Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 70

Episode Date: February 11, 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. Hi everyone, it's just me today, James, again. And I'm talking today with my friend Billy Ford. Billy's a program officer for the Burma team at the United States Institute of Peace. Do you want to say hello, Billy?

Hey, James. Hey, do you have audience? Thanks for joining in. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Was that a decent introduction? Have I summed up? Yep, that sounds right. What you do? Good. Good, didn't want to get that wrong. So people will have heard Billy before or heard from Billy when we finished our last series on Myanmar,

where we spoke about the funding that the PDFs are using and how they're using a lot of unique and really innovative methods to continue to support their revolution when they're not getting very much at all in the way of international support and certainly nothing compared to countries like Ukraine. But what we wanted to talk a little bit about today was the SAC or the Hunter's Attempts at kind of staging a sham election, which they've sort of backed off on. Can you explain a little bit about what they had proposed and then what they're maybe what they're doing now? Right, yeah. So the expectation was upon instigating the coup February 1st, 2021, that the state of emergency would end on February 1st, 2023, which was two days ago, giving them six months after that period to kind of undertake an election. And so the expectation was that before August 1st, 2023, there would be this sort of sham electoral process and the Hunter would essentially structure the process in such a way that their political party,

the USDP would prevail and that the commander in chief, mid online, who runs the SAC Hunter, would ascend as he had dreamed to become the president of the country and kind of rule in a military dictatorship model, but under kind of these auspices of civilian governance. So that was the expectation, but things have changed as you kind of alluded to. Yeah, so they've said they're going to extend for another six months. Is that right? That's right. So they said they would extend for another six months until August 1st. But then this morning they also announced a new political, economic and social objectives, which includes a five point road map, which for those of you who've been following Myanmar for some time is often the way that they frame their kind of sham and circuitous approaches to civilian governance. But that articulates a series of reforms, restoring law and order, you know, social development, implementing a peace process and then holding elections.

And this is, I think, indicates to most people that elections are very unlikely to occur any time in the near future. They did something almost identical in 2004, articulating a road map to democracy. And that didn't really start until 2010 when there were elections and there weren't really meaningful ones until 2015. But this is kind of an indication to, I think, a lot of folks that elections are unlikely this year and that there's kind of a long road ahead. The interesting element of this will be to see how the Hunters and of enablers in the international community, including Thailand, China and India in particular, how they will respond in part because they were pushing the SAC very hard to undertake these elections as a potential off-ramp to the horrifying violence that resulted from the coup and all the atrocities that the SAC has committed. Maybe we could talk a little bit about the international support they have because it's still quite significant, especially in terms of propping up their military force through the use of air power. They don't have domestic fighter jet manufacturing, right?

So can you talk a little bit about that? I think they received a couple more planes very recently, right? From the Chinese, it's kind of an interesting dynamic whereby you have an entire country of 53-ish million people fighting against a tiny military institution of about 500,000 or fewer if you include their families and all the medics. And that tiny institution is being supported by just a handful of countries, as I said, kind of China, Russia, to a certain degree, India and Thailand and a few others. And the vast majority of the world is kind of opposes this military takeover and the subsequent dictatorship and all the horrendous atrocities that they've committed. And so there's quite a lot of international actors who are providing kind of rhetorical support to the resistance and some support to civil society and humanitarian assistance and others. But on balance, the support that the Chinese, Indians, Russians in particular have provided in terms of material assistance to the SAC, as well as the diplomatic assistance that the Chinese provide at the Security Council in particular, but also the ties provide within ASEAN is four outweighs the rhetorical and small material assistance that the West and other supporters of the resistance movement have provided.

So yes, to answer your question, the Chinese and Indians continue to provide material military assistance to the SAC. And, you know, my question is kind of what is their theory of change here and how will supporting the SAC militarily lead to anything like stabilization is just kind of perplexing to me when both countries are very interested in supporting a level of functional stability so they can undertake their economic and geopolitical objectives, many of which go through Myanmar. I just don't really understand how they see kind of a military victory by the SAC as a pathway to stabilization when you have an entire nation that has been up against the dictatorship and has wholly rejected it and demonstrated that they're willing to make these incredible sacrifices to ensure that this coup does not succeed. It's very perplexing because like it's not in any sort of conventional sense like a consolidated regime and not show any chance of being one, right? Like it doesn't even have territorial control over large swathes of the country that it claims. Yeah, exactly. And you're even hearing this. I mean, there's been quite a bit of research, contested research that shows the junta has less than 50% control. But even today, or day before yesterday, you heard from in online the junta leader that he's now admitting that they only have 60% control, which is a pretty segment analysis of what they control. It's probably much smaller than that. But, you know, them demonstrating that they do not have control over 40% of the country is a pretty staggering proposition and kind of indication to their allies that, you know, they just don't have the capacity to administer a country that's unwilling to be pacified. And so and, you know, on top of that, there's very little, I just don't see a pathway in which they will capture more territory.

I mean, they have, you know, constrained resources. They have, I think they had 22 entrance into the Defense Service Academy last year. I mean, there's when they when there's casualties on the front lines, you just there's not a lot of replacement happening. They're not able to get spare parts for their Russian made helicopters. You know, there's just major material constraints that the SAC's military is facing. And it's just hard to imagine that they will ever regain much more than, you know, what they say is 60% territorial control. Yeah, it's very interesting. If we look at the PDFs by comparison, and I got banned from Twitter last week for posting a picture of them. But I had their equipment compared to even a year ago is vastly improved. Like, I don't know if you saw the one group of guys with the actual international rifle, but I have no idea where that came from. But it's very impressive that they have one. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of, honestly, the resilience of this movement is partly a testament to the ingenuity and innovation. I mean, we saw it in the beginning in the nonviolent action demonstrating or kind of deploying tactics that we've never seen before that have, you know, been lessons to other international nonviolent movements around the world is really creative fundraising tactics as you and I have discussed in the past. But yeah, now it's the military ingenuity. I mean, essentially creating facilities for retrofitting drones for aerial attacks. One of the military's helicopters was taken down this morning. I haven't know exactly what weapons were used in that. But you know, it's just kind of a level of innovation, given that these, you know, the PDFs and most of the arrows have very little access to very few kind of international, you know, arms markets. So the fact that they're able to sustain themselves at all and maintain this, you know, 40%, which is probably much more of the territory is kind of an incredible

testament to their innovation and ingenuity. Yeah, it's a couple, obviously, of several PDF fighters who I keep in touch with. And they've spoken to me about like, firstly, 3D printed guns, which we've spoken about extensively, but also tourniquets, night vision goggles, even prostheses, like limbs, people who have lost legs, right, to landmines and things. So like, it's amazing that they've set up all these things which normally require like a massive interaction with the state and with an international system. And they've done it using, in this case, the internet and a $300 printer they got on Aliexpress or something. Yeah, yeah. It's incredible. Yeah, it's extremely sort of inspirational in that sense. But also very sad, like, I want to talk about like, I want to talk a little bit about the, the SAC seems to have, it's not fair to say they've pivoted to war crimes, because it's been kind of integral to what they've done from the outset. But they seem to have given up on trying to make like targeted strikes against the military formations and just pivoted to dropping bombs on civilians. Could you talk about a couple of those like maybe we could talk about the Kachin music cultural festival that they bombed or one of the other examples of that? Yeah, there's definitely been a shift from a strategy of essentially augmenting or providing air support to kind of exposed frontline light infantry to a tactic of targeted air strikes against civilian targets and against armed organization headquarters, which had under previous negotiations been deemed like off limits, but it seems as if there is nothing off limits now. They bombed the Chin National Fronts headquarters, which is right on the India Chin border on the western part of Myanmar. And there's pretty reliable accounts that there were, there were bombs that landed in Indian territory. I mean, as you reference, they, there was a bombing in Chin State on a festival killing at least 60 civilians.

They've done something similar on ethnic armed organization headquarters in the southeast and Korean territories, including the Arakhan armies facilities in those areas. So there has been a shift in tactics to targeting headquarters facilities in that sense. And as you said, kind of civilian targets to, I don't know, you know, this is just the modus operandi of an institution that is devoid of humanity and so alienated from society that they, you know, they're willing to go to any ends to kind of protect themselves and their control of power. I think particularly now that they've seen that the public is against them and probably quite concerned that if they are unsuccessful in this military endeavor that they'll be kind of strung up, you know. So it's, I think it's kind of a sign of desperation. And as you mentioned, kind of a tactical shift. Maybe we should explain the sort of four cut strategy which has been a long term strategy even before the coup of the military and what that means and how that sort of provides, I guess, I don't know, like a moral framework. Maybe that's the wrong way. But, you know, it's not like they started doing this shit in February 1 2021, right? Like this is what this is how they do stuff. Yeah. I mean, this is an institution that's been at war with its own people for 70 years. Yeah. I mean, there is an underlying philosophy of the Myanmar military, the Sittat that they essentially are the protectors of national sovereignty and to a certain degree a protectors of the Bommar ethnic group and Bommar Buddhism in particular.

And this is a deeply entrenched philosophy within the military establishment and it's been, to a certain degree, a fairly compelling narrative for retention and institutional solidarity, which is why in some part, I mean, it's one of the reasons there are a number, why the SAC and the Sittat Myanmar military has been resilient to collapse despite, you know, being extremely incompetent and very isolated and virtually never having won a war despite being at war for 70 years and having structural and military advantages. And so this is kind of underlying the justification and the moral philosophy of this institution that is morally corrupted. But as you said, their tactical strategy is essentially one of social isolation division and ensuring as much human suffering as possible. So as to pacify a population into submission, and so essentially the strategy is to kind of cut communications and food supply and connections between communities and these sorts of things, which is, for a very long time, the military strategy has been one of divide and conquer in which they've attempted to exacerbate divisions between ethnic and religious minority communities to ensure that they would not face a united front. And so the incredible challenge and opportunity of the current resistance movement is one in which the Myanmar military is no longer at the table in conversations with one another and they are trying to build cohesion with one another. And frankly, this is where there is unbelievable progress that I don't think gets enough attention and appreciation. There's meaningful changes in behavior in terms of the Burma majority ethnic communities posture towards ethnic and religious minorities and, you know, communication and coordination across institutions that had historically been at odds and happy to go more into that.

But yeah, the strategy of divide and conquer is really front and center. Yeah, and ironically, by pushing that so hard that they've they've done the complete opposite, which has forced people to form like a popular front against them. Yeah, let's talk about that because I find it really fascinating how like, even how like EIOs and PDFs are kind of vaguely underneath a unified command at this point. And so yeah, let's talk about how those barriers which existed for so long is sort of gradually breaking down now. Yeah, rapidly, I guess. One of the ways in which there's been a meaningful shift has been just kind of the individual experiences of the military's atrocities. I mean, I think in your previous episode with Conchomo, he had indicated that, you know, public perception of Rohingya has shifted somewhat, although it's kind of questionable whether it's a durable shift and whether it's meaningful and all that. But he had attributed that shift in part to the fact that the Bommar majority Buddhist population is now experiencing, frankly, some of the forms of atrocity that the Rohingya had experienced, you know, in the 70s and the 90s.

And then in 2016, 17, when things escalated to to genocide. So I think this is one of the shifts is that the in the Burmese heartland in the area where the military recruits most of its soldiers, they are undertaking a shift. They are undertaking the most arguably the most extreme atrocities burning villages to the ground. You know, just horrendous stuff that like I don't even want to say on the air but just, you know, just an incredible campaign of terror, in part because the people's defense forces and the resistance forces are extremely strong there and only strengthening in response to these atrocities. So I think that's one of the dynamics is that there's there's been a shift in perception because of because of the huntess behavior. Another is that, frankly, there's just some massive political shift at play. I mean, you have, you know, February 1st, the National League like nationally for democracy led government is deposed and they don't necessarily have arms or an experience of military combat. Whereas the ethnic armed organizations have been fighting for 70 years against the central government, including the National League for Democracy led government.

And so there is a shift in power at that moment that, you know, shifts power from the Bamar Center to ethnic minority communities in a particular way. So that kind of open space for greater humility and greater dialogue and, you know, willingness to make concessions to ethnic and religious minority communities. And that is there's actually been tremendous progress there. So there's the the National Unity Consultative Council, which is, you know, probably the most important dialogue platform, but one one that is very focused on big picture governance challenges. And long term kind of national dialogue processes, but there's been some good progress there. But frankly, the most progress has been made in military and governance coordination platforms. So this includes the C3C, which is essentially a command and control platform that's between the National Unity Government and ethnic armed organization leadership, where they're coordinating military strategy and tactics. So that and there's been considerable trust building through those sorts of operations.

And similarly, there's been trust building in, you know, basic things like coordinating humanitarian assistance or local administration or policing, these sorts of things where there's, you know, there's a problem that's needed to be solved in the near term. And we can come together to solve it collaboratively and in that process sort of build understanding and trust with one another. So there's been really meaningful differences I've seen in terms of cohesion across traditional lines of inter-communal division, obviously a long way to go. But this is a lot of what we're working on at the US Institute of Peace and that the US government is supporting is trying to support the resistance capacity to chart a viable pathway to stabilization. And a lot of that relies upon building cohesion and trust among resistance groups. Yeah, everyone I spoke to, nearly, not everyone I spoke to was Burma, some people were Karen, and some of them were, some of the people we'd spoken to like remotely were Rohingya, and all of them said that what has to come out of this is like a federalized democracy. Do you think that that's likely and what does that look like in the country that's been at war with itself for most of this last century? Yeah, I mean, clearly this is a question that needs to be answered by the Myanmar people.

And I think the National Unity Consultative Council is a good platform for having this discussion. But there is a number of prerequisites for having that discussion and one of them is kind of new norms of dialogue based on trust and mutual respect. But yeah, I think that the only viable pathway to stability is one that results in a federal democratic system in which subnational federal units have a degree of autonomy and in which there is a baseline of equality. There is rule of law, independent judiciary, just the basic fundamentals that ensure protections of minority populations. Another challenge being that even within states like Kachin state where the Kachin ethnic community is an ethnic minority at the national level, but there are also some minorities that are like the Shawnee population. And there's concerns that there may, there needs to be protections for the minorities within the minority states. So all of these things need to be sort of worked out. And this is of course like maybe a decade long national dialogue process that will ultimately culminate in a new federal governance structure, a new security structure that maybe doesn't have a union level military with level of autonomy or political involvement.

That has plagued this country for so long. But this is really like the key to long term peace and stability in the country. And frankly, like it felt a long way off under the NLD administration. I mean, they were making a lot of progress in a lot of ways, but building a just and inequitable governance structure in which ethnic and religious minorities had a voice and didn't feel oppressed by the dominant Burma Buddhist population. Frankly, it was, it was quite a ways off. And this, you know, as horrible as the coup has been, it is definitely a shock to the system that may open up new pathways for dialogue, new opportunities for trust building, and, you know, the opportunity to, you know, think about a new model of governance that is, you know, more just, more equitable, more inclusive. Yeah, it's definitely bought in a whole generation of younger people who like aren't sort of who didn't come through the institutions that created the old regime and just came at this as like I'm 17 and I'm fucking angry. And like, I'm going to make this better.

You sort of however I can. Yeah, they're really, I mean, obviously very inspirational and then fascinated to talk to. I wonder, like, how do you see the end to this conflict because we're still a long way from like either side, having a definitive military victory, right? Certainly, all these big cities are still more or less controlled by the hunter and there's there's not an immediate way that I can foresee them not being that way. So if I could ask you to like speculate a little bit or look at the way things are going, how do we get out of the situation where the hunters bombing schools and music concerts and. Right. It's yeah, this is honestly like I think everyone is kind of lost in our attempts to make predictions of where this is going. Honestly, I don't know that there is a path to a military victory for either side here.

I mean, it seems pretty unlikely that you'll see PDFs marching on Nipidon capturing the Ministry of Defense anytime soon. But equally unlikely that the SAC will consolidate, you know, control of the country. I mean, that's just that's just not going to happen. So, I mean, the the a lot of our work is thinking through the best possible outcomes and increasing the problem, trying doing the work to try to increase the probability of those outcomes. And I think the this is where it's just like I have questions for a lot of the international actors that are supporting the SAC because I just don't know of any possible pathway to peace and stabilization that goes through a stronger SAC. It just seems unfathomable. But, you know, there are pathways to stabilization that go through a stronger resistance movement that either yields some radical transformation of the SAC's composition and then some sort of dialogue process. Or, you know, just a very, very extended conflict in which, you know, the resistance holds territory in some parts of the country.

The SAC controls some other areas over an extended period. The ethnic armed organizations contain kind of act more and more autonomously, and you have areas in, you know, Kachin and Wakhokong and the Chinese border where kind state that kind of gain a bit more autonomy and sort of act more independently of one another. So like this sort of fragmentation process. And honestly, if there is an election, you know, a sham election by the SAC, it seems to increase the probability of this fragmentation scenario. You know, it increases the probability that the SAC just maintains its presence in the in the urban areas, and then Rakhine State, Kachin State, Wakh State, these kind of become more autonomous regions. Chin State, and they start to operate as semi independent states. So honestly, that's that's part of why I feel like support to the SAC, not only is it SAC for the elections, I should say, not only does it almost definitely increase violence because, you know, the elections are a target, but also it increases the probability of national fragmentation. And it doesn't do anything to increase the probability of stability.

So I just don't I don't really see that that being a pathway to any form of stability or ending the SAC's bombings of schools. Yeah, I think it gives them this weird talking point bit of the Russian sham elections in the Donbas, like, because we saw like, I think it was a mobier PDF. I don't know if you saw this, but they did a drive by and shots and people who were polling for doing some kind of election stuff. And obviously that gives them this kind of, oh, look, our election workers are being attacked, what terrible people the PDFs are kind of. But you know, if you've spent more than 10 minutes your entire life reading about Myanmar, then you'll realize that that's the false claim. The international community just doesn't seem to care to a large degree about atrocities in Myanmar, about the revolution in Myanmar, about the coup in Myanmar. Certainly doesn't care in the same way that it cares about what's happening in Ukraine, right? It doesn't care with man pads and tanks and guns and training and all the things that could bring this war to an end much more quickly. Do you think that that will change or is this going to be Burmese people liberating Burmese people because the world doesn't care about them or doesn't care in a material fashion?

Yeah, I think there's like two dynamics at play here. One is that people care a lot less than Ukraine or Taiwan or other geopolitical interests. They see this to a certain level as a domestic issue that doesn't have regional implications, something that we're very focused on demonstrating is totally untrue. And the other thing is that people don't know what to do. Even the US Congress just passed the Burma Act, which is a piece of legislation that essentially signals congressional interest in Burma and more to be done alongside appropriations of resources to support it. The challenge now is figuring out what is the best use of resources. And I think that countries like Japan and honestly some EU states, you know, ASEAN states, it's more, they are very uncomfortable with the engaging with revolutionary actors. And there's just not a lot of certainty as to how to help because there's like, okay, military assistance to the NUG. It's like there's a lot of concern that, you know, you know, significant expansion of arms access in the countries, you know, you have this mass proliferation of weapons.

You have, you know, concerns about post-conflict warlordism or weapons and resources getting into the hands of narco traffickers. So there's just a lot of uncertainty. And so there's not an adequate given the first point that this is a kind of peripheral regional matter in the eyes of some. It yields a very low risk tolerance and uncertainty as to what to do. And so this kind of has resulted in a couple of things. One being that the buck is just passed to multilateral institutions like ASEAN. I mean, I think China has done a very effective job of ensuring nothing happens in the international realm by pushing it to ASEAN, which it knows is incapable of doing anything meaningful. And so it's just relegated to multilateral platforms where nothing will happen. You always have a veto from Thailand, Cambodia or Russia and China at the Security Council. And so, you know, it's these combinations of factors that really challenge this thing.

And even within the U.S. government, there's like a very robust interagency debate about exactly what is the best form of assistance? What is the most ethical way of engaging and what are risks associated with different forms of assistance to the resistance movement? So I think that uncertainty plays a lot into it. And so a lot of what I think there's a lot of value that could be added if the resistance movement can come together essentially around a common set of requests from the international community, essentially saying, this is what we need to be effective. And, you know, you, based on your risk tolerance, help us as you can. But we're demonstrating to you that we have, we're unified in these ways. We have these needs and, you know, help us however you feel is most appropriate given your risk tolerance.

So, I don't know, it's incredibly complicated. I think the having China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Laos as your neighbors also makes this just incredibly challenging. You can't access the country in the way that you can for Ukraine. So just logistically, it's incredibly challenging. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it does seem still like, like you said, like in Ukraine, we also have deeply problematic groups who we are, who we are arming. And yeah, it's ironic that their concern is spreading the, preventing the proliferation in arms and what they've done is, is helped like a giant leap forward in, I don't know, artisanal homemade weapons technology. Like, we're probably only seeing the very tip of in like our reporting, like I'm sure there's more stuff that we'll see as time goes on. But I wonder what can people do, people often ask, like, if where they can donate, how they can help, right?

Because obviously it is extremely difficult to see little kids getting shot in schools and want to do something. And I wonder what you would suggest for people who are looking to help. We've both spoken to people who are collecting money through click to donate, which is one thing people can do. But do you want to explain that, actually explain how people can participate in click to donate? Because I think that's cool. Yeah, I mean, there's been a number of really fascinating fundraising models. Yeah, the click to donate model is essentially the resistance leveraging what it has a comparative advantage in, which is huge numbers of people on their side. And essentially, the resistance creates web pages or YouTube content or anything and just engages the advertisements on those pages, which increases the value of that ad space and then they can kind of generate revenue that way.

The National Unity Government has also done some really fascinating stuff issuing bonds, conducting a lottery, selling off, you know, SAC military properties. I think they just sold the Mino Alliance House in Yangon for a considerable amount. So it's kind of an incredible fundraising model and requiring tremendous innovation. They've also created a financial technology called NUG Pay and a digital currency, DMMK. So yeah, it's kind of a remarkable innovation there. In terms of what kind of your listeners could do, I think, you know, I think engaging in some of the international kind of advocacy and awareness raising is really valuable. I think some of these things, like if, you know, if your congressperson acknowledges demand for this, then that can increase the pressure that they put on the State Department, DOD, National Security Council, and potentially increase the risk tolerance of the U.S. government if there's just more pressure there. So those sorts of things, I think, honestly, engaging with some of the content that's being created by the resistance, learning about Myanmar, you know, just following the story. I mean, it's like, I don't know, you've probably experienced this during your reporting, but it's just like the most unbelievable stories of human resilience and just like, I don't know, it's such like an honor to be nearby these people who are just risking so much for such an honorable cause that they truly believe in.

It's just like the quintessential example of integrity and kindness. Yeah, it's amazing. It's stuff you couldn't make up and like it's stories you can sell as fiction almost. Yeah, their integrity, like, even there, like, and one thing I find absolutely amazing is like you said, perspectives on ethnic groups of change on so many things that people, their willingness to be like, I've examined my stance on this and it was the wrong stance and I'm changing my stance on this is like, we spoke to so many young people who were like, yeah, I was fairly misogynist, like, February 1 2021. And since then, like, I've fought alongside women, I've, you know, I've seen them do things that I didn't, I've been told that they weren't capable of and I've changed, I was wrong. Like, we need to not be a misogynist country going forward. Yeah. No, there's a, I was, maybe you know this group, but I was engaging with an armed organization that was, it's led by kind of an activist, former activist. And he was kind of saying that they've essentially tried to eliminate all of the sort of misogyny in their, in their training protocols, like, even just using terms like man up or something. Like, wiped it from their approach because it's like, that's a misogynistic kind of, you know, approach to thinking about strength and power.

And so it's like, what you're saying is I'm here, I'm feeling the same, hearing the same things, which is incredibly powerful, given, particularly given the pressures and what they're all going through, just having the wherewithal to kind of pick their head ups and think about, you know, be reflective of themselves. Imagine in the American political discourse, people actually changing their minds for once. It's remarkable. Yeah, yeah, it genuinely is. And it's refreshing in that sense to see people like wanting the right thing and not letting tiny differences, like blow them into 7000 different pieces, right, like broadly agreeing on one thing. Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of the remarkable, I mean, the National Unity Consultative Council, for example, you know, it's had its challenges as a dialogue platform, but it's still going. And that is like, people are still coming to the table. And frankly, it's remarkable because repeatedly in quote unquote peace processes in Myanmar's history, they've collapsed because, you know, someone said something and, you know, another party left the table and didn't return. So the fact that these dialogues are continuing on is an incredible testament to people's willingness to kind of open up and be more humble and kind of consider the other's opinion and question their own, which is, you know, a lesson we could all learn. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Billy, where can people like, where can people find you online? And where can they find more good information about Myanmar? I am, you know, if you search Billy Ford at usip.org, you can find the stuff I've written recently. And then I'm on Twitter at B I L L E the number four, the letter D.

And good sources of information. I mean, there's great investigative work by Myanmar witness, which is just an incredible group of researchers. There's been a couple of good reports recently by global witness and Earth rights related to sanctions that just came out. USIP, you can check out some of our writing, my colleagues Jason Tower and Priscilla Klopp just published something related to how the conflict is has regional consequences that could be of interest. And there's, I don't know, there's innumerable great Myanmar think tanks, the Chin Human Rights Organization has done some incredible research and reporting about military atrocities in Chin state. We could go on and on. But yeah, if you, I don't know, check out my Twitter, I tend to repost stuff that I find fascinating and there's there's a lot out there. Yeah, great. Well, thank you so much for giving us some of your time this afternoon. I really appreciate it. It's good to catch up. Yeah, thanks for having me, James. It's been great. No worries. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 offending 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, hosted by myself, Andrew, as we talk about whatever. We've entered a new year. So, you know, happy new year, by the way, James. I don't think I told you. Oh, yeah. Happy new year, Andrew. Yeah. The whatever in question this time is carrying over from some of the discussions we had in the previous year, because, you know, time moves forward. And with time moving forward, how put it in hand, it becomes increasingly necessary, very, very necessary to interrogate and to uproot a lot of the classical, capitalist ideas embedded in our world. An ideology, for example, that just won't die, that idea of development. Despite as many critics over the past few decades, despite the colonizing and post-colonial nations, people of those nations, you know, rallying against such projects of development, due to the harms they've caused, social environments, you know, otherwise, this ideology, this idea of development just won't die.

But here we are, 2023. And I think at least here in this podcast, among the audience of this podcast, we can agree that the time has come for some kind of alternative. Maybe some kind of alternative can happen here, you know, a different view, a new path beyond we currently have. Enter, stage right, Buen Vivir. Are you familiar with the concept? I'm not, actually, no. Be fun to learn about it. All right, well, fantastic. So you could ask anything, any questions you have, what was it like going along? So a lot of the early concepts related to this idea of Buen Vivir arose in reaction to the classical economic development strategies that have ripped through communities and the environments. I'm talking, of course, about acts of enclosure, privatization, neoliberalization, economic imperialisms, and so forth. Capitalism in its element, basically. Government projects that line the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats.

Development banks, quote unquote, that really never seem to fund the people directly. Buen Vivir draws from this heritage, a heritage of indigenous communities, particularly in South America. In some cultures, they have no concept analogous to the modern Western capitalist concept of development. Of course, modern is in quotes. There is no concept of a linear life, a linear time even with a four-month subsequent state. And so the idea of underdevelopment and development of primitive and advanced just does not mesh with that ontology. Nor these concepts of wealth and poverty. Nor are there necessarily concepts of wealth and poverty as we understand them based on the accumulation or lack of material good.

I've said Buen Vivir probably a dozen times by now. The question is, what is Buen Vivir? In Latin America, the concept of Buen Vivir or good life or good living provides new alternatives to development. And to be honest with you, I feel like it's something that we should have been working on for a really long time. Me personally, I don't know about you, James, but I really care about GDP growth or increasing return on investment. I care about living a good life. I care about Buen Vivir. And so I think the name of the philosophy itself and the name of the concept itself automatically gets you to ask the question, what is a good life? And the answer, the beauty of the answer is that you decide that, I decide that, we decide that or communities decide that collaboratively.

The good life is not some sort of policy proposal or government project or development initiative or imposition. The good life is a pluralistic concept. It's Buenos Conviveres. It's different ways of living well together. It's not a single homogenous or unrealizable good life. It's not like this single homogenous pursuit of profit that our entire system is built around now. Now, the good life, Buen Vivir, is more about people living well together in a community, in different communities living well together and individuals in communities living well with nature. And these concepts aren't familiar, it's because you must have heard it from other places.

It's a trend that we're starting to see around the world in this 21st century and even prior to then. And these ideas are slowly getting more and more steam as time goes on, you know, the ideas present in social ecology, the ideas present in various animist ontologies. And they're really being brought to the forefront in this time because we need them now more than ever. Despite efforts of Western forces primarily to erase and to redact and to confine these ideas and these concepts to the realm of irrelevance or backwardness or superstition, they endure in sometimes new forms as with Buen Vivir. Buen Vivir is about quality of life, but also more so the idea that quality of life, our well-being as individuals, is only possible within a community, a community which, as I mentioned, includes the floor and floor that's around us. And there are many ways that can be interpreted, which is the real beauty of it. So as a concept, you can look at Buen Vivir as a two-word phrase and it's also a double barrel of a concept.

It's a two-for-one package of both criticism of the classical Western capitalist notion of development and an alternative to that Eurocentric tradition, but also indigenous traditions plural. And so that two-for-one package within that, and you can really unpack that package and see that, you know, you see the idea of the same sort of basis that degrowth is getting its critique from, the same sort of ideas being shared. And in terms of alternatives, when you look into Buen Vivir, you sort of see the anarchic bent that has become ever more present in new political imaginations over the past few years. At least it feels that way to me that that sort of community-oriented, autonomy-oriented, liberatory, decolonial-oriented mindset is becoming more and more prevalent. Of course, I could be, you know, my own internet biases and algorithms present to me what I want to see, but I would like to think that more and more people are exploring these ideas. Yeah, it is hard to say, isn't it? Because I feel the same way. Like, am I seeing what I want to see? Yeah, yeah, it's like, oh, there are these new institutes and initiatives and programs and movements that saw me as all these things are developing. And then, like, you talk to somebody who is not, like, in this fair and they haven't heard of any of it.

Yeah. You know, it's like... Yeah, they still think anarchism means, like, I don't know, throwing a brick through a window. I think that is the whole ideology. And yeah, I don't know. We can hope. We can hope, we can hope. I would like to think it's getting more prominent, but we can only hope. I feel like anarchists are too keen on, you know, necessarily submitting to an anarchism census, a global anarchism census or some kind. But I would like to think that anarchic ideas, I mean, in all the exploration that I've done of various parts of the world, however, you know, Shalu, my exploration has been so far. I just, I see it could be my anarchist tinted glasses, seeing anarchic principles and everything.

But I see it in certain practices, in certain ideologies, in certain ideas and, you know, ways of living. And I think Buen Vivir is a sort of a recognition of that in one sense. So there is no single Buen Vivir, right? There is no single good life. You know, I might want, for example, my Buen Vivir might look like sailing the Caribbean Sea, you know, touching down in various islands and exploring the ecology therein. Or my good life might look like a more settled sort of homestead existence or sort of a fusion of urban and rural living, sort of a good ending for the suburbs. Where you're able to live in a walkable sort of environment and community that is both not too far from, you know, the goings on of human social interaction, but also very much rooted and connected with what's happening in the natural world. But I mean, what might your good life, your Buen Vivir look like, James? Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? I think, you know, I grew up in a countryside, so it's like the idea of living in a rural area and still having community and having that being close to nature and still also being close to people who I care about and being able to look after each other. I think it's interesting how often, like, at least the sort of settler colonial concept of rural life or the construct of rural life, I guess, in America is like, oh, you're rugged individualism and being on your own when, in fact, like, living in a countryside, people have to look after one another.

Yeah, exactly. We maintain this kind of this false idea that it's you against the elements and, you know, crushing nature and subjecting it to your will and all this stuff. Yeah. And I think there's something interesting about, at least the people I've spoken to in various circles and stuff. When I ask them, you know, what is your ideal life? What is your good life? I don't necessarily say Buen Vivir, I just ask them, you know, what do you want? And you dig into it, you ask them a couple of problem questions and people, despite Buen Vivir being a pluralistic concept, people tend to generally want similar things. And so it sort of begs the question, like, why are we in this situation in the first place, you know, because, like, everyone says, oh, well, you know, I want, like, an involved community and I want, like, I want to be able to, like, grow my plants. And I also want to be able to do my art and, you know, enjoy my time with people and do a bit of travel and not work my whole life and that kind of thing. Yeah.

People, of course, phrase it and frame it in certain ways. And so that's why I ask the prob proving questions, because someone might initially say, oh, well, like, I want to retire early. I want you to really dig into what that means. It's like, I don't want to spend my whole life working. You know, or they might say something like, you know, I want to, I want to travel a lot. So I want to, like, start a business. When you ask them what kind of business they want to start, why they want to start a business, it really comes down to I want autonomy. I want flexibility in my labor. I want control of my own labor kind of thing. Like, yes, of course, they are people who have the code and code entrepreneurial spirit who want to just be at the top of the food chain. Well, then I think most of the entrepreneurs, the code and code entrepreneurs that I've met have been people who just like, oh, well, you know, I started selling candles, because I really like making candles and I want to share them with people and I also need to make a living. And I'm just passionate about it or whatever, that kind of thing. It's not necessarily wanting to grow it or whatever. They just want to be able to sustain themselves doing something that they enjoy. Yeah, it's interesting because we're always sold like every new advance in technology and in production that comes along like these concepts you're talking about, like working less, having community or these things are like always sold is what that's going to do, right?

Like, but instead we end up working more or the same amount and instead just generating more income for a certain group of people like we don't get any of these good things. But yeah, they're always a carrot in one of this kind of neoliberal capitalism that we have is but we never get there. Exactly. That's the tragedy of it. Another aspect of, you know, the idea of the good life is that it's not a static concept, right? It's not like we come up with this good life. That's when we hear we want for ourselves. Now we etch it into stone tablets and pious to get here to them forever like the Ten Commandments like now, you know, the good life is supposed to be flexible. When viewers would respond into your conditions, the conditions of your community, ecology, etc. and really redefining what it means to live a good life continuously, you know, in response to change and circumstances because, you know, change is life. Of course, nor is this idea to cut life quote unquote backward concepts. So problematic framing in and of itself, but sometimes you have to use problematic shortcuts to communicate effectively. But the idea of one review is not like of invitation to return to some idea like past or idea like non past, you know, like non existent world that people have sort of mentally constructed.

As in the case of a lot of these romanticizations you see on social media. Benefit is not like some kind of religion with its own rules and functions. But it's, and it's not also it's not imposing that you must become a homestead or forage or you must live in a rural community to live a good life. There's more possibilities yet unrealized. And it should be something that is, it should be considered something that is undergoing a constant construction and reproduction process. And that's I think we have the global potential that when you realize, you know, that's where I think there's viral potential for it. I mean, of course, when you look at a lot of the things that end up dominating the social media news cycle, it's a lot of negativity. Dominating current discourse right now I think is the topic of masculinity and particularly the prevalence of Andrew Tate and, you know, you also have the constantly bubbling under the surface existence of in cells.

And so, and then you go on tiktok. I don't know if you go on tiktok James. I don't know. That's the point at which I decided I become old just like I can't do this anymore. Yeah, I should have made that decision. But I mean, I kind of like tiktok because I don't know how other people are curating their, their four year pages. But my four year pages, a place I enjoy being at a bit too much, which is why I have like limits on my phone to prevent me from staying on tiktok for too long. But yeah, it's a place that I enjoy and you see a lot of trends come and go on tiktok. Right now the big thing is like niche talk and core core, which I know is probably Greek to you. Yes. But in that general vein, if you were to see what those trends were, I think you'd get a sense when I'm talking about niche talk and core core. And then it's also, it seems to be an attempt to rebrand the idea of Sigma.

Oh, God. And the Sigma male, it started off as a very, you know, patriarchal thing. And then I've seen a couple of different creators who did it in sort of an ironic or a post ironic sense as a sort of a meme because it became a meme to make fun of people who take it seriously. Yeah. And then from that, that sort of mumification of it, people started to reclaim the tomb and then became a sort of, you see, you see like a video where a guy does something polite or something, you know, shiver or something kind. And the comments are like typical Sigma w true Sigma. This is what true Sigma looks like. Oh, no. So I think it's just an actual aspect of the fluidity of the internet, the fickleness of the internet, because I'm sure there's still the heavily misogynistic Sigma people, they still exist. But then there's also people who memes themselves into a brand of Sigma that's a kind of a weird pseudo positive masculinity. It's kind of interesting.

I'll, I'll continue to do my TikTok anthropological research and, and you know, discuss my findings as this situation develops. But in that same vein of, in that vein of mumification, and those are developments, I think there is a potential for when we've here to become a global phenomenon to have that potential to have a global reach. Because then there's something in it for the people. The there's also an anti work current present in a lot of TikTok trends. So, you know, it's something to And again, again, I say there's an anti recurrent in a lot of TikTok trends. But those are the TikTok trends I'm being presented with. The post ironic rebrandification or whatever Sigma is something my for you page has given me. It's not necessarily reflective of the entirety of reality. And that's the scary part of the internet, right? Like you're not seeing the full reality you're seeing an algorithmically produced version skewed version of reality. Yeah, it's interesting to me how like, like most people I encounter on a daily basis will not know what or where Myanmar is. And like, if I look at my Twitter page right now, it's just all like half of it is in Burmese, you know, and it's lots of people I follow. And that's like my reality. But yeah, I sort of then I get really frustrated when when people don't have a clue what's going on there. Exactly. Exactly. It's kind of tricky. It's kind of tricky because you really in in times like these really get a sense of how, you know, in moments like those where you confront that in real life. It's like, okay, so like my my perception of reality is like slightly skewed by the internet, you know,

Yeah. In ways that I am aware and not aware of in ways that other people are aware not aware of. So that's interesting. But back to when we view right when we view I think is also like a path for decolonization, you know, sort of a way to let go of a lot of the Western norms and impositions on speech and dress and label and lifestyle and knowledge and social norms and relationships, etc. And adopt some ways of life that account for our cultures and conditions free of those mental lines. I think that is the power of when to the year. Yeah. So I guess another question arises, who or where or when did Ben Revere come from. And so the radical questioning that builds to Ben Revere was made possible within several indigenous traditions in South America, which, as I said, really a culturally lacked certain concepts of development or progress. And so the contribution of indigenous knowledge to brand review continues to be the sort of critical thread associated values and experiences and practices and worldviews of when to be already existed in some form before the arrival of European conquistadors, but they were over the process of colonization, silence and marginalized and even openly opposed. Ben Revere is part of a long legacy long quest, long pursuit of alternative lifestyles forged from the passionate battles of indigenous peoples and nations seeking new ways of life seeking freedom from the Latin America and the quintessential

Latin American oligarchal nation state, which is of course rooted in colonialism and neoliberalism. And so we are seeing through Ben Revere, within Ben Revere, outside of Ben Revere, adjacent to Ben Revere, utopias in the making, the imagination, the imagining of utopias, of the Andes and of the Amazon, that are shaping discourse are shaping political projects that are shaping social and cultural and economic practice. The good life Ben Revere is not something that is unique to Latin America, of course, has been practiced in many different epochs and regions of this earth. It's been known by many different names. The concept has been known by many different names. In Ecuador, it's known as suma kawase, which is a quichua wording for a fullness of life and community, together with other persons in nature. In Bolivia, the Aymara concept for it is called suma kamana. In the Mapuche, in Chile, in Guarani, in Paraguay, in the Cudan, in Panama, the Xhwara, in Nakhwa, in Ecuador, in Amazon, the Maya, in Guatemala, in Chiapas, Mexico, and of course the African too, Ubuntu, and the Indian concept of Swaraj. There are all these sorts of threads of what a good life, good life and community, radical, ecological, democracy and community, all of these sort of concepts are sort of threaded within developing different, in different forms, in different contexts. However, the concept has also been adopted in some sense by certain states, most notably Bolivia and Ecuador. Recently, Bolivia, you know, rewrote its constitution, establishing itself as a pluripational state. And they've taken it to, what they call it, if you look at it again, they're trying to basically propose an economic model that accommodates various diverse cultural origins.

In Ecuador, the conceptual framework is a bit different. They take point of view and they use it as a sort of, they describe it as a set of rights, rights to shelter, to health, to education, to food, to the environment. So it's less of an ethical principle, more of a complex set of rights that are also found in Western traditions, but also include, you know, the right to freedom, participation, to communities, to protection, and to nature. Part of that recognition of the right to nature and the fundamental right to water has led to the banning of any form of privatization of water and also the promotion of leaving crude oil in Ecuador and Amazon below the ground. However, I feel like I need to point out that I don't believe the state is compatible with the essence of when we're here with the practice of when we're here. And so the use of those concepts and state propaganda in state rebranding efforts, is not necessarily encouraging to me. It doesn't necessarily make such states the power gone so they would paint themselves to me because to me, when we're here, we can only really be grassroots concepts. So I think we must be careful of falling into that trap of accepting state propaganda on the good life, compromising the concept and allowing it to be co-opted or watered down. As I previously noted, I think there's a major overlap between the concept of deep growth and the idea of when we're here. I both agree that one of the fundamental problems is, you know, this idea of this constant commercialization of societal fabric and of nature, of, you know, this criticism of capitalism, this criticism of the way that progress for economic growth are understood and implemented.

And so they almost, they sort of complement each other, right? Because I think of criticism people have of deep growth, is that it's this destructive thing, it's this negative thing, it's negative framing. And so in a sense, when we're in deep growth can sort of be coupled, deep growth as the, quote unquote, missile word, destructive, while when we're here is, you know, presenting a constructive alternative. As you know, we attempt to progress to move away from capitalism to transition to new systems. There's a lot to learn with a lot we can learn from various non-capitalist practices around the world. And I think when Vivir is a concept that really tries to look at the ways that we have harmoniously coexisted as humans in our environment, and the ways that, you know, the good life can be combined with deep growth efforts. There's also a measure of fluidity present in Gwen Vivir that seeks balance socially, ecologically, politically, economically, and encompasses within that balance, people, plants and animals. There's not separate nature from society as found in classical Western dualism. And that sort of perspective isn't necessary if we were to move beyond the exploitation of nature, the fluids of accumulating capital that has really placed us in this mess and even in that in recognizing that we need to move beyond exploitation of nature, baked into that because we are part of nature is a recognition that we need to stop exploiting humans.

We need to recognize human beings as part of a community that we are not just atomizing individuals. We are in communities that we must be part of communities that our communities, the people within them, and the lands we are part of must cooperate in harmony. I think there's a challenge to Gwen Vivir. Of course, Gwen Vivir is not restricted to the countryside, but it did originate there. I think the challenge with Gwen Vivir is to confront today's urban spaces where much of humanity's population lives. To find ways to deal with the environment respectfully and with solidarity in an urban setting, to find, to conceptualize a good life for and in cities. We can't exactly expect everybody to move to the countryside, not should everybody. We need to find ways that city life, urbanized life can be reconstructed. One potential way that has manifested is through the transition towns movement, which you can look more into that's something that interests you where people are basically attempting to take control of their communities

to survive the challenge that is climate change and to create sustainable economies and ecologies where they find themselves. Movements can be found in many different countries. You might even find it in your area, in your country, look it up. It has a lot in common with the concept of Gwen Vivir. Like I said, I feel like there are so many different movements and ideas and philosophies with the same ideas that seem to feel like they're on the rise. Ultimately, I believe Gwen Vivir is highly subversive. I believe it looks not to return to the past or to get caught up in any kind of strict rules or in positions. It seeks a good life. It seeks to oppose colonialism and its consequences, to encourage new, more sustainable ways of living, drawn from old examples and models, and to really create a horizontal society, a cooperative society to develop self management instead of new forms of top down governance.

One that rejects both the market and the state as solutions to our issues and looks to ourselves. One that rejects the market and the state as potential solutions and looks to ourselves. The idea of development is an almost zombie category, as some writers have described it. It's supposed to be dead and yet it lives. And so Gwen Vivir provides us an opportunity to move away from development and look towards Gwen Vivir. It recognizes that all we may never create a perfect life, we can create a good life. That's it. Thanks.

That was pretty interesting. I like that. You can find me on YouTube at Andruism on Twitter.com slash underscore St. Drew. And if you're so inclined, you can support me on Patreon.com slash St. Drew. This has been Andru at It Could Happen Here with James signing off. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 offending 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 Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to A Could Happen Here. This is Shireen, and today I will be talking to you about the series of devastating earthquakes that have happened in Turkey and Syria this week. I am recording this the afternoon of Tuesday, February 7th. I am giving you that disclaimer because the numbers keep changing as far as the casualties and the death toll goes. So if the numbers are different by the time this comes out, which they probably will be, that is why unfortunately that is the nature of disasters like this. So there's nothing much that we can do. But let's talk about the earthquakes themselves first. The initial earthquake was a magnitude of 7.8 and it happened in southeastern Turkey early on Monday morning their local time, and it was followed by a magnitude 7.5 earthquake only nine hours later amid several aftershocks. All aftershocks are individual earthquakes, but as long as they are not stronger than the original quake, they are considered aftershocks.

But the 7.5 magnitude tremor that happened after the 7.81, only.3 of a difference, it was an unusually strong aftershock according to seismologists. Aftershocks are typically about 1.2 magnitude units lower than the original earthquake. So if there was a magnitude 8 earthquake, the aftershock would be in magnitude 7. So this was all a very rare disastrous occurrence. The second earthquake was a shock notable all on its own, as well as in relation to the primary earthquake. As of Tuesday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey, at least 125 aftershocks measuring 4.0 or greater have occurred since the initial 7.81. The frequency and magnitude of the aftershocks are decreasing, as is expected as we get further out from the time of the original earthquake. However, 5.0 and 6.0 aftershocks are still possible, and they bring a risk of additional damage to structures that are compromised from the original earthquake.

This brings a continued threat to rescue teams and survivors. The aftershocks stretch for more than 400 kilometers or about 250 miles along the fault zone that ruptured in southern Turkey. It stretches from the Mediterranean Sea off the northern coast of Syria up to the province of Malatiya. The initial tremor was centered about 20 miles from a major city and provincial capital, Gaziantep, and seismologists said that this first earthquake was one of the largest ever recorded in Turkey's history. It was also the region's strongest earthquake in nearly a century. In 1939, an earthquake of the same magnitude killed 30,000 people. Earthquakes of this magnitude are rare, with fewer than 5 occurring each year on average anywhere in the world.

7 earthquakes with magnitude 7.0 or greater have struck Turkey in the past 25 years, but the one that occurred on Monday is the most powerful. The effects were also felt in the neighboring countries of Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt to name a few, but there's a reason why earthquakes are so frequent in Turkey. Turkey sits on fault lines, and these earthquakes in the region have caused deadly landslides in the past. Turkey is situated on two massive tectonic plates, the Arabian and the Eurasian, and these meet underneath Turkey's southeastern provinces. Along this fault line, about 100 miles from one side or the other, the earth slipped. Seismologists refer to this event as a strike slip, where the plates are touching and all of a sudden they slide sideways. In a strike slip, the plates are moving horizontally rather than vertically.

This matters because the buildings don't want to go back and forth, and then the secondary waves begin to go back and forth as well. Because of the nature of this seismic event, the aftershocks could last for weeks and months. I have had to update the death toll many, many times in preparing this episode. I am probably going to have to update it many, many more times before this comes out. But as of now, when I am recording this, the evening of Tuesday, February 7th, the death toll is over 7,900 deaths in Turkey and Syria combined. And it's expected to rise significantly more in Syria as these days go by. The exact number that is being reported is 7,926 people. The Syrian civil defense, aka the White Helmets, said that the number of fatalities in rebel-held areas in northwest Syria rose to 1,220,

and the number of injured people rose to 2,600. And these figures are expected to rise significantly due to the presence of hundreds of families under the rubble. The White Helmets said, quote, Our teams continue search and rescue operations in difficult circumstances, and they described a tally of more than 400 collapsed buildings and more than 1,300 partially collapsed buildings and thousands of others that were damaged. Additionally, at least 812 deaths have been confirmed in government-controlled parts of Syria. In Turkey, at least 5,894 people are dead and 34,810 are injured. And this number is only going to continue to rise.

I don't know when it will stop, maybe a week from now, maybe a month. I don't know how many more people will be unaccounted for and not reported about, but this is what we have for now. You've probably seen pictures or videos of the devastation that is happening and all the destruction. There have been really disturbing images of the ground literally just opening up in two. And as if you can see the core of the earth, and other videos show the collapsed buildings and the rubble that rescuers are trying to dig underneath to find survivors. This is one story out of many, but a newborn baby was reportedly rescued from the rubble in Syria, and there is a video of this. A baby girl was rescued from the rubble of her home. Her umbilical cord was still attached to her mother when she was found, and her mother is believed to have died after giving birth.

One of the men that found her said, we heard a voice while we were digging. We cleared the dust and found the baby with the umbilical cord intact, so we cut it and my cousin took her to the hospital. The girl is receiving treatment at a children's hospital, and as of now she is stable, but arrived with bruises, lacerations, and hypothermia. And she's the sole survivor of her immediate family. They lived in a five-story apartment building that was leveled by the quake. And again, this is one example of the stories of thousands of people. And I think what's important to remember is that even after someone is rescued, they're not exactly home free. They can have many injuries or hypothermia because it's very cold over there right now, and their recovery is going to be brutal.

And I feel like that's a good thing to keep in mind when you hear the word rescue because the trauma doesn't stop there. Almost 6,000 buildings have been destroyed by this earthquake, and this includes residential buildings, hospitals, schools, and the damage is even more severe in northwestern Syria because it had been in the process of attempting to reconstruct itself since the Syrian war started in 2011. Thankfully, members of the international community have stepped up to coordinate relief efforts to Turkey and Syria after the powerful earthquakes. However, sending aid to Syria is going to be difficult because there is no central government to take care of the multi-sectorial response. The Turkish government said, quote, we do not know where the number of dead and injured can go. In Syria, rescue workers used headlamps and floodlights to work throughout the night. Many Syrian war refugees are also in the quake stricken area of Turkey.

Turkey has taken in 3.6 million Syrian refugees, more than any other country. And this is according to the UN Refugee Agency, which runs one of its largest operations in Gaziantep, where the first earthquake happened. And again, videos shared on social media from Turkey and across the border in Syria have showed destroyed buildings and rescue crews searching through piles of rubble for survivors. Some people fled their homes in the rain and took shelter in their cars. And governments around the world quickly responded to Turkey's request for international assistance. Many of them deploying rescue teams and offers of aid, which I will get into in a bit. The World Health Organization warned that the number of casualties are likely to increase as much as 8 times, as rescuers are finding more victims in the rubble. Rescuers have been combing through mountains of rubble in freezing and snowy conditions to find survivors, and these freezing conditions will leave many people without shelter, adding to the dangers.

It is freezing over there, and that obviously only makes things more difficult and more painful and more complicated. And we always see the same thing with earthquakes, unfortunately, which is that the initial reports of the numbers of people who have died or have been injured will increase quite significantly in the week that follows. The situation on the ground seems to be more disastrous in Syria, and this is according to the country director in Gaziantep for the Syrian American Medical Society Foundation. He said, it's a disastrous situation in both Turkey and Syria, although Syria is more disastrous. Over a decade of conflict in northern Syria has fostered a poor economic situation to say the least, making it very difficult to respond to the current crisis. In contrast, the situation in Turkey is coordinated through a very well-settled government, and northern Syria, unfortunately, has no government that gives a shit about it. In northern Syria, most of the services and help are provided by NGOs, and this is due to a long-term lack of investments in early recovery and infrastructure. One of these groups, again, is the White Helmets. They were one of the main saviors or helpers ever since the Syrian Civil War started in 2011.

They have been on the ground helping, and they are made up of Syrian volunteers. And I think that's important to keep in mind because many Syrians have relied on each other and each other alone because they didn't receive help in the past. And I'm going to get into later how much the country's civil war has made things exponentially worse. Several parts in northwestern Syria, including the city of Idlib, are still controlled by anti-government rebels. This representative added that they evacuated two maternity hospitals because of the physical impact of the earthquake on the infrastructure. And so the question is, where are these people going to go? There's no shelter. It is freezing, and there's not enough aid to go around. And I'm hoping the countries that I've said they will help are in the process of actually doing so.

And I'm going to get into some of them in a moment because I'm grateful that there's help coming from somewhere. And amongst all this, there have been calls to ease the Syrian border restrictions and controls for countries to offer their aid. And again, the rebel-held enclave in northwest Syria across the border from Turkey is among the areas that have been hit the worst by this disaster. International pledges, as I said, of emergency aid have poured in for Turkey and Syria, leading to calls for the international community to relax some of the political restrictions on aid entering northwest Syria. The Turkish president, Erdogan, who was facing an election in only a few months, said that offers of aid to Turkey had come from 45 countries ranging from Kuwait to Israel, Russia, and the UK. Syria said it had received offers of help from China, Russia, Lebanon, Algeria, and the United Arab Emirates. Aid from around the world is thankfully heading toward Turkey and Syria, and some 70 countries and 14 international organizations have offered their assistance.

Here's a roundup of some of the latest pledges. There is a Hungarian rescue team of 50 people, including five military doctors and two search dogs. South Korea plans to offer humanitarian aid worth 5 million to Turkey and send about 110 disaster relief workers and military personnel to support its search and rescue work. You may notice that I'm only saying they're sending aid to Turkey in a couple of these, and I will get into why in a little bit. But to continue, the Palestinian International Corporation Agency will deploy 70 experts to the Kuwait later this week, sending two crews comprised of the Civil Defense, Ministry of Health, and the Palestinian Red Cross, as well as doctors and engineers. There are also teams from the Palestinian Red Crescent, and they are carrying out earthquake rescue and relief operations in the Palestinian refugee camps in the surrounding areas in Syria. At least three Palestinian refugee camps in Syria were struck by the earthquake. Pakistan deployed two contingents of emergency services to Turkey. China said it will send about 5.9 million dollars worth of aid to Turkey, while also coordinating with Syria for emergency supplies and accelerating ongoing food aid projects.

Two Israeli aid groups chartered a special flight to Ghazi in Tehran Tuesday to bring personnel and equipment to victims. Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief is sending a team of 50 recovery experts to Turkey. The Dalai Lama committed to sending rescue and relief efforts early today. And Taiwan increased its donation to Turkey from 200,000 to 2 million dollars, and it dispatched about 130 rescue teams. Indonesia also supplied aid for Turkey. The Vice President of Indonesia highlighted the urgency of dispatching humanitarian aid to Turkey to return the support granted by the country to Indonesia during their times of need over natural disasters in the past. Canada also pledged 7.5 million dollars to earthquake relief. Egypt offered relief assistance to Syria in the wake of this earthquake.

Ukraine will send 87 emergency staff workers to Turkey to assist with the relief efforts. And not just countries, but also companies and nonprofits have offered their help this week. For example, Amazon announced that it will help the victims of the Turkey earthquake by donating food, medicine, and equipment from its Istanbul warehouse. Amazon has about 2,000 employees in Turkey, and in a statement on Monday, it said that it activated its, quote, disaster relief capabilities and was preparing to donate relief items, including blankets, tents, food, baby food, and medicines. Even here in the US, the Virginia Task Force One is sending a crew of 79 members and six dogs to Turkey, and there are 78 members of the LA County Fire Department who left Monday evening to Turkey. And then there's Greece, who set aside tensions with Turkey to send aid, but helping Syria, they said, is more complicated. Despite its tensions with Turkey, Greece was among the countries that have dispatched help to the country, but conflict-torn Northwest Syria makes the same efforts more complicated, the Prime Minister said. Grace in Turkey, he said, are, quote, neighbors who need to help each other through difficult times.

This is not the first time earthquakes have struck our countries. This is a time to temporarily set aside our differences and try to address what is a very, very urgent situation. He continued to explain that in Syria, however, there is no official person or official from the government to have a dialogue with, and no assurance that aid will make it to the impacted area and people, and that makes relief efforts hard to pull off. No country on its own has the ability to actually make these sort of arrangements. That's why I think it is important that these negotiations could take place either through the UN or through the European Union by pulling resources. I would not feel confident having these sort of discussions at a bilateral level. He also added that he has not directly communicated with Damascus. He went on to say that, quote, I want to stress this. This is not about geopolitics. This is not about recognizing any sort of regime. This is about saving people in horrible conditions who desperately need our assistance.

So the scale of aid being offered is going to require a large coordination effort, as well as delicate diplomatic maneuvers to supply aid to Syria where the leadership of Bashar al-Assad is not recognized in the West. It's not recognized for me, either, and many Syrians feel the same way. But that is the monster that we are currently dealing with, and there's not much we can do about that at this certain point in time. And so, as I mentioned, the Syrian side of the border is going to be a challenge since the worst affected areas contain hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees that are locked in a war zone and still facing attacks from Syrian government forces. Aid agencies reported that some of the roads from Turkey into Syria were blocked, including the main cross-border crossing used by international aid agencies. The White Helmets said hundreds of families were still trapped in the aftermath of the earthquake. They also added that terrible weather conditions, including freezing temperatures, had compounded the crisis. And their continuing rescue operations in Syria, despite great difficulties and aftershocks, they said. The White Helmets also urged the Assad regime and Russia to refrain from military activity in the affected areas in order to allow international groups to unify and help the people affected. A spokesperson from the White Helmets said,

Our teams responded and until now many families are under the rubble. Our teams are trying hard to find all the casualties. Northwest Syria is now a disaster area. We need help from everyone to save our people. I think this would be a moment to take a little break. I don't have the capacity or emotional bandwidth to think of a clever segue, so here are some ads. And we are back. We're talking about the difficulty sending aid to Syria along the Turkey-Syrian border. Last month, actually, the UN Security Council agreed to allow aid into Northwest Syria from Turkey across one border crossing, Bab Al-Hawa. Surprising no one, the Syrian regime has been resistant to allowing aid into a region serving more than 4 million of its people because it regards the aid as undermining Syrian sovereignty and reducing its chances of winning back control of the region. Yes, that is correct. The Syrian government doesn't want to help more than 4 million of its own people because one day it wants to control them again.

Are you fucking kidding me? I don't understand that malignant desire to rule over a land that you have destroyed and a people that you have murdered. I don't get the fucking point, but regardless, that is one of the many reasons why getting aid into Syria is going to be much more complicated than getting aid into Turkey. Additionally, Mark Lowcock, the former head of UN Humanitarian Affairs, said, The areas worst affected by the earthquake inside Syria look to be run by the Turkish-controlled opposition and not by the Syrian government. It is going to require Turkish acquiescence to aid in these areas. It is unlikely the Syrian government will do much to help. Yes, Mark, I think you're right. The Syrian government isn't going to do shit. If anything, Bashar al-Assad is probably happy seeing all these people die because that's his whole MO just to kill the Syrian people. Anyway, a video from a hospital posted by the Syrian American Medical Society showed that it was immensely crowded. They said our hospitals are overwhelmed with patients filling the hallways. There is an immediate need for trauma supplies and a comprehensive emergency response to save lives and treat the injured. Initial needs are for tens of thousands of tents, heaters for the tents, tens of thousands of blankets, thermal clothes, ready to eat food, and basic first aid kits.

A UNICEF representative in Aleppo said that the hospitals in Syria are absolutely overloaded. Hospitals are full of patients with trauma, broken bones and lacerations, and some people are going to the hospital to seek help for the mental trauma they endured after the earthquake struck. The UNICEF representative Angela Kearney said while hospitals are functioning, the task has been overwhelming. Describing the scene in Aleppo when the earthquake struck on Monday, Kearney said children who have already been traumatized by war were bewildered. They didn't know what was happening. Kearney said that on Monday morning when UNICEF began its work in the area, there were seven schools in Aleppo that are being used as shelters. By Tuesday morning, that number grew to 67, and currently it is nearly 200. In all of those schools that are partially damaged, there are families there who left their apartments, left their houses with just their pajamas, she said.

She also added that while aid is starting to go into the affected areas, there is still a desperate need for blankets, food, clean water, medical care, and nutritional care. She said that water, sanitation, and nutrition needs are the most urgent. The aid is starting to go in, but it is overwhelming. The needs are very great. There are discussions underway to open aid corridors from the government-controlled parts of Syria to the rebel-held areas. Mohammad Hamoud, Syria country manager at the Norwegian Red Cross, said that he hopes with the help and efforts from humanitarian communities this would happen in the coming days. And he said, currently, nothing has moved there. But there are discussions about moving aid and access to these areas. He continued to say, after being asked if the Syrian government in Damascus has been helpful to these areas, he said they have stated that they are open to cross-line intervention, meaning from government-held areas to these non-government-held areas. They are open to it. They're not doing shit, though, obviously.

Earlier today, the head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which described itself as an independent and volunteer-based humanitarian organization, said that the organization is ready to immediately send aid convoys to rebel-held areas, including Idlib, through the UN. Hamoud added that the humanitarian situation is worsening. He said, we are in a race against time. In describing the rescue and search operations, Hamoud said that due to the lack of machinery, most of the work on clearing the rubble is done by hand, and the cold weather conditions are not helping. He also added that the buildings are already weakened because of 11 years of war. In addition to the thousands of people that have been lost to this tragedy, there are also some cultural sites that have been permanently damaged in both Turkey and Syria. UNESCO, the United Nations Cultural Organization, said it's going to provide assistance following the cultural site damage. UNESCO said that it is particularly concerned about the situation in the ancient city of Aleppo, which is on the list of world heritage in danger.

It added that the citadel had significant damage. The old city wall has collapsed, and several buildings and the souks have been weakened. In the Turkish city of Diyad Bekud, UNESCO lamented the collapse of several buildings. The city is home to the World Heritage Site, the Diyad Bekud Fortress, and the Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape, which is an important center of the Roman, Sinassid, Byzantine, Islamic, and Ottoman periods. The organization says it is mobilizing experts to establish a precise inventory of the damage, with the aim of rapidly securing and stabilizing these sites. Aleppo was also one of the city's worst damage by the Syrian regime. It is a beautiful, beautiful place. Everything that the regime has destroyed was a beautiful, beautiful place. Aleppo had a lot of history though, and that region is just home to so much history, and it's just really heartbreaking to know the extent of the loss that doesn't just include lives.

In talking to my mom and my family about this, the sentiment seems like it's the same that it's been for the past decade, essentially. Syrians don't have a government. There is no government. Assad and his regime doesn't care about the Syrian people. My mom literally said, we have no one. We've known this for years. No one helped us. Syrians are the ones supporting each other. The White Helmets is a great example of this. One of our family's friends on the ground in the city of Hama, which is where my mom is from, was saying that it was absolute chaos. Everyone is in the streets, and no one is daring to go back inside their homes. Another person was telling us about his experience, and he said, I was asleep, and felt the earthquake start in my bed. My son was terrified, and I went to hug my son. I kept telling him, it'll be over soon. It'll be over soon. And then the roof started crumbling on top of us.

So then he ran outside, and he saw many people doing the same, just running outside their homes if they were able to make it out and watching their homes just crumble in front of them. Let's take a break, and when we come back, I want to set the scene of what Syrians have been going through even before this earthquake even happened, and how sanctions in particular have made the impact of this disaster exponentially worse. So we're back, and we're going to talk about how sanctions have only aided in the suffering of the Syrian people. Twelve years after the eruption of the Syrian uprising and the 2011 subsequent conflict, the US's Syria policy has constrained political pressure on the Assad regime to broad economic sanctions. But despite an expansive approach that targets entire economic sectors, these sanctions have had little to no effect in pushing the regime to offer political concessions, engage meaningfully in a peaceful settlement of the conflict, or improve its human rights record. All the while, conditions in Syria have steadily worsened, as sanctions, along with the destructive effects of 12 years of conflict,

the economic crisis in neighboring Lebanon, and the COVID-19 pandemic, all of this has fueled an economic collapse that has left more than 90% of the population in Syria living in poverty. In 1979, the United States listed Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism, and since then it has pursued sanctions as a primary tool in its policy towards Syria. The George W. Bush administration issued a series of sanctions under executive orders aiming to limit Syria's destabilizing influence in Iraq. However, after the 2011 uprising, the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations sanctioned the Assad regime on an unprecedented scale for its gross human rights violations against its people. These sanctions ultimately accumulated in the passing of the Caesar Act in 2019, and this allows primary and secondary sanctions targeting both those who commit the sanctionable offenses and those who enable them. Just three months ago, in November of 2022, a UN appointed independent human rights expert urged the United States to lift the unilateral sanctions against Syria, warning that they are perpetrating and exacerbating the destruction and trauma suffered by ordinary citizens since the brutal war began in 2011. This expert's name is Alana Dohan, and she said, I am struck by the pervasiveness of the human rights and humanitarian impact of the unilateral coercive measures imposed on Syria and the total economic and financial isolation of a country whose people are struggling to rebuild a life with dignity. In a statement that followed her 12-day visit to Syria, Dohan presented detailed information on the catastrophic effects that sanctions have had on all aspects of Syrian life.

Currently, 90% of Syria's population is living below the poverty line, she said, pointing to their limited access to food, water, electricity, shelter, cooking and heating fuel, transportation and health care. Moreover, growing economic hardship threatens to trigger a massive brain drain in the country. She said, with more than half of the vital infrastructure either completely destroyed or severely damaged, the imposition of unilateral sanctions on key economic sectors including oil, gas, electricity, trade, construction and engineering have quashed national income, and they undermine efforts toward economic recovery and reconstruction. These sanctions have committed various human rights violations in their existence, including the serious shortages in medicines and specialized medical equipment. My family and I have direct experience with these repercussions of the lack of medicines and medical equipment. My cousin, a child, had brain cancer and it got worse and worse and the city they were in did not offer the treatment necessary or even chemo to help his condition. So his mother would drive to Damascus where at least some of the treatment options were available. But the road to Damascus, even though it shouldn't take more than a few hours, can sometimes take all day because there are so many checkpoints and road closures and just the regime making it so difficult to do anything.

Ultimately, my cousin was suffering for the remainder of his very young life and he didn't get the treatment that he needed. And I really think these sanctions have a lot to do with the lack of access that my family and many families have in Syria. And that experience that my family went through is one of many that many Syrian families have endured because of these sanctions. So I want you guys to keep that in mind that numbers also contain individual lives and each one is devastating all on its own. And I know I say that often but I think it bears repeating every time. I don't want us to be numb to statistics and numbers when it comes to casualties and suffering and loss. And maybe it sounds obvious, but I just think we need to remember the value of human life and what it means to take it away. So that's what I'm going to say about that for now.

Let's get back to the reports that Ms. Dohan was showing the US back in November of 2022 about the effect of the sanctions. So including the impact that sanctions have had on the serious shortages in medicines and specialized medical equipment due to the unavailability of equipment in spare parts, she warned that the rehabilitation and development of water distribution networks for drinking and irrigation has stalled with serious implications for public health and food security. 12 million Syrians are experiencing food insecurity. This is pre-earthquake. The number is probably much higher now. Dohan urged for the immediate lifting of all unilateral sanctions that severely harm human rights and prevent any efforts for early recovery, rebuilding, and reconstruction. She said, No reference to good objectives of unilateral sanctions justifies the violation of fundamental human rights.

The international community has an obligation of solidarity and assistance to the Syrian people. I want to add something that UNICEF said about the children in Syria. Children in Syria continue to face one of the most complex humanitarian situations in the world. A worsening economic crisis continued localized hostilities after more than a decade of grinding conflict. Mass displacement and devastated public infrastructure have left two-thirds of the population in need of assistance. Waterborne diseases pose another deadly threat to children and families affected. And all of this is again pre-earthquake. This is the life that Syrians have known for years now without any assistance.

Sanctions have done nothing but contribute to the increase in the suffering of the Syrian people, and now countries and organizations might have a hard time providing aid because of these sanctions. Sanctions have done nothing but contribute to the suffering and pain of the Syrian people. They didn't do anything they were supposedly meant to do. The Assad regime isn't going to change anything. It hasn't changed anything. It's still killing its people. I also want to mention that last year, on May 31st, 2022, the EU extended its sanctions against the Syrian government for another year. Who knows if this will change, but for now, that's the reality. So I'm really hoping these sanctions get eventually lifted, or else helping the Syrian people is going to be extremely difficult.

And right now, rescuers are still digging through thousands and thousands of flattened buildings in near freezing temperatures. The death toll is only going to continue to rise, and everyone there needs all the help they can get. And I know, at least for me, it feels really helpless. I've felt pretty helpless for a long time when it comes to Syria. But if you're able to donate any money at all, I would really urge you to donate to a charity that you trust. I really like the white helmets because they're just on the ground and they've been doing the work for years. So if you're able to, I think help can go a long way. I want to end with something that Elena Dohan, the UN-appointed independent human rights expert that gave the US this report about the sanctions in November of 2022.

She quoted one view that she heard expressed many times. She said, I saw much suffering, but now I see the hope die. So that's where the Syrian people started. That's where they've been. Nearly 70% of the Syrian population was already in need of humanitarian aid before the earthquake even happened. And it's an issue that's only been compounded by the tragedy. Today, the UN said, quote, this tragedy will have a devastating impact on many vulnerable families who struggle to provide for their loved ones on a daily basis. The statement outlined the impact of serious 12-year war, describing a country as grappling with economic collapse, severe water, electricity, and fuel shortages. They issued an appeal to all donor partners to provide assistance necessary to alleviate suffering.

The UN and humanitarian partners say they are currently focusing on immediate needs, including food, shelter, and non-food items and medicine. And the devastation of this earthquake because of this is truly devastating. I cannot emphasize that enough. So again, if you're able to donate, I really urge you to. And if you can't, just keep raising awareness because someone else might be able to donate. And that's all we really have for now. So that's the episode. I hope it was informative or eye-opening in any way. Thank you for listening. I will talk to you later.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark and not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It seems like hardly a month goes by where we are not bombarded with horrific images of far-eyed violence. Mass shootings that target synagogues, black churches and queer nightclubs, death threats to hospitals spurred by posts from online trolls, and a barrage of fascist groups attempting to intimidate everyone and everything from children's events, black lives matter protests, pride celebrations, and abortion clinics. When resistance is mobilized and people do push back, the media often frames these confrontations as a clash simply between two sets of extremists. On today's show is the it's going down crew once again takes over it could happen here.

We look at how, far from being just confined to small sets of antifa super soldiers, mass community self-defense is part and parcel to the DNA of grassroots movements for liberation in the so-called United States. We can see this throughout the ongoing history of indigenous resistance to colonization and the fight against slavery and racial apartheid, radical labor unions such as the IWW organized against the Ku Klux Klan, attention that even led to running gun battles, while militant organizers like Robert F. Williams and groups such as the Deacons for Defense, who helped inspire the Black Panthers, fought back against white racist mobs. In the book, This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You Killed, author Charles E. Cobb documents this history discussing the wide use of arms in defending civil rights organizers from white supremacists. Groups like Anti-Racist Action or ARA carried on this trajectory, working to set up chapters of organized anti-racists that confronted neo-Nazi groups, the Klan, and participated in defense of abortion clinics. Once again, I'm Mike Andrews, let's get into it.

In 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the levees surrounding New Orleans broke, flooding working-class communities and homes. Those that could evacuate fled, while many, often poor and black, were stuck behind to fend for themselves. Stepping into this setting was a group of black liberation and anarchist activists who worked to set up mutual aid hubs and free clinics, dubbed Common Ground. But as these volunteers worked to feed people, restore people's homes, and provide free medical care, they quickly found that they weren't the only organized force on the streets of New Orleans. In this following interview, Sonsir Ali Shakur discusses how the group came up against and defended themselves from a formation of armed, racist white vigilantes who worked directly with local police and are suspected of carrying out multiple murders of unarmed black men. A warning, however, this interview is graphic and details death, racist violence, and anti-black racism. My name is Sonsir Ali Shakur, I'm an organizer out of Washington, DC. I went to New Orleans during Katrina, during the Katrina aftermath, and I helped form co-found Common Ground relief.

And Common Ground was formed as a response to the calamity of Katrina, and Common Ground was also the brainchild of the Angola III. So a lot of the base organizers of Common Ground were already in New Orleans organizing to help the Angola III. So the Angola III was basically the godfathers of Common Ground relief. We lost a few of the elders, Alfred Woodfox and such, and we still got King, King, Watters and everything. A note to our listeners, the Angola III referred to here is a group of formerly incarcerated black political prisoners and members of the Black Panther Party, who in the 1970s were imprisoned in the notorious Angola facility in Louisiana. This included Robert Hillary King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace. King was released in 2001, and along with another former Black Panther, Malik Rahim, became involved in mutual aid in disaster relief efforts in New Orleans following Katrina in 2005 under the banner of Common Ground. Wallace was released from prison on October 1, 2013, only to pass away sadly three days later, a day after being re-indicted by the state.

Albert Woodfox was finally released in February of 2016 and passed on six years later due to complications from COVID-19. Tireless activists on both sides of the prison walls together the Angola III endured a combined total of 114 years in solitary confinement. Yeah, my job when I touched down the Common Ground was basically I was a relief scout. I wore many hats. I was a mediation person, head of security, and I also organized about seven makeshift hurricane distribution centers from New Orleans to the Bayou, and I spent 18 months there and children's free breakfast program, anything the community needed, you know, I provided. I used to drive like 1400 miles a week taking supplies from New Orleans into different bayous and different surrounding areas in New Orleans. That was my job. When I first got there, I ran into Malik Rahim, former Black Panther in New Orleans, taking his minister of defense. And when I touched down, he had told me that there were a group of white vigilantes up to 18 of them, riding around and murdering black people as they walked through these white communities in Algiers and Algiers Point. Algiers wasn't affected by water, but it did have a great deal of wind damage. Most of the houses was intact. It just was no electricity. And the water was also a problem.

Well, what they would do, they would tie cans from one fence to another beginning of the neighborhood of the street. And if they were in their homes and you bumped it, you know, you try to get up under the cans and the cans started ringing, they would open up windows and begin to fire at you. And they would jump in their pickup trucks and chase you down. And some, you know, someone murdered, you know, Point Blank and those whom they wounded, they would throw in the back of the truck, take to a garage and pour gasoline over your wounds, put cigarettes out on you. And some didn't make it out that situation. They, like I said, they dropped about, according to the information we got, they dropped 19 innocent black men. And the brothers in the community got tired of these guys. And they broke into a pawn shop and stole all the guns out the pawn shop. And there was about to be a major race war. And you got to understand, too, how tight this situation was, because their base, their house that they, they hung out at, their backyard connected with our backyard. So it was extremely tense. So when the brothers broke into the pawn shop and got the weapons out, just so happened the next day, the National Guard showed up. But if the National Guard didn't show up the next day, it would have been extremely ugly out there and everything. And yeah, they used to patrol the streets and the pickup trucks. We would see them all the time. I would see them all the time. And they were cowards, man, you know, they would tend to one is always tend to one, you know, 10 vigilante is the one black man on our black man. But we noticed when they would drive by, we would come out with our weapons on our hips and let them know that this ain't no place to mess with. Keep driving. You know what I'm saying? You will be fired upon. You come here with that business. And I would have to set up patrols for our house at night. I would sleep in the hallway of my links home with a nominal meter car being rifle strapped across my chest and a radio calm so I could keep in contact with the others who are unarmed and doing patrols, you know, watching the house.

The other 36 volunteers that slept in tents in the backyard, you know, were asleep. Lucky for us, they were a bunch of cowards and they kept it moving. I would see them all the time. And they were they were afraid of me, because they knew that I was not afraid of them and I was armed. And we also when we had a few people back at the house that was armed as well. You could ride down certain streets and there will be dead bodies that were bloated from being left out in the sun and those bodies were left by the vigilantes. The rumor was that the New Orleans Police Department told the vigilantes what gave the vigilantes a green light to do what they needed to do. And as far as the bodies just leave them near the gutter and they will come and collect them later, which they didn't. And the bodies stayed out there, I would say up to two months, you know, you mean they were like you can see them all the time. And a lot of people had left. It wasn't a lot of people there because people had evacuated a lot of stray dogs running around in packs of 30. What we would have to do is get up early in the morning when the curfew was over, take bed sheets from Malink's mother's room and go out and wrap up the bodies with these sheets, keep the dogs from ripping them open for fluid and food. According to the Nation and ProPublica, investigative journalist AC Thompson spent months speaking with survivors of Katrina about a racist militia that formed in the predominantly white neighborhood of Algiers Point, who carried out a series of deadly shootings and even worked directly with local law enforcement. The business told investigators that police had given them a green light to shoot anyone, quote, breaking into their property, and to, quote, leave the bodies on the side of the road. Others spoke of a free-for-all of white against black where whites could indulge in violence with impunity. Years later, several white vigilantes were found guilty and were sentenced to prison time for shootings and murder.

And like many modern conspiracy theories pushed by the far-right about ANSIFA and BLM during the George Floyd uprising, the vigilantes in Algiers Point were largely animated by widespread racist rumors that were unfounded about looters. We were harassed a lot by the NOPD, you know, a lot of times at gunpoint, they would come to our house sometimes, you know, 10 cars deep, the NOPD would, and looking for Malink. One night they came through looking for Malink, and well, we had heard that they were out to assassinate him and anybody with him. They came out looking for Malink, one night about 10 cars deep, and they had went through the house looking for him and they couldn't find him. And they pulled out this 14-year-old young man that we had befriended and lived on the back street for Malink. And they started beating him, saying that he had stole the cooler out of somebody's yard. And mind you, you know, no one's there, so no one's really missing that cooler. And the young man thought, you know, because we didn't have refrigeration, and we had to put everything on ice. You know, ice was very important at that time, and water was very important, you know, along with gasoline, but the young brother brought us a cooler, and the police put shotguns in everybody's stomachs, and they beat him in front of us and dared us to do anything. As far as, like, what the environment looked like, it was not, and I'll say this, it was not a rescue mission. This was, seemed like they were running a drill, a military drill, you know, like the St. Albert, I mean, like the Albert Project.

You would look at the bridge and you would see continuous military cars going across the Crescent City Bridge. At nighttime in four corners of the community, you would have Black Hawk helicopters patrolling, you know, they would follow you through the yard with spotlights. Also, we had Homeland Security, which included mercenaries. They were sometimes up to 25 cars deep, and if you were to violate the curfew, they would ride up on you. And they had these little, and I used to have to interact with them, because we had some young people there that thought they had privilege from up north with translate in New Orleans, which it did not. They seen any white person outside of New Orleans as a bunch of quote-unquote niggas love us. So I would have to negotiate with these Homeland Security people. You had to be very calm, very still, because you could see the pupils, their pupils were dilated, were small.

Anybody that's been in war, like Vietnam and such, and there's a storm. They know when these people, when the pupils are dilated like that, that means these people have killed several times. And my uncle used to call it a hundred miles there. And you had to be very calm with these people, because if you flinched, if you did anything that they didn't like, or they felt threatened in any type of way, they will open up fire on you. They had AR-15s, all of them had AR-15s and nine millimeters strapped to their legs. So it seemed more like a military takeover, like I said before, than a rescue. And further down the line in the months, you had National Guardsmen that opened fire on people into busy traffic. You would find bodies in the 7th Ward and the 8th Ward in different houses with bullets in the back of their head, you know, execution style.

And our investigating team will go out and witness this firsthand. And I was a part of that with the investigating team that would do a walk through the house where the body was at and was shot in the back of the head. And the rumor was, you know, we had some rogue National Guardsmen executing, you know, people who didn't have homes or some homeless people, you know, that were left behind. Number one lesson I learned from Katrina was you may be a pacifist, but you might need to pass some fists. You may need to go out and get you firearms. Of course, we want you to get proper training. Of course, we don't want you to do anything illegal. Get your legal firearms and get some training. The second lesson was that human beings are incredible.

We saw a lot of destruction, but we also saw a lot of beauty and a lot of love in my experience, too. We were common ground, people came together in days and we fell in love with each other within days because of the pressure, the situation. If we did love each other, if we didn't get along with one another, we had to, you know, in order for survival. Things were so bad that if your car had broken down on the side of the highway on a road, you had to call us. And five different vehicles will be speeding to your location. You know, to see who would get there first before Homeland Security or a vigilante group will roll up on you. You can't rely on the state. 100% can't rely on the state. Stay with us as it could happen here returns after this short break and a word from our sponsors.

The same year that Sincere was facing down armed racist vigilantes in New Orleans, the stage was also set for an uprising to kick off in Toledo, Ohio. In our next interview, Tom tells us how a largely black community and anarchists affiliated with anti-racist action hit the streets against the National Socialist Movement or the NSM and participated in an uprising that exploded, not just against the neo-Nazis, but the police that were protecting them as well. The Toledo anti-racism protests really began when a National Socialist Movement member who was living in a black neighborhood in Toledo pulled a gun on two black children that were playing in the alley behind his house. Those kids then went home and told their parents. Their parents then showed up to his house with weapons. The guy pulled the gun on them and then called the National Socialist Movement, who then showed up. This is back when Bill White was still the head of NSM. NSM was actually starting to make some headway. They were growing really quickly. They targeted Ohio as a recruiting ground because they thought that they could gain a lot of membership there. Toledo was their first foray into trying to do stuff in Ohio.

They announced a date. The organizers on the ground in Toledo did something really interesting. Instead of organizing activists, they went and organized in the community directly. They were going around the streets talking to people. Street gangs were calling truces for the day. When October 15th rolled around, everybody showed up. There were anarchists there, but there were tons of people from the neighborhood there. The whole protest didn't last very long. This was October 15th, 2005. NSM was there and they had their shields. People were hucking stuff at them, but they were too far away to really hit. The cops started surrounding them and allowing them to march. As they were marching, they got within projectile range of people who then started pelting them with everything that they could think of. The cops then got the Nazis to run so they could try and get them out of the area. A group of people cut back behind a school to try and cut them off and got tear gassed. When the tear gas flew, everything just got set off. There was rioting on and off for three days in this neighborhood after this. A bar owned by a cop got looted and then burned to the ground. People tried to burn this Nazi's house down.

They had to declare a state of emergency over this. There were a number of things that were really important about that day, I think, for us. One was it really did point to the effectiveness of community anti-fascist work. People in that neighborhood were already mad, but it was this sort of mobilization work, which was done by people in the neighborhood and also done by anarchists that were down in the neighborhood working with people to really make that what it was. It really showed what a community can do when Nazis show up in their neighborhood and how much a community can reassert its ownership over their space when the police decide to protect the Nazis that are attacking their neighborhood. The other thing that it really demonstrated, that it really created, was it created a dynamic in Ohio, which had been building for a little while, but you can still feel the ramifications of it. Starting with the over-the-rind riots, which I think were in 2003 or 2001, when the Cincinnati police killed Timothy Thomas, there had kind of been this escalating series of tensions with the state around this period of time. It was also the period of time that a lot of Ohio cities were sort of beginning their real acute period of their decline, that they had been sort of declining for a while, but this is really when things got bad. It was starting in really like the early 2000s, mid-2000s. The financial collapse in Cleveland, for example, was in 2006, but it had already been sort of going for a couple of years before that.

And so there were these political conditions that were in place that facilitated this, but this also kind of created a dynamic of confrontation with the state and created a mentality within anarchist communities about being really realistic about what those confrontations look like, that instead of being idealistic, sort of like people were in the anti-war movement and sort of approaching police from a perspective of ideas and discourse, what we learned during those days is that we should probably approach the police as a logistical force and understand them as such. It was after that point that people really started researching police tactics in this area of the country, and that has had really profound impacts over the last 15 years, right? It really did create an entire culture of really digging into those kinds of things very carefully and doing it in a way which wasn't bombastic, but was focused on actual research. The reason that that could happen was what went down on those days was so intense. It was the first time a lot of people had experienced like full-blown major rioting before, and like major large-scale urban rioting before. And it definitely changed a lot about the way that anarchists in this area of the country approach things, and you can still feel the ramifications, the ripple effects of that today.

Stay with us. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back after these words from our sponsors. In our last segment, we're going to speak to anti-fascist researcher and author Spencer Sunshine. But first, let's rewind the clock to when Trump first came in as president in 2017, kicking off riots, walkouts, and protests around the country. Anchory protests soon spilled into airports. His people in the tens of thousands took action to defeat the Muslim ban. On February 2nd, a massive riot kicked off at UC Berkeley against the far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos, shutting down his scheduled talk. The far-right responded by holding a series of free speech rallies throughout the summer. And anti-fascists soon found themselves outflanked in the streets by a loose coalition of militia members, proud boys, neo-Nazis, and alt-right groups. Seeking to seize on this moment, the wide-nash swing of the movement called for another free speech rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the scene was set for historic and deadly showdown.

It was pretty clear, especially as the run-up to it happened about how big it was going to be, how many different kinds of groups were going to be involved, and that for the first time, although there had been increasing mobilizations throughout the year, especially, it was the first one that was going to be led by open fascists. Some of the other ones, fascists participated in them, but they were more a pan far-right. They were like pan far-right events, like what happened in Berkeley. But this one was going to be led by fascists, and there were all those many different kinds of groups, and they were coming out of the woodwork. We had old activists who had been around in the 80s who stated they were going to come, and there was clearly a lot of energy behind it. And it seemed like it was the big bid, and some of the participants were openly saying this. It was going to be the big bid for power and legitimacy of the alt-right. I believe it was Richard Spencer who said, or Matthew Himeck, I forget which one, actually said there's going to be before Charlottesville and after Charlottesville,

which was true, but not in the way that they hoped for. I think it was a success for anti-fascists and other people who wanted the alt-right to want that inertia to stop and eventually end. But it was not a success, I think, in the way that people wanted it to be or think about it as a success. It could have been a failure very easily after the event. The event itself was fairly neutral. I mean, there was all the fighting that is in people's minds that all happened before the rally was supposed to start. That was kind of a draw. It certainly was not a success that anti-fascists stopped the rally, they did not stop people from entering into the rally grounds.

The police dispersed it before the rally itself actually started, so that can be seen as a success. And then the car attack, of course, was, well, in some ways, a failure for us. And I think at the very beginning, many of the fascists were excited about it, like it really did add to their inertia. And the whole thing could have been forgotten about very quickly, in which case I think it then would have been seen as a success for the fascists. If people remember, the first, when it happened, Trump immediately was like, Nazi's bad. And then the next day, he made his very fine people on both sides comment, and this is what energized liberals, essentially, to condemn him and to jump on the bandwagon against him. If he hadn't said that, this could have just sort of passed out of the public eye very easily. And it'd be seen, at least by fascists, that anti-fascists were unable to mobilize enough people to stop them.

And the only stopping of them only happened because the police did it. So I think it could have easily been a draw or neutral or a failure without Trump's comments. And it did end up being a success because of this backlash against them. It did, for whatever reason, did finally bring it to the consciousness of people that this huge rise in the far right that Trump had engendered, what it really meant, how violent it was really going to be, what a threat it really was. And it did motivate people to, and the aftermath in particular, unfortunately, this sort of went away fairly quickly to take the streets and come out in big numbers and condemn the alt-right. And the fascist swing of the alt-right did collapse fairly soon afterwards by spring of the next year. Charlottesville was interesting because people had been killed by the alt-right before it, but not in such a dramatic manner, not in public and not on video.

And it was sort of like, I think, for people, and I've said this before, kind of, you remember the first murders, you remember the first blood, and in that sense, because afterwards a lot of people were killed during the Trump administration, car attacks, I think a few dozen people during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, it became almost rude where you're like, oh, someone was killed at a demonstration again. But it was the shock of this at first because this had not been seen for a very long time in the United States. It's someone being murdered at a demonstration, and that really sort of stuck with people, and in that way, it became a symbol. You can even today still say Charlottesville, unless people are teenagers or something, don't. Remember, people know what you're talking about. Biden invoked it when he was running for president.

So it's good, it remains as a symbol of how big, the really, really far-right, you know, the fascists can become quite quickly, and how violent and murderous they are. And so that remains as a symbol to people, I think. And frankly, that there can be resistance to it. Like, people also saw there was real resistance, and people were willing to fight them. And especially after 1-6, like, there's no more of this idiotic discourse about if it's okay to punch a Nazi. I really think most people do think it's okay now, you know, after they've seen what unfolded under the entire arc of Trump from Charlottesville to the Capitol takeover. If people had stayed home, if there wasn't, though, the mobilization that did occur, oh, it would have been a total victory for them.

They would have taken it as a total victory and then moved on to the next thing and tried something bigger. Absolutely. Who held a demonstration and a thousand people came? You know, wouldn't you be, and you did your thing? Wouldn't you be like, cool, like, let's move on to the next thing. That was successful. Over the years, as I've done more and more activism, I come to realize what nothing succeeds as success means. Like, once you start going, once something succeeds, more people come to it, and you can move on and move on as a bigger thing and be able to do things you weren't able to do before. So this is why I always say we need to confront people. We can't break their movement. We can't let it jump from either success to success or just simply not a failure. Because if you're already moving and you hit something that's not a failure, you'll just go on to the next thing.

Nothing will stop you and we need these things to stop. The night that Heather Heier was murdered, thousands hit the streets and cities across the United States, tearing down Confederate statues and marching in solidarity. A few weeks later, when far-right activists tried to hold a rally in Boston, over 40,000 hit the streets to shut it down. A week later in San Francisco and Berkeley, tens of thousands marched to shut down more all-right rallies. In Berkeley, a black block of several hundred strong marched information as part of a wider anti-racist coalition, pushing both far-right activists and heavily armed riot police out of a downtown park, where only months before far-right activists had driven out anti-fascists.

The events of the first eight months of the Trump administration showed that there was mass militant opposition on the streets of the U.S. against the far-right, which destabilized the Trump regime and made it backpedal. But more importantly, it showed millions of people across the country that resistance was possible. That is going to do it for us today. Follow IGD at it'sgoingdown.org and on Macedon at IGD underscore news. Thanks so much for tuning in and be sure to come back next time as it could happen here returns. We will continue to tread where we please into the fascist Nopah Saran. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He was a shark in on the good badass way, and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 everyone, it's me James. And just before we start today, we're going to discuss in quite some detail the being to death of Tyree Nichols by the police in Memphis. And if you don't want to hear that detail, that's totally fine. But we wanted to let you know now so that you didn't get surprised by it in your morning commute or whatever. So if you want to skip this one, if you don't listen to that one, then we are trying to give you that warning ahead of time. Discourse. Discourse.

Discourse is about podcast. I don't know. It could happen here is the podcast that you're listening to. If you came here looking for another podcast, then you fucked up, but you fucked up in a good way because that podcast was trash. Thank you for being here with us today. Who's here? Who are you people? We're a little unsure. Yeah, I'm Mia Wong. I'm here.

Wow. I'm James. I'm a little unsure about who I am beyond that, but that's who I am. It's okay. I'm Garrison Davis and I'm here to engage in discourse. There's nothing I love more than discourse. Speaking of discourse, today we're going to be talking about, well, I don't know, it's not really discourse, but today we're going to be talking about the reaction to the video of the Memphis police murdering Tyree Nichols. And particularly, we're going to be talking about the way in which kind of the left responded to this both online and kind of public channels and actually in the streets. Because I think there's some interesting stuff here.

And I think it's kind of worth analyzing outside of the broader conversation about police violence and that sort of thing because I think there's some interesting sort of tactical stuff to kind of talk about here. And yeah, that's what we're going to be doing today. In case you've been kind of stuck under a rock, you should probably be aware that on January 7, 2023, police from the Memphis PD Scorpion Unit, which was a unit with a very sinister name that existed to effectively overpolice a chunk of the city of Memphis. Yeah, pulled over Tyree Nichols, a 29 year old black man. Tyree was an amateur photographer. He liked skating. He had Crohn's disease. He was just driving around that night.

And the encounter, as we would later see on the video, went pretty much immediately violent on behalf of the police. Nichols was beaten very badly. And he died in the hospital three days later. And for the first few days after the killing, obviously, this happened, the police did this, and then rumors started kind of spreading in the immediate wake of the beating, but very little was known for certain about what had happened, about why this had gotten escalated so quickly. One of the first kind of signs that this was going to become a thing on the national in terms of like the national attention span was when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the US Department of Justice independently opened investigations into the beating. After reviewing body camera footage from multiple officers on scene, five Memphis PD officers were dismissed on January 20. Three days later, an autopsy commissioned by Tyree's family found extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating. Outrage around the killing grew rapidly, and it was announced by the Memphis police that body camera footage of the stop and of the beating would be released to the public. This started the rumor mill really churning up.

There was kind of a couple of leaks from people who had seen the footage, I think, who were close to the case, and they all sort of described it as uniquely bad. The term that I heard a lot was that it's worse than the Rodney King beating. This is just the way in which people started talking about it. And as more details filtered out, there were conversations around the country, particularly folks on the activist left, who started talking about the need to prepare for what they suspected would be the aftermath of the video's release. And one of the things that was kind of worth discussing here is that in the immediate, like immediately before the video came out, a lot of the conversations that people on the left were having and that people in law enforcement were having kind of focused around the same expectations, which was that there would be widespread protests and rioting as a result of the release of this video. Police departments around the country entered high alert, riot squads were prepped, and then kind of on the other side of things and sort of open channels on Twitter and mastodon and in person in a number of different cases. Leftists and people who claim to be that online talked about their expectations too. I heard variations of the phrase, you know, it's going to be a really hot year, this is going to like lead into a particularly aggressive summer on the ground. People are going to make the burning of that precinct in Minneapolis look tame, you know, get your gear together, check in with your friends, everything's about to go off.

There was a lot of chatter kind of along those lines and I don't know, I didn't really speak up too much about this, but my kind of thinking as folks were sort of anticipating the reaction to this was, I suspected that the actual reaction on a mass scale to the video's release was going to be more muted and law abiding than people were expecting at the time. And I guess the primary reason that I felt this way was simply that kind of the vibes were off, it just didn't feel like folks were ready for that kind of a response. But I do kind of have a fact based reason for why I was anticipating that as well. On January 26, two days before the video's release, five Memphis PD officers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, assault, a bevy of very serious charges. Immediately after that, three firefighters, two EMTs and a police lieutenant who'd been on scene after the beating were fired for failing to assess and provide emergency care to Nichols on scene. And there's a couple of ways to view what happened here. I think the less optimistic one is that the state simply made a pragmatic decision to throw these guys onto the bus. That's definitely what happened. The more optimistic way to look at this is that because people had rioted so hard for so long in the wake of George Floyd's murder, the state felt like it had to throw these guys under the bus rather than, you know, risk another year of rage.

And this is also correct. I think both of these things are pretty accurate ways to look at what happened. The idea that the release of the footage of Tyree's murder would lead to massive protests was not quite universal, but I did notice that a lot of the people who felt similarly to me expressed the belief that if people didn't riot over what had happened to Tyree, it was due to a mix of liberal cowardice and racism since most of the officers who beat Tyree to death were themselves black. And I think this is kind of a short-sighted and unfair take, and I'll talk about why shortly. On January 27th of Friday, the Tyree Nichols videos were released by the Memphis Police Department. Along with a lot of you, I watched them all immediately. And you can find, there's a description on my Twitter page. It's currently pinned to my profile of the video. If you haven't seen it, but want to know what happened there, to kind of summarize it in brief, it's very ugly. Tyree is immediately calm as he's pulled over and taken from his car. The police are not calm. He attempts to de-escalate them. They accuse him falsely of resisting, then they mace him and themselves. I think in general that the inciting incident for the beating was the incompetent use of mace by these officers. They hurt themselves, they got pissed, and then they beat Tyree because they were angry at themselves for macing themselves. It's also kind of worth noting that a white officer who's since been fired as well also deployed his taser on the young man. This was kind of left out of a lot of the initial summaries of what had happened.

That guy has now been fired. And yeah, it's bad. The video is very unpleasant and very brutal. Watching it, though, I think kind of the thing that struck me most was how much like a normal traffic stop a lot of this was. I think that if, you know, they had gone a little bit less hard and beaten him a little less badly and he had survived, they probably would have charged him with resisting arrest and assault on a police officer. And who knows how the case would have gone. You can hear the police preparing for this eventuality in the footage. One officer claims that Tyree went for his gun. There's no evidence of this in the footage. And you can kind of hear them all working to get their stories straight after they beat Tyree for the inevitable court case. More officers and emergency personnel arrive on scene as he's just kind of laying there and none of them seem to find what's happened, peculiar or noteworthy. Which is interesting because immediately prior to the video's release, police departments around the country all issued statements that were basically identical, condemning the officers who had beaten Nichols, saying basically this behavior is unacceptable. These men are bad apples. This is like an extreme example that does not represent policing values. And there's a couple of things that are interesting about this. One of them is that the actual way in which emergency responders on scene treated the beating kind of puts the lie to that because nobody acts as if anything outside of the normal has occurred.

And the other thing that is noteworthy is the uniformity of these messages by police departments around the country. I have not actually seen that happen before. There was kind of a version of this that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd video, but it was much more cohesive prior to the release of the Tyree Nichols video. That said, there were no widespread riots or acts of property destruction after the video was released. There were protests in a number of cities, most notably in Memphis. But compared to 2020, things were very subdued. There was not kind of widespread property destruction or rioting. In Portland, which was obviously the site of intense radical street actions in 2020, there were two fairly small marches. I'm not going to delve into this in tremendous detail, but there were kind of allegations from one of the marches that the larger and less radical of the two was an op designed to take numbers and energy away from the radical march. There were confrontations between members of both groups. And while the overall story again is not worth spending time on, the gist of it is that very little happened. This is not kind of limited to Portland. Atlanta, Georgia is probably the city in the US today that's been the center of the most effective radical protests against law enforcement. And the history of attempts to stop and sabotage the construction of cop city, which is obviously a massive police training compound in Atlanta's largest urban forest has been well documented by by Garrison Davis, as well as a number of other reporters.

And I do think it's worth noting that days before the Nichols video was released, Atlanta police shot and killed a forest defender, Torteghida, and a moderately large protest followed where protesters smashing windows and lighting one cop car on fire. This was the kind of action that I think most of the activists I observed expected in the wake of the Nichols video as well. But we simply didn't see that. I'm just going to butt in here for a little bit and you'll you'll you'll hear more about that riot slash protest in Atlanta. Yeah, next week. I'm putting together a series on it that'll that'll be out soon. But definitely one of the things that was talked about a lot in Atlanta. Was the upcoming release of this video and the potentiality of this video getting released shortly after the death of Torteghida at the hands of police kind of both of these things feeding off each other into into a similar like 2020 level uprising. And this was like no one was like for sure about this. Like no one was like saying this is absolutely definitely going to happen. But it was something that was definitely thought about. It was something that was definitely considered. I think honestly, if the the video was set to come out originally on like the Monday or Tuesday following the big downtown protest in Atlanta, it was supposed to come out just a few days later. And that that didn't happen. It was delayed once again for further further into the week.

I think if it came out sooner, I think that could have fed off momentum in a pretty considerable way. I think a few things happened both in Atlanta that in the next few days that kind of stunted possible, possible further protest. National Guard was deployed. Police in Savannah were ordered to start arresting people and shutting down gatherings of over 15, specifically for like, including vigils. And in Atlanta, obviously, there was people getting really pretty, pretty inflated high level felonies and domestic terrorism charges simply for being simply for being present at a protest. So I think those those things kind of all in all impacted people's ability to like prepare for, you know, a sequence of protests, which there was some in there was some in LA for for like a day or two. The ones in Memphis were pretty big. But I think they the the timeline in which they released the video is definitely should be considered in terms of when they chose to release it. Like, yeah, in terms of like the state's goal of preventing, you know, large large scale protests. But that was definitely something that was talked about a lot during during like the little over a week that I was that I was in Atlanta's because everyone was getting ready for this. Like everyone heard that this is going to be like the worst video that we've seen since Rodney King. Like that that that was the way it was. It was thought up of like on the ground, you know, just like word of mouth being being passed. And people were definitely like preparing for like preparing themselves for it, like like thinking like thinking about like what's going to happen if this is like if this really is the most horrific thing, what is the appropriate response to that.

And this is kind of a lot of what I wanted to talk around because you have sort of Georgia law enforcement, there's this this riot and the response to that as well as the response to the tree set is a series of domestic terrorism charges. And then this video comes out. And there's not a mass like radical street response to it. And it seems to me and Garrison you can correct me if I'm wrong that a big part of that is people in Atlanta were kind of not willing to throw more lives and bodies at the police without kind of more of a cohesive plan of what to do given the severity of the repression that that was being engaged in. I mean, I obviously can't comment on people's motivations or like plans for for stuff because that's not something that I would be would be privy to privy to. Yeah. So I, I don't know. There's there's there's a lot of stuff. I mean, like, I think a big part of why I heard a lot about it in Atlanta was one because a friend of a lot of people who were involved in the forest in the forest defense got killed by police a few days earlier. And then the other thing that I do, Memphis is only a few hours away from Atlanta. Like it's it's it's not it's it's not that far. And a big part of the stuff in Atlanta is like solidarity with struggles that are not just in your immediate vicinity. I'm not going to argue that Memphis really is in the immediate vicinity of Georgia. But like that type of cross cross state solidarity is is is a big part. But yeah, I can I could I could not comment on on on why why people did or did not choose to do specific things. I think that that's that's up for people themselves.

I wouldn't want to put words into anyone's mouth, but it was kind of interesting because I paid attention a lot to the reaction. And there were a lot of folks talking about how disheartening it was that there were not more of the kind of radical actions that they wanted to see in the wake of the video coming out. And I'm that's kind of the thing I wanted sort of to talk most around because I feel very mixed around this. But broadly speaking, I guess I'm glad that we didn't see a repeat of the part of 2020 that was folks standing up in front of cop shops until riot police came in and getting charges against them because I just don't think that that works right now. I don't think it works is is functional anymore. I don't think it actually hurts the state because the reaction like there was a period of time early in 2020, those first couple of months in particular, where you could see the police were off balance obviously in like Minneapolis with the burning of the third precinct was was this kind of sea change moment. But you could see it in a number of cities that like they didn't really know what was going on and they were themselves concerned with how out of control the situation had gotten. And then it kind of morphed later in the year to I think a situation they could control very well where there were these acts of fairly minor property destruction and then a bunch of people would get picked up and charged. And I think that while I understand like the desire to react that way and to do something kind of very firm and and radical in response to state violence like this. I'm also like deeply concerned about people not throwing away months and years of their lives fighting charges. Yeah, I mean, a big part of it is people learning that treating protesters as disposable meat bags to throw against the wall of the state is kind of a bad idea.

Yeah. And there's I think this is something that that that was talked about in conversations, just just like regarding like, hey, this video is going to come out. What do you think it's going to happen? Like there's just a lot of like casual casual conversations. But like there was a lot to make 2020 happened. A lot of things contributed to the intensity and the length of those protests. I think COVID being a pretty big part. This was a few months into the pandemic. People have been stuck in their homes now for a few months and not really like prepared for that. Like at this point, we're kind of we're all kind of used to being in our house a lot more now. But back then it was it was new for a lot of people. So I think the opportunity the opportunity to get out of the house for what seemed like an important reason I think was a really big part of 2020. People being out of a lot of work was a really big part of 2020 because a lot of people did did not have the types of jobs that they might have now did not have the jobs they had like in like the months before. Maybe because I can't really think of another example like this from history. Obviously a lot of uprisings occur when people are suddenly out of work. But this was a mix of people are suddenly out of work and they suddenly they all have cash. Which contributed in a lot of ways because that was I think what funded a lot of people bringing in food and people bringing in like pallets of water and getting gas masks and stuff as they had these sort of checks for as a result of like COVID relief, which was an interesting situation as well that hasn't been replicated since. I think there's there's another very important factor of this that doesn't get talked about that much which is just the weather. Like if you if you if you go back and look at when the largest police like what largest anti police protests in the US have happened right.

They either start like late spring, early fall, or just the middle of the summer. And the reason yeah, like this is I think another big this is this is the thing up in Chicago right was it was just really fucking cold. And I mean this this affects activist circles too but it's like you can't get the critical mass of just regular people in the streets when it's like 20 fucking degrees. I think the other side of that is just summer vacation of a lot of a lot of the people who go the hardest at these protests are people in high school. And during winter, fall, spring, kids kids are in school during during summer. People have people under the age of 18 have a lot more free time on their hands. So I think that is another contributing factor. And I think there's this one other aspect which is very sinister. And but I think is worth talking about in terms of how of how the state may have been trying to frame this to like to frame the release of this video to kind of like curtail the the the the intensity of any type of like a protest revolt or uprising. Now, obviously, there was like the fucked up nature of like making this feel like a world premiere of like a snuff film. Yeah, yeah, it was it was it was it was like extremely bizarre.

A weird aspect which I think it encouraged the video to be to be something that is consumed versus something that's actually like watched and like, oh, this is a fucked up thing that we that we need to do something about. Instead, it turned it into this like element of consumption and the other aspect for this in terms of a lot of hardcore activists like like people who have thrown down in the streets before people who have who have who have seen fucked up shit. Is that the intense what was the violence depicted on this video was framed as being extremely horrific, being being a very, very unusual, a very like uncommon, but but but horrifying display of violence and display of brutality by the police. This is this. This is what police departments were very good as this is what the president of the United States was framing this as like this. This this is a case of a few of a few bad actors who who did an egregious but, you know, uncommon thing. And I think when a lot of people who've thrown down watched this video, it just reminded you of stuff that you've seen before. Like, yeah, they they saw a thing they had seen.

It wasn't it was not shocking in the same way that it was getting framed as because what separates this from most of the arrests that happened in Portland during 2020 is very little like one or two punches that were that were thrown just a little bit too hard. Is all that separates this from most like violent police arrests like this was not an uncommon display of violence. This was an ordinary an ordinary encounter that just a few things were pushed just barely over the edge. And I think a lot of people watched like my first reaction was like, oh, like this this is not as bad as what I thought like this. And that that that should be like a condemnation of the police's actions. Well, that's why I think one of the most important things to watch is how the other cops who were not present for the beating but who show up immediately after or at the end of it because some of them did watch the others beat him. How they react because they're just kind of going around. They're showing.

Yeah. It was remarkable to them. Even the MTs right who turn up. Oh, yeah, this has happened. Well, we do a stand back when this happened. Yeah, it's a normal night. The people on the ground were not concerned. Like it was not you could you could slowly watch because like a lot of this video was not of the actual beating.

It was it was of the aftermath. Yeah. And you could you could watch these cops slowly start to realize that maybe they went a little too hard. They just very slowly over the course of like 30 minutes. But for most of the time they're on the ground, they're like making jokes. They are talking about how fun like how fun it was to beat up this person. And they're complaining about macing each other. Yeah.

That is most of the video. I think it's worth noting like a couple of things. One, like it's extremely long. Like I'm not in the way that the George Floyd video like fits into the attention span of stuff we consume on our telephones at a time. It's been at versus eight minutes versus like an hour of footage, right? Yeah. If Tyree Nichols had just been seriously disabled, have life altering injuries been charged with resisting arrest. All things that very plausibly could have happened if a couple of punches had handed in different place.

This body camera footage would have been denied under the investigative exemption, right? That have said, no, we're investigating his resistance for arrest. You can't you can't see it. And none of this shit would have happened. And like the normalcy of so much other than the outcome. I don't know if that stripped some of the rage away, but it's important context, I think. A few things. I mean, and this is, again, one of the things that I think you can see from this that is evidence of sort of a positive long term result to and it's a very mixed bag when I say it's positive.

But that is kind of a positive sign is that they acted so quickly to throw all of these guys. They are firing and charging a lot of city employees over this. It's going to be between all of the people fired and all of the people charged more than a dozen people by the time this is all done, which I can't think of another time when that has happened this quickly over an incident of police violence. And they did that not because it's the right thing to do, but because they were scared. And again, I do I want to emphasize here, the thing that they're scared of is not that like radical left wing protesters will take to the street. It's that liberals and more or less apolitical people would take to the street. They know that the consequence of the cops beating someone to death is that like someone's soccer mum will fucking abandon her minivan and swing a sledgehammer into your cop shop if you don't fucking do this. Do like give a scapegoat, right?

Like do the bare minimum. And so the positive, the thing that I can say that is probably positive about this is that it does show there's still some fear there on their behalf. The thing that's negative is that like, well, it worked because I will say on a moral level, I think a wide variety of radical actions are morally justified by what was done to Tyree Nichols. Now, that said, like back to sort of the point we were making at the start of this, I don't particularly urge or encourage that just because like I don't like seeing people get arrested and charged and spend years of their life fighting shit in court for the chance to like, let's say carry out minor acts of property destruction on a cop shop. I don't think like that sort of activism works right now. It certainly doesn't work without the without the critical mass of liberals sort of behind it without enough people saying like we again you look at like the fact that the burning of the third precinct in Minneapolis is still one of the most popular things in modern American politics. But that was the product of a fairly unique moment and I just don't.

I see some positives in like the lingering fear of that moment, but I also don't see the material conditions that make me think it something like that is coming again in the immediate future. And especially because this the situation around this video demonstrates how much more effort the state's putting into trying to prevent things from happening before they start like there was a lot of like interagency work put into having all of these local police departments release statements, having the FBI release statements, having the president release statements and it is all made slightly more bizarre considering that the contents of the video are not on the level of like uncommon or like rare, rare displays of violence that the police do. Like this is this is this is relatively standard and that that kind of one thing I've been thinking about is like why did they choose this video like why did they why do they make this one? Like what were they afraid of like for this video because like other other other videos have come out in the past few years like other like other police killings have happened like this police killings all the fucking time. But they they they did a lot of work on this one specifically. And it's kind it's kind of interesting that like why why they chose this specific video to dedicate all of this work into because not not only did they like you know deny and stuff but they also they like they like hyped it up. They're like using this as like an example.

Yeah, like using this as an example like here. This is what bad cops look like. Watch us punish these bad cops. Well, but I think I think I think there's a rate. I think there's a huge racial aspect of this right which is that like, you know, all the cops are getting prosecuted are only the black cops who are involved in this right and I think that's a huge part of this entire strategy. I think that's why they framed this as exceptional violence is to play on people's racism. Right. I think I think that's why I think that's why this is allowed to happen which was that.

Yeah, you can it is like even inside the police is a lot easier to throw black cops under the bus than it is throw white cops under the bus. That's just how the system works. And it doesn't trigger that same like visceral response right that we all had to seeing the George Floyd video. I don't think quite like like it and there is an age old tradition of white men doing violence to black men on behalf of the state. And I think also it's also easier politically inside of the police departments because I think I think there would have been a lot more pushback from it like the police like there hasn't been much that I've seen like internal pushback like from inside of police departments. I think if it had been five white cops, I think this would have been a huge fight. And I think you would have had like the fucking police union like calling Biden like an anti cop like whatever. But I think I think these were people who they were like we can throw these people onto the bus and it doesn't fucking matter because who cares.

Yeah. Solidarity isn't there for them. I think those are I mean that's certainly like a significant aspect of why like this was the one they focused on. But I also think a major aspect of it is that it shows and records the reaction of other city employees to this. And you can see in real time the police putting together that story. Like it's it there's I think a few things about this that are really unique. But even the it's relatively unusual to have an angle which is not like the body camera, right? Which really I think the violence in this was was captured and depicted in a way which was more explicit than you would get many individual cops body camera.

And like the fact that they most of the time when cops kill people, they do it with guns, right? Or maybe with a taser or something like that. The fact that they took minutes, you know, like several minutes to beat a man to death is it is just. We've said like how this isn't unusual and it's not. But it doesn't mean it's not repulsive. No, no, no. It's fucking disgusted by it. It's nightmarish.

Yeah, I just want to make sure. Yeah, it's even more nightmarish considering how common this is. Because yes, they did spend a few minutes doing this, but it was really only I think one or two punches that threw it right over the edge. Like it wasn't just punches. The thing that I think one of the things that I saw that I think was probably critical in why he died. No, it was when they tackled him, his head bounced against the ground with a significant amount of force. There's a number of like a perfect storm of factors, right? That went into making this the incident that they talked about and like this the incident that didn't start 2020 part two.

I guess like it's no one particular thing. It's all these things that led to it. And I do think also like we have Joe Biden as president, right? Like a lot of the same bullshit is still happening. Like we've covered, right? Like we're talking about the cops, talking about the border, talking about all this stuff. But it's not being shoved in people's faces by like legacy media outlets. Liberal folks have not been getting gradually angrier or more upset at like the appearance of vulgarity from the White House.

And that's also a big aspect of why things went the way they did in 2020 is you have four years of pent up frustration on behalf of a large group of liberals as well. Although I do, again, I don't like pushing kind of the simple narrative here because I see that on the left a lot that like, oh, the Libs, they stopped coming out because Biden won and they never really cared for that. And I think that like that's there's certainly like a decent chunk of people who showed up because it was the thing to do and we're not committed. But I also think the folks who are just like, you know, people stopped coming out because they suck. That's that's a little bit of a of a reductive summary of the take. But I think that that that broad idea leaves out a lot.

One of the things that leaves out is that a lot of those those Libs and moderates who showed up in 2020 got the shit beaten out of them and got pretty traumatized and are probably would be willing to get back out again, but are going to need to feel like there's a an actual chance of doing something because they understand the consequences of showing up in the street better. And they're like, well, I don't want to do the same thing that I just got my ass kicked and there's still cops. There is a decent amount of evidence that for kind of the long term positive impact of getting all those people out in the street and of the fact that so many more people in 2020 witnessed police violence with their own eyes. There's a couple of places you can go to look at this. But I was I was watch going through a recent ABC News Washington Post poll that showed that from 2014 to 2023 confidence that police treat black and white people equally fell from 52% where it was in 2014 to 39% among Americans and and confidence that yeah and confidence that it's certainly too high but that's a significant change and confidence that police were adequately trained to avoid use of excessive force fell from 54% to 41%. And like and confidence in both of these things fell twice as fast from 2020 to 2023 as it did from 2014 to 2020.

And that like 30 something percent number is just that is also just like close to like the number of people who are like active like like actively hardcore racist. About 40% of the country are bigots. Yeah, I don't think the election was real. I think that yeah, I wanted quickly mentioned that like some of those liberal folks as well like like this is not if we don't do like shitting on the lips or whatever it's useless and doesn't help. A lot of those folks have been out doing other shit to like I've seen folks who I haven't seen since 2020 like trying to protect trans kids trying to stop bigot shouting get little children going to the pantomime shit like they've been doing stuff and that contributes of course to people being you know fatigue from other actions. Yeah, a large part of what I'm seeing people not being willing to do anymore is like the same shit that they did in 2020 that stopped working right it didn't continue to be effective. Yeah, no, yeah, and I think also like this this also you know the sometimes like the way like the stuff that was happening in the very very like the first week where like I don't know like the cops lost control of like the center of Chicago right like that the kind of people who did that stuff.

Like aren't really like that those aren't those those that was not being done by people who are sort of like political liberals or whatever that was being done by people who like had it like very various tiny very tenuous connection to politics at all under normal circumstances. And you know like eventually eventually you'll get we'll see something like that again. I don't know I mean it took like six six five or six years between like Ferguson and 2020. Yeah, like that that will happen again but that kind of that kind of stuff doesn't happen that like those those the kind of people who actually write very significantly who are not in the sort of like cadre of like hardcore left organizers like they don't throw in that often and a lot of political conditions have to like converge exactly correctly for it to happen and it's just not going to happen most of the time and that's pressing in a lot of ways but like you like that's just that's just what reality is. Yeah, I don't think there's been enough time between cycles in order for things to really pick up because yeah it does require a lot of people to forget to forget the brutality of what the cops did to people and like. And and and just like material conditions and like recovering from burnout and it creates it like one thing that's been so incredible about Atlanta is the level of resiliency because they've not they've not really stopped since. Like they've kind of they've they've they've kept going in a very particular way that both like encourages people to like take care of themselves and not to be treated as disposable.

And I think a big part of that is having like a multi product movement like the movement isn't it's not built around a singular thing like going out and breaking windows or even even just like camping in the forest like the movement isn't just those things there's a lot of other various aspects so when you're exhausted from one single thing you can move on to one of the other many aspects and like do that as like as your recovery and having that I think it's contributed to the level of resiliency that we've seen. But I don't think the rest of the states has those types of practices like people in Portland are definitely still extremely burnt out from from 2020. And I assume a lot of a lot of other cities are dealing with similar levels of fatigue. One thing I do want to address really quickly is the horseshit framing of this by legacy media again. Like yeah the very fucking people who like on the day that Derek Chauvin went to jail retweeted that initial statement where Minneapolis PD like basically said George Floyd died of a heart attack. I think we had a cardiac condition or something and the very same people who retweeted that statement said never again are we going to be calm by this shit and now out there fucking just carrying water for the cops like CNN saying that Terry Nichols had an encounter with the police. I don't understand what it fucking takes for these people to understand like I've been like I was on NBC this year trying to persuade other NBC journalists to maybe critically assess the claims of the police and like here we are again.

Doing the same shit again and we should we should probably close out here soon. But one kind of final thought that I've had is the other another kind of crucial difference between how this was treated as opposed to the George Floyd video is that the person who recorded the George Floyd video was like a bystander. Like they were just there and they posted that on their own accord and it was able to grow to it was able to grow traction over the course of a few weeks kind of slowly in like underground like in like underground communities. Like you know people who are much more aware of police violence and then that's totally seeped out into the mainstream. I think there's a difference in having that type of natural growth of people learning about like hey did you see this fucked up thing that my friends sent me. Like did you like like there's that level of like oh we found this thing that is really fucked up and people need to care about this versus the framing of the police and how they use this as like a world premiere of this like of this of this like snuff film it's it's like there was like a fucking countdown to watch the video. And that that immediately frames this as something to be consumed that immediately frames this as something like the way to engage with this is to sit down and watch it and then you're done like that. That is like they're they're they're framing this the same way that you would watch like a movie or like a music video drop like that is that is the style of engagement because this video is being published by the police like they are. They are they are they are from the very start they're controlling the way that information is distributed they're controlling what information is distributed.

It like creates this scenario where the consumption of the video itself like is the event as opposed to any type of like follow up action or protest or direct action. That instead of that being like the action event the action event is just the consumption of the video based on how it was hyped up as as this thing. That was to be like officially released and you like count down for it and then you watch it and you're like OK that was it that was the thing. And I think that does just really impact it when it's like this like sanctioned premiere versus this thing that's spread by regular people. Yeah I think you're right. It kind of became this act of penance like you watch the video you say holy fuck that's disgusting and then like the fingers already done it right like the cops already fired so you just do your penance you go through the painful thing rather than. The George Floyd thing which was like nothing has been done about this I've got this organically for my friend and I'm fucking furious. Oh yeah yeah I think you're right.

It's very different. Yep. All right well I think that's probably going to do it for us today until next time. I don't know. Don't don't let your city name a police elite unit Scorpion or anything else. Yeah you can tell us. Yeah yeah don't have special police. I would prefer no cops if you're going to have a special police unit maybe call it like the Barney Fife battalion or something like that. At least at least try not to hype them up to be scorpions. Anyway that fuck. Hi everyone it's James again book ending the episode and I'm just here to ask you again to donate if you have the means if you're able to to.

Relief for people in Syria who are obviously experiencing terrible consequences from the earthquake the new cycle kind of moves on but people's lives don't and they still need your help. So a couple of places you can donate the white helmets that's white helmets dot org slash en for English Syrian American Medical Society Foundation that's s a m s hyphen us a dot net. Metsons on frontier doctors without borders that's doctors without borders dot org and the Kurdish Requestion H E Y V A S O R U K dot org those are all great places and we'd love it if you could spare your money to help people out. Thanks bye. Hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visitor website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources thanks for listening. 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 like a lot of guns but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space. Well I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him. He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts 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 to death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.