Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 81

Episode Date: April 29, 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.

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Assassinated in cold blood. This is silenced, the radio murders. You left the body there for a reason. It was the calling card. It's like the mafia used to do. The mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, they clearly gave a green light. I'm Osvalotian. Listen to silenced, the radio murders. On the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart.

And today, I'm happy that we're recording this right now, James and Garrison, because we all just got a historic example of something falling apart. Elon Musk's Big Silly Rocket. We're recording this about a day or so after it exploded in midair over the Gulf Coast, showering a turtle sanctuary with toxic waste. It's such a fun news. That's comically perfect. It is really, it is pretty cool. Unless it crash landed in a kitten farm, that couldn't really be much more perfect. No, I mean, what's nice is that it's given me, it's made me feel young again. Because when I was a wee lad, I was attending a speech

debate rally in Cooper, Texas, when the last space shuttle to explode exploded directly over us, blowing out a bunch of the windows in the building and raining. Yeah, it was, yeah, so whenever a space shuttle explodes over, of some sort, explodes over Texas, I get powerful nostalgia. Well, they slip the surly bonds of earth to blow out the windows in a high school in Cooper, Texas. That's how the line goes. It makes me think of all the other things I was doing that day, which was namely playing Lord of the Rings risk in a high school gym, as we were want to do. Great game. One of the better risk covers.

What are we talking about today? Frendos, buddies, well, we're talking about one one man having having a fun time on discord.com. I guess, yeah, doing the human equivalent of being a spaceship that explodes in the sky. I suppose discord is not really a dot com. It's more, it's more, it's more of a more of an application now. But yes, it is. Yeah, discord, an app that I am permanently banned from. What did you do to discord, James? What did you do to get banned from discord? I said a video. You know who's on discord, right? Like literally the worst fucking people on earth. All of the worst people. Yeah, no, we tried to start a discord for the fundraising live show,

and I tried with several emails, and every time it came back with ban evasion. That is extremely funny, James. Yeah, I posted a video of my chickens, and it has never forgiven me. Wow. Well, I mean, you know, those chickens didn't consent, and they were technically naked. So I think it does count as revenge point. Hello, my chickens are always close, man. They were a little chicken pants. Oh yeah, you're one of the pansies. There's a big conflict in chicken owners, and James has taken a side. So we're talking this week about the discord leaks, and this is one of those things. We came into this kind of debating how much detail to go into. But when we brought this up,

like, this is something that Gare, James and I is like a major thing in our bubble for the last like week. So we've all been following it. But when we brought this up in the work chat, Daniel had no idea that this had going on. So we're going to start with a pretty basic overview of what what people are calling the largest leak of top secret US military and defense data since, you know, Snowden. So we're going to go over all of that right now. I think I want to start by talking about an MMORPG called War Thunder. Can you break down MMORPG for those of us? It's like World of Warcraft. It's a big video game that is play that you play online with a bunch of strangers. It's a free game. You use like modern military weapons to like fight other

players. And it's kind of well known for having extremely realistic renderings and and sort of depictions of the functionality of modern tanks and armored transports and fighter planes and naval vessels, right? So and it's like it's a game for war nerds, right? Like there's you utilize like radar in a way that's broadly realistic. Like if you shoot, you know, if one tank shoots at another, the tank's weaponry works the way it's supposed to in the real world. The armor is vulnerable, where it's vulnerable in the real world. And this is like the appeal to the kind of nerds who play this game. And as you might guess from a bunch of people who really want to like in the most realistic way possible, render and fight each other with modern military vehicles, a significant

number of these dudes are members of various different like defense departments, right? Or at least are employed in some degree of various different national military forces. Several different as a result, like when arguments happen, you know, with any MMORPG, if you're playing like World of Warcraft, right? And like something gets nerfed or something isn't working as well as it's supposed to, you'll get these like massive threads in the forums where people are like arguing about how something needs to be changed or changed back or how there's a glitch or whatever. And because War Thunder is so based in realism, when you have these arguments online, it's often like, well, you know, the F 15 shouldn't work this way, it should work this way, and people will get into

arguments about that. And then someone will, as happened like a couple of weeks ago, I think, someone will post sensitive information about the F 15 strike eagle to in order to like prove that it would function the way that they are arguing it should function in this forum debate. That happened earlier this year. And I think with the F 15, it wasn't technically top secret information, it was information that US citizens were allowed to have, but not allowed to post online because that's a violation of something called ITAR, which is a thing that governs the export essentially of military information and technology. But on another situation, I think like a year or so ago, information about I believe the F 22 was posted that was extremely sensitive that was like top

secret. And these are again, like some dude who's got some sort of military job and has a clearance and thinks that the right way to use it is arguing about the video game War Thunder. These are not just Americans, I want to be clear about that in July of 2021. There was a player arguing about a challenger to tank who claimed to have been a former tank commander with the British army. And he shared information from the army equipment support publication. The information had been labeled unclassified, but it was actually classified. And other lakes have been a little more golly. A French army soldier leaked information on the clear command battle tank that was top secret and a Chinese user leaked capabilities at the Chinese army's DTC 1025

millimeter anti tank round that should not have been leaked. So this shit keeps happening in War Thunder. It's like a joke. Like the War Thunder account when these discord leaks happened a week or so ago, like joked about it. Like the thing that the game is known for is these like different people in different national defense apparatus can't stop themselves from like leaking top secret info about vehicles. It's very funny. It gets the only reason I know why War Thunder exists. I think it's the only reason why we know a decent amount of what like by we here at meaning I couldn't like I guess like Western militaries know which of course we are all members of know about like Russian main battle tanks is from War Thunder leaks. It gets very funny. Yeah. And you have to assume I would

be surprised if no one had tried just like having you know, an agent from a national security agency in Oh, for sure. Trying to like be like trying to like provoke arguments about Chinese tanks or whatever. I'd be shocked if that hasn't happened. Yeah. Like the overlap between like people who might play War Thunder anyway and people who might work for a national security agency like those Venn diagrams are a circle. Yeah, exactly. So it's one of those things where this happens a bunch on War Thunder, but it's just kind of something people joke about because these leaks like they're meaningful, I guess to like militaries care about them. But like you sitting at home, you hear like, Oh, hey, details of like the couple of construction of the new Abrams like

models has leaked. That's not like the same as I don't know Chelsea Manning leaking information about like war crimes by the US military in Iraq or Edward Snowden leaking info about like the NSA like it's a little less relevant to most people. What we started seeing a couple of weeks ago is documents top secret labeled documents like actual pictures of straight up unredacted top secret US Defense Department documents just kind of filtering out over various discords and they were kind of appearing in random little bits. You'd see one that was like an update on the war in Ukraine that was kind of showing concerns that the US military had about the ability of the Ukrainian military to carry out the counter offensive that everybody's expecting in the near

future. You have like casualty estimates from the US military. Another document that was leaked had like a bunch of information inside the Russian general staff. So these are number one, very serious leaks, right? You're talking about, especially with the leaks from inside Putin's kind of inner circle, you're talking about leaks that could potentially expose a major US source inside the Russian government. And you're also talking about leaks that just kind of reveal the reveal the degree to which the CIA has an enormous amount of information, apparently at least about what's happening inside the Kremlin. So these are very significant leaks, but they didn't appear, they weren't being like kind of filtered out and released by an agency like WikiLeaks.

They weren't being sent to journalists. They were just kind of showing up in these, you know, discord is basically a series of chat rooms and they were just kind of showing up in different discords. So this is, you know, a mystery and it's the kind of mystery that like a certain kind of person who is extremely online is not going to be able to get out of their head and is going to kind of try to trace back to its origin. And in the case of this specific mystery, the nerd who could not get it out of their head and decided to trace it back to its origin was my former boss at Bellingcat, Eric Toller. Eric is a very nice guy, probably the most talented and skilled researcher that I've ever met in my life. And, you know, Eric started seeing

these like everyone else, these top secret documents and was like, where the fuck are these coming from? And this is one of those things we'll talk about, it's become extremely controversial among a certain set of people in the day since. But when this kind of started, number one, you can't really deny there was an intense public interest in figuring out what the origin point of these was because that was the only way to figure out are these actual leaks. When you see something that's just like listed as a top secret document randomly on the internet, if you call up the US government and you say, Hey, is this real top secret info? They're not going to say yes, right? Like, you don't get that response from them. I mean, and especially right now with all of

like the AI chat generation tools, generating fake documents is one of the main things people are doing for disinfo generating like fake sources, fake documents, of course, you can like edit things the further to like make them seem more realistic. But yes, that you would, someone who is extremely curious is going to wonder if this is actually like a real thing, or if this is just some like bullshit prank or something. And there were edits of these documents did also go viral. In fact, Tucker Carlson, one of the one of the original documents shows kind of US estimates for killed in action on Ukraine's on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side in the war. Obviously, it showed more Russian casualties than Ukrainian casualties, which is

consistent with all previous reporting. But the edit of it showed something like like many times as many Ukrainian dead as Russian dead, which is, you know, something that was valuable for the people who are trying to argue that like this war is unwinnable on behalf of the Ukrainians, guys like Tucker Carlson, who covered the leaks on his show and knowingly used the fake edit of the leak. I can't imagine he I have to assume it was knowingly, because it had been very well exposed by that point. So there's really no other explanation, I think. But anyway, the fact that there were edits of these documents that were not legitimate going around, it's just kind of part of why there was a legitimate public interest in trying to figure out where the fuck are these

things coming from. Eric is again, an extremely good researcher. And through a mix of open source intelligence and eventually just kind of like calling up people and talking to them, he found what appeared to be the source of these leaks, which was an invitation only clubhouse on discord of like 30 ish people, most of whom were teenagers. Over time, it kind of became clear that this group was a bunch of kind of young people who had gotten together during the pandemic to talk about, you know, games. These guys are all gamers. Most of them were like kids in high school. They kind of were cut off from their friends. So they wanted a place to be social. They would share memes, including like extremely racist, you know, borderline Nazi shit. They would like

watch movies over and like chat over kind of the voice app. They were all what you call Tran cats, which is like basically weirdo Catholic fundamentalists. Like I think a lot of them deny Vatican to that sort of shit. It's like a whole thing. A lot of them were that at least. So there was a lot of like praying and anyway, a bunch of weirdos. And the head of this group of weirdos was the oldest of them, a guy who was known on like in the discord as OG. And OG, he's a was, you know, in the land of the teenagers, the person in the early 20s who can buy an AR-15 is king. And so this guy is in his early 20s. He's in the military, which he talks about. He posts videos of himself like shooting guns and like, you know, saying racial slurs and like signposts

into these like, you know, weird memes and stuff that they're all into, which to them like makes him seem extremely cool, right? It's one of those things when you kind of read the different coverage of this, it's there's a little bit of like weird culty stuff going on. I don't know if I'd say that it was a cult and more than just like every discord server is a cult. Insular online communities like this very often reproduce aspects of cult dynamics. Hey, everybody, Robert here. We had a little audio error, obviously, in the recording. I wanted to clarify this section because it was kind of garbled. The name of the discord server they were in was Thug Shaker Central, which is potentially a reference to one of a couple of

things. You'll find some disagreement about this online, but it's not really relevant. That's the discord name that they worked under. You get like the overall point of this. It's a bunch of like kids who are fans of games. They're fans of like this, this YouTube or Oxide. It's like a little group of dudes who got together via fandom and the pandemic and over the course of years developed like a shared culture. And part of the shared culture is this guy, OG, who's the older one of them, trying to keep them aware of what he thought was important about kind of global politics. And that particularly included aspects of like battlefield conditions in Ukraine, information about North Korean ballistic missiles, all of this kind of stuff

that he had access to because spoilers, he was in an Air National Guard wing as an intelligence. It was in the intelligence sector of like an Air National Guard wing, and he had a security classification. And once this all got revealed, people are like, why the fuck is a 21-year-old? Because that's this guy's age, have access to top secret data. And everybody who knows anything about the way our government classifies information was like, most of the people who have access to it are like 20. Yeah. Who do you think fights our wars, 50-year-olds? Yeah, I think it just genuinely like, you know, like if we've been around war and conflict and the people who do it quite a lot, I think most people would be genuinely blown away that most people doing it are children.

Yeah. And this has caused like obviously some problems before for the Defense Department, but it's also like it's kind of a thorny problem because like most of your workforce are always going to be young kids. These are spoilers, shitty jobs often. And that's the only one who will do a lot of them. And also just like if you're fighting a war, most of the people you have that are going to be tasked with field intelligence are going to be in this age ring. So it's not at all weird that this guy had access to this shit. What is weird is that so he starts off kind of like arguing, you know, sometimes he'll bring up stuff that he knows that's from classified documents, while he's arguing, you know, about the war in Ukraine or whatever with his friends online.

And then he starts doing like a series of regular updates where he'll basically, he'll type out details from like a bunch of different top secret documents and he's massive, long and apparently kind of hard to read posts. And he'll just like post them into the chat to kind of keep his friends abreast of what he thinks is, you know, important. But he gets frustrated over time that like they're not reading this shit because it's really boring and like kind of weird to just info dump top secret info. And they don't these kids don't again, like these other folks are like in high school, they don't really realize where he's getting the info or what he has. But they do the folks who do pay attention recognized over time that

like stuff will happen in the real world that corresponds to something he posted a couple of weeks ago. And they're like, wow, he seems to have like actually really good information. Eventually, OG gets frustrated because he's not no one's paying attention to his posts. So he starts taking photos of just the top secret documents themselves and posting them in the discord chat. Now, this is unbelievably illegal. Yeah, he really crossed a line there. And just unbelievably dumb. By the way, it was illegal before, but this is really illegal in terms of like allowing yourself to make it so much easier for the consequences you're fucking around to find you like that he crossed a Rubicon right there. Yeah. And now we have to face the hard

question. Is this guy an illegalist king? Or is he more problematic? And this is this is the question that we have to actually focus on now. Stop. Because it is it is on one hand pretty funny. It's extremely funny. There's zero argument there among people who aren't shitheads. It's very funny. Yeah, it's very funny that like he could be doing an illegalism without with zero intention of doing so. Now, I do think there's a some people have kind of erently called him a whistleblower, which is not that's not accurate. That is that is not what he's doing. He's a Nazi who's posting top secret information to impress children online. That's right, Garrison. I do think we have to I think we have to let's let's um dig into that a little bit because a whistleblower

is somebody who exposes information from inside of an organization for some sort of purpose, right? They believe that what's going on is wrong. They think that like they believe there's some sort of public interest in information that is being kind of siloed inside of an organization that they're a part of and they release that organization, right? Fundamentally, that's what a whistleblower is. This guy was telling his friends and this 30 person discord, do not post these anywhere else. This is not stuff that you're allowed to share. This is just for your eyes because we're friends, right? He does not intend for this to get out. But here's the thing, all of his friends in this group are like dumb kids and just like those people on War Thunder,

they start getting into arguments with people outside of the discord chat and other discords, discords. One of them is a fan discord for some other YouTuber. One of them is the discord is a Minecraft discord and they get into arguments with random other users about like the war in Ukraine and stuff. And when they're having those arguments, they'll hear someone make a point and they'll think back to a top secret document that OG posted and they'll be like, well, I know you're wrong because I've seen like some CIA like satellite footage that like shows that this is inaccurate. And rather than being like, well, I guess I can't prove this person wrong on the internet without exposing my friend in our private discord to being imprisoned for a decade.

They just grab top secret documents that he posted and they post them in these other discords. And that's how this shit breaks containment, right? Now, it's one of those things I do want to note that like, these are not generally speaking super pleasant people. OG is the kind of guy who like one of his big arguments that he tries to like make to these kids, he like claims that based on the top secret info he has, which he posts nothing that proves this. The mass shooting in Buffalo, New York by that Nazi at that majority, you know, black frequented grocery store, that that was like a government plot to institute gun control and shit, it was a false flag. So he's not just posting good, he's like lying here too. Obviously, there's no intelligence to post backing

that up. He just he's just kind of trying to, it's a mix of he's trying to like prove that, you know, he's trying to make arguments about like what's happening, you know, in various overseas conflicts using US Intel. But he's also just like spreading different kind of conspiracy theories that he has to these kids to our by and large looking up to him. There's a couple like the Washington Post has done some some really deep reporting where they talk to some of these kids who they're like, yeah, man, we loved him. Like, when he realized this shit had broken containment, he like called us and we were all crying because he knew he was going to go to prison. Like there they seem legitimately distraught. Yeah, there's like lines like he said something

had happened and he prayed to God that this event would not happen. But now it's in God's hands. So like, these are like weirdo, ashy kids. I hesitate to like, condemn like the literal children too much, because they're very vulnerable. This guy is like a bad person. This guy is a bad person who is deeply like in a very fucked up way influencing this group of like 30 ish teenagers on the Internet. And his like weird politics, it's not great. Now that's separate from the question of like, is there a value to these leagues, which we can talk about in a little right. So as we've talked about, Eric Toler tracks down where this is happening, tracks down like the name OG publishes a piece on Bellingcat. It's

sort of ripped off by like, I don't know, a dozen like every other newspaper in the world. And then additional reporting is done Bellingcat and the New York Times team up and they eventually like track down and publish an article on who this guy is, an airman named Jack Tixera. And they publish an article about that about a day before this guy gets arrested by the FBI. And it's one of those things one of the if you if you look at the FBI affidavit, it kind of makes clear how the FBI cracked this guy down and found him because they did so, you know, using the resources they had before the Times did online, people have been going after the Times and Eric for like revealing this guy to the government, which is is not the case. Basically, once it became clear

what had gotten leaked, the FBI, because they have access to, you know, the systems by which people utilize and get access to sensitive compartmented information, found out who had most recently, like on the days that kind of correspond to the leaks, pulled up information about that and narrowed it down to this guy, Jack. They had access to like one of the things they did is they called Discord and talked to Discord and Discord helped them track down where the leaks were originating from. And then because they could see that the account that had posted, you know, the top secret data originally was a paid account, they were able to like provide the FBI with this guy's home address and shit. This is exactly what you'd expect for the FBI.

Yeah, I mean, the FBI has a lot of a non open source means to do this type of investigation. Yeah, they're not doing what Eric is doing and just kind of like clicking through shit for hours and hours and hours until they figure out where it's come from. Like they have, they're the FBI, they have access to other things. And it's what you'd expect from Discord too, right? Like they will comply with whatever. Yes, absolutely. These are top secret. They don't have a legal choice here. They're a gigantic company. They're going to comply. So this is the kind of thing where like one of the, there's this big argument. I don't even know if it's big, but there's definitely like a weird chunk of the left that has like leaned on because the right has immediately

started calling this guy a whistleblower. Fucking Marjorie Taylor Green was like, he's a Christian and he's a leaker trying to expose crucial details about our government. And like, no, he wasn't. He was like trying to fucking groom some teenagers and they posted it without his permission. A lot of a lot of the more conspiracy type stuff is like trying to call out like, you know, it's a lot of the more conspiracy related stuff is related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and making it seem like the US is doing things that are wrong and secretly helping the Ukrainians too much. And it kind of it plays into this weird, weird thing that people have against the way Biden's been handling the geopolitics around the Russian

invasion. And it's like, it plays into a whole bunch of right wing talking points we've seen around Russia. You know, we've seen this type of stuff get talked about by Tucker Carlson quite often. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of like little nodes that this that this touches on. And we even see we even see stuff like that among like, you know, people who are authoritarian communists, right, who are who are still pro Russia, despite Russia not being a communist country. But still, like being like, oh, there, you know, this is something he's trying to expose the the things that are we people are doing wrong to Russia. And it's like, okay, all right. Yeah. Yeah. And to me, it's one of the and there's also you've gotten among some chunks of this

attitude that like, well, you know, I don't care why he did it or like what he is in his personal life, any leak, you know, of the US military machine is good and should be, you know, protected. And it's like, for one thing, this guy, like nobody knew where these things were coming from, there was a vested need in sort of figuring out what the origin point was to figure out if they were accurate. But for like another thing, I don't know, man, you can argue about like what point, you know, the digging, whether or not like the it's ethical to dig this shit back to its source. I would argue that like people also have a right to know if there's some sort of fucking, like, like if the documents were fake or altered in some way, there was a reason to be trying to

figure out the providence of this shit. But more to the point, like, I think it's good to have access to like data from inside of our military, I think that's that's broadly positive. And I when I look at these data, or when I look at what's been leaked, I don't think most of it's, you know, one of the concerns that's always that always exists when you're talking about a leak of data is like, is this going to expose like potentially innocent people to any kind of harm. And there is a potential for that with some of this, because some of it dealt with Ukrainian military readiness for the upcoming offensive. And like, like, I don't really care if some guy inside the Kremlin, who's like a member of the Russian General Staff and a double, I don't care if that guy like

something bad happens to him, he's probably not a great dude. But but I do care about like a bunch of random Ukrainian soldiers potentially getting harmed. Now, I will say, from what I can tell from this, I think the odds of that are pretty low. It looks like this has impacted kind of the timetable for the counter offensive. But I don't know that it's, I haven't seen any evidence that it's exposed things in a way that's like going to cause loss of life, although it's a little bit unclear as to whether that not that might happen. But also, while I while I think it's accurate to say, I'm not saying evidence that like a lot of people's safety have been harmed by these leaks. It's also not, you know, what we're, it's not anything like what Snowden did or what Manning

did, right? Again, Manning revealed, you know, videos like the collateral murder video evidence of like breakdowns of order and things that I think are accurate to call war crimes that were being kind of hidden by our government. Whereas Snowden revealed intense details about an NSA spying program, all of that's extremely relevant to the average American. Most of this is just kind of like wonky inside baseball military stuff. Which again, I'm not like sad that it's gotten out, but it's also not. Again, it really does seem like a bunch of shit that like a guy pulled out based on his own kind of like weird interests. It's not, there's not like a strong unifying theme around them. And again, most of it's, most of it's

shit that's not going to be interesting to the average person. One of the documents I just read an article about, because like, we don't entirely know everything that was leaked right now, right? There's been, there's like the post and the time seemed to have a pretty complete archive of what was leaked, but they haven't published anything because, you know, they're reading through it and, you know, actually reporting it out. One of the articles that just came out was about the fact that the Ukrainians made some overtures to the Kurdish led self administration in, in Northern, North East Syria to Rojava to the SDF in order to talk about the potential for them attacking Russian assets in elsewhere in Syria. When this has kind of gotten out over like Twitter,

it's often been like described as, oh, the Ukrainians were going to team up with the Kurds who attacked Russia in Syria. Like, like this was an actual like serious plan. Would you actually the document? It seems a lot less inciting than that. Basically, what happened was some folks on the Ukrainian general staff or whatever were like looking into the possibility, hey, you know, is there any way that we could kind of anything we could pay the Kurds over in Syria to carry out an attack on the Russians? And apparently they had access to somebody who claimed to be in the SDF at least. And that person was like, we might be able to do something if you can get us some anti air defenses, right? Which I don't know how Ukraine could possibly ship meaningful anti air

defenses to Northeast Syria. It's kind of bordered on all sides. There is some stuff. If you're a walk in the region, there's some interesting stuff about this, which is that the SDF basically responded like we could potentially do this. We couldn't attack Russian assets that are within the borders of the self administration. Russians are acting as peacekeepers there between Turkey. And, you know, it's kind of desire to invade the entire region. They're not great as peacekeepers. The Armenians will tell you that Russian soldiers are not great. But the SDF didn't want to like shit where they were eating, right? So there was some like debate about where they might be able to attack. One of the things that is really interesting about this leak is that apparently

Ukraine, like talk to Turkey about this, because obviously the Turks consider the core of the SDF, the YPG to be a terrorist organization. But when Ukraine was talking to them, they're like, hey, we might basically bribe these people to carry out an attack on Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. Turkey was like, okay, well, don't do it here, here, here, because that's kind of close to some are guys that might upset like that. That part is interesting. But again, none of this matters all that much because nothing happened. As far as we know, in December, Zelensky was like, no, don't proceed with looking into this. This is the kind of thing like the US military has like plans for what happens if we have to fight Canada. This is the kind of thing defense departments do.

And as far as I can tell, there's no evidence that went much further than like a series of phone calls, right? Which by the way, the SDF denies ever happened. I don't know what exactly occurred. I don't know if it's hard for me to tell the Ukrainians were they talking to someone who was actually a representative of the SDF's like military hierarchy? Or was this like some guy that they thought was because maybe Ukraine doesn't have great context into the like, or did the US and it's not kind of clear to the US, maybe like hook them up with somebody. But it doesn't like at the end of the day, you can argue as someone who follows the region, I find this kind of interesting. It's not exactly like groundbreaking, you know, and it's important because nothing

happened. No one did anything. This is like some guys in Ukraine thought about doing a thing and then decided not to, which is, you know, potentially interesting context, but we're not talking about the Manning or the Snowden leaks here. Yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it's that particular document, I think is kind of clearly they have access to people who have formally fought in Syria with the YPG, right? There are probably dozens of them now fighting in Ukraine without the volunteer units. Like it's, it's not hard to see how this thought came up. But like you said, nothing really happened. It was just some people like spitballing. So I don't know. There's some other like bits and stuff in here that are kind of interesting.

One of them was there was a document in there about how the US had kind of like interfered in peace negotiations in Yemen due to like kind of concerns that they had about the fact that China was kind of brokering a degree of peace between the Houthi rebels and between the Saudi government. There's definitely some like slightly some somewhat shady shit from the US in there. But at the end of the day, it didn't derail the peace negotiations. It's just like, yeah, there were like, like, like in a lot of it's like that where it's kind of like this is useful context. I'm glad historians or journalists reporting it out will have that. But at the end of the day, like the fact that like, oh, hey, at one point in these peace negotiations,

the US was like, you know, being being kind of a kind of a dick isn't exactly like shocking, you know, it's not going to like change your overall concept of what's happening over there. It's not stuff that like is most of it's not stuff that's like massively important important. It is really interesting that the detail that our defense establishment apparently has from within the Russian government. I do think it's worth noting because we're talking like when we talk about sort of the the provenance of these and the the reliability of these leaks as they regard the war in Ukraine. There's been a lot of talk about like, oh, this reveals that like the Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to carry out a counter offensive or that the war's gone much

worse for them than they think. It is kind of worth noting that like, prior to the expanded Russian invasion, all US military intelligence suggested that the Ukrainian government was going to fold in a matter of days. So even though a lot of this is top secret info that doesn't mean it's like 100% accurate, right? Like our guys like think back to the Iraq war. Our dudes get shit wrong constantly. 20 years. Again, this is all really interesting. And I will say two things. I think it's very funny that this this guy nuked his entire life basically to impress children on a discord. I think it's extremely funny. I have laughed many a time at this. I also think it's like, I like as someone who is interested in this stuff, interesting that and good that we have this context, I don't think any of

this is like massively surprising or shocking. Like the the shit that's in that defense industry and or a defense intelligence agency analysis of, you know, the Ukrainian position right now is like stuff that you would know if you were paying attention to the good, oscent aggregators who have been covering the war. And if you've been like just reading good reporting on what's going on over there, I'll read a little bit of a summary from an article that's kind of going over some of the other stuff that appears to have been leaked. One details information apparently obtained through US eavesdropping on Russia's foreign intelligence service and suggests that China approved the provision of lethal aid to Russia in its war

in Ukraine early this year and plan to disguise its military equipment as civilian items. Another includes details of a test conducted conducted by Beijing on one of its advanced experimental missiles, the DF-27 hypersonic glide vehicle on February 25th. It says the vehicle flew for 12 minutes across 1300 miles and that it possessed a high probability of penetrating US ballistic missile defense systems. The documents contain new details about a Chinese spy balloon dubbed Killeen 23 by US intelligence agencies that earlier this year flew over the United States. They detail sophisticated surveillance equipment. US intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese spy balloons, the document say in another previously unreported revelation.

And so let's kind of break that down. One thing we have here is basically an argument from the US that based on their intercepts, they believe that China has approved provisioning weaponry, selling weaponry to Russia and disguising it as civilian items. That doesn't mean they have done this. It means that like there's sigint that someone in our government has that says that they were. That could be disinformation from them. It could be out of date. It could be something like with this Ukraine and Syria thing that they talked about doing and then didn't do. It's interesting. I would say if you are a defense industry reporter, it's something that should definitely spur you to further reporting because like that's really relevant if that's

occurring. But it's not the final word on the matter. Meanwhile, you've got this thing on like, yeah, this hypersonic missile the Chinese had is good at shooting shit theoretically. This is the kind of thing that's interesting and I think is probably more accurate than talking about the China providing lethal aid because you can kind of theoretically you're looking at actual like data on how the missile has performed. It just seems like it's something that you've got more fidelity on. But this is again, to kind of contrast it with like the Snowden and Manning Leagues. Well, what do you do if like the NSA is spying on people? Well, you could at least attempt to pass laws that restrict their ability to do that, right? What do

you do if there have been like war crimes committed by your military that were then covered up? Well, you can at least attempt to prosecute people. What do you do if some other country's got a better missile? Well, there's not a whole lot for you to do sitting at home in like New York City or, you know, fucking Austin, Texas, right? Like, like, what are we to do about China's hyper? I don't know. My assumption generally speaking, not that this isn't interesting, but my assumption generally speaking is that when you're talking about Russia, China, the United States, we can all murder each other if we wanted to, right? Like we've all got real nice missiles at this point. And it's this, you know, the Chinese spy balloon stuff is like interesting.

I don't think anyone's surprised by this. Like we knew there was a spy balloon. I assumed it had sophisticated surveillance technique. It's again, it's interesting that there were four other spy balloons in the area, but we simply know from older reporting that this happened like three or four times while Trump was in office too. So like, yeah, this is something we've known about, there's been reporting about. This is corroboration. That's interesting. Again, none of this is really like a sea change in our understanding of any of these conflicts. It is interesting context. Some of it's being blown up, you know, into stuff that it isn't. There's reporting on like the number of U.S. servicemen in Ukraine that's being like spun as like, we've got boots

on the ground there. And it's like, well, they're like embassy guards and stuff. There's like 29 dudes that this like confirmed Michael Tracy. Yeah. Yeah. This confirms there's not a lot of U.S. guys on the ground there. We send a lot of people when we're when we're doing wars. But yeah, like every embassy in the world has a contingent of Marines who make sure that it doesn't just get I don't want to say Benghazi, but yeah, yeah, no, Benghazi. Yeah, that's fine. And this is not new news to anyone who's been paying attention. But if you are Michael Tracy, this is brain melting shit. Michael Tracy is a weirdo quasi left journalist who like early on in the war, he didn't want to go into Ukraine very much. But he like hung out in Poland and took pictures of

like U.S. soldiers and like a facility that they were had been in for years and was like, look, you know, this is evidence of the secret U.S. support. And it's like, guys, I mean, for one thing, like, look at this, look at how much shit just leaked out because some kid wanted to impress children. If there were like, like secret massive formations of U.S. troops or even large like forces of U.S. spec ops guys carrying out operations in Ukraine, how good do you think they'd be at keeping that shit secret? Right. For one thing, like special forces guys get killed all the fucking time. Like they get killed, they get overrun. Like it's a terrible risk for us to just like send SEAL team six in to fight the Russians. When spoilers, the Ukrainians have

really good special forces guys, every bit as good as ours actually, with in a lot of cases, more experience fighting this kind of war. And it's like, if you want to talk about U.S. involvement, we're giving them their weapons. Like we're involved fucking plenty. There's just not much of a point in us like sending the green fucking berets in to Bakhmut, right? Like why? That doesn't that doesn't help us at all. That doesn't like help our government. That's not like good for the military. It would be stupid. Anyway, whatever. Anything else to talk about here? Do we want to talk about the Israel one? Oh, yeah. No, this is one of the interest, although it's not again, basically, one of the things that leaked is like the U.S. is spying on

all of its allies, which this leaks every couple of years. We're always spying on our allies, including Israel. Israel has spied on us a bunch. That's why they have nuclear weapons. Yeah, James, you want to talk about this? Yeah. So this is a document that basically what it alleges is what has been alleged, perhaps incorrectly, is that it was encouraging Mossad staff to attend protests against Netanyahu when he was attempting his like his auto gold pay, his like his coup from within. Yeah, if you want to call that right. He was attempting to centralize power, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, it's a document. It says that I'm quoting from it or I'm quoting from reporting on it at least senior leaders of the Mossad spy service advocated

for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli government's proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government according to SIGINT signals intelligence. So actually Netanyahu himself has been asked about this. And it's worth noting that he appointed the Mossad director, a guy called David, I think it's by Neha. Yeah. And he has also he's on the record previously in news media before this saying that he had clarified to Mossad personnel who could attend protests and who could not attend like because at a certain point, in any of these things that you're not allowed to be explicitly political, right? Yeah, folks even at a very low point in the US military, like you're

not supposed to say and do certain things. So the there was a petition that went out earlier, and again, this has already been reported. They were sent by intelligence officers basically saying like, we'll go on strike. And there had been again, like widely reported instances of other Israeli military people saying that they would go on strike or not show up for work if these judicial reforms went ahead. So I think again, it's been kind of we've really stretched. What was interesting, I thought was that it had a FISA label on FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And if people aren't familiar, basically, it allows US intelligence to wiretap things which they can do it without warrant if it doesn't include a US person. So a US person is not

just a citizen, but also maybe a permanent resident, something like that, right? Like a person who has more rights than others in the United States. But in this case, they seem to have got a FISA warrant, which it's very easy to get, right? It's like a closed courtroom procedure where they go to a judge and like, it's not like an adversarial argument. There's no one who argues that you should get the warrant. And so in practice, they nearly always get these warrants. But what it showed, they have to just prove that it's intelligence asset of a foreign power. And so it showed that at some point, they went for a judge and said, like, hey, you know, we need to wiretap some kind of communication. I'm using wiretap in the broad sense rather than in the specific sense.

But it's interesting, I think, that they have some intelligence asset in the United States that said, hey, we know this is an Israeli intelligence asset. And to be clear that this could just be shit that's going in and out of the embassy. And they've decided that they needed to wiretap that and keep an eye on that. And now, given that, like, it's Rails foreign policy has been toxic and terrible for decades, but Netanyahu is a new degree of crazy. It's unsurprising that, like, anyone concerned with, I guess, international relations would want to know more about what's going on. And again, like, that's, it's interesting context. As you noted, a lot of this had been reported out previously. So, yeah, it's just like, it's all interesting. Again, my attitude here is,

like, I'm glad this information is out, and I don't really care what happens to Jack Texierra. Like, yeah, in my ideal world, the policing infrastructure that's come down on this kid would not exist. But he made this decision knowing full well what happens when you leak top secret, like, it's one of those things where it's like, just within the context of shit that's fucked up in our country, the thing I'm going to be upset about is not a kid leaking top secret info to win an online argument, and then having it blow up on him, right? Like, especially not a kid who's a fucking Nazi. At the end of the day, he did something that was obviously done. It's like if some guy hops on Twitter under his real name and starts posting

pictures of heroin and saying, hey, guys, this is my name and address. I'm selling hella heroin. Here's photos of a felony quantity of heroin and guns. Well, I think heroin should be legal. But I'm not going to like, I'm not going to like make a crusade out of that guy's arrest, because that's stupid. Like, you know what happens if you post, hey, here is my home address and name. Here is all of the heroin I'm selling. Yeah, you'll probably get in trouble because you have posted online a serious crime. Obviously, that could be a problem for you. That's just not my primary concern in the world when people do really stupid shit and it blows up on them. And it's like, again, leakers, you look at the way Manning proceeded, you look at the way

Snowden proceeded. They were aware of the danger of what they were doing. I mean, you know, Chelsea did years in fucking prison, Snowden fled the country. Because they were actually whistleblowers. Because they were whistleblowers. They understood this is a serious, like this is very illegal and I have to try to take steps to protect myself because the government's going to come after me. The thing about Jack is like just the level of like arrogance that like, I can post this shit all day long and nothing will happen. It was like, well, for one thing, this is never going like it's information you're posting online. Like, I don't care, there's no way to keep the stuff completely contained within a 30 person discord. It's

going to leak out. And when it is, the government's going to want to know who the fuck is leaking this shit. And you took like took pictures of this shit inside his home. Like, it's just dumb. I'm not going to like, I don't at the end of the day, I have no room in my sympathy for like a fucking fashy kid who committed the dumbest crime possible and got in trouble. Like, I don't know, there's people who, I don't know, for example, we're camping in a forest and are getting charged with terrorism and facing longer penalties, right? Jack might do 15 years at the most, which is like fucked up, I guess. But you know, there's people facing a lot worse for a lot less. And I just, you know, whatever, I don't care what happens to this kid. He seems like he sucks.

I think the leaks are interesting. There's nothing in here that's like fundamentally changed my understanding of geopolitics, though. That's where I am. I would agree. It is a useful reminder to keep your crime offline. Yeah, don't continue to not post crimes on the Internet. Again, if you're selling heroin, don't post on Twitter, here is my name and home address. Anyone want to buy some fucking China white? That's not a great idea. If anyone has any top secret documents, you can find me on the Star Wars, the old republic forums. Just post them there. I am part of the Jedi initiate program. So just locate that and it'll be, I'm sure I'll see it.

Yeah, I am on the Nostromo server on World of Warcraft. You can just hit me up under my given name. Just DM me and we'll figure it out. You can send that shit to me over AOL instant messenger. That's how I take all of my leaks. It's the most secure platform. You can find me in the mountain project comment section where only good things happen. We're all on War Thunder too, so you can hit us up there too. For work reasons, yeah. I'll be shit talking your grading on a problem, but also accepting national security leaks. Yeah, we do, we do it all. All right, everybody. That's an episode. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessi, we can't get enough of it.

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dozens of tourists have died mysteriously on the island. One thing is certain. In this beautiful place, no coast is clear. Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, podcast enjoyers. It's me, James, today. And I am joined again by Mo. Mo, they are an educator, attorney, abolitionist, and they serve overlapping communities of activists, queer people, and prisoners. And we've heard from them before. We heard from them about June 11th.

But today we're talking about something a little different. We're talking about redistributing power in the attorney-client relationship. How are you, Mo? I'm doing okay. How are you, James? I'm existing. I'm fine. I'm thriving. So, yeah, you wanted to talk today. You reached out to talk about this. I think it's a really interesting topic, and it's one that I've become increasingly more aware of in my coverage of some sort of different stuff that's various prosecutions, I guess, in the US. And so I was very interested in this.

Can you perhaps start out by explaining what it is exactly that you wanted to discuss within the attorney-client relationship? Yeah, sure. I wanted to talk about building a trusting relationship with your attorney where you feel heard and respected and understand what you have a right to expect from your attorney and feel empowered to push for it. And this, actually, I want to address this both from the side of the client, particularly for people who are accused of criminal offenses. And I also want to speak a little bit to the people who may be representing folks who are accused of criminal offenses. For people accused of criminal offenses, I want to make sure that anyone in

that position really understands what you have a right to expect from that relationship and to feel really confident asking for it. For people who are representing individuals who are politically radical or people who are facing politically motivated prosecutions, I want those attorneys to feel safe and ethically empowered to practice criminal defense in a way that honors the goals of clients who may define their legal interests, not with respect to only their own personal liability, but with respect to a larger set of principles or a larger community. Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a very, it's a good distinction to draw. And I think I could think for people to be thinking about. So why is this sort of a topic that's important right now?

Well, so I certainly don't want to say that participating in protest or in social movements is dangerous or that it's even more dangerous than it has been in the past. But I am concerned that we might be seeing some arrests and charges that are a little more unhinged than we've seen in a while. So this isn't new, but it may be new to a newer generation of activists. And I think some of the community knowledge that was cultivated and held 20 or 30 years ago may be outdated or it might be inaccessible to folks who weren't involved back then or maybe who weren't involved in things that were like subject to this level of state repression 20 or 30 years ago. So that includes activists, but it also includes even very

experienced criminal defense attorneys who maybe haven't interacted with these kinds of prosecutions, you know, for whatever reason, because they were doing a different area of practice, maybe because this was happening to the people they were representing in the geographic area where they practice, or like it wasn't happening at the time that they were practicing. So I think that people on both sides of the attorney-client relationship could benefit from considering that there are some maybe important and time-tested methods of working to mount a collaborative defense in the context of a politically motivated prosecution. Yeah, I think that's just to kind of piggyback off what you said. I think it's incredibly valuable.

Often, like if you've been part of social movements, protest movements, whatever you want to call it, like for a long time, often we do have to learn things like the institutional memory of movements can be quite short. And a lot of people have come to the protest movement now who were not, like in my own case, like involved in sort of the campaign against neoliberal globalization in the early 2000s, where we screwed up a lot and learned a lot, and some of us are still around. And some of us are not, sadly, because part of the screw-ups that happened. And a lot of people, understandably, right, have been radicalized by having their bodily autonomy attacked by seeing the cops continue to murder people after we all got in the streets and got shot with rubber

bullets to ask them to stop murdering people. Like all these things that have understandably made people realize that the institutions haven't really responded to their demands for basic human decency. And so, yeah, they might find themselves out in the streets, and government doesn't generally yield power willingly. And certainly, government right now is doing everything to kind of take what little liberty and autonomy folks have and slice into that. So, yeah, it's very reasonable to consider these things. So, if in this attorney-client relationship, what would be some areas of friction or of, maybe I'm phrasing that wrong, but places where people might want to advocate for themselves in order to get an outcome that they desire?

Right. Well, so, I'll certainly get more into the specifics. But I guess, you know, I want to talk about this because I am seeing disconnects between people in these relationships. And just from where I sit, I feel like I can see what's going wrong. And I think that there are some straightforward solutions. And I think that having compassion, each party having compassion for the other can be really useful here. So, I think like one thing that's happening is that attorneys are very much educated to be confident until the point of arrogance. And clients often either don't feel authorized to push back on their attorney's ideas, or they do, and attorneys then just maybe steamroll them. And this is not entirely because attorneys are assholes. I think it is because criminal defense attorneys

are very often taught to minimize their client's legal liability by any means necessary. Well, by any lawful means, I guess is what I should say. So, for criminal defense attorneys who do not primarily work with movement-aligned clients, this often means negotiating deals with the prosecution that involve cooperating with the state's investigation, handing over information on your confederates, putting the client in an isolated or adversarial position with their co-defendants or co-arrestees, or doing things that require a person to renounce or disparage the people or the communities that they've been involved with that they come from. And I think it's true that using these kinds of tactics to minimize your own legal risk is very

often what people charged with criminal offenses want. But that sort of approach is often at odds with movement values. And it's often totally inconsistent with what activists want when they are facing charges. So, trying to minimize legal consequences is certainly always a part of our job. And it's often a totally valid thing for lawyers to be doing. But the idea that an attorney's job is solely to mitigate legal fallout is not actually entirely accurate. What lawyers are supposed to do is work with the client to help the client articulate their goals, and then the attorney should use their expertise and their experience to help the client lawfully pursue those goals. And that's what attorneys are supposed to do in

every case. But I think it often becomes most salient when the client's goals are less focused on minimizing legal consequences and more focused on, for example, highlighting movement messages or acting in solidarity with other people who are facing similar charges. So, again, I'm talking about this right now in the context of explicitly politically motivated prosecution, but frankly, the goals of the client have to lead in all cases. Yeah, of course. So, one thing that we've chatted about a little bit that I think maybe folks in some areas that I've looked at might not have been aware of is the concept of a joint defense. Could you explain for people who aren't familiar what that looks like?

So, a joint defense is a way of approaching a legal case where there are multiple defendants or multiple arrestees. Typically, in a criminal case, if you have multiple defendants, there's sort of a presumption that their interests are at odds with each other, that one of them or one or more of them is going to get thrown under the bus to reduce the punishment of one or more of the others. When we're talking about something like a mass arrest or an arrest that takes place in the context of a social movement where there are multiple defendants, very often those people do not see their interests as being at odds with each other. Very often, they see their interests as being unified. And so, they want to act in solidarity with each other.

And there are a bunch of reasons for this that are legal and there are also political and social reasons. Just in terms of people having caring social relationships, they often have commitments to each other and to community. But politically, people often feel that their individual legal interests are less the important thing that's at stake and that the thing that's at stake is actually the health and welfare of their social movement. And that if they did do something like cooperate with the state's investigation, they would actually be undermining their larger social movement goals. Legally, and this is really important, legally, having a joint defense agreement or using a joint defense approach allows all of those people to work together

in a privileged context because they share a unity of interest. And so, they and their attorneys are able to work on legal strategy together, are able to do things like negotiate for non-cooperating plea agreements as a block, are able to just have more eyes on the problem, more people doing legal research, more people drafting motions. And so, in a very material sense, this is often a legal strategy working together actually leads to better legal outcomes for everybody involved. So, I want to be clear that this approach, both using joint defense agreements and using that approach, but also just in terms of an individual attorney-client relationship acting in a way that's more collaborative is not just cosmetic. And it's not just something that makes you feel good if

you're someone who's committed to anti-authoritarian principles in a material way, approaching the attorney-client relationship in a way that is calculated to more fully incorporate the goals and expertise of the client or of many clients leads to better legal outcomes, less punitive outcomes. It leads to outcomes that are more closely aligned with client values and it leads to outcomes that are better understood by the client, even if those outcomes are bad. Right, yeah, at least they're part of that process. I think a great example of a joint defense that we discussed would be the J-20 case, right? If I'm not mistaken, it was a group of folks who were tried together or who amounted to joint defense, I guess, against charges that were

like filed against them. Was it a Trump's inauguration? It was something to do with Trump. They were kettled in DC protesting Trump's inauguration and there were more than 200 people arrested in this mass arrest. They had a very coordinated defense and they all worked together. Ultimately, I'm going to say in large part because they had so many eyes on the problem, they had so many people working on it, they were able to really go through the state's evidence against them and find prosecutorial misconduct that led to the favorable resolution of those cases. The other thing that they did is that they really all refused to cooperate with the state's investigation, which limited the harm that was done to larger social movements because

it meant that people were not just rolling over on each other and giving the state information to which it was not entitled. Information about people's relationships or interpersonal conflicts or different kinds of First Amendment protected information that the state always wants to have about activists, which they actually are not entitled to, but which they often end up getting because people who are facing criminal charges sometimes will offer that up in exchange for what they hope will be some lenience. I think that was a really good explanation of how these techniques, like you say, they're not just cosmetic, it's not posturing or an aesthetic thing. It can result in material benefits as well as aligning with your moral

desires. Can you explain substantively then how this looks in an attorney-client relationship, either with an individual or as a group now to join defense? Like any other relationship that's predicated on anti-authoritarian principles and shared values of mutual aid and self-determination, it requires building trust. It requires clear expectations, honest communication, respect for each other's expertise and consent. I think the piece that I think is sometimes missing is a real understanding from both parties that the accused is the person who has rights and liberty on the line. The accused is the person whose goals matter. The accused is the person who needs to be able to make decisions about things like whether or not to

accept a plea offer, whether or not to cooperate with the state, whether or not to go to trial, and whether or not to testify at trial. The attorney is presumably the person who has a lot of expertise with the law and a lot of experience with the legal system, and that is valuable and important. But I want people who are facing criminal charges to understand how much power they ought to feel comfortable exercising in this relationship. It is up to the accused whether they want their attorney to take part in a joint defense strategy. Now, we are seeing some stuff. I have recently seen some bond conditions imposed on people facing criminal charges that appear to me to make it very difficult for attorneys to engage in a

joint defense strategy, because sometimes it looks like these co-defendants are being forbidden from communicating with each other. That is an interesting wrinkle, but one of the things it can mean is that it is up to the accused whether they need their attorney to go and argue to have that bond condition removed. Right. I hadn't thought of that, but there are definitely cases, especially if you are being prosecuted in a group, or it is alleged that you have conspired to do something illegal, then yes, that might be a condition of your bond. That would make it very hard to do a joint defense. Like you said, that is when you should feel empowered to ask your attorney to stop that from being a thing. Right. The person who is facing charges gets to make

these decisions. I am saying, well, it is your right to decide whether to be involved in a joint defense. It is also your right to decide not to be. You can absolutely exercise your right to independent counsel, meaning the right to have an attorney who is not representing anyone else who is involved in your case, like who is not in any way connected to a co-defendant or co-arrested. Now, this is not to say that your attorney has to do everything you want, and they are just a yes man, and that if they decline to do everything you instruct them to do, that you should fire them. Attorneys do have to operate under certain constraints, and this ranges from things like some law is not relevant to this case. I've

occasionally had clients ask me to use the Uniform Commercial Code to defend their criminal cases, which is not a thing. I've also had clients ask me to have a hearing or file a motion at a time when procedurally that's not permissible. You can't just do everything that the client says, but look, typically the attorney has control over legal strategy because, as I said, presumably they have expertise with law. Even if you have decided that you're just going to defer to your attorney entirely in matters of strategy, or even if you have an attorney who's not super comfortable involving you in strategy to the degree that I might be, at a minimum, the attorney needs to be able to explain their strategy to you and justify it. Again, there needs to be mutual

trust and respect for each other, so expertise, they're not just a mouthpiece, but if you feel like they're genuinely not listening to your goals or not helping you to understand what's happening or they're actively disrespectful, it's really important for you to know you can fire your attorney. Yeah, I think the one area at least where I've become aware of this is somebody whose attorney was either refusing to or somehow was incapable of gendering them in a way that they would like to be gendered. In cases like that, you have the right to ask your attorney to use whatever pronouns you prefer and to be referred to using those pronouns. Is that right? Absolutely. I've certainly heard horror stories and I'll speak to this in a second. I have heard

horror stories not just about public defenders, but also about private counsel being, you know, casually racist, being misogynist, being transphobic, and being ableist, being really disrespectful and classist, particularly around things like transportation and childcare. If you have an attorney who's just straight, rude, or being disrespectful, or being oppressive in some way, I would say the first step, I suppose, would be to bring it to their attention. If they are not responsive, you should know that you do have a right to choose your own attorney. Now, I do understand that there are financial issues with just choosing your own attorney, but particularly in the context of movement-related prosecutions.

There are often, not always, but often resources available to you where people will either work to find you someone who can represent you pro bono or will raise money. The other thing is that if you have a public defender, you can almost always have appointed counsel from another office if you have some kind of irretrievable conflict with your attorney. I think we should talk about public defenders a bit, because I think sometimes people can think that they're the worst option or the bargain-basement choice or what have you, when in fact there are some things you can get with a public defender, you're very unlikely to get with private counsel. Let's talk about how to defend us a little bit. Sure, I would love to. I love public defenders, especially in large cities

that have what we would call institutional public defenders, as opposed to everyone takes a turn being a public defender for one week out of the year. People who want to be public defenders do not go into public defense for the big bucks. They go into it because they care about defending people and keeping people out of jail. Very often, the people who are in those positions care very much and are really, really well-trained, and they are not dummies. They will work really hard for you. I do want to push back against the widespread perception that public defenders are not good attorneys. They very often are the best available option. You are often in very, very good hands. Now, this isn't to say that you're never going to come across a public defender who

is rude or incompetent in some way, but I would really, really caution you against assuming that the public defender is not a super qualified, committed attorney. The other thing is that the offices of the public defender often have resources available to them that private counsel do not. They have investigators. They have social workers. They have vouchers for public transportation, and all of those things are resources that I think can be very useful in supporting someone who's facing criminal charges. Again, certainly, if you're having some kind of interpersonal problem with your public defender or any attorney, I want you to feel really, really empowered to address it. Hopefully, they're able to respond in a way that's appropriate and explain what's

going on and why things are happening in whatever way they are. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss the public defender as a good option. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I know some public defenders and some of them are really great people, very, very committed, like you said, to keeping folks out of jail, which is his goal in a lot of these cases. Some of my best friends are public defenders. Yeah, no, they don't. People obviously will be, I guess, a lot of people who are anti-authoritarian are going to be less than positively aligned with any institutions or feel concerned about interacting with people who are part of these institutions. But as far as those people exist within those institutions, it's to keep people out of much worse institutions like jails.

I think a lot of people who do public defense really have the sense that their mission is harm reduction, and they're prepared to operate in the confines of what are sometimes sort of leviathan bureaucracies in order to achieve that. Maybe a lot of folks would have run into, I certainly know, I met a lot of public turns in 2020 in the course of covering protest. Yeah, it's pretty clear that those folks were largely aligned with good things, with stopping the state doing violence to people in all of the different ways that it does that. Mo, is there anything else that you'd like us to get to with respect to these relationships people might have with their attorney? Yeah, I say this a lot.

Attorneys have an obligation to give their clients their best understanding of what's going on, what paths are available to take, and the possible or likely outcomes of each of those paths. An attorney has an obligation to give you the best possible legal advice based on your articulated goals, their understanding of the law, their experience, and their clinical judgment. And their clients have no corresponding obligation to follow that advice, which can be frustrating from where I sit. But it is nevertheless, a critical attribute of my work that I do not get to make big decisions for other people. They get to make decisions that I would not make if I were allowed to make them, but I'm not.

I think that I try to be really transparent with my clients about what my ethical commitments are, what I will do for them, what I'm not allowed to do for them. I try to have those conversations in an ongoing way. I don't know that that's common practice. I think people are really busy and that's a hard practice to maintain. But I want to encourage people who are in an attorney-client relationship to initiate those conversations. I guess the only other thing I would say is, if you have concerns with your lawyer, address those concerns immediately because the farther into a case you are, the harder it is to have that conversation. And the farther into a case you are, the harder it is to fire your lawyer. Typically, you have a right to choose your own

attorney, but if you're one week out from going to trial, the judge may not allow you to do it. I just wanted to tell anyone who's listening that if you are in a situation where you have to have a relationship with an attorney, it's already probably a bad situation. And you should be in a relationship where you feel like your lawyer is taking all of your goals seriously, which includes not just your straightforward legal goals, but movement support and solidarity. And if your lawyer is disrespecting your goals or disrespecting your identities or disrespecting other kinds of ethical commitments you have, you can choose to find a different attorney. And there are resources available. And ultimately, these decisions are yours.

And then I had some resources that I wanted to. So for people who may be accused of criminal offenses, there is a really great book called The Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant. And if you Google that, you can find a free PDF of it. I would also encourage people to reach out to and to become non-lawyer legal workers. So people who have experience with jail support, people who have experience with court support and with providing community support to people who are facing charges. If you are somebody who has an ongoing case, having a support committee that includes at least one legal worker can be just so critical in maintaining morale and in feeling supported and in having the wherewithal to be an active participant in your own defense.

And we do know that when people are active participants in their own defense, they have better legal outcomes. Yeah, I would imagine even if they don't have better legal outcomes, they have ones that are easier for them to understand, they're more satisfactory because of that. Absolutely. There are a lot of times when there are no good options on the table. I want to be very clear, being an active participant in your own defense or having a really great attorney who really listens to you and respects your goals does not mean that you are not going to experience punishment or state repression. And it means that you are going to have a better handle on what your options are and why things

are happening in the way that they are. So even if you end up in a situation that involves, for example, spending time in carceral confinement, you will at least understand how you got there and you will understand what the other possible options were. Somebody might choose to endure punishment rather than cooperate with the state. And even if that is not what most people would understand as a better legal outcome, it is an outcome that at least was more intentionally pursued than the alternative. Yes, yeah. So where could people find these non-lawyer legal workers if they wanted to add one or if they wanted support from one? If people wanted to find legal workers in their own community, I mean, typically they are

involved with movements. They might be associated with your local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. They might be the people who are most active in jail support. If you really can't find anybody, you can call the National Lawyers Guild Anti-Repression hotline if you are actively facing charges. That number is 212-679-2811. And we can try to connect you with appropriate legal resources in your community. That is one way that I would encourage people to reach out about if you are facing charges and you're having a hard time connecting with legal resources. That hotline is mostly for federal cases and for federal repression. But if you call it, we will do our best to connect you with appropriate resources wherever you are.

And there are also some resources for lawyers that I wanted to hype here, which are, first of all, the National Lawyers Guild, which is a bar association for people who value human rights over property rights. What a dark situation that this is the subset of human beings that the NLG are great for some positive NLG experiences. What a dark situation that it hadn't occurred to me how telling that was about lawyers as a whole. Yeah, when it's subset of your profession. Well, a subset of my profession is equally the dark and terrible people. So we just have to try and be better, I guess. The other thing that is available for attorneys who are interested is there is a book put out by the same people who wrote the Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant

for attorneys, and it's called Representing Radicals. And that is, I think, available through AK Press. You should buy it from AK Press directly and not from Jeffrey Bezos in any way. Thank you. And the other thing is there are a lot of attorneys around the country who are more than happy to consult, to act as mentors, to share motions, to share legal research. The people who work in movement spaces as lawyers are typically always prepared to share our experience and resources because we have a stake in other people becoming really good at this. My goal is to have fewer clients. So if anyone is interested in helping me to achieve that goal, either by going to law school or by taking some of my clients or taking some of the people who might otherwise

be my clients, please, I would be delighted to shepherd you into movement defense. Yeah, that would be great if we have any little budding movement defenders. How would they be able to find you? Oh, yes. If you would like to find me on the internet, please don't. But I do have a website that you can find if you Google me. It is moatlaw. And I am pretty available if you reach out to me by email and have questions. But generally, when I come on these things, the only thing I have to plug is the concept of not talking to cops. I want to do an episode on that. Maybe we'll do it one day. I think we should do an expanded how to not talk to cops guide. I guess it's not just the concept of not talking to cops. It's

actually the practice of not talking to cops. And certainly, if somebody, myself, who lives on the border and has to deal with all kinds of different jurisdictions of cops on an almost daily basis, just in the travel I need to do to live my life, it can be complicated and scary. And if you're not a citizen, it becomes even more complicated and scary. So that's the thing we should discuss in detail. I would like to say that, apart from some very, very specific exceptions that involve being at borders or being subpoenaed to a federal grand jury, you never have an obligation to talk to cops to answer their questions or to cooperate with their investigations. That doesn't mean you can obstruct their investigations. But you absolutely

have no affirmative obligation to speak to police officers. And if they ask you, if they are trying to interrogate you or ask you questions, you can say, I am going to remain silent. And I don't want to speak to a lawyer. And if the feds show up at your house or call you on the phone or come to your office or your place of work, you can say, I am represented by counsel. Please leave your name and number. And my lawyer will call you. Okay. Yeah, that's good to have scripts. I want to, yeah, I think we should, we should break down in detail some more scenarios. We should do it in another episode because it'll be maybe a bit longer. Yes. Yeah, I think folks, maybe, I think everyone understands the concept, but the practice and those

that advice you give me know is great. Yeah. And if you don't yet have an attorney and you feel uncomfortable saying I'm represented by counsel, you can just say, please leave your name and number and my lawyer will call you. And then you can call the National Lawyers Guild Anti-Federal Repression Hotline at 212-679-2811 and have a privileged conversation about your rights, risks, and responsibilities. And we can connect you with an attorney in your area. Yeah, that is excellent actionable advice. Yeah, thank you so much for giving us so much of your time and help. And yeah, I really appreciate it. I'm sure everyone else does too. Not at all. It's my pleasure. I am always available to come and talk to you about

various, the various rights of people accused of criminal offenses. Usually I am talking about your rights with respect to the state, but it has become really evident that I needed to talk about people's rights with respect to their own attorneys. Yeah, it's good. It's empowering for people to hear this. So I'm glad we talked about it. Me too. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again.

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Today on the show to chat about all of this, I've got Garrison Davis, James Stout, Mia Wong and Sophie Lichterman. Hi, everybody. Wow. When was the last time we got the whole crew together? A long time. This is the bulk of us. Even Sophie wasn't here for the come episode. No, Sophie refused to be on for the come episode, threatening to quit. No, she didn't, sadly. Today is a couple of days since we all got the surprising news that Tucker has been let go at Fox. This was news that was surprising to Tucker. There's a couple of things that are funny about the announcement itself, namely that he signed off his last episode saying, see you guys next week. Fox in the messaging they've

put out was like, you know, we both agreed that he needed to leave the network, that this is an amicable split. The Brian Kilmeade, who replaced him the next episode with a Fox News Tonight, was like, Tucker and I are still good friends. He's just decided mutually to take a leave from the company. This is definitely not true. We'll talk a little bit about all of this, but the gist of, I think it's kind of worth talking about, like, why this happened. As far as we know, there's not, you know, objective kind of confirmation about why specifically he got fired. But the broad speculation, some articles have like quoted a Fox News insider who says that it was due to something either he said and recorded, but unerred episode of the show, or that it was

something that was found in the emails that were revealed during discovery that was profoundly anti-Semitic. I've heard out like in one source at least said that it was anti-Semitic enough that it might have been legally actionable. That's obviously like, what the fuck? I would love to know what that specifically means. But what we do know is that a former producer for the Tucker Carlson show, who was a booking for him, is currently suing the network, both for a hostile work environment. She claims that she was exposed to intense anti-Semitism while working there. And she alleges that she was basically threatened into changing her deposition. So the lawsuit came alongside her like issuing a correction to her deposition and saying that

she had basically lied in order like because she was being threatened by people at Fox, which is like, so there's a lot going on here. So that's kind of the gist of what we know right now as to like why he got shit canned. Yeah, that's the basics. It's interesting too that he, it's been like a day now and he has said nothing. There have been multiple people who said that he's not responding to his texts, which is extremely funny. I saw one report that, I don't know how accurate it is. I saw one report that says he found out 10 minutes before Fox like released the statement. Yeah, he was in contract negotiations. So he was in the middle of presumably getting Fox to agree to pay him a shitload more money. Yeah, and now he has no money, which is very funny.

Well, he'll still probably get a lot of money somehow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd be interested to see if he like pivots to something like like OANN or Newsmax. I don't know if they have the means to pay him what he would probably want. Yeah, no, I mean, this is one of the questions kind of following this and how this decision is going to affect politics going forward, especially with 2024. Two big questions being where is Tucker going to go and who is going to take his place? For the next few weeks, Fox is probably just going to be doing like a rotating selection of hosts until they like make a final decision. So, you know, a lot of people could could end up end up with that job. But in terms of where

he's going, there's there's a few interesting options. Now, it kind of does come down to who's going to be willing to pay the probably pretty high price or if he's just going to try to stay independent. But I think something like Newsmax isn't isn't out of the question. I think this is this is just like a guess. But I think there's a decent chance that the Daily Wire is going to go after him really hard. Yeah, he's already pretty friendly with a lot of the people there. They've been willing to dish out a lot of money for someone like Steven Crowder. Now, Tucker will be undoubtedly more, but also he's going to be more of a pull. And that that is something that's entirely possible. I mean, the Daily Wire already produces like usually

two of the most popular podcasts in the world, like in like the top 10, they already have a lot. They have a lot of web traffic. They don't have like cable, but they get a lot of like other other ways to to to spread their work. They have a paid streaming service, don't they? Yes, yes. They also have the Daily Wire Plus. Yep. They are, I think they're probably the only people on the right that can offer Tucker both money that's broadly in line with what Fox could and an audience that's that's sizable, potentially even an audience that's larger. One of the things to kind of keep in mind is that Tucker was going to get out three and a half million viewers a night somewhere around there, which made him the most popular host on cable news. But also is

minuscule based on historical number one, minuscule based on the kind of audiences that like you can get on streaming platforms today, which are much larger than cable audiences. And is minuscule based on like, I mean, it was like 10 years ago that three and a half million viewers on a night 10, 15 years ago would have been like an unsuccessful show on NBC, right? For some for some perspective, the most successful TV finale of all time was the Mash finale, which had like 105 million viewers. Like cable cable don't go, you know, television period does not get the kind of viewership that it does anymore. And I think when you're looking at Tucker, he is the main draw for him has to be the audience. He's not. And he's the heir to the

Campbell or to the the Swanson, you know, dinner fortune. He cannot be motivated primarily by the paycheck, right? That that that there's he simply like it just that can't be the reason he's doing it. It has to be the the the fame, you know. And so daily wire, I think is is a likely place for him as a result of that. Yeah, another thing that's interesting, I thought is like me, I mentioned that he hasn't said anything yet. And he's probably taking advice from his lawyer, Brian Friedman, who incidentally is the same dude who's representing Don Lemon, who lost his job on the same day, which is great, which is a good year for that guy. It is a good year for this guy. He like this is the guy who gets a shit ton of money from networks when people get fired from

networks, like he was represented like Megan Kelly before. Like all when you hear of a famous person getting let go by network, it's probably this guy who's representing them. And I thought it was utterly hilarious that yeah, both of them retained the same guy on the same day, having been fired. But thinking about lawyering up made me think about like, and so if you mentioned it, that like Carlson defames people, he lies on an almost daily basis, right? We recently spoke about how he took the statistics of Russian deaths from those leaks documents that he used the blatantly altered version of those documents long after everyone knew they'd been altered, right? He needs serious legal clout to defend him from the fact that he lies and defames people

every single day. So like, going, even though he has a sizeable fortune, going out on his own would be costly in the sense of like he would almost have to be permanently defending himself. Yeah. And I think this is one of the things where, well, it's not clear to me what the impact is of the Alex Jones trial has been, but this is one of those things where I think the Dominion people actually just nailing Fox to the wall is going to be a sort of big factor here because it makes it seem easier and more plausible and things that like lawyers are willing to risk getting in fights about for actually going after these people for just like defending people. And so yeah, it'll be it'll be interesting to see like how long Tucker can last on his own

before he gets into a giant court battle with someone and whether he is, I don't know, attempts to be slightly more careful. Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. I don't think if he's, if he goes to YouTube or something, he's not going to be spending his frozen dinner fortune on legal fees. I don't think so. He just, and he can't do what he does without spouting shit, right? Like his whole thing is just straight up lying and doing this sort of credulous full routine that he does, which, which always results in these ridiculous conclusions that he comes to. So like, I don't know where that may be the daily why I can sustain that I don't really have a good sense of sort of their clout. If people aren't familiar, should we summarize the Dominion case?

I know you'd spoken about it on fast. Yeah, I did. I mean, you can listen to the two part or I did with Katie and Cody on on the Dominion lawsuit where we basically just go over the entire document that Dominion prepared for that. But the gist of it is that Tucker knowingly, and knowingly, we know that he knew because the discovery process revealed a bunch of his text messages and emails where he talked about knowing that the election fraud conspiracy theory was bullshit. And he propagated it and attacks against Dominion and another company, Smartmatic, in order to keep his audience on board, which is a criminal, you know, defamation, or not criminal, but at least like legally actionable, you can sue as as Dominion did and

won like 800 million bucks. So and I do think that's really worth that is that is kind of pertinent when we're talking about who's going to take him next because like obviously the daily wire would want to guy like Tucker, except for the fact that he could cost them another 800 million dollars, which has to be has to be part of the calculus of any company looking at taking him on. And I think is something none of us, nobody really knows what's going to happen with this. But I think there is a good chance he is permanently marginalized in terms of audience, just because of how much like 800 million dollars is not enough to sink Fox on its own. But it is enough to make anybody looking at bringing Tucker on board a second guest themselves.

Yeah, I saw some numbers that were, I think, I think they were saying he was bringing in the highest like amount of revenue of any like like Kimmel Do's anchor, but it was like it was like 78 million dollars a year. And he lost like so he lost 10 years of his income in one year. He basically lost everything he'd made Fox during the time when he was the number one. Yeah. Yeah. And that has to be that has to be a huge part of the calculus of like, okay, you know, these these people like as much as the right is ideological, it is also capitalist. And the risk reward on that is terrifying. Yeah. And like, especially when it comes to the daily wire, a cost like that would just probably make their entire company fold. They're not that big of a company. They just

have a disproportionate amount of influence because their hosts are really good at like marketing and social media manipulation. Yeah. Yeah. Ad revenue now would be a great time for us to pivot to for some gold or coins with Ronald Reagan. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can hear the ads for the new podcast that our future colleague Tucker Carlson is going to be doing. Yeah, it's way him and Don Lemon just have a different. Yeah, him and Don Lemon. We're calling it. I don't know if there's a good, there's a good, there's a good joke with their two names somewhere. I haven't figured it out yet, though. So you do that for yourselves, audience. Ah, what a good, what a good time that we're talking about here. This is just just just a great day, great week. So yeah, we're looking

at, you know, I think kind of when we're talking about what what's possible here in a daily wire agree is kind of the most likely thing. If you look at what leaked recently during their drama with Steven Crowder, the contract they were offering Crowder was somewhere around $30 million, which from everything people have said is a big deal for them. That's one of the bigger offerings they're capable of doing. That is, you know, probably the most Tucker is realistically going to be able to get. But also, one of the things that kind of is noteworthy about the contract they were offering Crowder is that it included clauses where like, Crowder's take home could be reduced significantly if he got kicked off of platforms. And fucking Tucker Carlson

is not going to keep it a YouTube account. I mean, it is, it is interesting in that sense of like, they were, they, all of his content was able to be kept up when he was under Fox, like on on YouTube, you can find all of his segments. And it'd be interesting to see how the content moderation differs if like he starts his own channel and how, and how comparatively what things would be would be counted as like community guideline strikes. But yeah, I mean, just, I think, I think like last week, Matt Walsh's show got got demonetized on YouTube, which if his contract is anything like Crowder's means that he is going to be suffering up like a personal financial hit. Yeah, they're taking probably, you know, in the millions that he's losing.

Yeah. And there's something, I think this is an interesting thing that's been happening in the last maybe like six months has been there's, there's been sort of increasing tension between sort of the far right that's basically seized control of the Republican Party and like the money. And they keep running into these issues where in order to keep their base going, they need to say stuff that like, they're sort of like corporate backers are like, this is either losing us money or is so far out there that like, it's, it's, you know, it's either directly losing this money from lawsuits, or it's losing it's losing us elections, or it's losing us like business. And now I'm never going to claim that like Murdoch is not the far right because he is.

But it's it's interesting that we've gotten to a point where where people like Murdoch are getting more gun shy about what they can put on air because it's finally like, the money is finally starting to see actual consequences and they're starting to pull back from the stuff a little bit. Well, see, that's part of what I'm questioning is I I'm sure that that is something that's entering his calculus more now since the settlement. But it's at least the early reporting suggests that's not really why or at least not most of the reason why Tucker got shit canned. It's a bunch of shit, like stuff that is not revealed yet in the deposition that he was saying and emailing. I mean, one of the things came out that woman who

was accusing him of creating a sexist and anti-semitic work environment is that he like, when she got hired, he plastered swimsuit photos of Nancy Pelosi over her office. And that's what we've heard like the shit that like, I think it's possible I think it's possible that what actually got Murdoch to make the call to can him is that Murdoch himself found out through discovery that he was saying shit in emails that would sink the company. Like if he's saying full on Nazi shit, and there's documentation of that, which I don't think is unlikely. He had ye on like, there's no limit at that point. Like, yeah, no, the like, clearly that shit aligns with his views. And he's made a concerted effort

to mainstream more and more outright fascist and eugenicist white supremacist talking points every year that he's had that show. So it would not, especially when they got his text messages, like he might be smart enough not to like, maybe use his work email. But I think that the fact that his there were some things in his text messages. And yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. It's either that or he said something personal about one of the Murdochs. And they did, he did talk shit about Fox executives, which some people have suggested as like part of why they made the decision to can him that he actually just pissed off the moneymen too. And this was kind of an excuse to take more action. Again, like it's kind of unclear exactly

what happened. I think it's probably worth talking about in the last portion of this, what impact because it is likely that whatever happens, he's he's going to have less reach in at least less reach in like a practical way. Because if Tucker starts a podcast, even if the podcast has kind of more, you know, through Daily Wire or whatever, even if it's got on paper more listeners than Fox. I think there's something about cable news where you're reaching an audience that's that's different with the ideas that he was. He's when he was on Fox, he was hitting people who would never have encountered some of this like fascist shit, this great replacement stuff. Whereas if he's saying the same thing on a

Daily Wire podcast, he's probably talking more to people who are already, you know, pilled, so to speak. So I do think there's a good chance that overall, this kind of tanks his ability to actually influence culture in radicalized boomers. Like everyone listening can probably think of a person who they know or who is in their sort of greater circle of people who their friends know, who is an older person who is very much offline and has encountered these great replacement ideas through Tucker Carlson and become a significantly worse person because of Tucker Carlson's program. Yeah. I mean, and you can see how all of the Daily Wire guys like Walsh and Michael Knowles and even someone like Andy Know, they suck up to Carlson so much

and have been for the past few years because they realized that that actually gives them cultural access to be on his show on that platform in a way that they're much more like Peterson too. Peterson, sure. I think Peterson's broken into the mainstream, I think a bit more. But like all of these other guys like Andy Know, Walsh, Knowles, they're all heavily like internet people and they influence like internet shit and sometimes that can start crossing over but in general, the cable news platform kind of reifies things into broader culture in a way that someone like Walsh just doesn't because like most people don't know who Walsh is, but most people do know who Tucker is and that is my dad is like a lifelong Republican voter.

And when I talked to him complaining about shit, Matt Walsh is doing like the first thing he said was like, I've never heard of this guy. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, because he's he's a fucking internet weirdo. And my dad doesn't, you know, he knows Ben Shapiro because Ben breaks through to the mainstream, but he knows Ben Shapiro from like catching clips of him randomly being shared on Facebook by other people in his age group as opposed to like seeking this shit out. And that's that's kind of the power of Tucker. And I think one of the things you've seen, Gar, that you were kind of talking at, which is the thing that is maybe most hopeful to me is how scared people like Andy Know, Glenn Greenwald, flip the fuck out when this guy announced

because they see a mate, this is a major threat to their reach into their earning potential. Yeah, Tucker can't host them anymore. That's potentially disastrous for them. And the fact that that's happening right as we're gearing up for 2024 is something I'm hopeful about, at least I'll say. Right. No, I mean, it is, it is a massive like rejection of, of that platform to people like that, like this type of like rhetoric that Tucker is doing, having this be like publicly rejected in this way will make all these people that are more on the fringes probably make it harder for them to break through in little ways like they used to try to by being on Tucker's show. Speaking of reifying things into the broader culture by these products.

And we're back. Okay, so there's one other thing that we've probably been touching on it, but I think it's really interesting is that Tucker, Tucker basically has a sort of media ecosystem that revolves around him. And you know, there's a very established pathway for how you can become a sort of like a successful and profitable right wing grifter, which goes through, you know, you sort of go viral on Twitter, you go viral on TikTok, and then you go on a Tucker. And you know, and like, like people like lives at TikTok, right? Like, I think, I think there's, there's a specific kind of media campaign that even with whoever like whatever absolute asshole that like Fox puts in that slot after Tucker's, you know, whenever they sort of figure out who

that's going to be, like, there's still I think going to be sort of a hole there. Yep, where I think it gets harder to run the kinds, the very, very specific kinds of campaigns like libtutik talk, like the sort of bombs for liberty shit that's been just making the country unfathomably awful for the past few years. With like that, I've been kind of working on writing something scripted about this trans panic that happened in a town very near me in Santy, right? Which like was an extremely clear, like, like that was the goal, right? Like, like due to speech, go viral, go on Tucker, create, you know, then go on the speaking circuit, make money. Like, to me, at least it seems very clear that that was, that was the goal. And I want to document that

process. Yeah, he's a weapon system that they, they have learned like has become kind of the center of right wing strategy, really, is like, get on Tucker, cause, you know, moral panic, culture wars shit. Yep. Yeah. And, and, you know, and like, obviously, like other foxholes do this stuff, it doesn't work anywhere, anywhere near as well. And I think the person, the person that gets the closest is probably Laura Ingram. But I think she, she kind of suffers from the glass ceiling problem. Yeah. She, she actually cannot be as influential. They love to hold a girl boss down. Yeah, I mean, comrade massagity. I stand with Laura Ingram, Robin, you bigot. Specifically viewing Tucker as this thing that was like a targeted weapon, I think it's a really good way to look at this. And specifically now

that, that weapon no longer can like actually aim correctly, because it does, or at least may not be able to, right? I mean, maybe he'll come back somewhere and if we're wrong, but I, I, I am optimistic, I think I'll say. Yeah. It puts a spanner in the works of the hate machine that, that he built and the fox built. And that's a good thing. But Mia, you were saying before I rudely interrupted you. You asshole. Well, you love to hold a girl boss down. I cannot remember what I was going to say. You're talking about how, how, how other, other hosts kind of do the thing, but not quite real. Yeah. Well, I mean, part of it also is just, you know, part of the power of Tucker is just the time slot that he's in, which is, you know, that, that's the one where like

all of the people who've gotten off of work or who are like turning on the television at night get to. But yeah, like Tucker was, I think was really in the entirety of the sort of TV and media sphere was uniquely good at that stuff. And no one else, no one else can do it like that. And, you know, like the, like the Fox people will create someone else. But until they fill that spot A, there's a gap and B, it really remains to be seen whether they're going to sort of pick someone who is as embedded in like that part of the sort of fascist right as Tucker is, or if they're going to find someone who's like, I mean, still really, really right wing and sucks, but isn't like having ye on. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I am kind of curious slash worried

about who's going to follow him into that time slot. Folks, real old heads will know. Tucker got his job after Bill O'Reilly, who was the Fox News fascist of my childhood, got shit canned for sexual harassment on an industrial scale. And so that's, that's why Tucker is in. And obviously, as bad as Bill was, Tucker was worse. And maybe the person who follows Tucker will be worse than Tucker. I do have trouble imagining what that could be, because my God, he really, he went, he went right up to the edge of putting on a fucking swastika armband. Yeah. Yeah. I will say about the Bill O'Reilly thing. People, people have been like, oh, like Tucker's going to disappear in the way Bill O'Reilly did. I don't, I don't think that's,

I think he's going to be a bigger, like, assuming he winds up somewhere, I think he'll be, still be a bigger influence than like Bill O'Reilly was after he got fired, but. Yeah. I mean, Bill was also a lot older, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that is, that is an accurate assessment. Well, I'm excited, excited to get my new rumble subscription so I can watch. Oh, yeah. All of Tucker's name together. Yeah. No, it's going to be glorious to see him finally pair up with Tim Poole. The two, the two of them carrying AK-47s and doing field journalism in 2024. Yeah. Yeah. Tucker Carlson, for those are not familiar, carried a gun when reporting in Iraq,

which for many reasons, it's a fucking terrible idea, including putting everyone else doing your job in change. Yeah. But it is really funny. It is very funny. I will, I will say that. It is funny. I, I, I genuinely, like, part of me doesn't, part of me does hope he decides to do a thing where he's like, I'm going to go do field journalism in Ukraine and just imbibe him. Oh, so, so funny. She wants to join me. She just gets fucking merked by goddamn like him. You know what happens? No, no, no. You know what happens? He, he embeds with the Aesop battalion. Yeah. There you go. And they all get taken out. Yeah. Yeah. And they just got active. God willing. Kindest. But I think, one thing I was definitely thinking about,

like the past few years, less, less so this, this like past year specifically, but for a while, it was a quite frightening prospect to think about what if Tucker was going to run for president. And I don't think he, he is, he is not going to do that in 2024. Absolutely. That's, that's, that's not happening. But I mean, it's still possible he could in the future. 2028 is likely if, like, if he wants. But I think the, the loss of this position at this point in time will probably affect that decision because it's something he's certainly been thinking about considering. He's one of the most influential conservative people on the, like on the planet. He determines policy or did. He did. Yeah. And, and, and now it's interesting with him,

with him leaving his job in this way. It'll be interesting to see if, how that, how that affects any kind of potential prospect for him, for him running for office. My big question around all that, and this is kind of unanswerable, is like, does Tucker have any appeal outside of the right way base? Three and a half million cable news viewers is not evidence of the kind of broad based appeal that can draw on independence and win an election. And Tucker has never, you know, the one, the closest thing he's been to a political candidate is when he went up against John Stuart, and that didn't go great for him. No, he moved after, after John Stuart kind of destroyed his crossfire career, he moved to a situation where he was, he had unprecedented

control over his show. It was almost entirely recorded and stuff out of a studio in Maine that he set up. He built everything he was doing around being able to totally control how he was seen, how, what was shown, what of his was like put out to the public, and you simply can't do that as a presidential candidate. You have to accept and be able to make work for you the fact that every eye is on you and you, you do not have total control over what about you is put out and published. Among other things, you're going to be repeatedly questioned in situations where you can't edit the footage or stop things from going out afterwards. And I don't know that Tucker has what it takes to succeed in that kind of environment.

Yeah. An enchilade, he'd fucking never succeeds again and we never have to hear about him. Yeah, we should shout out this lady Cat Abu Ghazale, the person who had to watch Tucker Carlson for years and years and years and then explain it to people. She works at Media Matters for America, but she is taking the biggest victory lap that anyone has ever taken right now and it's kind of glorious to watch. Doing the Lord's work truly. Yeah, taking on trauma for all of us. Her stuff was quite good. She did a good job explaining how toxic Tucker was to people who might not have been aware of it. Yeah. Anyway, in conclusion, Tucker, we would love to have you on at Cool Zone. Totally welcome to come host your own podcast. We'll bring you on that could

happen here. You could do a bastard's guest appearance. We'll send him to Myanmar. He can right into the jungle. We'll drop him directly. Come on, come on, Tucker. We'd love to have you. Anyway, I think that's, I think that's a soad. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So whenever you're out sustaining in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again. Because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V-E-S-S-I.com. And see for yourself.

Vessie, come alive in the rain. From the studio who brought you the number one podcast, The Python Massacre, this is Death Island. Just a few miles off the Thailand coast, the island of Koh Tao looks like a postcard. It's almost like if you were going to imagine a paradise island or draw a picture of one, that's what Koh Tao looks like. Young tourists from all over the world visit the pristine beaches and crystal clear water. But underneath the surface lies something sinister. A dark cloud has come over the island and cast its shadow. Death, mystery, and danger. In the last 20 years, dozens of tourists have died mysteriously on the island.

One thing is certain. In this beautiful place, no coast is clear. Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been four months since French President Emmanuel Macron effectively declared war on French society. Euphemistically called pension reforms, Macron's proposal would increase the retirement age from 62 to 64, effectively robbing the working class of two years of their lives. In January, French unions filled the streets of Paris with trash. Now, French workers build brick and mortar barricades on highways and set branches on fire on train tracks.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. The escalation from protest to uprising is, in part, a product of how Macron forced the retirement age increase through a national assembly he no longer controls. Without the ability to win a vote, Macron's Prime Minister, Elizabeth Bourne, suddenly invoked Article 49 of the French Constitution, which allows the ruling government to force a bill into law without a vote. Macron argues that because circumventing parliament to force legislation through is legal, the move is democratic. Millions across France disagree. We spoke to two French protesters, Mayel, a student in Lyon, and Agat, a union railway

worker at a state-owned rail company, about the movement. The two met through a struggle committee designed to bring people from different backgrounds and movements together to fight against Macron's reforms. And four, as Mayel put it, victories for our class. Agat had this to say about Macron's anti-democratic sleight of hand. What they are using right now is a historical trap, which consists of confusing democracy and constitutionalism. I don't know if I'm using the right word. But, for instance, you know that they maybe, you know, that to impose this reform, they have been using an article, which is Article 49.3 of our constitution. And they say that, well, this article is in the constitution. We are in a democracy, and therefore

this article is democratic, which is absolutely false. It's a fallacious reasoning. It is not true. The 49.3 is an anti-democratic article of the constitution. And this is what they have been trying to do lately, to say, to make us believe that everything that's been happening is absolutely normal and complies with the democratic standards of France, which is not true. Also, what they are trying to do to disqualify any opposition from the left wing is to say that the left wing party is actually an extreme left wing party, which it is not. They are trying to induce a kind of history in all this and to radicalize what is not. What we are asking for is simply for them to listen to what we, for once, can call the people. Generally, when you have a protest, it's only a

part of the population that disagrees with the policy of the government. But this time, honestly, there are seven people out of 10 who disagree with this, and nine workers out of 10 who disagree with this reform. Honestly, I think we can call ourselves the people. And in a democracy, well, what you do is listen to the people, not the representatives and not the members of the government, but the people in the fucking streets, I'm sorry. And because they do not want to do that, they try to say that we are radicals and that we are supported by radical political parties, which is not true. Yeah, it's a very weird situation. Yeah, this is what I wanted to say about what their current strategy, aside from the repression of which we are going to talk in a

few minutes, this is what their strategy is. Yeah, basically, they confuse all of the forces on the left together. They say that Melancholy is funding the black bloc. So it's things like that, the CGT, the LFE, all of them, it's all the same. And they all want the destruction of civilization. And I don't know, that's the discourse on the far right. Yeah, and we eat babies. That sounds like the American right to. Yeah. And this is kind of linked to police violence, this discourse, when you were talking about how they're saying that the constitution is democratic, and there's nothing you can say, even though, well, the point of the constitution is to bypass the parliament. I don't know if

that's democratic. But yeah, so when it comes to police violence, the reaction is to say that the state holds the legitimate monopoly of violence. So therefore, they can repress us however they want. And that's literally what they're saying right now, which is kind of worrying. The French police have been incredibly violent in their campaign to suppress the protests. At an ecological action in Saint-Salin on March 25, tens of thousands of activists were met with helicopters, armored vehicles, and 6,000 grenades, many of which were the French police's new and incredibly dangerous military grade GM2L CS gas grenades. One protester was shot in the head with a tear gas grenade fired by a grenade launcher mounted on an armored vehicle.

He remained in a coma fighting for his life for an entire month. Earlier today, his parents released a statement saying that he has begun to wake up but is not fully conscious, and his life remains in danger. The day before, a special police motorcycle unit called BRAV-M, created in 2019 to suppress the gilet jaune with the yellow vest protests, was recorded threatening a group of random people that had arrested for sitting in front of a building. From the Washington Post, the cop says, quote, you're lucky to be sitting there now that we've arrested you. I swear, I'd have broken your legs, literally. I can tell you, we've broken elbows and faces. But you, I'd have broken your legs, one officer says in the recording, Le Monde reported.

Two slapping sounds can be heard, the report says, along with an officer saying, wipe that smile off your face. Later in the clip, a police officer warns the young people they have detained, quote, next time we come, you won't be getting in the car to go to the police station. You'll be getting in another thing called an ambulance to go to the hospital. Paris police chief Lorette Nuez said on Friday he was, quote, very shocked by the audio clip. Mayel and a gat were less shocked. This is not really a surprise, unfortunately, because, well, our lease is not as, I don't know, it's problematic, but maybe not as problematic as in the US. I'm sorry if I'm wrong about that, but we also follow sometimes what happens on the other side of the ocean.

I must say that we have had issues of police murders on the street, like in police violence, wanton violence. And unfortunately, that now it's not new. And there is a newspaper called Mediapart who managed to find an excerpts of, I think it's a group on WhatsApp or whatever, of policemen talking about race war and all these kind of things. And unfortunately, we know that there are such people in our police. So the police are, they're basically fascists, all of them, like they have like one of their unions, which called Alliance. And for the politics, for the presidential elections, they invited the right wing party who are basically only people who don't whistle about genocide. And then the classic Marine Le Pen and Zemo,

as a far right who's openly calling for a civilizational war with Muslims. So that's the police unions. And for a little bit of history and the police, we have, for example, one of the very violent units that you see arresting people all over France, which are called Brigade Anticriminalité, or BAC for short. And these people come from some sort of colonial units who were in Algeria during the war. And when there was a need to repress populations who previously lived in colonies and then moved to France, to the main country, they created a lot of very violent units and recruited through people who were in the Algerian war to basically break down people's house, things like this, beat them up, you know.

It was really colonial practices. And all of this kind of state, with the repression of poor and non-white areas of town, where they try to always have a strong police presence and catch people, they say, in the act, but they're really making up reasons to arrest people. Police violence is not new at all. And yeah, basically these units train in all year long against poor and non-white people. And then during protests, they come against people who have come to protests, which are generally different people, but not entirely different people, of course. The police response to protests, Agat says, has gotten more violence as the Gilles Jean protests in 2019. But instead of clearing

the streets as Macron had hoped, the increase in violence is just narrowing the traditional gap between more moderate trade union protesters and the more radical protesters found in black blocks. I've seen people in America, in England, saying that the movement is dying down because the inter-union protests are more and more away from each other. But in the actual protests, people are much, much more radical. And what happens is that the people who are in the front of the protests before the union, and who may potentially fight with the cops that the union will never do, they're more and more numerous, like four times bigger than the protests a month ago. And so the cops cannot charge us. Every time they charge, people get around them and there are

rocks which happen to hit their heads. I don't know how. Yeah. Could I ask about that a bit, specifically about the dynamic of there being a sort of, I don't know, a kind of divide between the sort of more militant people who are fighting the cops and the sort of more moderate like trade union protesters? I wanted to ask, I guess, like, how firm has that separation been? And what, I guess, have the unions been doing here? Have they been trying to contain things? Have they been trying to push forward? Well, I think it's a very recent phenomenon kind of, especially the way it's taken form now, because it's basically a mix of a black bloc and some gilets jaunes and some

red or radical people. Yeah, yellow vests. But so the black bloc, it started really in 2016. Before this, there was no real black bloc all the time at protests. And the attitude of the unions is that they hate the black bloc. It's pretty simple. I mean, not of course, as everyone who's in a union, but the unions who organize the protests, they don't want anyone in front of them. They want people to go behind them and follow whatever they want to do. So they've been really aggressive. But even if there are conflicts right now, I would say the fact that the people in front of the union are more and more numerous, I think there's somewhat less tension. The unions, I don't think they feel like they can really push

against even the black bloc or radicals who break stuff. Eva may add in something. Indeed, there is a difference between the attitude of the union directions, let's say, and people like me, the simple unionized workers. And what Miles said is absolutely true about the hate. They really don't want any black blocs, especially in front of them. But what I observed in these over the last few demonstrations is that what we call the cortège de tête, which is really the very head of the demonstration, even in front of the unions, the official union group, where there are the black blocs and the yellow vests, there are more and more people. I was going to say like me, but I'm still a bit cowardly,

and I'm still afraid of getting in this kind of place. But there are more and more unionized workers who mingle with the black blocs and et cetera. And we also have what we call manifestation sauvage, the wild and unorganized protests that are not organized by unions, but are kind of spontaneous. They happened after Macron forced the reform through parliament without a vote, and people just went in the streets without a union, and they burned, and there were images in Paris of everything burning. It was that day, and that's what we call a wild protest. Yeah. And indeed, for the first time, I saw unionized workers joining in. That is crazy, because they were feeling that what the unions were proposing

within the legal and pacifist and nice frame was not enough, because really our president was really just making fun of us, and we couldn't have it. And what we usually do was not longer enough for us, and this is really something new. I asked about the appearance of the Gilles Jean in the current protest, and what the two thought of them. Mayel, the student, was somewhat dismissive, but the impact that Gilles Jean had on a gat and the railway workers was very different. Yeah, I can say a little bit, but I don't know much about the yellow vests. So what I saw of the yellow vests were a lot of blockages and people against taxes on gas, and the way it radicalized was towards some form of radical democracy, but maybe not so radical because they wanted

the mass movements seem to end on the demand for referendums, basically. They wanted to be able to call their own referendums, and the demands were not directly linked to economics as I saw them many very often, and when we saw them in protests in Lyon, they were kind of weird, but I don't know them very well. What I saw was that the government repressed them really, really hard, much harder than the usual protests that we do, because they were really scared of them. Yeah, because I took part to the yellow vest movement, and I tend to disagree a bit with your analysis on this. Yeah, go ahead, no problem. No, it's just a saying, and it's not an attack at all. At first, I must say I hated this movement because, well, just long story short, it began

in 2018, and in 2018, there was a big movement in the SNCF where I work in the railway public company, because the current, it's very funny, because it's the current prime minister who was the transport minister at the time. They just move them around. We keep seeing the same people. I can't stand that. Anyway, I have a personal vendetta with this woman, and we had been trying to fight off the, well, they kind of started to kill off our company. It's only now dying of its low death, but this is where it really, well, this is where the end really began in 2018 for us. You mean by privatization, they're killing the company? Yeah, we are not private yet, but the door has been open on that year. So it's been a really,

really hard protest for us, and in the end, we lost. It was really hard. After that, I've seen these people, the Yellow Vests, stand up and take on our songs to make them their own, the famous Onlila. It started in the railway world, and it really started in Lyon. I was there, and suddenly these people whom I did not see by our side a few months before started to invade the streets and sing our songs. I was really outraged. I was furious. Fortunately, I spent time with people who are more intelligent than me and who said that it was worth going to see these people and see what was on their minds and what they were thinking, especially because there were people who had never before protested, that there had never been on the street to

demonstrate about anything, and they were right to do that. It all started with the price of oil and of gasolina, and I found that really insignificant. In fact, it really opened my mind about the reality of other people, because I do not have a car, but some people have a car and they need it to live together, to make a living. Not only that, but the motives of the protest, they broadened and broadened these people. They got politicized at such a speed, a high speed. This is incredible, because quite rapidly, what they were demanding was not simply the lowering of the oil price. It was also more democracy. It was more social justice. It was against the cancellation of attacks on fortune, the great fortune of people of great wealth. On climate

also, it merged with a lot of climate demonstrations. It was about really a social model and what world we want to live in tomorrow. This is why I say this movement was really incredible. It was also incredible, because it was taking place without the unions. It depends on the regions in France. In Lyon, for example, there is no love lost between the Yellow Vests and the unions, the direction of the unions. In other regions, like in south of France or in the north, it's very different. Soon, they began to protest together. The Yellow Vests gave us a fresh new breath. It was really a breath of fresh air. They were so spontaneous and so angry also. They reminded us what it was to be angry and to have the right to be angry and not to be helpless

in front of an unjust policy. It really changed this. Just like I said earlier, in this very movement, the movement we live in now, there are unionized workers who mingle with the Black Bloc, for example, where there were a lot of us unionized workers in the Yellow Vests too. It influenced us a lot. I think we can say that if 2016 added Black Bloc to the protests, now with the Yellow Vests, it changed completely the way we protest as well. All the blockages are much more regular and the way people fear less to demand things and to organize without unions. I think we can say that it definitely changed things. Also, personally, I think that if I say wrong things about Yellow Vests, why I don't know them in Portuguese is

because the concern about gas price was not what I was buying because I live in a city and I don't have a car. So I think it affected more the countryside of France, which is more concerned with gas prices than big cities also because we already have lots of political movements here. So it's kind of different. I don't know. It's not very well to be honest. Maybe I should just show up. No, I mean, it's interesting to me because I remember when the Gilles Legende protests started up, there was a lot of debate outside of France and kind of like Westerners observing the protests as to, are these guys, is this something that's like a positive movement? Are they all right wing? And it's interesting that the way in which kind of all of these different sort of eras

of protest movements in France have melded together for this most recent kind of uprising. You've got these trade unions, you've got Gilles Legendes, you've got the black block, all sort of working as different pieces of this uprising based on kind of the different tactics of their eras that's fascinating to me. I was discussing and saying that it's kind of a feature of movements about pensions, even if they can be very different, that they tend to attract a lot of people. And at first, the protests were not very radical at all, compared to protests we could have with similar sizes. But gradually, the movement is radicalizing a lot. It seems to me the people who are in it. And the fact that it tends to mobilize everyone

at first, you know, if it's not very radical, why it created this sort of mingling of everybody, so the Yellow Vesta Union, the black block, everybody accepts the political parties because they're useless. But alongside the radicalization of protesters from all walks of life inside France, there's been a surprisingly strong international reaction from other European workers and activists. You know, I'm wondering, you know, during the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. in 2020, international attention was significant. And it was, to some extent, useful in terms of helping to raise money and stuff for different bail funds, people from all around the world helped to that extent. But I'm wondering, is the degree of international attention by other countries,

left-wings, you know, movements on what's happening in France right now, is it having an impact directly, or is it just sort of like noise? Well, on my part, it seems to be a lot of noise, yes, because a lot of people seem to misunderstand completely the situation. And, yeah, they just give their opinion, and that's fine, I guess. But I think there may be actual solidarity with some militants. I mean, I know among anarchists that there are anarchists who come from Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and other countries who try to help actions and protests. And I'm pretty sure that among unions, there is international solidarity as well. But maybe, I guess, you should say something about this. Yes, there is international solidarity.

Honestly, this is not something I was expecting. But for instance, last week in Belgium, there are workers from a total plant that actually blocked the freaking port and to prevent them from sending a sending product to substitute it to the product that was blocked by protesters in France. And that was, for me, this is absolutely wonderful. And yes, so yes, there are international solidarities. We have been in our interprofessional assembly, because we have a local interprofessional assembly, and we have been expressing our gratitude to the people in Greece, in Argentina, in Spain, in Germany, who expressed their support openly. And personally, I was really surprised to see how many people actually were paying attention to what was happening in our country. And it gives us,

well, it gave strength to many people. And it also gives hope, because I realized that, well, the main leverage we have on our politicians is the economical leverage. And so when the bosses of big companies and investors and everything start to say, well, Guy, your reform of pensions in France is starting to make a mess in Germany, in Spain, in Greece, please stop your madness. Well, this is a leverage I was not expecting. We are trying to use the leverage of the big wealth and the big companies in France, which is already something quite hard to move. And that was really an unexpected support. And we really hope that it's going to have an impact, because Macron is very, he's a narcissistic guy, and he loves his own image. So if his image is starting to suffer

internationally, I think this is going to be a big problem for him. And his image at the time is really a catastrophe. Belgium, of course, is not the only place where blockades are happening. They've become a staple of the uprising in France as well. I'm very interested in talking about the blockages of the highways around Lyon. Because many cities are trying to do this. There is Rennes, which is in Bretagne, which manages to block the highways very often. And so they started in Lyon. We tried once a few weeks ago. It was a call by the unions with a few points to block in the morning. And people then militants from all over joined the points at like 6am or 7am, I don't remember. But when people arrived, there were cops everywhere, and they were pushed away.

And circulation and capitalism could work normally, and everything was fine. So we were very frustrated. So we reorganized completely. And through the struggle committee, we assembled people from general assemblies all over the city, and also various groups. And we managed to organize a blockade last Thursday. And it worked pretty well. It was not exceptional. But for first try, people were very happy about it. And it led to many people from all over in the movement working together on a project, and meeting together in assembly, and then being together on blockages. And I think it's moments like this, which are very important for the movement to develop. I'm not sure if the blockage in itself is the most interesting action in terms of economic damage,

especially if we don't stay very long. But the different social relations it can create. And I think it can have a lot of influence in the movement, especially when we're thinking about the unions and the leaders of the unions who don't want to mobilize too much, who don't want to go too far. What can we do outside of that? Well, I think that's part of the answer, at least. I agree. Yeah, I think that's something that was interesting to me, because I think the roadblocks and barricades like that as a sort of social site is like a really... It's a thing you see a lot in

the past like 20, 25 years of protest movements. This was a big deal in like in Hawking 2006. There's a lot of similar stuff in Chiron during the uprising there. It's interesting to see it sort of like re-entering the repertoire of stuff. Yeah, the kind of... The different species of social interactions that are made possible by these kind of zones of autonomy that are created. Yeah, and they ask a lot of new questions for militants. How to hold a barricade against cops and against cars. It's a lot of different questions, which I think they can radicalize people, at least to demand more things. So it's not clear what they want to demand for now.

Yeah, I just wanted to say that I'm really, really happy to see people from different ports of society really coming together and accepting to work together. Like so many things impossible now. As a student, I've met basically students from all universities in my town. I now have free access to all publications in French and I'll never pay for anything. It's really, really great. In terms of blockage, there is just south of Lyon. There is an oil refinery, which is not on strike. It's among the only ones. So it's really important because in France, there's a special system because they wanted to stay independent from oil producers. So they import the oil and then they refine it in France.

So basically, if we stop all the refineries, there is no more gas for cars. And right now, it's becoming a real problem because of the strikes. And this one stays open. And so people have started to try and block the entry. So right now, there's like something like 50 union workers and like 50 radical militants who come there every morning. Well, not this week, but last week they were doing it. Because this week, we haven't said, but everyone is on holiday kind of somewhat. The students are on holiday. So many people take their paid leave right now as well. It's kind of a special time. But next week, probably the blockages are going to start to gain. And it's great to see union workers meeting with more radical people to try and get

an action together. And I think when there is solidarity like this, great things can happen. If I may add something about blockages and everything, what works pretty well and it's it's quite satisfying. There are big days of mobilization. And what has happened several times now is that on the very same day at the very same time, there are several appointments a little everywhere in the in the town. And to block something to block a highway to block a factory to block a school or whatever. And this allows it allows us to to dispatch and to stretch the forces of the police. And so they are never enough everywhere to stop us. And that makes that can make that can make the day a real success. Because you have a lot of things happening at the

very same time. But there is only so many cops. So yeah, it works pretty well. This is, interestingly, the same analysis the US police came to in 2020. It's easy to stop one large action, but several smaller actions split police forces and prevent them from just cuddling one large block of protesters. I guess I think I was interested in is that I think one of the things that happens in the US a lot is you'll get a national day of action. But all of the actions, like they'll just be one giant action in a city. And you don't get the kind of like diffusion that's been helpful with spreading out cop numbers. And I was wondering, like, is this something like the unions are specifically planning to have multiple events all over the

place? Or is that something that's been happening? Oh, like outside that or? No, no, no, the unions only plan once I plan for a strike and for protests. There are also actions, but only one action and and the others are organized by I mean, the regular people or no, but like you mean the actions on the day they're not organized by the the National Union. It's local unions which do the actions, right? That's what you're talking about. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so there are local unions because in France, unions are like very federal somewhat. It's this we can talk about. It's a bit of a problem. But like, you know, the CGT, it started out as an anarchist unions. So they were like very into federalism and all of

this. So there is local autonomy. And what happens is workers in very mobilized sectors, like the railways, the energy workers, they will organize through their union actions on that day. For example, and on top of this, for example, you have students in a certain high school or a certain university who decide to block something. And for example, they need support. Recently, there was a notably right wing campus who was blocked by students. And so a lot of us came to help them because we've had never seen this campus blocked ever. And of course, what happened was some fascists attacked them. But we were much, much more numerous than them. So it was no problem. But the next time they had a block cage planned at this campus, they ended up not having enough

numbers so they cancelled. But the fascists didn't know that it was cancelled. And so they all came really armed with metal bars and all of that, you know. Still, despite the threat of fascist street gangs and their better armed and more legitimate counterparts in the police, the protests continue. They continue to block roads. They continue to occupy universities. They continue to strike. They continue to fight the police. They continue to find new forms of resistance, new forms of solidarity, new worlds composed of people who in ordinary times would never have met. And in the process, they continue to find new ways of being free. Beneath the cobblestones, the beach, said another generation of French protesters in May of 1968,

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. This is a... We are once again talking about Wizards of the Coast. Now, this time it's not about Dungeons and Dragons, it is about their other property, Magic the Gathering. Which, if you don't know, is Wizards of the Coast's trading card game. That's at the forefront of some truly wild stuff right now. Now, you could ask, Mia, why are we even talking about Magic the Gathering on this show? And there's multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial profit rates have been decreasing in the last half a century, capital is increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to make

money. Magic is now a billion-dollar brand, partnering with everything from Fortnite to The Walking Dead to, and this is not a joke, being in the process of releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings cards. As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry, and Magic in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the frontlines of class struggle. Workers at TCG Player this year, given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands of cards at TCG Player processes, finally won their second attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns. And this is where things get very, very weird. And bear with me here, dear listeners, we have to talk about a little bit of Magic by NUSHA to understand what has happened

in this incident, and then we will get back to what the show is usually about, which is corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So a few days ago, Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small Magic YouTube channel called OldSchoolMDG, bought what he thought were cards from the latest Magic The Gathering set called March of the Machine. Now, Magic releases new cards periodically in what are called sets. These sets have plots and characters, they have written stories, they are enormous lore events, they have enormous hype behind them, and March of the Machine story-wise is basically the version of an Avengers movie, giant apocalyptic threats, all the heroes crossing over, people hopping through multiverses, etc, etc, etc. Now, okay,

this has happened before, Wizards does big sets. It wasn't that weird, but Wizards decided to do something very, very weird, which is they printed for the first time ever a mini set called March of the Machine Aftermath. Now, the regular March of the Machine set has 387 cards in it. Aftermath has 50. Now, I don't know why they decided to do this, if they've never done anything like this, if they've never printed just a tiny set that they released a bit after the regular set before. And, you know, the names are very, very confusing, right? One is called March of the Machine, the other one is March of the Machine Aftermath. How is a regular person supposed to keep track of this? The mind boggles, etc, etc. Either way, so Dan Cannon tries to buy cards

from the regular March of the Machine set. What he gets in the set instead are, by accident, March of the Machine Aftermath cards. Now, these cards are still secret. They have not been revealed yet. No one knows what they are. No one's supposed to know what they are. Before every set, there's an incredibly elaborate process where Wizards gives cards to influencers to, you know, reveal them to the public. And on a certain date, everyone reveals, you know, your influencer reveals what their card is, and there's this whole hype cycle on Reddit, and everyone argues about how good the cards are, and how good the art is, and what it means for the story. It's sort of similar to the sort of hype cycles that would happen around trailers

from Marvel movies, where people would be analyzing every detail of it, etc. And these are, these spoiler seasons, as they're called, are a huge deal for Wizards. Wizards tries to heavily control the entire process, but sometimes cards leak out. Now, Dan Cannon suddenly has been handed a bunch of cards no one has ever seen before. So he does what, you know, every person who just suddenly has magic cards that haven't been revealed yet, do, and have been doing for years and years and years, he makes a video showing off the cards. Now, importantly, this is not illegal. I need to stress this because of what's going to have, what is going to happen next, you know, it's very, very easy to look at the, at the sort of severity of what's going to happen to this guy

and assume that he broke a law. But no, he did not. He did not break a law. Nothing he has done is illegal. Literally, what he's done is he bought some magic cards from someone who screwed up and accidentally broke the street date for selling cards because he confused March of the Machine with March of the Machine aftermath. Wow, how can anyone make that mistake, right? The genius of Wizards of the Coast marketing is unmatched. Everything they do is incredibly clear, etc, etc. Now, in the process, because of how many cards he bought and how small the set is, he reveals most of the cards that are in the set. And then the Pinkerton's show up to his house, force the way through his door, make his wife cry, threaten to arrest him and threaten to put

him in prison for 10 years with $200,000 fines for copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material. The Pinkerton's also harass his elderly neighbors. Literally, just today, as I'm recording this, a story broke on Gizmodo that revealed that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkerton's before to go after stolen goods. Now, some of you may be asking, who are the Pinkerton's? I mean, I think some of you probably know. In very broad outlines who the Pinkerton's are. But in order to really get at the core of what this organization is, and why they look the way they do today as compared to how they've looked in the past, we need to ask another question, which is, how has the balance of military power between the

state and corporations changed over time? And this seems like a very weird question. But the Pinkerton's emerge in a very weird period of time in this balance. They are what fills in the gap between corporations directly having armies that could conquer nations and modern corporations who, instead of having their own personal armies, have vast intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and the government as the people who do violence for them. So let's go back and tell the story from the beginning by taking a brief look at the most infamous corporate army of them all, the army of the East India Trading Company. The East India Trading Company was formed in 1600, and it was given a vast state monopoly over trade in what they call East India, which is an area

we would broadly call Southeast Asia in the South Pacific today. And at the start, these guys are optimistically, they are half trading group, half pirate, the level of piracy is really high, especially in the early days. They trade for spices, they steal a lot of other people's spices from places like Java, and they bring them back to England, they make a lot of money. Now, over the course of their actions, and again, it's worth noting, these people are kind of the descendants of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake, who'd been, you know, they're just pirates who had been hired by the government to only go after like Spanish ships instead of English ships. So they are, you know, from the beginning, the East India Company has

this sort of DNA of army in it. And over the course of about two centuries, they are going to conquer with their own army, most of what is now India and Pakistan, and that territory is either going to indirectly or directly come under the rule of the East India Company. And the East India Company is fighting wars everywhere. Again, they seize India and Pakistan by force, they are fighting wars in Afghanistan. They kill unfathomable numbers of people. The worst of these events is the Great Bengal famine. There's a there's a behind the bastards episode about this that you can listen to if you want a really sort of long thing about the East India Company and the famine. But I want to talk about the famine a little bit because so the Great Bengal famine of 1770 kills 10 million

people. And I knew this intellectually, right? I studied a bit in college. But what I had never actually looked up somehow, what I'd never seen was the percentage of the population that this famine kills. And this famine is directly the fall of the East India Company. This is something that all historians who have looked at this agree is that this is this is directly the fall of the East India Company and the combination of their agricultural policies and their tax extraction. But to sort of put into perspective how bad this gets, the highest serious estimates for the number of people who die in the Great Leap Forward stands at about 30 million dead. This is an unfathomable atrocity. It is a scale of death at which the human mind breaks down and loses

the ability to process some of my family lived through it. It is horrific in ways that are difficult to even begin to describe. The Great Leap Forward killed about 5% of China's population. The Great Bengal famine killed 30% of the population of India that the East India Trading Company controlled. 30%. That's not just sort of small population statistics either, right? It's not like they killed 30% of a country with 30 people in it, right? They killed 10 million people. This is an, you know, this is an unbelievable force of human evil. They are, they are capable of killing people in numbers that defy comprehension. They're able to do this because they have an army that is the size of a great power in nation state. The East India

Trading Company's army in 1800 had 200,000 soldiers. That is a massive army today. That is like the size of the active Ukrainian army in 2022. It is more than twice the size of the British army in 1800. And, you know, in 1800, it's not like the British aren't fighting wars, right? They are, in 1800, the British are fighting the war of the Second Coalition. So they are, they are, they are fighting Napoleon, right? So this, this isn't a sort of, you know, completely half-assed like peacetime British army. This is a, you know, this is a serious military force. And even, even once they like fully build up their army at the peak of the Napoleonic Wars, 13 years later, the entire size of the British army is about 250,000 troops.

And that's not much larger than the East India Company's army at the same time. And at the height of the East India Trading Company, their army swells to, again, 250,000, which is, again, the size of the regular British army at, in the most desperate war that the British had fought to that point. The East India Trading Company is a full-on military great power, right? But, and this is, this is, this is something that is going to shape an enormous amount of, of the sort of arc of the relationship between corporate and military power. It is unbelievably expensive to maintain an army like this. The, the, the East, the British East India Company, even though they're, they, you know, they are looting entire nations,

right? They have, they have, they're, there are entire states where they're fully taking over the tax services. They're just walking into temples and taking stuff. Even, but even with all of that profit, right? They, you know, they have the ability to mint their own coins in a lot of these areas, but they still lose money. And they still lose money, again, because they're maintaining this on 250,000 strong army. And, you know, so you have this problem, right? Which is that you have this item on your balance sheet that is unfathomably expensive. And then you have a second problem, which is that if you have an army, there's always a danger that the army goes into revolt. And that's what happens in 1857. The British managed to piss off their own army, which is

almost all composed of Indian troops, and they fight an incredibly bloody war. You know, to see this is a deploy mutiny, a deploy uprising. And the British win, and they, after victory, they strap a bunch of prisoners' bodies to cannons and shoot them so they can't be properly buried. But the consequence of this sort of horrifying war, and particularly the sort of fear it invokes in the minds of, you know, the British populace of like, oh my God, these non-white people can actually fight us, is that they directly seize control of India from the East India Trading Company. And for all you nationalization fans out there, the British assuming direct control of India was actually a nationalization. It's not actually inherently socialist guys. You have

to be a bit smarter than this. But that aside, right, this marks an enormous shift in the sort of political economy of violence. What is happening here is that states are assuming direct military control over their colonies instead of operating through corporations. And this means that what you see is a shift from direct corporate armies to corporations using the state to do violence for them. And this doesn't mean that corporations don't use force directly today, and it also doesn't mean that the governments, you know, weren't acting as the armies of corporations in like the 1800s. But what's happening here, and specifically the direct seizure of India from the East India, the direct seizure of India from the East India Company

marks a dramatic shift in the balance of forces away from corporations with armies doing violence towards states doing violence on their behalf. And this is one of the things alongside sort of slave catchers in the US, at least the formation, the police. You see this both both both both in Britain and in sort of France, right, you start to get police agencies that are, you know, largely tasked with putting down their own working class. And this is one of the one of the sort of inexorable marches that happens over the course of the 20th century. And it's also happening in the 19th century, too. There is a sort of mass centralization of state and police power, and particularly that's an expansion of the bureaucracy, right? The American state in 1840 is barely a functional

state by today's standards, right? Like they they have an incredibly difficult time even figuring out how many people there are in the country, their provisioning of services is a joke. Nobody has ID cards, like people people don't even have birth certificates for the most part. And that's something, you know, and that's something that changes, right over the course of sort of the 18th and 1900s is that you get a massive bureaucracy, the bureaucracy is built on the model of the police, and they get bigger and more powerful. And by the time you're, you know, you're halfway through the 20th century, you get a you get a modern standing army. And that's something that is very, very weird. The founders who, you know, suck ass in enormous numbers of

ways are also fundamentally and deeply opposed to standing armies, because, you know, they are students of Roman history. And they know that standing armies have this, you know, this sort of way of of seizing power. But we've landed in a situation where, you know, they don't really need to, right? The US army is kept in check by the fact that it has basically a limited budget that increases every year. So you can't even like talk about cutting it without getting accused of treason. But it didn't used to be like that in the 1800s, right? After a war would end, you know, entire parts of the like, you know, all the US cavalry, for example, sometimes would just get disbanded, right? There'd be these massive reductions in troop size in between wars. And you know,

that doesn't happen anymore, right? But the product of this was that, you know, there weren't that many like armed agents of the state running around with guns. And that's the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern American life. I mean, modern American life has reached a point where people, you can't even imagine what it would be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere. And if you didn't have the ability to call the police about anything. And that was just the sort of the state of affairs for a lot of the 1800s in the US is that just, you know, they're really weren't police. And, you know, there's kind of midpoints in the level of sort of bureaucratic development and the level of sort of the bureaucracy of violence that is

the police happens after a bit after the Civil War, where there are not enough police to develop the kind of sort of to deploy against the kind of violence that companies need to stop unions from forming. And you know, the secondary problem, right? Which is, okay, so, you know, there are armed troops in a state, but the armed troops are the militia. And, you know, a lot of the times the militia can be relied upon to shoot striking workers and break them. But there's always a chance that you order the militia in. And the militia are people from the towns where I, you know, where the striking workers are from. And this was a real problem with sheriffs, too, right? Is that in this period, you get you get a lot of sheriffs who just won't prosecute workers

because the entire town and the sheriff are all pro union. And this is where we come to the Pinkerton's. But first, and this is something that the Pinkerton's would have approved of some ads. And we're back. So who are the Pinkerton's? The Pinkerton's are founded by a guy named Alan Pinkerton. Alan Pinkerton's an interesting guy. He's, he's kind of a radical when he's young. He's like, he's a hardcore abolitionist who like funds John Brown, right? There's a whole debate about the extent to which she was involved in a sort of British workers reform movement called the British workers reform movement called the chart lists. Every source I've read disagrees about how much he was involved in it. It's, I mean, was disagreements are basically pinned in the radiology.

I don't know if we're ever going to get a good answer about how involved in it. He is. But Pinkerton briefly and kind of by accident becomes a bounty hunter, but he just like walks across, just runs into a camp of people who seem to clearly be counterfeiters. And he eventually becomes a detective around Michigan and then in Chicago. And then he becomes a postal cop. And in the process of being a postal cop, he figures out something that is more lucrative. He figured out a more lucrative way to do detective work than just working for the state, which is working for the railways. So by 1850, he has a full detective agency going that he renames the Pinkertons. Now, you know, this is this is the 1850s, right? You are rapidly

approaching the Civil War. During the Civil War, he is hired by George McClellan, the just the worst union general. He runs a spy network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks like all the spies get caught. His intelligence being awful is one of the things that leaves McClellan to suspect, you know, that there's like secretly way more Confederate troops that there actually are. So he just never does anything for the entire war. He's like the worst union general until he gets replaced. Yeah, when McClellan is axed, Pinkerton is also out. But you know, the agency is still around. And the detectives are initially known as cider as cinder dicks for complicated railroading reasons. I yeah, I don't know about that one. But it's very funny. And what they sort

of do right is in this early phase, they have this massive network of sort of informants and spies that they sell to the highest bidder. They're not sort of we know that they are detectives, right, in some sense, but they're not detectives in the Sherlock sense, where you have a guy who sees a bunch of evidence and then uses logic and uses investigation to deduce like who did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives. They do infiltrations. This is basically their one trick, right? Is they send a guy undercover, and then he gets people to talk to him and then they catch the guy because someone talked, right? Now, the other thing that the Pinkerton's are really, really good at is spinning mythology around them. Pinkerton claims that he saved Lincoln from an

assassination plot. And, you know, he successfully convinces Lincoln to flee a building in a disguise, right? The problem is that, you know, as early as like the next day, after this, like supposed plot happens, assassinating assassination plot happens, people were already claiming that there wasn't one. And, you know, I think the evidence for there not being one is bolstered by the fact that no one was ever like, not only was no one ever tried for this, no one was ever even arrested for again, a plot to assassinate the president of the United States. So I am inclined to suspect that this was fake. The historians disagree about this, but he's able to milk this for incredible PR, right? He's, you know, he's like, I'm the guy who saved the president, and he does this whole

sort of like, ah, if I had been there when, ah, if I had only been there when Abe Lincoln was being gunned down by John Wilkes Booth, ah, I would have saved him. And, you know, this makes him very famous. They also start doing, you know, it's sort of weird noting, right? The kind of crime that they're doing, these guys are, they're, they're basically a corporate anti-crime group, right? They, they solve crimes, but the crimes that they solve are people stealing from corporations. So for example, they do a lot of solving bank robberies, they do a lot of security to stop train robbers, they do counterfeiting. These are all kinds of crimes that affect rich people. And the, you know, and so, and so the Pinkerton's are slowly starting to gain this reputation to

sort of like the hired hands of capital. Now, they're also sort of doing like frontier outlaw stuff. There's a gang of people who, this is a gang that sort of bandits who they very successfully break up, ah, but they also go after Jesse James. And, okay, we need to tell the story of Jesse James briefly here because it's, it's an important thing to get an understanding of what the sort of conflict that's going on in the West is at this point. And the thing that's incredibly important to understand about the story of Jesse James versus the Pinkerton's is that there are no heroes here. Every single person involved in all sides is just an absolutely terrible person. So Jesse James is an ex-Confederate terrorist who somehow managed to make robbing

trains uncool by doing it dressed in a KKK, ah, rope with the aim of like restoring the honor of the Confederacy. So this sucks. And this is where part of the sort of like rebel flag, like that part of the sort of like lost cosmic, those comes from, right? There are, you know, there are these sort of frontier outlaws who are like ex-Confederates whose thing is like, yeah, we're like against the man, and like the man is like, you know, the North, right? But these people suck, right? These are people who fought and died for slavery. Jesse James in particular, like he's, again, he's, he's in this group of like guerrillas who are fighting in Kansas and Missouri, and they do, they do things that are genuinely unspeakable. So these people suck,

right? But the problem is the people going after them are the Pinkertons, and we're gonna learn a lot about the Pinkertons by what they managed to accomplish by going after, again, ex-Confederate terrorists who are like some of the worst people who've ever lived. So the Pinkertons take this case in 1871. He sends in a bunch of agents trying to infiltrate the gang, and Jesse James just like smokes them all. So in a very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons do a raid on Jesse James's house. So they throw in this weird pseudo, it's a very weird kind of explosive device thing that they, I don't know, they claim that they were just trying to scare like the family out of the house so they could arrest them. But the family sees this thing that looks like a bomb and they

throw it into their fireplace and it blows up. And instead of smoking the family out, they have now blown up Jesse James's nine-year-old stepbrother and maimed his mom. So the Pinkertons absolutely suck, right? Like so far in there, they catch Jesse James, they have managed to blow up a child and maim a woman. Now, you can ask the question, right? Okay, so they have killed a child, they have maimed a woman. Do they get Jesse James? No, no they don't, they never get him. Because that's what happens when, you know, you have an ex-Confederate in places with a bunch of ex-Confederate, with a bunch of people who support the Confederacy, right? They won't turn over their own people. And, you know, and when the people they're growing up against are the Pinkertons who

are like the hired guns of Northern Capital, a bunch of people, you know, what happens is a bunch of random people end up dead. And yeah, both sides of this are incredibly deeply evil. Jesse James is later shot by one of his own men. And yeah, that is the famous story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons, which I think is useful in establishing that like, God, like the South are obviously the bad guys in the Civil War, but a lot of the people in the Union are sort of genuinely awful hired gun for Capital people. And, you know, that's not that's not so much of a big deal, dream the war, but after the war, you know, you get these battles just like, Oh God, everyone here is like everyone here should simply die. Now, Ellen Pinkerton dies in 1886, and he's

replaced by his even worse sons. And at this point, the Pinkerton's cease even sort of the pretense of being a detective agency, and they devote themselves full time to being strike breakers. Now they have spies everywhere, they have, you know, over 1000 of them at their peak, spread across the dozens and dozens and dozens of unions. They are spying on meetings or pointing with the Pinkertons. And this allows corporations, for example, if you know who's in a union meeting, right, you can just fire all of them. And this is especially easy in the end, you know, in this sort of pre 1930s period, we're like, there is no protected right to strike, right? Like if you if you if you stop working, that is illegal. The other thing they do is provide quote

unquote security for corporations during strikes. What this looks like in practice is shooting people. And you know, sometimes those people are striking workers like the three strikers they killed in the Pennsylvania Cold Strike of 1890. Sometimes they just shoot random bystanders like the random guy they shot in 18, in 1866 while providing security. And you know, again, when you're shooting a random bystander, you have to ask like, security for who, who like who who is the security you're providing for when you're just shooting random people? You know, it nominally is for the bosses when a dog strike. And sometimes like in in 1877, they shoot children where they they shot and killed a 15 year old, you know, Jersey Coal

Wharf strike. You know, and they do stuff like this all the time, right? There's a famous incident in Chicago where a bunch of people are yelling at them because again, the thinker has have a really bad reputation among workers at this point. And you know, there's a point where they're they're going by in a train and people yell the train and the pink attention spot by taking out the rivals and shooting for people out the window. So, you know, these are these are good people, TM, right? The other thing they do is they start getting into breaking strikes by being being a company you can hire to import scabs. And this culminates in the homestead strike again, there's another thing there's like a giant bastards episode on but we'll do we'll do

we'll do a short version of the homestead strike. So the homestead strike is this giant confrontation between steel workers and the forces of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick. Carnegie and Frick like lock the union out of the factory. And they call a Pinkerton army to seize control of the town of Homestead. This is from the book inventing the Pinkerton's quote, by the end of June, he had built around the mills a protective 12 foot fence that included rifle holes, water man's capable of blasting strikers with boiling water and wires attached to a generator which could be electrified. In response, workers dubbed the mills Fort Frick. Now, striking steel workers and other residents of Homestead here, the Pinkerton's are coming and

they, they, you know, they that the Pinkerton's are trying to land on these like invasion barges that they've modified. And so the Homestead people go try to stop the barges and the Pinkerton's start shooting at them. And this is this is another thing that's very interesting about this whole story is that, okay, every account at the time agrees that the first person, the people who started shooting first with Pinkerton's later accounts suddenly like mysteriously later on, you suddenly start to claim it like, well, nobody really knows you started the shooting in the, in these fights or like maybe it was a worker. But like, again, everyone at the time, because it was the Pinkerton's. So I, I, I, and given given what we know about the track record

of Pinkerton's of shooting children, of shooting random people yelling at them outside of a train of shooting just literally random people on the street. I, we can be pretty sure the Pinkerton started this and but you know, the workers in Homestead are heavily armed. And this starts a massive gun battle. I'm going to read from from inventing the Pinkerton's again. This serious battle would last the next 14 hours. After an initial surge, the Pinkerton's were pinned down in their barges. After several hours, the crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire. Residents borrowed the cannon that had been that the city used for commemorations. By the way, that that's a civil war cannon that they're using in 1890 to try to sink his boats.

The crowd also sent burning rail cars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil into the river which they attempted to light on fire in hopes of burning the Pinkerton's out of their barges. The lubricating oil thrown onto the water proved impossible to set aflame. So the Pinkerton's like try to surrender, but by this point people hate them so much that every, they do this four times and each time someone will hold up a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag and refuse to let them surrender. On try five, the Pinkerton's are finally allowed to surrender and the Pinkerton's are crushed, but unfortunately the state militia is brought in to sort of break the strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania is essentially destroyed. But PR white, this is terrible from

the Pinkerton's and they start trying to do like a giant PR op to sort of recover their reputation and a lot of what the sort of popular image of the Pinkerton's right comes from the PR off the agency does like after the home district that gets reproduced by like TV producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit to some other stuff that they were involved in. In late 1905, someone blew up the notoriously anti-union governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking workers a few years ago. Now Idaho hires a Pinkerton detective to just torture a guy into confessing to the murder and then also claiming that like basically every instance of violence in the last five years in that part of the US was committed by the IWW who are the IWW are a very,

very radical union whose thing basically was that society should be run by like confederations of direct democratic unions, like run, you know, all of society, all production should be run by workers in these, you know, in the form of like one giant direct democratic union. And people hate this. My people, I mean, like bosses absolutely hate this. The IWW very, IWW very popularly with workers, bosses are going to spend the next rest of their just murdering them, you know, but having having tortured this guy into saying into fingering the industrial workers of the world in this conspiracy, they get big Bill Haywood, who is one of the most famous and like successful organizers of the IWW and several other IWW leaders kidnapped and

taken to Idaho to stand trial for murder, which again, they're nothing to do with. Haywood is defended by Clarence Darrow of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial and Haywood gets off, but the case does serious damage to the IWW. If you want to learn more about this whole story, go listen to cool people who did cool stuff. There's two episodes about the IWW in this period called the IWW and the hobos who saved free speech. It's good stuff. You know, I should also briefly mention, right, another thing that the Pinkerton's do is, okay, so if someone's wanted in one state, right, instead of having to like make, you know, the government having to like the state government have to making requests, having to make requests

to another state in order to get them to extradite someone, they would just have the Pinkerton's kidnapped them. This is one of the sort of big services they provide. They also seem, it's very unclear, I don't know, the historical record is a bit muddled. They seem also to have been people you could hire. If so, if like your spouse was trying to divorce you, which sucks, it is deeply evil. They do sort of lots more deeply evil stuff, which we will get into after these ads. All right, we're back. So speaking of deeply evil stuff, they also send 100 detectives to break a strike of the mostly black brotherhood of temperate workers, which is an IWW affiliate in Louisiana. Now, they break this, they try to break this union by walking into a union meeting,

shooting 44 people and killing four of them. There are like 40 more stories of a guy with a Pinkerton walks in and shoots amongst people that I could put here. I had to find the limit at some point to how many stories about Pinkerton's murdering people that I could I could sort of put. But, you know, there's an interesting shift that starts to happen in the in the in sort of as the 1900s, you know, the 1900s turn into 1910s. The Pinkerton start to figure out that it's more effective to form mobs of vigilantes than it is to fight unions directly. And there's a few benefits here, right? There's less danger to Pinkerton detectives themselves, it's easier to deploy large numbers of people, instead of having to sort of like, pay an enormous amount of money

for a bunch like 800 detectives and weapons and logistics, you can just sort of whip up a mob and get them to do the shooting, right? The Pinkerton is also get plausible deniability, which is very helpful for their reputation. And, you know, the Pinkerton's are very much ahead of the curve here. The government, you know, who is going to displace the Pinkerton to serve the main force opposing the IWW and later sort of like CIO, Union Organizations, later sort of like CIO, Union Organizing, that, you know, turn into the two red scares, they're going to start taking pages from the Pinkerton's book and eventually they're going to, you know, instead of like, sending the US Army to invade Nicaragua, which is what they would have

done in the 1800s by, you know, by the time he gets into the 1980s, right? They are sending people to train Nicaraguan desquads. And so we can track the shift here, right? As it's as the 19th century comes to a close, and we get to sort of the October Revolution to the height of the red scare, we're in a place where there's starting to be enough cops and enough federal agents to do the job the Pinkerton's had done in previous generations. And, you know, there's a sort of robust arguments in the sort of histiography about to what extent J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were influenced by the Pinkerton's. I think there's decent evidence that they were influenced by them, but the FBI kind of turns into what the Pinkerton's are. You know, they're the people who suddenly are

like showing up and shooting people, showing up and arresting union organizers, deporting union organizers from the country. But this puts the Pinkerton's in kind of a weird spot, right? The Pinkerton name has become synonymous with sort of this kind of like, you know, they're called sort of like feudal retainers, right? These sort of lawless private armies that are, you know, not supposed to exist in a democracy. And so, you know, in the 1930s, when the Wagner Act like makes strikes legal, right? I talked about the Wagner acts a long time ago in an episode called The Union Makes It Strong. But after this, they tried, Robert Pinkerton, the second, who's the new sort of owner of the Pinkerton's, tries to do a rebrand. He has this great quote

that's, quote, he's talking about union busting. That is a phase of our business that we are not particularly delighted or proud of and we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal about it at the time. Now, okay, you can say a lot about what was or wasn't illegal in a period when, you know, you could order a drink that was cocaine mixed with wine. And, you know, you could just get like opium prescribed to your baby. But torturing and murdering people was still illegal back then. Now, I guess if you, you know, if you really wanted to have fun, you can get into an argument that like nowhere in the Constitution does murder specifically banned, but like, you know, have fun with that. But FDR and then in the New Dealers go after

the Pinkerton's very hard. And this is a lot of interesting effects. What it means is on the one hand, you can't have some guy with a detective badge who works for a corporation walked into a union meeting and started the killing. But it also means that when you need someone to smash a union by force, it's going to be the state doing it. And the apostiosis of this, the sort of one of the internal contradictions that destroys the New Deal, is that its reliance on the state to contain the worst excess of capitalism means that, you know, they have in turn, directly and enormously empowered the state and the state's military capacity. And this means that in the 1980s, unions are going to be destroyed by the state that the New Deal had built.

The Pinkerton's are replaced by Hoover and the G-men and the G-men are eventually sort of become known as the dreaded modern fad who, you know, lurks at every doorstep eating babies and is the terror of every sort of political movement in the US. Now, the Pinkerton's for their part, right? With union busting now technically illegal, and when I say union busting, like, I mean, walking and shooting people to stop them from forming a union, they start working basically as regular security guards. And then they move on to selling surveillance equipment and training for government organizations. And this reflects a kind of larger shift in what what kinds of military operation the corporations run, which is that instead of

directly running armies or hiring groups like the Pinkerton's to do violence for them, now what they're in the business of is intelligence operations. And this changes the way that corporations kill people enormously. You know, when Coca Cola now needs to kill union organizers, right, they have paramilitaries for this. Now, some of these guys are contractors, some of them are paid under the table, some of them are rated for ideology, some of it for money, but it's not, you know, it's not quite like Coca Cola has its own military force like it would have been in the 1800s in the early 1800s. It's also not there is just like a private, but there's not like it's not they're not they're not also not like hiring a specific

private military contractor, right? The way they do, the way they do it tends to be they, you know, sort of semi clandestinely armed paramilitary. Now, there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies will have private armies in places where civil wars are going on. But that's usually the thing that happens when they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity. When they're in a place that does have state capacity, like for example, Nigeria, you get a very, very different story. So Nigeria is a major oil producer. And this has a number of consequences on the places where that oil is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency. So, okay, why is there an insurgency

there, right? Part of the reason is that there is an indescribable amount of wealth coming out of the oil and Niger Delta. And that money goes mostly to, I mean, my say mostly 90% of it, right, goes to Nigerian elites and corrupt foreign oil foreign oil companies. And, you know, another part of the reason this turns into an insurgency is that people try nonviolent civil disobedience in the Niger Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental consequences of companies like Shell doing oil extraction, you know, and they have these marches that will draw out 300,000 people in places where this is half of the population, half the total population of the ethnic group being affected. The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing

one of the movement's leaders, the famous activist Kensar Awiwa, by hanging him and then dissolving his body in lime so he couldn't be buried, which is a real British empire shit. And, okay, so at this point, you've come to the sort of crossroad of a nonviolent movement, right, where the government's answers to nonviolences will publicly hang you. And you get to this question, do you take up arms? And the answer is, yeah, a lot of people do, right? This is a very complicated insurgency in a lot of ways that, you know, we can't do justice here too. But I want to read something from this interview from a guy from the movement for the emancipation of the Niger Delta men, which is one of the like many, many, many, many, many,

like Milton groups that appear in the Delta over the last 25 years. Quote, this is our territory. The soldiers dare not come here now. They came and we defeat them, he says, we are civilized people, educated people, and we do not want our children to be deprived as we have been deprived. So other people can get rich from what is under our feet. The oil companies have had many years to treat us right. They have never done that. Now, we are making them think. Now, if this is, you know, 1820, right, and shallow is dealing with people taking up arms and cutting off their ability to sort of like extract profits of oil, they would form an army of semi literate Belgian and British barbarians,

armed them with cannons and conquer the region and place the entire area under direct corporate rule. You know, if this was, say, like the 1890s, right, they would hire the Pinkertons and the Pinkertons would go shoot these people for them. But this is the 1990s and the 2000s. So instead, what Shell does is literally pay the salaries of Nigerian cops who go slaughter protesters in the streets. And eventually they moved to spending hundreds of millions of dollars just just between 2007-2009 alone, directly funding, equipping an army, the Nigerian army, and a special like war crimes task force called the Joint Task Force, the JFT, which is this, like, it's this sort of incredible thing where the army, the navy and the police do a fusion dance to massacre civilians.

And you know, I say there's hundreds of millions of dollars, right? That's an underestimate. That's just three years. That's just what we know about the actual total that they sunk into sort of, like, literally funding the Nigerian army is enormous. Now, what's interesting here is that Shell does have its own security guards, but the ratio of what they spend on the Nigerian army versus what they spend on their own security guards is two to one. And this goes to demonstrate the point that I've sort of been making this episode, right, which is that there's been a shift in, you know, if you are a company like Shell, right, who has a need, you know, who are horrifically exploiting a bunch of people to the point where you need to shoot them in order to keep them in line,

instead of going to, like, a private detective agency or having your own army, they are increasingly simply funding the state. And, you know, this means that, right, again, instead of the Pinkertons, the actual trigger pullers are cops, they are the police, they are the military, they're weird special forces groups. And, you know, where that sort of leaves space, groups like the Pinkertons now, is the area that's left for them is corporate intelligence. And this seems to be most of what the Pinkertons have been up to recently. Amazon hired them in the last few years to work with their intelligence division, the Global Security Operations Center, which they use to try to stomp out union organizing in their warehouses.

And Amazon isn't just sort of spying on union organizers. They're spying on basically every social movement they can get their hands on. Here's some advice. In 2019, Amazon monitored the Yellowfest movement, known as the Gilles Jean, a grassroots uprising for economic justice that spread across France, and solidarity movements in Vienna and protests against state repression in Iran. They've been deployed against strikes of communication workers in West Virginia. Google and Facebook deploys them against their own employees to rid out leakers. Now, this is all in line with the pivot of sort of corporate repression towards mass surveillance. Interestingly, the Pinkertons have been planting stories in the press about going back to their

roots as mercenaries, pitching themselves as, you know, the force that could stop climate chaos with ex-military forces. The company claims to have been deployed by corporations in Puerto Rico after the hurricane, after Hurricane Maria in 2017. I don't know if that's true. This is possible, but again, it's something that they have to be very careful with the Pinkertons is that they are very, very brand obsessed, even though they're now owned by like a different sort of Swedish security company. And they lie constantly. So it's very difficult to sort of sort of the myth from the fact when mythmaking has been such a vital part of their branding from the beginning. For another example, here's from New York Times magazine.

Among their most popular new services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional, in which agents join a client's company like any other new hire, allowing them to provide intel on employees. By 2018, the agency said it could count among its clients about 80% of Fortune 1000 companies. Are these numbers correct? Who knows? They absolutely could be lying, right? On the other hand, here's here's Gizmodo talking about the current reach of the Pinkertons in matching the gathering. There are other connections between Wizards of the Coast and the Pinkerton Agency. Robert M. Klimmick, who's been the director of security risk management at Hasbro Inc, which the parent company, Wizards of the Coast, for 12 years, was previously the

director of supply chain security practice at Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations. The current manager of global investigations is also a former Pinkerton agent. So what we saw in the fact that Wizards of the Coast said the Pinkertons, after a guy who made a YouTube video showing some cards that he'd bought from someone else, is you can see in that the arc of what the Pinkertons are trying to do, right? You have on the one hand the Pinkertons falling back into their sort of intelligence role. You also have them like specifically trading on their reputation to intimidate people and the other reputation they acquired by killing unfathomable numbers of people between the 1800s, which they used to sort of intimidate people

by just sort of the power of their reputation. You can see something very interesting, which is that the Pinkertons don't arrest Dan Cannon directly, right? They're able to leave with the sort of goods. But what they threaten Dan Cannon with is the regular police. And that is, I think, a very important aspect of what the story actually is, which is it's a story about the modern division of labor of violence against people who corporations don't like. And that division of labor runs through security, you know, you have your major, you have a major corporation, that corporation has its own security division, that security division is connected to the Pinkertons, they use the Pinkertons as an intelligence network, and they have done several times now. And then,

you know, when it comes time to, you know, you can use the Pinkertons as like the people with the zombie boots, but when it comes time to actually do violence against someone when it comes time to arrest someone, that's the state's job. And that, that I think is the thing that's that, you know, that that that's very important to understand about the way all of this stuff works is that the thing that is true now, about the year 2023, that was not true about the year, like 1873, is that the sort of primary driver of corporate violence in, in, you know, in, in, in the US and abroad is not necessarily private security companies. It is the state and it is the police. And yeah, this has been it could happen here.

The police suck a cab. Get rid of them. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. Some people can't stand the rain, but at Vessie, we can't get enough of it. That's why we make 100% waterproof shoes that look and feel anything but imagine your favorite sneaker styles supercharged with waterproof tech. So when everyone else is staying in, you're getting out for a walk with your pup and jumping in puddles like a kid again, because with waterproof shoes, there's nothing stopping you. Head to Vessie.com. That's V E S S I dot com and see for yourself. Vessie come alive in the rain.

Picture Miami picture it's beaches picture three radio journalists assassinated in cold blood. This is silenced the radio murders. You left the body there for a reason. It was the calling card. That's like the mafia used to do. The mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, they clearly gave a green light. I'm Osvalotian. Listen to silenced the radio murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.