved and also found kind of sociologically fascinating about tabletop gaming, which is you just brought up Call of Cthulhu, which is a game that is, I don't believe is under the control of the original company that it was made under. People have been playing versions of Call of Cthulhu for a very long time. Dungeons and Dragons has gone through multiple owners. Shadow Run, which I played a lot of as a kid, has gone through multiple owners. And the rulesets change and the company that is profiting from the official licensed material changes. But no matter what happens, even when those companies go under, the games keep going.

There's something, I think, unique there. That is, it's not the case even like, you know, there's versions of it that happens in PC gaming. But there's also this thing that happens that a lot of gamers I know complain about, which is that like periodically, shit will get removed for whatever reason. A company goes under, a game is not supported, and that game is just gone. That little piece of culture is just gone. And it seems like so far, I'm not going to say in every case, because obviously there have been games that have, you know, people stopped playing and stuff in the tabletop space. But it's, there's this continuity, you know, even in the face of changes of the guards in terms of like what companies are successful of like people keep playing these the same games and iterating them and changing them. And I don't know, that's always one of the things I found most inspiring about the way tabletop works. Yeah, I mean, I do think the legacy of tabletop roleplaying games is one of cooperation. It was there from the start, right? You know, the moment Gary and Dave and folks, you know, got together and started turning their, you know, miniatures wargame and giving characters to them and everyone started building a story together, that spark was the start.

And it's carried through in a million different ways and a million different tables. And even if, you know, the companies go under or disappear, people with those books are still playing those games. There's plenty of people still playing AD&D first edition, right? You know, they never left. And they're fine with that. And I salute them. Yeah, yeah, I think about, and again, this is like one of the reasons this has such a place in my heart. I started playing AD&D. But, you know, it was, my friends and I would play at Cub Scout campouts and we didn't have access to dice. So we had the rule books, we had like the monsters manual and the players guide and we use those as jumping off points. And we would bring like a bunch of nickels and we would, we would figure out ways like, okay, for this action, you got to get three heads out of five flips or something like that. And that's a success in this. And like, so many people have stories like that have variants of that because it really is fundamentally what you need for any of these games. Which is what makes them so durable is a group of people to want to sit around a table and tell a story together, which is rad.

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing else like it, right? There really isn't. And that's why I think you're seeing so much fervor over this, because for a lot of people, this is very deeply personal. Yeah, gathering together with your friends and telling a story together. That's something you and your friends built. And, you know, if you happen to find a way to make some money off of it, great, that's your creativity coming to life. And frankly, kind of having a big giant corporation come in and say, hey, where's my cut is not really very fun. No. And I, my heart goes out to you and your colleagues over how stressful this last three or four weeks has been. And I hope that we're past the worst of it. It certainly seems like some what's going to come out of this is going to be pretty exciting. So I'm hopeful. And it sounds like you're hopeful. Yeah, I think, you know, over the past couple weeks, there's been a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of meetings.

But frankly, I feel more excited and energized about the future of piezo about the future of gaming than I have in quite a long time. So buy piezo's games, pick up some Pathfinder books, go to your go to your nearest game store and pick one up or two or three. Jason, anything else you want to plug at the end here? Yeah, you can learn more about piezo in our game. So that would be Pathfinder and Starfinder at piezo.com. We have a blog there talking about the orc and we'll have undoubtedly have more to say about it here in the coming weeks. As for me, you can find me on all the various social media platforms at backslash Jason Bulman, B-U-L-M-A-H-N. Thank you, Jason, both for sitting down for this interview and for all of all of the many, many countless hours I have spent playing games that you had a hand in making. Thank you, Robert. We'll have to get together and roll some dice together soon.

I would love that. All right, everybody, that's a soad. See you tomorrow. 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 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. Hi, and welcome to What Could Happen Here, a podcast which today is only me and my guest Nicole.

And today we're going to be talking a little bit about immigration, about immigration policy over the last three or four years, and about some of the strange laws that impact it. So Nicole is joining me. She works for Alotro Lado. And Nicole, would you like to introduce yourself and explain a little bit about what you do? Hi, my name is Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, and I am the director of Alotro Lado's Border Rights Project, which is based in Tijuana, Mexico. Great. Okay. So I think perhaps to start off with, you could clue people in on a little bit of what you guys do, because you do some incredible work, and it's very, very valuable to border communities. And I think a lot of people, if they don't live along the border, might not be familiar with it. Alotro Lado, we provide legal orientation to migrants that are considering seeking asylum in the US. We started off as a project that focused locally on migrants in Tijuana.

And over the years, we have expanded to serve migrants in Mexicali and then remotely in other cities along the US-Mexico border, including Grenosa, Matamoros, Juarez, Piedras Negras, Laredo. And in this legal orientation, we're providing information about what are the current policies at the moment that will impact their ability to seek asylum in the US or prevent them from doing so, or how these policies might be impacting their family composition, so policies that are related to detention or family separation. After we provide legal orientation, we are then identifying asylum seekers that fall into several vulnerability categories to provide additional accompaniment through this process, because the policies are shifting and changing and becoming more restrictive over time. It's very confusing and cumbersome to weed through all of the fuzz and figure out what you need to do in order to seek asylum in the US. So that's where we come in. And we provide the orientation in multiple languages. The border is a very diverse place. It is not just Spanish speakers that are coming, but people that speak Asian Creole, French, Farsi, Indigenous languages, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, and all of these people need access to information.

That's one of the pillars of our program is that migrants have the absolute right to accurate legal information about the process that they will be entering. Among the asylum seekers that we work with, we also identify those that are in need of shelter and make referrals appropriately to shelters for medical care. In some instances, we assist with obtaining medications or obtaining a needed surgery if the migrant does not have access to those resources, helping them obtain access to HIV medication or hormone treatment. And of those migrants, we are also connecting them with other supportive services from our partners that have shelters that have programs where they're giving them basic dispenses of food because they are struggling with food insecurity, trying to create as much of a social safety net as possible because folks are waiting at the border for longer and longer periods of time. The border used to be a place that people pass through. Maybe they were here for a few days before ultimately they were able to present themselves at a US port of entry to a US official and enter the asylum process.

However, now we have individuals that have been waiting at the border for years who may not have worked status in Mexico, may not be Spanish speakers and are really struggling to meet their basic needs. And so we've had to expand our services from not just legal service provider, provider of legal information, but also providing humanitarian aid so that people can be healthy and as well as possible while they're waiting. Yeah, and it's incredibly valuable and it's amazing how you guys have continued to step up and scale up as the federal government has continued to fail people. And I think if people haven't come to the border, they probably won't be aware of, like you say, that diversity of people who come to the US Mexico border. I remember a couple of years ago I was working with an aromotranslator and we would speak to people who come from Ethiopia, people come from Eritrea. Of course, people coming from Ukraine now, it's a very diverse space, which is something that kind of gets collapsed pretty often in border reporting, I think. Like all that diversity gets collapsed into just people lumped together as migrants or people seeking asylum. And that's a shame because it's part of what makes us so complicated, but also what makes these border places such kind of interesting and special places.

And I like what you said about all the sort of services that are provided as well. It's incredible to look at how these services are provided by a huge broad network of volunteers, of non-profits, of NGOs, as well as some government agencies. And how people have stepped up consistently, especially in the last, I guess, six, seven, I don't know, God, it did seem such a long time. Since 2016, 2017, how people have stepped up to help each other along the border. So perhaps if we go back, you and I were just talking before we started, if we go back to 2018, which people may or may not remember was the midterm and the middle of Donald Trump's presidency. And a large caravan of people, a group of people, particularly large or remarkable, a group of people arrived at the border and became kind of the center of something of like a... I think their arrival was used by both political parties as part of their sort of midterm messaging. And I think that was maybe for some people, especially if they're younger and have been watching their news, their sort of first introduction to the asylum process.

So can you explain kind of how asylum is supposed to happen, and then maybe we can get into some of the weird and bizarre things that have been happening to it in the past three or four years? Asylum is supposed to be a system that's managed first by government authorities. Under Title VIII, Section 1225 of the United States Code, a U.S. immigration officer at port of entry or at any point in between ports of entry, such as Border Patrol, when they are presented with a person that expresses that they have a fear of return to their home country, that they fear persecution, to refer them along the track to be processed as an asylum seeker. Now, that can mean that that person is still detained for the entirety of their asylum case and sent to an immigration detention center. That could also mean that that person is given court paperwork to show up in immigration court at a later date to begin the process of explaining their case to the immigration court and getting a final decision. Over the years, beginning at the end of the Obama administration, continuing through the Trump administration and also continuing even now into the Biden administration, we have seen policies issued by CBP which restrict access to the port of entry for asylum seekers.

Initially, it started out in 2016 where the Obama administration came up with a policy called the metering policy, which was known as the waitlist, which required at first only Haitian asylum seekers to put their name on a waitlist with Mexican immigration authorities. And then they would be called in groups to enter the US. And that was in response to the exodus of immigrants that we saw coming from Haiti and through Brazil in 2016. The metering list was later expanded to apply to all nationalities, including Mexican migrants that were trying to flee their own country, including those that had legitimate claims for protection, being persecuted by members of their own government. Everyone had to still get on this list. That policy was extended in an ideological framework when the Trump administration came up with a program known as Remain in Mexico. And just building upon that idea that it is okay to make asylum seekers wait in territory in which they fear persecution because a lot of people fear persecution in Mexico. And under the Remain in Mexico policy, also known as the migrant protection protocols, MPP, we always refer to it as the migrant persecution protocols because it feels more different. It's extremely Orwellian, right? People like to use Orwellian wrong, but that went pretty 1984.

Yeah, this program required asylum seekers that were entered. They were placed into a program called MPP. They were given a court date and people were to appear at court in their nearest border city where there was an immigration court at some date in the future. It could be a few weeks. It could be several months. It could be a year. And in between their court hearings, they would be required to remain in Mexico. They could only go to the court of entry on the date of their court. They would be transported to court and then transported back to Mexico after their court, leaving people in Mexico and limbo for years. And then when the pandemic came, we saw the border closed entirely under Title 42. The Trump administration billed it as necessary to protect the American public from migrants that could be carriers of COVID-19. But this is really no different than other immigration legislation that we've seen throughout history, which tends to paint immigrants as vectors of disease, and we need to just keep them at all costs. And under Title 42, it's just a wall of policy. People try to present themselves at the court of entry and they're turned away. People enter the U.S. at different points that are not ports of entry without inspection and get caught and they're expelled immediately back to Mexico. Or if it's not a country that Mexico will accept an expulsion, they could be detained in U.S. custody and then expelled back to their country of origin without any opportunity to speak with an asylum officer.

Right now, we have been dealing with Title 42 in a process where a certain number of people are exempted from this blanket denial every day. And different ports of entry along the border participate. Each port of entry has its own cap, numerical cap, and initially when this program started in May, the names of people that were being submitted as exemptions, the asylum seekers names, were submitted by civil society organizations such as Alotolado. Alotolado, just this year alone, we submitted around 11,500 exemptions requests. And that was from individuals from 29 different countries speaking just over 30 different languages. So now, though, the system has recently changed to a smartphone application known as CBP-1, which requires migrants to download this application to their smartphone, assuming that they have a smartphone. And then complete this lengthy application that requires them to upload a photo for facial recognition software and wait for an appointment date to be made available. And they have to keep entering the system multiple times until an appointment date becomes available, waking up every morning at 5.30 for when the new slots are made available at 6 a.m. And the problem among many problems with this application is that right now it's only available in Spanish and English, so if you speak any other language, you are not able to access it.

And we have, to give you an example, we have an online survey where people register or try to seek help from us. We have over, since April 21, over 50,000 unique responses. Around half of those are from Haitian Creole speakers, cannot access this app to get an appointment. And the other issue is, is that the facial recognition software that's integrated into the CBP-1 app, you know, there's a lot of studies throughout the years about how this software will lead to false positives or failure to recognize for individuals that have Afro-descendant features or individuals that have more indigenous features. And we have seen this firsthand. So many of our Haitian clients are unable to even complete the profile. And they are taking photos with cameras that have a decent, you know, lens capacity and they still can't get past the facial recognition software appointment. Yeah, it's just like a layers on layers of sort of, I know, sometimes it's just them being like ineffective sometimes it just seems cruel. Let's go back a little bit to Title 42, because that word's been thrown around a lot, right? Title 32 isn't an issue, it's not immigration law, is it? It's public health law, is that right? I guess it's a public health policy that's part of immigration law.

Yeah, it's public health policy that's being applied in the immigration context to close the border. Yeah. And then one thing that I think we've seen a lot recently is like one of the worst accounts on Twitter, which is the Border Patrol Union likes to, they do occasionally like tweet their end losses, which is kind of funny. But they like to throw out these statistics, right, constantly about encounters at the border. Can you explain how under Title 42 each encounter might not be a unique individual? Yeah, absolutely. Those individuals are over counted because people will make multiple attempts to try to enter the US because they're so desperate. There's a dystopian hellscape on the inside of the border with people being trafficked, kidnapped for extortion, tortured, raped, murdered, sold. And so if that were any reasonable person, you would try 10, 15 times whatever it took to get across to safety. And the Border Patrol Union is disingenuous because it knows this and instead it pulls out a figure that is much larger than what it represents in actual people. And they're disingenuous in how they describe it.

Yeah, I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see through it. When we combine this with the wall or the fence or whatever you want to call it, people are crossing in more remote and more dangerous areas, which makes the crossing more risky and results in a higher instance of people dying or hurting themselves trying to cross, which as you say, it's not a reasonable thing to do when you're faced with these terrible circumstances. Yeah, there's a beautiful poem called Home by Warsh and Sire, who's a Somali British poet and one of the lines is you don't put your child in a boat unless it's safer than the land. No one would attempt to cross a 30 foot wall or wade the Rio Grande or cross the Arizona desert in the middle of summer, unless what was behind them, they were so sure was going to kill them. And the way that we've structured the wall and raising the height of the wall to make it harder to cross and to build as much wall along the places where it would be a little bit easier to cross for people making it so the only way to cross is through the most dangerous parts. That's intentional. That is, you know, designed for people to die because the government mistakenly believes that if it kills more people that folks will be deterred.

But that's not actually what we see on the ground. No, I'm like, it's not a vacuum right people are coming from bad things like making just making the border difficult what will do nothing more than kill more people which is what they've succeeded in doing sadly. And so and then another thing I wanted to get at is title 42 with this this crazy series of court cases around title 42 right so can you explain like why titled 42 hasn't been repealed when we've done away with almost every other protection for people in kind of an ongoing pandemic. Title 42 could be repealed if the government was so not so intent on fighting the repeal of title 42 the ACLU has been in court for the last few years around title 42. In a case called Wisha Wisha, the my orcas and the judge in that case issued a decision in December, ruling that turning away asylum seekers using title 42 as a pretext to turn asylum seekers away was unlawful. However, that decision was stayed the government requested that the decision be temporarily stayed to give it time to make operational plans the ACLU did not oppose that stay. And as a result during that time, a group of conservative states filed intervening litigation to make their arguments about how their interests were harmed by the decision. So now that cases before the Supreme Court, and they will not hear the case until February, and we could be waiting as long as June for a decision.

Yeah, many of those, but lots of those states weren't even along the border right there some of the ones who sued. Yeah, that's still a mystery to all of us along the border, how interior states that short might be receiving people coming from the border, but don't have that close nexus isn't there a border community and they're being immediately impacted. Yeah, yeah, pretty pretty venal stuff. And the, the other issue I want to raise for people is the narrative is that we're in a crisis the border is in a crisis. There's so many people we can't possibly help them all, we close the border for over two years. So of course there's going to be more people, because we've made it impossible for people to access. However, the courts of entry have contingency plans for mass migration events. This is something that was learned during the context of our litigation against CBP around access to the port of entry. And we see that the government is capable of responding rapidly in a manner that is consistent with human dignity and how it responded to 30,000 Ukrainians showing up in Tijuana this spring. In some days, CBP accepted as many as 1000 Ukrainians in a given day, whereas on those days they were accepting zero of other nationality, and they were able to get up to speed so quickly, because every port of entry has a contingency plan.

We are the United States government, we are arguably one of the most powerful well resourced governments on earth. And if you buy the line that this is a crisis and we don't have a contingency plan, then we've got a lot of work to do here. And so it's not it's a it's a manufactured crisis. We have the resources we have the personnel CBP has the largest law enforcement budget of all the law enforcement agencies in the federal government. We have tens of thousands of personnel. It's what we lack is the political will and the emotional capital to do what we've already agreed to under US federal law, as well as the refugee convention, which we signed following World War Two, which was designed to prevent further genocide, further persecution of large groups of people. But we continue to renege on those obligations to which we agreed to. Yeah, yeah, like when we talk about genocide and persecution, like I personally know people from Myanmar who are really struggling with the United States asylum system right now. And yeah, it's really deeply just infuriating to see them continue to pursue this kind of like waving my hands in the air. I don't know what to do kind of thing.

Let's talk a little bit about Joe Biden and his policies because like they've been lackluster or just completely like it. He's issued executive orders which basically have gone unfulfilled right regarding asylum. And so they made a statement a few weeks ago now and Biden visited the border. Can you explain what he said in that statement and then sort of what the Biden administration hasn't done to clear up the asylum system that it promised it would do. The Biden administration made a lot of promises on the campaign trail, made an effort to put advocates in places in DHS other key positions to give the appearance that it was serious about reform and treating immigrants in a way that is dignified and humane. But what we've seen is a continuation of Trump policies which restrict access to the border for example, the new asylum ban that they are proposing through regulation where individuals that translated through another country and did not seek asylum in that country, even if that country was not a safe country for them, that they would be precluded from applying for asylum. A lot of people are been enthusiastic about these new parole programs for specific nationalities like Paraguans, Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans. However, those programs are really just scraps. They have a 30,000 person cap. The Ukrainian parole program had 100,000 person cap, which has already been surpassed.

Ukrainian sponsors, as well as the Ukrainian asylum seekers that were presenting through that parole program, had much less by way of requirements. And so they've made a separate and not equal program for other nationalities, which just happen to be nationalities that aren't white. Yeah, yeah, it's hard not to see a kind of white people first approach to asylum here. It certainly challenges your ability not to believe it's outright racist. So I wonder, like, going forward, obviously people listening will probably be sort of upset and concerned at the continuing failures of our government to do anything about it. Can you outline, like, how people can help? I know there's lots of people who will do direct mutual aid, right? Like, people like food, not bombs are feeding people in Tijuana. But how can folks maybe who are at the border and then who aren't near the border, how can they help? Well, organizations that are at the border, including ourselves, who work with volunteers that are remote, particularly if they have a foreign language skill, because we can't serve tens of thousands of people each year with just the staff that we have. So we have a really robust remote volunteer network. I would also encourage people, as you pointed out, to look for organizations in their own community that are serving immigrants. It is incredibly humbling to move to another country and realize you don't know how to read the light bill.

You don't know how to register your kids for school. Can your kids go to school? Where can I go to the doctor? What is an ambulance? Do I not have to pay for that? All of these things that might be different for them and a real lack of volunteers to assist people with those daily integration activities that are so important to figuring out how your new community works. I also encourage people to, when there's an opportunity to have conversations with your elected official, to have those conversations, write emails, go in person if that's an opportunity. Different officials will have open days for their offices where you might be able to get, maybe not face time with that official, but with their point person who is overseeing that issue. Right now our elected officials, they don't care about immigration because a lot of their constituents are not making it known to them what it is that they care about and that they're willing to go to drastic measures such as shutting down their office if they don't take action on immigration. We're all just thinking about it as, okay, well, this is happening to immigrants. This is not me. I am a citizen. But all of the worst fascist policies are tried out first on groups in society that have less political power. On people that have criminal convictions, on the people who have disabilities that make it impossible for them to communicate on immigrants. And so I would really encourage, if you're concerned about fascism, if you're concerned about how your rights may be trampled in the future, focus on immigrants because they are the testing ground for a lot of fascist government's worst intentions.

Yeah, and we've already seen that, right? If people aren't familiar, it was Bortak, among others who were out there running around Portland, chucking people into unmarked vans. It was DHS drones surveilling people in Minneapolis. It was indeed DHS surveilling, I think people from Malo Trolado and other organizations in 2018 when lots of us were crossing the border very often to help people who were part of what was called the migrant caravan then. So this is happening to us, right? There's a thing that crime think have on some of their posters, which I always like, which is the border doesn't protect you, it controls you, which I think is more true than ever now. It's a place where we experiment with these policies and they seem to get away with them, right? It doesn't seem to be something that people care about like they did even two or three years ago under the Trump administration. I wonder, Nicole, how can people, another thing that I think people lack is like a direct connection to people seeking asylum or to the situation at the border, right? Like every time something happens, I'm sure you've seen this more often than I have. Someone from LA or DC or New York or whatever kind of parachutes into border communities, I can see that this is the frustration that you share. It does a story which misses masses of context and then buggers off back to the place where they came from. And so like, where can people find better connections to the situation for people seeking asylum? I really like a blog and it's also a podcast every week, Border Chronicles, Todd Miller's Border Chronicles. I also would recommend reading all of Todd Miller's books.

He is an incredible investigative journalist that does deep dive on how we got to this militarized state of the border. So I would recommend starting with Border Patrol Nation and just going straight through there. I also think ProPublica also does really great investigative long dive reporting, the intercept. I would look at those places. Yeah, yeah. I think if you're in a border community, like it's really not that hard to cross and see what's going on for yourself and do a little something to help make some of your money that you set aside developing other people can go a long way if you choose to use it that way. Nicole, how can people support your work directly? Like is there a website or a Twitter account they can follow to find more about a lot of it? Yeah, we do have our own website. We're also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. We regularly post opportunities to volunteer remotely, volunteer in person and campaigns that people want to donate to. There's that opportunity as well. Great. Is there anything else you want to share about that you feel that our listeners should know maybe if they haven't been following border situation closely?

The border situation is part of a larger historical context and briefly I talked about earlier. The US is a signatory to the refugee convention, which is an outgrowth of the horror that the world collectively felt when we came to grips with what happened during the Holocaust and we collectively said never again, never again. Part of our part in the Holocaust was we rejected the MS St. Louis from the coast of Florida and there was over 900 Jewish refugees that were on that boat. No other country accepted them. Cuba, Canada rejected and ultimately had to go back to Europe and some of those people ultimately died in the Holocaust and those deaths are on our conscience. And any time the asylum seekers are being turned away along the border when they have the legal right to present themselves under existing US law and international law, it's a repetition of the MS St. Louis except it's happening all across the border every single day. Yeah, that's very well put and it doesn't matter if it's one person or 100 people, it's a tragedy every time. We have plenty of safe places for people to go, but we're deciding not to welcome them and it's very, very sad. Well, thank you so much for giving us some of your afternoon, Nicola. If people want to find you personally, do you have a personal social media? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter and I'm Lucen La Frontera on Twitter.

Okay, great. And Alotrolado, is it just Alotrolado on Twitter? Yes, Alotrolado. Sometimes we have Alotrolado.org. Yeah, so that's A-L-O-T-R-O-L-A-D-O if people need to spell it out right. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you so much. 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. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Once again, I'm Andrew from the YouTube channel Andrewism as we talk about whatever. And whatever in question is the second most popular country in the world and one potential vision for its future drawn from its anti-colonial past. I'm speaking of course about India, a sub-constant from which I draw a good portion of my heritage. And when that boasts over 9,000 years of recorded history and roughly 55,000 years of no human settlement. India is an incredibly diverse country, ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and otherwise.

But unfortunately, it has suffered much of the same fate that Thrust the World has, falling prey to the rapacious appetite of British colonialism. Now, historically, the Indian local economy was dependent upon the most productive and sustainable agriculture and horticulture and of course pottery and furniture making. Jewelry was very well known for jewelry. In fact, Indian jewelry makers ended up starting some very successful jewelry businesses when they were freed from indentureship in Trinidad. They also got involved in leather work and a lot of other economic activities in India. But the basis of India has traditionally historically, for thousands of years, been textiles, different types of textiles. Each village had its spinners and carters and diers and weavers who were of course at the heart of that village's economy. But an interesting outcome of British colonialism in India has been the flooding of India with the machine-made, inexpensive, mass-produced textiles from Lancashire. During Britain's Industrial Revolution, the local textile artists were very quickly put out of business and village economies suffered very terribly.

So I mean, you know, I think we're familiar with this sort of general story. Smaller cottage industries became overrun by mass production. And of course, it'll mean to sound like I'm entirely demonizing mass production, just describing what has happened. Of course, mass production has had its many benefits in providing access to resources and to products of many different people. But of course, it's also had its many drawbacks, including, you know, the environmental impact, as well as the impact on people. You know, as Mark spoke about, of their alienation from the process of production as the industrial system basically separated each step in the process of production to different workers. And so no one had a hand in the production of a product from start to finish. And of course, that had significant social and, I would also assume, mental impact on people with, you know, that whole era of British economic imperialism happening in India.

The changes that took place within a generation was so rapid, you know, your head would spin. And that devolution of, you know, the Indian home economy was really a sight to behold. And another element of British economic imperialism and British imperialism, or broadly, was the introduction of British education under colonial rule in the 18th century. When Lord Macaulay introduced the Indian Education Act in the British Parliament, he said, and I quote, A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India. Neither as a language of the law, nor as a language of religion, has a Sanskrit any particular claim to our engagement. We must do our best to form a class of Prussians, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. So the typical racism, typical white man's burden, typical, you know, of course, this phrase was used in a North American, indigenous American context,

but I believe the phrase is taking the Indian out to the man. Yeah, kill the Indian, save the man. Right. So it's kind of interesting. There's a different type of Indian talking about there, but that sort of idea still applies. And really, that sort of sentiment is something that has existed throughout the history of colonialism, something that, you know, is seen in all of Britain's former colonies, because once this aim was put into Parliament and pushed forward, it was pursued with the might of the British Raj, or the traditional schools that took place in different village communities were gradually replaced by colonial schools and universities. Of course, taking advantage of the caste and class system that was in place in India prior to their arrival, the British would have selected wealthier Indians. We sent to public schools such as Etan and Haro and universities like Oxford and Cambridge.

And those Indians that, you know, they learned English poetry, English law, English customs to neglect of their own culture. You know, it's like why read the classics of the Vedas when you have Shakespeare and the London times. And so having been raised in that environment, having grown up, having basically their minds colonized from the crib, they began to see their own cultures as backward, uncivilized, old fashioned, regressive. And again, something you see all over the world. You saw it in the residential schools, you see it in the schools in the Caribbean, you see it in schools in Africa, basically everywhere they colonized. It's when they would take a generation, they would take generations of young people and they would develop that self-hatred, that disdain for their own culture by, you know, positioning their education, British education as, you know, superior.

In fact, during the process of decolonization, quote, unquote, of, you know, formal political independence, many of the formal colonies of Britain, particularly in the Caribbean, that's where I'm most familiar, a lot of the people who became, you know, the first Prime Minister of the country, the one that would establish the trajectory of the country for years or decades to come, thinking of people like Bustamante in Jamaica, Eric Williams, Dr. Eric Williams in Trinidad Spago, among others, basically all of the first Prime Ministers, basically every single Caribbean country, they had all been educated in English schools, in English universities, well, in the prestige schools of their countries, they didn't end up being flown out to Britain itself. And they basically became the rulers, became the leaders, were handed power over by the British to basically rule in their stead.

Of course, with all the talk of finally independence, people got caught up in that energy of political independence and freedom from the control of the British after all the decades and centuries of struggle. But unfortunately, it proved, I believe, to be a ruse as very little changed for the average person in the years post-political independence. Yeah, this is something that Fanon talks about in the sort of Francophone context of, like, even in countries where you have, like, the colonizers are thrown out by actual revolutions, you get this class of, like, lawyers and intellectuals who are, like, have been educated in imperialist powers or in sort of their schools who wind up as, like, the first generation of post-independence leaders. And those people, like, you know, whether they want to or not end up sort of, like, reflecting the sort of values and political positions of the form of colonial powers and there's this whole sort of dynamic that, like, I feel like this is the part of Fanon that people don't read very much,

but that's about how these leaders sort of, like, lose touch with the sort of, like, anti-colonial masses and how they sort of, like, wind up reincorporating their countries back into sort of colonialism. Yeah, yeah, that's really how you see that neo-colonial dynamic developing. And it's really, it's hard to tell retrospectively whether these leaders thought they were actually, you know, anti-colonial or if they knew that they were, you know, carrying on a particular legacy. But I find that because Trinatus only recently celebrated just last year, 60 years of independence, there are, of course, people who were alive prior to independence. And so you find a lot of the older generation, how they, how some of them speak, particularly the more educated ones, how they carry themselves, how they dress, the attitudes they espouse is very much like to get any kind of respect in their time.

You had to behave with them, you had to present yourself with them, you had to present yourself, you know, as approximate to Britishness as possible. The whole, you know, conversation of respectability, politics and stuff. And so I have some understanding of what they had to go through and where they're coming from when they hold onto these perspectives still, because that's what they grew up in. But it really is a shame that they've been holding back progress for so long now, because they still hold onto these deeply conservative, deeply religious, deeply reactionary ideas that were just, you know, they're just inculcated with in the education system and in the cultural zeitgeist of their time. I was just, when Mia was talking about Fanno, I was thinking as well about like, have you read a book called Beyond the Boundary by CLR James Andrew? I haven't, because it's about crickets and I'm not too integrated, crickets. But I know it's an iconic, I know it's an iconic read.

I think he, yeah, he explains a lot of that very well. I think if people could read it, even if they don't like it, I'm not a big cricket person, but it's certainly one of the best sports books I've read and maybe one of the best books. And he does have a good job of explaining things. CLR, he put out a lot of bangers in his tank. Yeah, he did have some bangers. Highly recommended. Yeah, if you don't want to read about cricket, he also talks about this in the Krumah and the Ghana Revolution. Yeah, that is not about cricket.

It's more of an autobiography, like seen through the lens of his cricket, I think. Oh, that'd be cool, because I know he spent a lot of time, he grew up, of course, born, raised and stuff in Trinidad. So we're interested to see sort of, if he talks about his political development, how that arose in his time in Trinidad. Yeah, I think he does. It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he talks about how he sort of saw himself constituted as colonial subjects through his experiences interacting with British people on one of the places where the terrains where he'd encounter them, I guess, was playing cricket. Right, yes, of course. And, you know, thankfully, we've come to decimate them at their own game as usual. It's true, yeah. And even like English cricket at some point, like we're getting really into cricket, which I know is a diversion, but like they had rules where you could only have a certain number of international players playing for each English county.

It's extreme, like if you look at how the Empire constituted whiteness through sport and like who was allowed to play rugby, which is a touching sport, and who was allowed to play cricket, which isn't normally a touching sport, like it's racist as fuck. Yeah, I mean, of course, there's a lot of racism in sports history. Yeah. Sorry for the cricket diversion. So please continue. It's entirely fine. I see it's all Greek to me because I don't know what any of those points or numbers or anything means. There are too many different types of cricket. I mean, I've had people try to explain to me before. It's just not my thing. I know people who play it though. So, you know, good for them and all.

But back to India, right? If there's one particular person in India's history that really represented this type of Western educated, colonized subject trying to be something bigger than that kind of mentality. It was Jawaharlal who became the first Prime Minister after independence. Peru, of course, sought to promote the industrialization of India, not via a capitalist route, but by more of a centralized planning route, which is why if you look in India's constitution, you'll see that it's reversed itself as a socialist country. Yeah, really, if I'm remembering right. He was like a Fabian socialist or something? Yeah. His inspiration came from the intellectuals of the London School of Economics and the Fabian society. So yeah, he's quite the character. And you see the sort of direction that he ended up putting the country in. I mean, even today, India in many ways continues to be ruled in the English way without English rulers. Just like in the Caribbean, continues to be ruled in the English way without English rulers. In Africa, you know, the various countries have been ruled in various colonizing powers way rather than in their own way without the colonizers rulers. They're the colonizing rulers.

The industrialists, the intellectuals, the entrepreneurs, all of them are working with the government to see the salvation of India taking place in a subordination to the World Bank and the IMF and the GATT. You know, they see India as part of this global economy meant to submit and to sue to multinational corporations. But of course, the people of India, not to please and the people of India suffer under the brunt of that. After seeing the failures of, of course, the Congress party under Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi. The poor continues to be poor than ever. The middle classes and turning towards, should I say, certain directions. And of course, as we've seen in the past few years, the farmers have been agitating against various pressures they've been placed under. Things kind of stuck. And it was pretty much how Mahatma Gandhi predicted that it would, because unlike Nehru and unlike other Western educated thinkers of his time, Gandhi thought differently about what India's potential could be, what it looked like. And that's part of the reason they killed him.

And I must preface this discussion of Gandhi's vision of a free India by noting, of course, that Gandhi himself was a very flawed person, you know, racist, sexist. Pretty sure he assaulted somebody. He did some very fucked up stuff to his knees. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. But I mean, that's not something you can put aside. So it's something to be cognizant of. But one of the aspects of his time on this planet had been his development of a sort of a vision of a free India. Not as a nation state, but as a confederation of self governing, self reliant, self employed people living in village communities, deriving their right livelihood from the products of their homesteads. It would have been a sort of a bottom up system where the power to decide what could be imported into or exported from the village where economic and political power

remain in the hands of village assemblies, where people in these village assemblies in these communities would continue to live in relative harmony with their surroundings with, they would continue to weave their homespun clothes, eat their homegrown food, use their homemade goods, care for their animals, their forests and their lands, take care of the facility, the soil, enjoy the homegrown stories and epics of India and continue to build their temples and appreciate their various regional distinctive cultures. This was meant to be the system, the practice, the idea, the philosophy of Swadeshi, which is a conjunction of two Sanskrit words, swa, which meaning self or own, and desh meaning country. Swadeshi as an adjective meaning of one's own country. According to the principle of Swadeshi, the idea is that whatever is made or produced in a village must be used first and foremost by the members of that village. So I mean, there could be trading and collaboration between villages and communities, but kindly thought it should be minimal, like sort of an icing on the cake. Goods and services to him was something that should have been generated within the community, the things that needed to be used by the community should be created in that community.

Another influential, perhaps the most influential aspect of Swadeshi and Swadeshi philosophy took place in the early 20th century as a direct fallout to the decision of the British India government to partition Bengal. The use of Swadeshi goods or the goods that were produced and made in India by India for Indians and the boycott of foreign made goods were among the two main objectives of the Swadeshi movement. And so the boycott resolution ended up being passed in Calcutta City Hall in August 7, 1904 boycotts in the use of Manchester cloth and sold from Liverpool. In the district of Arasile, the masses adopted the message of boycotts of foreign made goods and the value of the British cloth sold there fell very rapidly. Various songs and cultural works ended up being produced in the time to sort of bolster the movement. At one point, 150,000 English cloths were burnt as part of the boycott and the symbol of caddy spinners, the sort of tool that was used to weave cloth, to weave fibers, to create yarn became a major force in the movement and in the representation of the movement. I think I get what you're saying, like we can all benefit from a little specialization and the like improvements that that brings while still sort of acknowledging that autonomy is desirable. Yeah, I think there needs to be some, some balance between your autonomy and self reliance and that kind of thing, and also collaboration. I think he goes a bit too much in that autonomy direction, but in the context of when these ideas are being developed, it's sort of understandable because in this time,

you know, the self reliance of the people is being vastly eroded, people being forced into, you know, cities, they've lost their livelihoods. There was a sort of a developing reliance in the global economy, where Swadeshi proposes, you know, in the avoids economic dependence on external market forces that create these vulnerabilities and communities that end up in a really harming the members of that community. Swadeshi's meant to avoid the unhealthy and wasteful environmentally destructive transportation of goods between communities, avoiding the excessive emissions that would cause and promoting, of course, the development of a strong economic base to satisfy the needs of the community, to satisfy the local production consumption. Swadeshi is kind of about both creating a self reliant India and also creating self reliant villages within India so that each village is a microcosm of the greater India, a web of sort of a distributed decentralized web of loosely interconnected communities. In a time where the British were promoting the centralized industrialized and mechanized modes of production, Gandhi was turning to the principle of decentralized homegrown handcrafted modes of production, rather than mass production, production by the masses. I think there was also a spiritual component to the idea of Swadeshi, because at the time Gandhi was on a fan of the idea that people were not using their hands to produce the idea that, you know, everyone should be involved in some kind of trade or skill of some kind that utilizes their hands because of, you know, the whole spiritual component of using the body that you have fully. And another aspect of the spirituality of Swadeshi was, of course, the idea of this locally based community enhancing a community spirit, community relationships and community well being an economy that actively encourages mutual aid, that encourages the principle of care between families, neighbors, animals, lands, forestry, natural resources for present and future generations.

It's a very confrontation of the driving force between mass production, which Gandhi saw as this cult of the individual, where they must be to expansion of the economy on a global scale and expand the consumption production for the sake of economic growth out of a desire for the individual's personal whims for the desire for, you know, personal and corporate profit. Another reason, of course, that Gandhi rallied against this idea of mass production and promoted production for the masses by the masses is because mass production led to people leaving their villages, their land, their crafts and their homesteads to go work in factories where they became cogs in a machine standing in a conveyor belt living in shanty towns and dependent upon the mercy of the bosses. And of course, as those bosses gained access to more efficient technologies because they were constantly in pursuit of greater productivity in this greater profit, the masters of this economy, you know, they want more efficient machines working faster and so they want less people working those machines. And so the result was that the people who had to move to these cities to work in these factories, we eventually thrown out when they were no longer considered useful, and became enjoying the millions of unemployed, you know, rootless, jobless people in Indian society. Swadeshi instead encourages the idea that the machine should not be something that subordinates the worker, but instead something that is subordinated to the worker, that it can become the master, but instead it is mastered and allows us to orchestrate our own pace of, you know, human activity. It's not that Swadeshi is necessarily against automation, against technological development, but it's more so that it aims to circumvent the harms that could be caused by such technologies being out of the control of the people themselves and in the control of the select private few. I think Swadeshi has a sort of an element of glorification of the past.

So my research for this episode, I ended up looking into, of course, the writings of proponents of Swadeshi, and people discussing Gandhi's thoughts on the subject, and I'll just quote one particular passage. Swadeshi is the way to comprehensive peace, peace with oneself, peace between peoples and peace with nature. The global economy drives people toward high performance, high achievement and high ambition for materialistic success. Loss in stress, loss of meaning, loss of inner peace, loss of space for personal and family relationships and loss of spiritual life. Gandhi realized that in the past, life in India was not only prosperous but also conducive to philosophical and spiritual development. So that she for Gandhi was a spiritual imperative. I think it's understandable that a decolonial project would attempt to develop a pride in the history of the people who have gone through so much. You know, their legacy and their traditions and their ideas. But I think it's a bit of a stretch to glorify India's past and precolonial past in such a respect. I don't think any people's precolonial past should be excessively glorified or mythologized. Because I feel as though one that clouds our judgments and our critical eye for the aspects of past societies that do need to be challenged, do need to be changed. I think that's part of my issue with Swadeshi is this idea that, you know, if things just go back to these sorts of villages and village communities, that everything else would just be okay. But of course, there were other issues that NK was dealing with, even practicalization, you know, in terms of sexism, in terms of the control of the caste system and the higher caste.

And the other aspects of Indian society that of course were made more severe by British colonialism, colorism, I think is one of those issues that of course existed practicalization but was made worse by the British and their presence in the continent. But I think striking that balance of cleaning, learning from respecting that precolonial past, but also in our precolonial projects, not excessively romanticizing the past in an effort to progress towards the future. These days, I believe Swadeshi is most known for its focus on protectionism, its disdain for, you know, foreign important investment, but it was of course a very wide spanning philosophy. It was a vision and a philosophy of life that Gandhi held for his entire life. It's not something that I was familiar with prior to looking into it and my continued pursuit of decolonial perspectives and explorations of various post-colonial projects and philosophies, but it's something that I've appreciated despite my criticisms of some aspects of it. And that's about all I have for you all today. You can find me on YouTube at Andrewism on Twitter.com slash underscore St. True. And you can support me on Patreon.com slash St. True. Thank you so much. And if 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 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 Nick at App & Hear, a podcast that's being done for the first time and not the second time because we had bike problems. We did not just record a very funny intro that is now completely lost in time.

Yeah, you'll never hear it. You'll never know what great fun we had. The joy was in the creation though, not in the sharing. Process, not an event, structure, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm Mia, I'm doing this episode. Also, Garrison is here. Hello. Hi. And also, James. Hi. I'm recording, so we're good now. The good news is, stunningly, as much as it seems, we are now more prepared to record this episode than we were last time. What are we talking about?

We are talking about the age of the gender bureaucrat. So as people are probably aware, there is a raft of anti-trans bill sweeping through state legislatures. The latest of these bills to pass as of time of recording is the bill in Utah, which has banned minors from getting gender-affirming care, like hormone therapy, hormone blockers, and any kind of gender-affirming surgery for anyone who's not already receiving them. Does the Utah one also ban therapy, like talk therapy? No, but so on the one hand, it doesn't ban talk therapy. On the other hand, there's a provision in there that I think might also suggest that people do conversion therapy. So that's great. It fucking sucks, ass. Yeah, kids are going to die because of this bill. The people who are writing and signing these bills know that kids are going to die. We know this because Utah's Governor Spencer Cox, who is the guy who signed the bill, vetoed an earlier ban on trans athletes participating in school sports, specifically citing the risk of suicide.

So he knows this is going to kill kids. He signs this anyways. And we are now living in what I call the age of the gender bureaucrat. We're going to have another episode later on where we spend a lot of time going through all of the individual bills, and the stuff Trump's been saying about this because Jesus Christ. Pretty pretty pretty grim stuff that they're, I mean, on the one hand, making making trans people out to be the boogeyman did not work in their favor greatly in the midterms. But it seems like they're not trying to they're not trying to change their tactics here. They are still going all in based on Trump's speech from a few days ago of using the using the transgender menace as the as the greatest threat to America and the and the and the nuclear family. We'll see how that goes for them like electorally, but it's pretty bad rhetoric to see flying around. Yeah, I think the it does really well with the people who who allowed and like you often see this in like primaries, right? Like people push to the limits of their party because that plays well with the most politicized people. And for sure, if you're going to a Trump rally, like three years after he got kicked out. Yeah, you are also a bigot. Yeah. But before we do that, I want to before we actually like really do an episode on this, I want to take a look at the sort of bureaucratic grounding for this entire thing.

And to do that, we need to look up gender bureaucrats and the American gender bureaucracy. So I'm going to cite my sources a bit and say that I stole this from a incredibly unlikely source, which is the Maoist review of Shrek two. What? Wait. Stop. Wait. Yeah. Never speak those words again. This is the Maoist review of Shrek two is one of the three great sort of text of American Maoism. There's this one, there's towards a protracted people's war, the Florida Everglades. And then there's that time the RCP got into a fight with the PSL and they're both trying to grab each other's signs. Amazing. Amazing stuff. But unfortunately, you know, having having come up with the term gender bureaucrat, which is incredibly useful, they're Maoist. So they're constitutionally and politically just unable to understand what a bureaucrat is. So I have now stolen this term and I'm using it for other purposes.

Reappropriate. No, it's stealing. They're Maoists. It's never wrong to steal from Maoists. Okay. Fine. So, all right. Getting back to some more serious stuff. To understand what this is, I want to talk about sort of the term assigned gender at birth. This used to be a fairly common kind of in circles to refer to people as like amab or affabs, like assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth. And it kind of sucks as a term. It's been replaced by other stuff. But I think there's something important here, which is I want to go back and look at the assigned part. And I want to look at specifically the part about the gender being assigned because I think there's something that gets lost in sort of popular discussions of this. Which is that when people think about like the term like the assignment of gender, right, they think about it as something that's created socially, right?

They think about it as, you know, people being like pressured to perform one kind of gender or another by the people around them, sort of by their families, by just like people walking down the street. And this is all true. But there's also something else going on here. That's something else going on here is we need to ask ourselves when we talk about someone's gender being assigned, who is it being assigned by? Because this is an actual specific person, right? The person who actually assigns your gender is a doctor or sometimes a nurse or midwife. And this person is the first gender bureaucrat. And they're the first gender bureaucrat because they are the person who sits down and puts down what your gender is on a form. Now, okay, you may be asking yourself, right?

Mia, why should anyone care that your gender is now on a piece of paper? Well, because it also would be like, they're also mainly, at least in like a medical scientific sense, it's mainly like, oh, what parts do you have? And then using those parts as a carryover for gender as it's been modeled after ever since we stopped dressing boys and girls and dresses and all the same clothing. Yeah, and we'll get into sort of like how this has sort of changed over time. But okay, to understand why this actually matters, I think we need to talk about what bureaucracy actually is. Because this is a thing that used to be fairly common in the left and then people have stopped doing over the past maybe like half decade. The anthropologist David Graber wrote extensively about bureaucracy throughout his career. Probably his most famous book is one of his later works called Bullshit Jobs.

But I want to go back to an earlier thing that he wrote called the Utopia of Rules. I'm gonna read a little bit of one of the first sections of it. Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real life existence and reducing everything to preconceived mechanical or statistical formula. Whether it's a matter of forms, rural statistics or questionnaires, it is always a matter of simplification. Typically, it's not very different from the boss who walks into the kitchen to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong. In either case, it is a matter of applying very simple pre-existing templates to complex and often ambiguous situations. The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have, for some arbitrary reason, decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see 2% of what's in front of them. We can see some of the core aspects of bureaucracy here. Bureaucracy inherently is an active simplification.

Because of literally the technical systems of what a bureaucracy is and because of how it stores information, how it moves information around, it can only see the world in incredibly simplified terms. Yeah, it has to abstract these things and make assumptions based off those abstractions in order to have any type of functionality. On the one hand, the simplification and model-making that goes on in a bureaucracy can be really frustrating if you have to interact with it, but on the other hand, the reduction of the complex to the simple, it's not just a thing that's inherently evil in and of itself. It's the basis of all thought. Because we actually can't in and of ourselves process the world by immediately holding in our minds all of the information at one time. The way we understand the world is implications of models. It's pattern recognition, recreating recursive thought loops that give us the very concept of meaning and that's how we know what words are. It's also possible to take a lot of data and make nonsense out of it. This is a field called economics. Marketing, yeah.

This is also the basis of all social theory. Social theory is about taking a bunch of incredibly complicated and messy relationships and statistical stuff and the noise of people doing things in everyday lives and trying to establish ways of understanding them. This in some sense is a kind of violence. It's a violence of simplification. But on the other hand, the violence you're doing to reality here bears more resemblance to sort of like Bakunin's creative destruction. You're imposing a kind of violence on reality in simplifying and destroying a bunch of aspects of it so you can understand just like one part of it at a time. But this is a useful thing. It's how we think. We literally couldn't do anything without it. But as Graeber puts it, the problems arise at the moment that violence is no longer metaphorical. Here, let me turn from imaginary cops to real ones. Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. Cops don't beat up burglars, he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple.

The one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction from police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts it, define the situation. That perfectly describes any physical interaction with police. This is one of the things I like about Graeber because this is something that I noticed when I was in academia. It is very, very easy to tell when you're reading a social theorist talking about stuff like, who has been tear gasped before? Who hasn't? It's like he was actually dealt with a cup. I'm always reminded when we talk about academics who have a real fucking life, of that picture of Edward Said throwing stones at a single most based academic thing anyone has done. Graeber, I think he's been tear gasped on five continents or something like that. He's gotten around, he's done a lot of stuff. It is always nice whenever these types of theorists, they often will philosophize about the nature of power, the nature of the state, and sometimes it can get a little bit wishy-washy.

And it's nice when there's people who do that who also know the material reality of power and how the philosophy of power transfers over to street politics. It's always an interesting difference to compare various theory to. In 2020, I was teaching a world history course and obviously it's remote because of the pandemic, right? So we would just log in in the morning, fully aware that I had seen and been tear gasped with some of my students the night before, and then just discussed how the state has a monopoly on violence. So people would be like, yeah, that fucking lines up. Looks like you've got a massive bruise again. It's very instructive and everyone should do it in their history classes. Yeah.

Okay, so I'm going to keep reading from this quote because there's a couple more things I want to get out of this. Cool. So he's talking about how you get a violent reaction from challenging the right to define the situation. That is to say, no, this isn't a possible crime situation. This is a citizen who pays your salary walking his dog situation. So shove off, let alone the invariably disastrous, wait, why are you handcuffing that guy? He didn't do anything. So true. It's talking back above all that inspires beat downs and means challenging whatever administrative rubric,

an orderly, a disorderly crowd, a properly or improperly registered vehicle has been applied by the officer's discretionary judgment. The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost on attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts John Piaget's famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives or multiple or possible perspectives, one can see here precisely how bureaucratic power at the moment it turns to violence becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity. Yeah, it is. It is this weird like childlike sense that is that is an interesting combination of thoughts. That's a fantastic grave of passage.

Like literally reading this book is like one of the things that like really sort of like committed me to anarchism because it's a book that actually takes violence seriously. While talking about bureaucracy was something that really doesn't. I don't know. It's a good critique and we kind of have lost it over the years. I think we've gotten into arguments about this sort of thing when discussing the usefulness of like a Foucault's theories of power and like how power functions. You've definitely brought up this passage before talking about how the extent of that is always is always measured by where the truncheon is hitting. Yeah, like the actual street level. Yeah, but you know, okay, Graeber isn't writing about gender here really, right?

He's mostly writing about sort of direct police violence, although I mean it is worth noting that like all of the stuff that he's writing is informed by sort of like by actually specifically by actual critical race theory and by sort of like like feminist standpoint theory stuff. Yeah. But you know, okay, if you look back at this, right? And you look back at sort of the point at which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schemes and the monopoly on force come together or specifically the parts that are about, right, like the way you get a violent reaction is by being something that a bureaucrat thinks you're not. Yeah. That is... It's challenging their version of reality. It's challenging the validity of their perception of reality.

Yeah, and you know, and if you think about this for about five seconds, if you're a trans person, that's not good because someone, a bureaucrat has already assigned you a gender at birth and if you're not that gender, things are going to get really bad really quickly. Well, do you know what bureaucracies are actually worthwhile and things that you should definitely consider greatly? Is all of the bureaucracies that support the products and services that fund this podcast? Well, I hope you enjoy your five new bars of gold. Thank you for supporting the show. We are back. Let's talk about gender and the bureaucracy that seeks to contain it. Violence.

Yeah, sure. You know, if you are, for example, intersex, the point at which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force comes together is on the operating table of the hospital where you're born. You know, first, a doctor assigns you a fucking gender, which is never intersex, by the way. The doctor just decides whether you're male or female and then, you know, puts that gender on your birth certificate. It's technically possible in some places to get it changed to intersex later in life. But when I say it's technically possible, there might even be more people who've done it. The first person who we know ever changed their gender to intersex did it in 2017. Wow.

So, yeah. I'm sure there were, like, pre-bureaucracy indigenous societies. I know there were. Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, but this is, yeah, this is, yeah. And this is another, like, the way that, like, we treat intersex people also has gotten worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, yeah. And we're gonna get into this, too, but it's like, you know, this is a very, like, it's a very obvious thing where there's clearly more than two genders. And how a society reacts to that, I think, says, you know, A, it's an enormous sort of, like, it's something that enormously impacts intersex people, right? Like, you know, you have, like, an incredible amount of violence that is inflicted onto them. And then, secondly, the way intersex people is dealt with, it's something that reveals a lot about how the society is going to look at gender and how society is going to look

at the enforcement of gender. I think on the point of how, in a lot of ways, the treatment of intersex people has gotten worse in the past, like, a few hundred years. As the bureaucracy grows, the amount of violence that is necessary to maintain it also grows. And the bigger, any small thing threatens the validity of the entire bureaucracy, so they have to come down hard on anything that is, that is, like, deviant from that. Because they need to maintain the validity of the system that they have built. I think that's definitely an aspect.

And the other thing that's really, really bad is that, you know, we're going to talk about this more a bit later, but, like, the actual capacity of the bureaucracy to enforce this stuff has increased so dramatically, even in the past 50 years, it is like, like, the U.S. is a, does someone, does someone live in 1890, right? The modern U.S. is an incomprehensibly bureaucratic society. It is like, like, it, it, it, it, it. Even like the, even like the 1960s. You know, like, like, the, like, yeah, like, even, like, the, the, the, the most sort of,

like, totalitarian Stalinist bureaucrat, like, looks at the U.S. and is like, what the fuck, guys? You guys have taken, taken bureaucracy too far. Like, even just, like, the surveillance capacity is. Oh, you definitely would. Like, you would have loved that. Well, to, to be, to be fair, to be fair, the East Germans did really well with what they had, but.

I think it's really, I think also just in terms of how surveillance impacts the way you're able to do gender. When you're. Yeah. When you're getting targeted advertisements for stuff based on your internet searches, they're like, that, that's one side of it. And there's other sides of it in terms of, like, you know, people, people seeking to make, like, different gender presentations illegal.

How the, how, how that type of surveillance will eventually lead into pretty, pretty draconian stuff. And I think, I think, I think in a lot of ways, like, the violence that is done to intersex kids is sort of, is one of the sort of origin points of this, right? I do actually want, I want to sort of get into what, what this is a little bit since the 1960s. And again, those I'm saying this, like, this stuff is kind of recent, right? Doctors have started commonly performing non-consensual surgery on intersex kids to force them to

conform to a gender. Here's from a 2013 report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture that's human rights watch. Children who are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to irreversible sex assignment, involuntary sterilization, involuntary genital normalization surgery, performed without their informed consent or that of the parents in an attempt, quote, in an attempt to fix their sex, leaving them with permanent, permanent irreversible infertility and causing severe mental suffering.

And this is fucking horrible. It happens all the time and all of the people who write these fucking laws that are like giving, giving someone gender affirming care is like mutilating them, specifically carve out sections so that doctors can keep fucking doing this to intersex kids. And it's horrible. It's really interesting how like, so often the sports field is a terrain where this kind of gets hashed out or like this brutality happens for the first time, like the sports field usually 140 kids get to assert their sex because the sex field is so terrible.

And the people in the planning authorities have been fucking brutalizing intersex athletes for 50 years now and every time it's because, yeah, there's a, they'll put forth an argument and then lose in court most of the time because they'll they'll seek to advance And then they'll lose, and they'll respond to losing by fucking destroying that person. Yeah. Yeah, there are plenty of cases people can find in history of that happening, and yeah, it's fucked up. Yeah, and I think, the more I've been thinking about this, the more I think that the sort

of like, that a lot of what Turfism is, is this kind of like, it's attempting to take the bureaucratic categories as literal truth, but that doesn't work. It doesn't actually work on a sort of, either on a scientific level or on a sort of moral philosophical level, because again, what that sort of bureaucratic assignment is, is a radical simplification of reality that destroys reality itself in order to create a sort of like an M or an F on a page. And when you try to go back into the real world, that shit doesn't work. It only works when you can enforce it with violence.

Turfs, do you be loving to enforce gender with violence? Yeah. I mean, this is, this entire thing is sort of, this is the basis of the sort of the American gender bureaucracy, right? It's inherently violent. It's not just sort of a procedure for recording what your gender is, it is, it always sort of has been and is increasingly more so now, becoming a system that imposes a gender on you.

You know, and there's also a lot of ways that this bureaucracy gets imposed on you that are, you know, less extreme. You know, if we go back to the question of like, who are you assigned a gender for, right? You're assigned a gender for the state. And you know, almost everything in your life depends on these bureaucratic documents, because that's how the state understands you as a person, by these bureaucratic documents, like specifically birth certificates, but also like driver's licenses, social security cards, passports, immigration papers, yeah, I mean, like, here's the American Bar Association

talking about birth certificates. They are so common that we might even overlook their significance. In the United States, birth certificates serve as a proof of an individual's age, citizenship status and identity. They are necessary to obtain social security, apply for a passport, enroll in schools, get a driver's license, gain employment or apply for other benefits. Humanitarian Desmond Tutu described the birth certificate as quote, a small paper, but it actually establishes who you are and gives access to the rights and privileges and the

obligations of citizenship. You know, and I think Desmond Tutu is being enormously optimistic about sort of what it means to be seen by the state here, because the other thing that it does is it exposes you to the state's violence in a way where, you know, it now, the state, like this is the mechanism through which it now knows who you are, right? So does not having one, like when the subsids try to not have birth certificates for their children, the state gets real violent. And this is the thing, one of the things I hear about this is that like, you know, okay,

you used to be able to like get away with not having birth certificates, right? Like a lot of Americans used to not to, used to like not. But one of the things that happens over the course of World War II is there's this enormous expansion in the state's bureaucratic capacity and there's an expansion in the state's bureaucratic capacity because it has to, you know, it has to go to war. But simultaneously this, and this is something that didn't have to happen, but did, is that you get the army and you get employers starting to ask people's birth certificates, but people don't have them because like, I don't know, I was why the fuck do I need a record of me

being born? Yeah. Right? Like this is, this is, this is only a, this is not everything you need. It's only a thing the state needs. Yeah. It's interesting to look at like, I was just thinking about how like this is also where the kind of frontline of colonialism happens.

Yeah. Like the, the enforcement of a binary gender on indigenous people, like you can look at specific individuals, Osh Tish is one of them, they were a crow, person from the Crow Nation who fought for the United States as a scout, was what's called a bade and then was like in later life kind of forced to conform to a binary gender with which they didn't identify and they hadn't lived that way. And because they had to having been assigned identity papers to live on a reservation, you have to take one of the fucking boxes.

Yeah. And you know, and the thing about those fucking boxes, right, is, you know, even like to this day, there are a lot of states where you can't change your gender, like on, on, on, you can't change what it says in the fucking card, you just can't. And you know, if they've assigned you a gender that's not your gender, then well, tough luck. They have, they have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and you don't. You know, and there's other states where you need a fucking court order saying that you've had surgery in order to get the fucking, you know, in order to change your bureaucratic

person. And again, the reason for this is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, fuck you. That is, that is, that is the reason for this. Yeah, I want to, I want to go back also to, you know, look to look a bit more about sort of bureaucratic effects. I'm going to read from an IEEE piece about a trans guy in the UK in the 50s. From the start, the sensationalized press coverage of Ferguson's transition focused on some surprisingly quotidian elements, quote, chains of sex puts them in a different employment category with a raise in salary reported one newspaper, underscoring the fact that being

reclassified as male in the eyes of his employer, the British government tied into a complex network of gendered economic and labor discrimination. In fact, not only did his pay change, but his whole job category changed, even though he was doing exactly the same work under the same conditions. This was because women workers were simply, were not simply paid less, but also kept in feminized job grades in the civil service. Despite the government's claims that service was a meritocracy, a question, a question raised in parliament by an MP who had heard about Ferguson demanded to know what form and number of proofs other than a mere announcement

by the subject. It is required before a female, quote, civil servant is permitted to obtain a higher salary in a different employment category owing to a change in sex. By gaining a, quote, official change, Jonathan Ferguson suddenly transformed himself, suddenly transformed into chief experimental officer with a male breadwinner salary large enough to support a family rather than a woman's lower wage that was expected to be supplemental to a family's earnings. For obvious reasons noted the treasury, we should not have to say anything which would

have led to a request for the male pay rate to be applied from his data's entry to the civil service. In other words, the treasury wanted to ensure that Ferguson did not try to claim back wages. Incredible. Turf Island always been very normal, and I want to read a little bit more of this. Conversely, a different civil servant, this time a trans woman who was working in the Admiralty Department and transitioning around the same time, was advised it was in her, quote, interest to delay official recognition of the change until at least January 1960,

assuming full equal pay in the civil service is introduced by 1961. Her employers wrote that it was in her, quote, own interest, in their opinion, to continue wearing men's clothing for the time being in order to avoid a significant reduction in pay. It's funny because I was not funny, it's fucked up in this stupid, isn't it, but I knew trans people in Britain who will have grown up around this time, who socially transitioned after retirement. Yeah.

At least openly, we weren't like BFFs or anything, but it's absolutely fucking insane that this argument was deployed. Yeah, and you can see what's sort of going on here, which is that it's more explicitly obvious in here than it is in a lot of other cases, but your status in the gender bureaucracy is a key element of how you're able to extract resources from the state. And that's literally just an explicit pay gap, like it was based on institutional sexism. But I think the second case is in a lot of ways more revealing, right? The state and its gender bureaucracy is very explicitly saying conform to what the bureaucracy

says your gender is and you'll get paid more, and if you don't, you'll get paid less. And if you look at this more abstractly, right, in order to interface with the state in order to extract wealth or benefits, in order to pay your fucking taxes, in order to drive, in order to buy alcohol, apparently now in order to buy the stupid cleaning bottles of compressed air that you have to use to clean out your computer keyboards, in order to buy alcohol in order to get on an airplane, you have to conform to the state's bureaucratic view of you. And if you don't, you can't do it.

And this brings up the question, what right does the state have to assign my gender? And the state will spit out a variety of sort of pseudo-medical and pseudo-political explanations, but the answer is that the state has no right to tell you what your gender is except force. And you know, the extent to which the state has actually been able to sort of do this kind of stuff has changed over time. We've talked about this a bit, but like, you know, over the course of sort of the 20th century, and you know, we can also look at things like, we can look at the war on terror, we can look at neoliberalism, and David Graber's iron law of liberalism, which is the iron law

of liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing a total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs, which I always love. But you know, like, we've seen the sort of consequences of this playing out over the course of, you know, the last about a century, right, if you go back to the 1890s, it was possible for basically private citizens to have just full on wars with each other in parts of the US, and the government would just be like, sure, okay, whatever, like,

the people mining bird shit off of the coast of California are shooting each other with cannons again, like, whatever, right, like, it's not really until the 20th century and really, even like the last 50, 60, 70 years has been a massive expansion of this, that like the state actually has full territorial control over everywhere that it claims to have control of, right, we're like, we are just now getting to a place where the police can actually, you know, like have like militarily hold the entire country at one time. And even then they can only do it as long as people sort of cooperate with them. But you know, this, this is really bad, if you're a person who the bureaucracy has deemed

to be something else, or, and this is another sort of angle on this, right, like, if you're someone who does not have documentation, the state very, very quickly will just attempt to destroy you, because, you know, oh, hey, you don't have the right papers, this means the government can fucking arrest you and kick you out of the country. Yeah. And, you know, this is fucking horrible. There's a lot of stuff, like there's a lot of other angles you can look at this from, right?

I mean, like at some point, we probably will do an episode about like the process of getting medical care and all of the people who you have to convince that you are your gender. But you know, that's another episode entirely. What I want to get at here is that state bureaucratic power is being used in by just increasingly politicized gender bureaucrats, not only to force people to comply with their sort of state mandated gender when they deal with the state, but also to force them to inhabit that gender in their private lives, which is constitutes nothing less than a form of full scale gender totalitarianism.

We talked about that fucking Utah bill, which, you know, again, prohibits minors from getting gender-affirming surgery, PB Block is a hormone treatment, that that is a bill that forces people to live in their state mandated gender. In Florida, gender bureaucrats are allowed to physically inspect athletes. They suspect of being trans, which is to say, not conforming to fucking state bureaucratic gender controls. It's children, right? Yeah.

Fucking children. Like, they are allowed to molest your child because they think they're trans. The other aspect of this is obviously there is something we've talked about before, something that you're starting to see with these bills is they're trying to make the bills age number go as high as possible. There's bills proposing 25 now, 21, there's bills proposing 25, so it's trying to police and control the bodily autonomy of complete adults, which obviously is not a new thing for the GOP specifically, especially in the wake of the Roe v. Wade overturning.

Another aspect of this goes beyond just people who are younger than the age of 19. They're going to try to keep raising this as much as possible, and this is where the types of surveillance that I was talking about before is going to become a problem because if you're Googling how to do DIY HRT and get stuff shipped in from Brazil, don't think that the surveillance stuff is not going to impact your ability to do that. There are also policies like the gender presentation of cis people, specifically cis women, I think. The people who are getting physically inspected because of these laws are just girls who are good at fucking sport, like there's cis girls, they might be taller or stronger, and anyone

has the power to just be like, oh, you're not a girly enough girl, so fucking now you get to go to the pervert room and get inspected by my kids. In Texas, the law right now is that if the state thinks your fucking child is not sufficiently close to the gender, they can fucking take your child from you and force them to be whatever fucking gender the state wants them to be. Any other period in history, if you walk into a room and tell a bunch of people the state is going to decide your fucking gender, everyone would lose their goddamn minds, this would be like, this is a unfathomable, even in the depths of the totalitarian nightmare of states.

This is like an unfathomable level of state bureaucratic imposition onto people's lives, and yet it's the fucking U.S., right? We are the most bureaucratic society humanity has ever produced, nobody thinks it's the most bureaucratic society has ever produced, and we are right now every day seeing the points at which bureaucracy meets violence. The last thing I have to say is that this is the future of gender, the future of gender is government bureaucrats, whether they're cops, politicians, doctors, child protective services, or school board administrators forcing you to be a gender that they're not.

But fundamentally, they have no fucking right to do this, right? What they have is power, and their grasp on power is still right now tenuous. So you know, it is possible to stop them from going any further than this, it is possible to beat back the power of the state, and it is possible to have a world that's not this. And we know it's possible to have a world that's not this because it wasn't fucking like this like 50 years ago. So yeah, fuck them. And that's that's that's that's that's that's gender bureaucrats.

People should read David Graber, learn about intersectionality for fucking second. Another another another great resource to learn about how you can like, mix up gender stuff. There's this new video game out right now, which has a pretty intense character creation selection. But you can it's called it's called Hogwarts Legacy. Is that? Oh, no, I thought you're going with cyberpunk. Oh, no.

But it has it has it has a lot of different customizations that you can do for your gender presentation and and and your body parts. You know, OK, OK, I've I've I've been refusing to do this on Twitter, but I need I need to take fucking one minute, talk about the dumbest argument anyone's ever made, which is that I have to buy this game in order to support the developers, which think about this for a second. It's right. OK, if you have to buy this game to support the developers, don't you have to buy every

other game to support their developers? In fact, are you not morally obligated to buy every single product on earth? Because if you don't buy every single product that's ever been made, you the those the people who made those products will not be deployed. It's bullshit. This is such a weird weird like capitalism of poison development here thinking you're obligated to consume lots of people online. I have been holding my tongue on Twitter about this for months now, fucking watching people

watching people make the argument. I have to buy something to support the developers, which again, buy a different game, support those developers by fucking go go on strike. Fucking I don't know if you want to if you want to support the developer, give your money to this off. Someone who isn't a fucking video game developer. Well, I'm glad we could I'm glad we could have that that special bonding moment over the very inclusive gender settings inside this new hit video game.

So that's that's pretty cool. I feel like I'm an ad from them soon. I hope so. I hope so. The worst Twitter day of my life is the day we get that fucking ad gold presented by Hogwarts. 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 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. Welcome 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. Hi everyone. It could happen here and it's just James today because today I'm doing a little interview on the situation for Rohingya people. If you're not familiar with the Rohingya genocide, we're not going to cover that in

depth, but we will give a little bit of an overview. And I'm talking to Ankur Mo who is Rohingya himself and who works with the National Unity Government in advising them about Rohingya people's human rights. I think the news cycle hasn't really covered many Rohingya issues since the Rohingya genocide. The world's kind of moved on from caring about them, but they're still in a very difficult situation and we want to update you on issues that continue to face the Rohingya people. I hope you enjoy the interview. So today I'm joined by Ankur Mo, who's an advisor to the National Unity Government of

Myanmar, which people will hopefully be familiar with, if not he can explain a little bit of what that is. He's an advisor to the Ministry of Human Rights and also a Rohingya human rights activist himself. So, hi. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so what I'd love to do today is, I think, if our listeners have listened to our previous

coverage of what's happening in Myanmar or Burma, depending on which one you prefer, they will know a lot about the coup and they will know a lot about the things of Papas Dinsukhu, the PDFs and the ethnic resistance organizations. But I think they might not be as familiar with the situation that Rohingya people have been in for a long time and continue to be in. It's a different part of the country. We were in Maisot, which is on the other side, and that's something we've covered a lot less.

So, perhaps you could begin by explaining why there are so many Rohingya refugees who have left. Obviously, the history of the persecution of Rohingya people is very long, but if you could give us a potted history of the persecution of Rohingya people by various governments in Myanmar and what has led to this massive exodus and this big refugee population of Rohingya people now, that would be great to start with. Great. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. The history is very long, but I will be concrete and short. The Rohingya people have been in Myanmar before Burma even existed, before Burma became Burma and before British came and their significant architect-related infrastructure that exists indicates the existence of the Rohingya, and there's a lot of literature and research, and Rohingya people themselves living in generations and generations there indicates that Rohingya are part of Myanmar and it used to be and it will be. And Rohingya, not only the ethnic minority, they are also the religious minority.

Majority of Burmese people are Buddhists and, of course, the second largest followed by the Muslims are Christian and then the third largest are Muslim and Rohingya are Muslim. And Rohingya sing the Muslim ethnic groups and sing also religious ethnic groups. And there has been historical exclusion, discriminations sponsored and carried out by the consecutive government of Myanmar to target these religious and ethnic minority to exclude from religious, ethnic and social aspects of the society and it has been politically motivating for many government. It has always been beneficial in convincing the larger populations of Myanmar by showing

Rohingya as a threat to the country because of their religious differences and the way that we wear and we eat are slightly different than Burmese because we have our own culture and own traditions and own language and it's enriched by those. Thus the first start of executing these discriminatory policies towards the Rohingya started as long as as far as back in 1960 where the first coup took place, 1962 when first coup took place and then military, consecutive military government accelerated that to form two situations where it can be defined and all under the category of the crimes against humanity. So in 1978 there is a big operations against Rohingya people to deport them and 200,000

people has to flee to Bangladesh and some of them still remain as refugees to third generation, fourth generations in Bangladesh not being able to repatriate it to the place where they come from. And followed by that the 1992 there was another influx of the refugees and the refugee it's also the quite significant larger number of the refugees and not everyone could come back and there is another layer of the refugees that remains from the repatriating. And from the human right violations became to Rohingya as business as usual, limiting the child, the number of child that you can have and treating you less than an animal,

not having the religious right to exercise the way that you believe and restrictions of movement, killing, raping and it's continued and it has been accelerated in different form and shape where it could come to a situation it's from crimes against humanity it's being transformed to genocides and in 2017 it's one to the highest peak of the genocides where a million people are being deported by burning and many thousand people died and many thousand women being raped and there are a lot of fatherless a child in the camp today being big born by the women victims of the rape of the Myanmar military and today there is a million people in Bangladesh and with no hope to be repatriated soon to the place of origin with safety and

dignity and of course the political landscape in Myanmar has shifted it used to be in the democratic transition from 2010 to 2020 with two consecutive different government and the democratically elected government has been overthrown by a Temku by the military who had ruled the country for many decades and of course the democratically elected government which I advise to is being some of the member of the government are being arrested and some are in the ethnic territorial control and some are in exile and so the country the reactions of the 50 million people has been different because there has been several coup in Myanmar and this was the political calculations of the military leaders to attend the coup was

wrong that they did not expect the resistance of the people and then of course the young generation Z people came in to resist and usually they claim to be peacefully protesting to hand over the power back to the to the democratically elected people but as a result they were being brutally cracked on and killed arrested and then and then young people started to understand that we need to speak the language that they understand so they speak that language is grabbing a gun and forming the military so followed by that national unity government has been formed by with the elected members of the of the of the parliament vote lower on upper house so the national unity government today is the most the legitimate government

of Myanmar and having also some territorial control of course majority of the government in best infrastructure are being being captured illegally by the military yeah and it's interesting that people are familiar with the sort of ethnic makeup of previous governments and then the national unity government from what I understand it's not as much dominated by the majority ethnic Furman people in the national unity government as it was before and even under the NLD right even under sort of the most most democratic that it has been in Myanmar for some time like there was still a domination by by one ethnicity right but the national unity government is more ethnically diverse is that right correct but still there's a

lot of rooms for improvement particularly Rohingya people has always been part of Myanmar and politically excluded and despite a million people being pushed out to the Bangladesh through a genocidal attempt the remaining populations in Myanmar is 600,000 people politically represented both sides of populations under continued genocidal attempts of the Myanmar military and the national unity government did not include politically meaningfully the Rohingya population still now and they appointed me as an advisor but a politically representable size of populations need to be represented not by functions alone it's need to be both represented by functions and number equally to to to other ethnic and we

are in the context of identity politics in Myanmar and your political rights and responsibilities to what the nations are associated that the very identity that you were so time to time there is a big questions like you know we are moving forward to the path of democracy to make the country to back to the track of democracy but the very principle of democracy is majority rules and respect the minorities right and still the Rohingya are being despite the international pressure particularly the United States and its allies to have inclusive democracy and Rohingya people are not yet meaningfully included in the government. Yeah and I think that's something we've spoken about a lot with with the Korean and Korean

people who we've spoken to about sort of the need for a more inclusive structure whether that's like a federal democracy after obviously after the military hunter has been deposed or certainly something that's more inclusive and perhaps we can talk about how like it's very interesting to me when I talk to young people generation Z people from Myanmar they will say that like they wouldn't have even said sometimes Rohingya like 10 years ago that they wouldn't have used a term they'd have they'd have seen the people who we know who we would call Rohingya as Bangladeshis right because this was the narrative can you explain how you've explained very well that that's not true but how that narrative was

constructed and what it was used to do. I think it's once again to exclude Rohingya and to carry out systematic distractions mentally and physically on the Rohingya is also a lot to do with the spreading propaganda misinformation and disinformation through state-led media both online and offline and so this means these distractions has happened to the state sponsored and state pre-planned intentional intentional way of doing it and thus the the society the Rohingya people has been restricted from moving and this one of the least developed region where the Rohingya people live in a lot of people from from like other state wouldn't be able to travel and go and see what is happening

really inside there and to Rohingya people would not be able to move out of that to tell their stories so all the narrative that people hear is the military and the government what the government used to put at that moment so in the in the in the eyes or in the perceptions of the people the Rohingyas are from Bangladesh and they are trying to take over the country and they had a national security threat and that was the narrative so the reality is being defined by the perceptions and false and misinformation that being given in a consistent intentional way to the young people and of course today I think has changed slightly to be seeing to what what is reality and and people showing the sympathy to what happened

to the Rohingya because it's every time something happened in Myanmar like that it's consistent to what to the Rohingya the the human right violations crimes against humanity and genocide and the people 50 million people in Myanmar were not either they are seeing neutral or they are standing with the military not like to that they should do this and this is right to do to kill people right to rape because they are national security threat but what had happened to the Rohingya people perhaps in the not the same shape and same a sorority or or velocity or momentum or intensity started to happen after the coup to to the to the Burma people and then they tend to realize oh what happened to Rohingya what Rohingya

used to tell burning the whole village is killing and raping is exactly what what what is happening more or less exactly what is happening to us than they they were right and it's the victims change and the perpetrators remain the same and with that concept people come to but again I think they still it's very small number of the populations compared to the whole populations that lives in Myanmar and in in in the democratic principles there is no like you don't tend to say something just because that you sympathize and they are they are principles and values that you do not compromise in any circumstance so equal right justice and and inclusivity and like like celebrating of the the diversity these

things are very core principles of of of the democracy that's that we are like as a Burmese people asking from international community to help what we are preaching for to what to the democracy need to be demonstrated at home first we need to act upon and and so I think the the the benchmark there is no the benchmark shouldn't be defined to include or exclude someone based on the sympathies need to be based on the principles and values can you explain a little bit about the situation that Rohingya people who have left Myanmar maybe they're in Cox's Bazaar maybe they're in no man's land maybe they're they're now being moved to an island right can can you explain what life is like for those people

of course the when Rohingya people flights to Bangladesh it was attempting to survive like they managed to survive and otherwise many died and they they could be one of those who who who died and they they survived meaning that these all people are have physical and mental destruction and unheal the scars in their physical and mental aspects of the life and and of course a million people in Bangladesh to be hosted by the Bangladeshi government Bangladeshi people has been also very difficult because the resource in the given area is very limited and Bangladesh itself is a small country with with with limited resource and we should always appreciate Bangladeshi people and Bangladeshi government to open their arms

and hearts to to to absorb and and and a million people and and and and again I think the problem has started in Myanmar and and the the solutions need to be in Myanmar and and people need to be going with safe dignified way to the place of origin and and of course Bangladesh it has been five years plus now that the people like the largest influx took place in 2017 and there were repatriation set them being made and and they when people fled from Myanmar jump into the North River and Bay of Bengal in 2017 because the land was more dangerous than the sea situations remain very same or even worse than that now in in in Myanmar to be going back so you are you escape from a grave that you have half buried to be killed

and being pushed to go back to to to Myanmar is as in sent him back to the to the grave that you escape from from from dying so the situation doesn't favor for a safe dignified voluntary return for the for the Rohingya thus Bangladeshi authorities are trying to find different innovative modality different ways how to how to create sustainable situations for the Rohingya including relocations of the of the certain number of the of the of the Rohingya populations because the the the the camps are very congested and the hygiene level in the camp are very low and there are a lot of also the the crowd on like you know if a million people in a smaller scale place like that's are being being closed anything

could happen anytime you know so the the the idea was to by the Bangladesh government which doesn't fall into into the principle of international way of doing things and and relocating some of these refugees to an island that has is a new island to know human being has been ever lived there and the island has been technically from various technical assessment has identified it's not liveable by human being yet and because there are a lot of like cyclones and and and floods and things like that and it's very far away from a million of Bangladesh and indeed so there is risk from from from various perspective to be able but despite this Bangladesh government has built sheltered this and relocated some

number of Rohingya and some of them went by their own will seeing that it might be a different and and some are being maybe perhaps forced and and of course there are a certain number of like around close to five to six thousand people in no man's land when Bangladesh at the beginning did not open its border to when Rohingya were fleeing and and so this no man land we're being occupied by the nearby villages because Bangladesh wouldn't open the gate for them and they were stuck in India so they happen to be stuck there since last five years and the the the the remaining Rohingya lives in in in Cox was our districts of Bangladesh in different part of this district so that's the situation.

Yeah that's very well said and some people have have taken on recently leaving these camps in Bangladesh they've taken on this very risky boat journey right I think they're going to places like Malaysia if I'm not mistaken Indonesia and can you explain a little bit about like how prevalent that is and of course how incredibly like high risk it is for people to take that journey. Sure the the situations in the camp is not much different than the life that they used to live in in in Myanmar despite that the level of level of human right violations and the treatment that they are having may not be the same but Bangladesh is not a signatory

to 1952 refugee conventions and it's not legally obliged to be to be following all international norms and protocols to be to be hosting the the the refugees but despite they have demonstrated the humanity and demonstrated the moral obligations towards the humanity to host the the a million people and the then the a million people some of them has been from 1978 and some of them are from 1992 some of them are from 2017 has a very dark future they they are closed in this fence camp and the movements are restricted access to information are not given like the inter access to information are like internet service and things like that has been denied access to livelihoods are denied and they are not able to legally work and solely rely

on to to the international human resources and access to education has been denied. So the young people who are growing in this camp does not see a future that they will be able to go back to Myanmar or if they live here as if you are living at that like you know you don't have any any any way forward seeing a bright future so there is there is the only they don't have a best alternative to be try to be exploring different path and the only path it happened to be is being created in the past in the past by some Rohingyas taking these boats and making to Malaysia where they could do some domestic works and get a refugee status and maybe able to work and and some you're lucky enough to be resettled

in a thought country a small number maybe less than two less than two three percent of the total total Rohingya in Malaysia. So the journey is very risky the the the the boats that they are taking the first the sea is very rough that they take and they are the the the infrastructure what infrastructure that they're taking are not built like they they not built in a way to be coping with this rough sea and rough rough weather and climate. So many of these Rohingya people who make these less than 50 percent of them may make it to the to the destinations either they die on the sea or they are being arrested

by different navies and and or they are they are being jailed by by Myanmar and in 2020 alone 3,500 more than 3,500 people including children as young as two years old are jailed to five years for trying to attempt to to go to Malaysia. So this is this is what is happening so the the the life is meaningless there and of course taking this journey mean that you are tossing a coin whether you you you get a tail or you get a you get head or you got tails you know and and and so it's like batting your life whether if you make it your your life to somewhat level meaningfully if you don't make it your life and it is more or less the same that you will live in there in there.

So that's why these are the push factors and of course they are full factors reunification if a son has made three years ago five years ago to to Malaysia and working in the constructions or or or gardening like levers and and you have a remaining family in the camp and you don't want to see your family in that situation and you want to bring your family kids or children or wife and you do that and and lastly also they are growing youth in Malaysia who are who want to marry the Rungia and maintain the cultural language and things like that. So they want to have rights bringing from the refugee camp and and so they're they're different push pull factor as well from from Malaysia but the primary factor is the push

factor in Myanmar and in Bangladesh. Right yeah and it's perfectly reasonable for people to want so yeah some futures and some chance to realize their own life and their goals. So can you explain people will probably have seen like I think we're recording this on Thursday which is the look at the day the 19th and and people will have seen the last couple of days maybe videos of fires in no man's land and and they will probably have seen like some acronyms which are a lot of acronyms when when you're reading about Myanmar it can be very confusing. So could you explain a little bit about who these two groups that we've seen right the ARSA and the ARSA who they are and what they what they represent and perhaps why these two groups who are normally

Rohingya are fighting each other. So the in the context of Myanmar politics the ethnic people has been fighting for decades and and and decades with Myanmar, Malaysia and Bama supremacy like for larger majority supremacy at the beginning they were attempt during the time of independence through reconciliation and dialogue meaning like without arms but the the language again being understood by the by the Myanmar larger majority is the language that they speak as well. So then ethnic people started to grab the arms and and resist control their territory to to attempt to control their territory in order to get the equal right and decide for their own future be part of the decisions that collectively impact the nations

and and to basically equal right justice and and and those those things that's what ethnic peoples are fighting for and giving their lives and livelihoods it's nothing less than that and nothing more than that's very simple we want to live with dignity freely equally with anyone else and and so many ethnic revolutionary organizations forms came came up in different part of Myanmar representing different ethnic and Rohingya also used to be one of those back in 1950 40 after 1940 48 dependent and 1952 Rohingya is the first one to drop the gun in exchange of the peace with the government saying that we are peace loving people and as long as you give us what what what our identity and and and we are able to and we are so then there's a certain period

of time that the Rohingya people did not have an armed opposition group because I am someone who believed in nonviolent movement but in a context like Myanmar again nonviolent movement who didn't go anywhere if it's work 70 years Myanmar wouldn't have longest civil war in the world more than 70 years right so we need to be practical and and seeing the reality like that so then then 1978 again these things happened and then and the Rohingya thinks okay then what we have been promised and what we have we are we are being told to be promised to be given is not given so we have to grab the gun again and form a do as others are doing in order to to so the Rohingya solidarity organization has been formed and and it has been one of the popular organizations getting a lot of

popularity from the Rohingya community and then there were issues within the institution that has been growing of course they were not able to maintain the the institutional growth and institutional resource management and then the the institution collapse and as well as it has to do something with the like you don't have a territory like other other other armed opposition group will will be stationed in Myanmar where Rohingya we're stationed in Bangladesh and Bangladesh government we're not really supporting enough for them to survive with with with to enhance its military capability and and of course there are several other other other things and and so then it's disappeared in between and then and 2014 this guy a guy called this the guy who is leading

currently the the the RARC Arkan celebrations army who was born in in Pakistan and grew up in Saudi Arabia his parent he claimed his parent is Rohingya and of course he speak the Rohingya language that's mean it's indicate that he is and came to to our kind of stage to mobilize people saying that you need to grab the gun and this is what then people of course who have critical thinking skills and did not believe into things because it's need to be from and within and someone who does not understand how Myanmar politics look like cannot lead to a revolutions because revolutionary has to do a lot with the with the politics political landscape as well in the country and and but however there are a certain number of people who believe in it in

full very small number and and Rohingya didn't want to again fight or or enter into violence and they just want to live peacefully and and that and and they are resilient to what to what they are trying to gain equally as others and and so then the our conservation army ARSE has attacked the post 30 different police force in 2017 that's where the the collective punishment has been given as a result of the Rohingya Rohingya community and it's not collective action it was individual's action a certain hundred four people gathered together and at 10 police force and and and the whole Rohingya population has been punished so then followed by that as well ARSE has been pre-strangerizing themselves and then the Rohingya solidarity organizations also pop up

parallely back into 2018-2019 and and and of course the the ideology that they stand are slightly different from one another and so the the the that's why the the clash happened and and Rohingya solidarity organization think that like the way that ARSE has been conducting and they're responsible the for what happened to the Rohingya people as a collectively genocides and things like that creating opportunities for Burmese military to to wipe out the Rohingya and deport the Rohingya and so they were this political disagreement between these two groups and this normal land has been mostly occupied within the Rohingya refugees there some ARSE members are often try to to enter there and and and the stations there and so recently the what we have

learned from the ground is that ARSE Rohingya solidarity organizations wrote out and operations to remove them from there and so that the Rohingya refugee in the normal lands could live peacefully without crimes and things like that and and that's how the fight has started and and it's escalated and there were 200 houses being burned on shelters during refugee shelters around 2500 to 3000 people has been has to be displaced they were not allowed to enter to Bangladesh because normal land is not accessible by neither parties and it's just in between so some of them has destroyed the fence towards Burma and entered to there because they are just from the nearby villages they could see their villages for five years but they could not go back so they so they

they went back there but now Myanmar military is pushing them out from from there back to the normal lands yeah it's just a yeah terrible situation and if both these aren't the only armed groups in that state right there are other armed groups but like this this sort of explains it more succinctly like if we get into the other armed groups it gets even more complicated and so I wonder what people listening obviously will um they've had they've heard a lot about about the conflict in Burma about the various different groups that have been persecuted by the Burmese military how can they help specifically with with this issue is is there ways that people can can help out I think we have seen how the world came together to help

Ukraine people unjustly illegally to be attacked by by Russia and and threatening the democratic society of the world and and that has been very inspiring appreciated and and we stand with the Ukrainian people and people in Burma has the the life of the the value of the life of the people in Burma has also the there is no difference in lives you can buy one you you know so we have been the people in Myanmar has been fighting for for the cost of life and livelihoods today with whatever means that they have to make this country back to the path of democracy and and so international community should do beyond releasing the statement or of concern and statement of concern maybe maybe may name and shame and may put political pressure and

political pressure is not the the the the thing that's being cared by by the by the by the junta so the the the the total enemy of the overall people including Duhengge people are the military and and and they are the one who has destroyed this country and they are the one who is destroying and they are responsible primary responsible you know people institutions who wiped out Duhengge and who carried out the genocide so I think the international community should do beyond beyond sanctions and embargo and and and and respective citizens of the country should claim to the respective government to do more for Burmese people and the Duhengge people to dominate the moral obligations to what to the humanity and in 21st century genocide took

place while the world was watching and we said in the United Nations back in 1950-48 that's never again and and it's very shameful that it could the the genocide could take place in the eyes of eight billion people in 21st century in modern age and the world failed to protect the Duhengge despite there has been compelling stories images and the satellites and and and still it's continued to be so and followed by that crimes against humanity war crimes has been being committed continually by the by the same military that committed genocide yeah and I think the international community will have at some point to answer to themselves on their beliefs of the humanity yeah like I think the international community let this happen for too long and they ignored it for

too long and and then now this always happens right like it's like Foucault's boom rang the violence spreads and gets you in the metropole and it's deeply upsetting what does that support look like from the international community like does that mean uh man pads for PDFs does it mean recognizing the national unity government like what concrete things should the community be doing the international community should recognize uh there are again uh the there are some issues that need to be fixed within the the the national unity government particularly the inclusions of the Rohingya and other uh like it's its positions to what to the religious other religious and ethnic minorities particularly those are small and that need to be fixed and international

community should do it in an incentivized way that okay you do this and we will do this for you and and and the recognitions come with incentive of supporting uh supporting the because it's only legitimate uh whether we like the national unity government or not we don't have the best alternative uh to it it's democratically elected and and there is a lot of issues within the within the within the within the the national unity government particularly when it's come to the Rohingya issues so these need to be dealt in national unity government I have been consistently advising them to fix this acting beyond policy and and and and showing like state level prioritized agenda uh with concrete milestone to to to the change toward to the Rohingya uh and of course parallel

to that international community should ensure that big supports are being given being recognized and and and and in order to win these revolutions which has shaken these very institutions that has consumed the the the resource of the country in various means and ways uh some uh and one of the strongest institution has been shaken by the young people uh with very small means uh that they have very small and time to time very innovative uh and and and and utilizing whatever means that they had an international community should provide support to pdf uh to be uh first and foremost institutionalizing and and and capacity building enhancing acting upon international standard we are uh we are operating as a as a as a military group and and of course uh when you

are be established as an as a military uh uh institutions uh and and it's it's it's being formed by the by the legal government of Myanmar and to support this this this military and many many nations are getting military assistance package yeah and and I think international community should have no problem to provide military assistance package to of course in in a very principles and value-based with with the value-based approach and and and and and that's include the technical support to to to set up the mechanisms to help the accountable and to ensure the transparency and account across this spectrum yeah yeah I think that's very well said and they do tend like if people aren't familiar with the way the pdf's have been

organized like they have been very respectful of like norms and laws of war and things like that which obviously the Burmese military have not and and it I think and institutions that's a group that has been with hundred hundred thousand of people young people with no prior military experience and mostly operating in a very limited uh to no resource context and being able to respect the human rights and and human dignity should be recognized you know there when you you have a gun and there are things that happen and need to be justified and and and being held accountable for but I'm saying that I'm not saying that it should be a lot and any any any kind of misconduct within the military systems need to be investigated properly and take actions upon and held accountable

those who gave these who carried out these actions and who gave comment to carry out this action but the number of cases related to the to the uh to the to the pdf has been significantly low uh and when it's come to the to the human right violations and and it has to be zero and even one is too much but I'm saying compared to uh to uh and and and I think continued support need to be given there in order to to to enhance their capacity to defeat the junta plus to defeat it in a principal and value-based with a principal and value-based approach yeah yeah certainly they could definitely do like people we spoke into are terribly equipped by any modern standards incredibly brave and innovative and they could certainly do a lot better if they have a lot more

okay where can people if people want to follow along with your work which is very impressive how can they find you do you have like uh do you want to share your twitter account or a website maybe where can people keep up with you so I am on twitter and facebook mostly and my twitter is akmo2 uh and to which uh you can see it's uh with my pictures and and I have put my bio as well there and I am also very active on the facebook and and whatever uh the work related most of the work that I do uh uh are being uh not everything but some part that international community need to know are being portrayed there and particularly uh the the the human rights situations uh related to the Rohingya and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are being uh being

being shared there in a timely very timely manner sometimes even lives you know it's happening now and being and uh yeah yeah you've been very good at that and I follow your twitter account and it's very informative and it helps me stay informed so that's it's akmo2 if people are searching for it thank you so much for giving us some of your evening I really really appreciate your time is there anything else you want to get to before we finish up now it's lovely to be part of the program and thank you so much for helping me once again thank you very much hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of coolzone media for more podcasts from coolzone media

visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening 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 podcast

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 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

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