Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 9

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

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And today we're talking to some people who were in kind of the best case scenario situation for having a bunch of authoritarians try to dominate your country. By which I mean we're talking to some Chilean activists who won in as much as it's possible to win in the world. It's a pretty exciting situation happening there. I'm excited to introduce people to like what's been going on. But first I want to introduce our guests for today. You all want to say hello? Hello. My name is Jeremiah. I'm from the United States. I've lived in Chile for the last 10 years. I'm Stephanie. I'm a Chilean and I live here with my husband. Hi, I'm Nicolas. I'm Chilean and I have been living here for my whole life. Yeah, so we started a small group called Vecinos Unitos to do some activism to try to get out the vote for the plebiscito to try to, last year, to get the Constitution approved to be voted on.

And it was successful. So we are proud of the small bit of work that we did to help that happen. And so today the Constitution is being written and it's a very exciting time. Yeah, and I want to let's pull back a little bit because the last time we talked about Chilean behind the bastards in 2019 when a protest that started as some, I think it's fair to say zoomers protesting a fair increase by like jumping fares at the underground, the subway, was met with police doing police stuff, which was met with people taking to the streets. And very significant numbers, which is the thing that by now a lot more people are experienced with. But unlike kind of what happened in my country, you did it, you made them blink. And that's what the plebiscite is, right? Like there was an agreement made to give because Chile was still, if I'm not mistaken, governed under the same Constitution that Pinochet had had, right? And Pinochet famously not a great guy. So I wonder if you might give us kind of an overview of y'all's experience during that time from like the start of the protests to, oh shit, we might actually get to change things at a pretty fundamental level in our country. Yeah, so it was incredible time about exactly two years ago. So just the 18th of October was just the two year anniversary. And as you said, it all started with literal high schoolers, 16 year olds, who are protesting a 30 peso increase, which is, you know, like 20 cent increase in the metro.

But we of course have one of the most expensive metros in the world and a very low minimum wage here. And so, as you said, they went out there and started to jump the turnstiles, but in massive groups, hundreds of them going to the metro together and all jumping together. And in response, the government ended up closing the metros. And so it was this Friday night, and we were having dinner and suddenly the metros were all closed and everyone had to just walk home from work or dinner or where they were. And that was kind of the beginning of everything and it was almost like the government brought it on themselves because suddenly there were thousands of people in the streets just because they had no other way to get home. From there, there were protests and the protests were met with extreme police oppression and water cannons and tear gas and all of that. And eventually it led to one March, which had over a million people throughout Chile marching, and a series of marches and protests basically every week for months. And finally, it came down to they announced that there would be this plebiscite and it was a vote yes or no to create a new constitution, because, yes, Chile is still, there were some reforms in the early 2000s to the Constitution. But still, we live under the Constitution written by Jaime Guzman, kind of, you know, chase right hand man. And we happen to live Nico is our good friend and also our next door neighbor, and we live about four blocks from the Plaza. Formerly Plaza Italia. Now the protesters have deemed it Plaza Dignidad. And so we've been just in the middle of it and for for a couple months our whole neighborhood was like a war zone, and just really crazy protests every single day and and tear gas and all of that. And it was it was really intense for a while. And it still is, you know, last Friday, we, you know, we're met with tear gas and water cannons again so it's, it's, it's even though the current the Constitution is being written again and the plebiscite was a year ago but the police are still out there, being bastards.

Yeah, I'm curious what each of you kind of sees as the moment when or if you, because maybe I was going too optimistic right like I guess I'm wondering, do you think that a corner has been turned and and if so what was kind of the moment each of you felt that like oh my god we might actually this isn't just going to be like showing up to get the shit kicked out of us we we're going to get some at least of what we're fighting for. Yeah, I mean, I think that, like that particular moment was when we finally went to the election, don't we call the referendum for the for this new constitution. And we were kind of skeptic about the percentage of people who approve this new constitution. Because a few months ago or a few weeks before this referendum we have like polls we had the polls and they were kind of 5050 so we were kind of skeptic about are we going to have a new constitution or not. And that the same night I mean the process very quick so after I know the distinct close at 6pm and then you have the results like three hours later so on the same day, we're having the results and it was like 80 against 20 so it was like kind of I think we I think that nobody was expecting to have this kind of 80% of the of the people in Chile where I want to talk to the being the you know check constitution. So it was kind of like, I don't know, I will say like the best moment. Yeah, there's this. There's an American, a deceased American sociologist who wrote an essay that I find quite influential called the shock of victory and it's about how activists often fail to take advantage of their momentum, like because they're kind of

surprised at the success early on and then they don't properly take advantage of what they have when they have it and you know progress gets turned back which I think we've seen happen in the United States in the wake of what happened here last summer. Why do you think that that hasn't happened in Chile what do you think it is that that that enabled you all to actually keep the pressure on and take advantage of that that moment in time which which never. I guess that's what I'm impressed with the most is that you y'all did manage to to make that momentum work for you rather than kind of letting it pull you off balance and I guess I'm just trying to get a handle on on how. I guess, for me what I think it's lost a lot in the conversation is the Primera linea. So the first line of defense. And so you have a bunch of young people anarchists you know just crazy young people who went out there to fight with the cops every single day. And it was really impressive and a lot of times we I don't know I feel like they don't get the credit they deserve because you know they're the delinquents and that you know we talk a lot about the big marches when there was a million people on the street and and obviously like Nico said winning the vote by 79% showed that it was something that everyone in Chile wanted, but it never would have happened if it weren't for the, this small group of fighters who are there every single day. Facing tear gas and water cannons and police beating them up with, you know, throwing rocks and stuff like that so I think that's the main thing it wasn't like once a month or even once a week it was every single day, and they were there on the frontline and it none of this would be possible without them. That's fascinating to me because obviously things like that groups like that existed here like a Portland when every night for not as long but for not an insignificant amount of time and it was the same it was a lot of these kind of young anarchist frontliners who were willing to go toe to the

cops every night but you didn't have you didn't have that kind of larger more moderate populace backing them up and I guess one of the things I'm curious about is what was kind of the you mentioned you don't think they get the credit they deserve. Was there a broad attitude that like these people are the ones going face to face with the cops so that those of us you know people who are older people who aren't as good as people who can't physically take as much abuse can still show up or was it. I'm kind of curious how how those people represented what they were doing and how it how it was seen by most of kind of the more moderate people who still supported change around you because that. That dynamic exists in any mass protest movement and I'm it worked where you are and I'm trying to get a handle on maybe how it was different than than what I saw in Portland. So now a lot of them are in jail and or without one eye so is it's really terrible because we have all these new beautiful process but we are without. Really a completely democracy with the liberty with it for this guy or or democracy for all this person that lose eyes or. Yeah everyone that was injured so yeah a lot of protests nowadays actually I think today right now there's a protest going on to free the political prisoners and but. Yeah I mean I think they're even among you know obviously with 80% of the country voted for the new constitution so there's a lot of different points of view there but but yeah there was division even among the left.

A lot of people said you know this is not the form of this is not the way to protest and we should not be violent and you know burning things and. But but there was a lot I mean you saw a lot of the opposite where people were saying just as you said like those out there on the front line are the reason that the older people and others can come out and feel safer to protest because. The primary linea is kind of taking the brunt of the violence from the police and that allows the older people and those who are less confrontational to be out there and protest so for me some of some of the most inspiring signs I remember seeing are like. Folks that are 80 years old and they have signs that say you know gracias a la primera linea you know like thank you to the the front liners who who are taking that violence so that they are able. The others to to protest in a more peaceful way. That's such a fascinating situation to me that you've got you've got these these more radical front liners who were as you say critical in allowing this this really groundbreaking change to occur in your society but the same time things haven't changed enough that number one the cops who beat the shit out of them I'm guessing are still largely employed. And a bunch of them are in jail and do you have much hope that at the very least there will be something to like get these people out or is it is that.

Maybe a bridge I don't know I don't know your country obviously as well you know I'm curious like do you feel like there's much hope in pushing for that because it seems like you know those people need to be free. I mean most of these guys who are in prison they have spent like I don't know like 12 months in prison without any evidence so yeah it's only the the word of the cops against them so. After I know like 30 months 40 months they will finally get released because they have they have no evidence or they could they may find that the police they made up all the evidence so yeah they finally go out but I mean. You spend like almost a year in prison that's yeah me it's clearly like political I mean your political prisoner. Like they got they got you in prison with no evidence without any proper process they keep you in prison for a year and who's gonna pay for that I mean you lost a year. Yeah. We're talking so far about the sacrifices made here what do you think with this new constitution you and your your your fellow Chileans what are you going to get like how what are the changes that that are seem to be most concrete and the ones that you think are most important. I think already it's been groundbreaking I believe it's the only constitution ever to be written by a plurality of women and also to have a representation from the indigenous peoples and so it's already been very inspiring and groundbreaking.

The president of the constitutional convention is a very inspiring Mapuche leader woman. And the good thing is that the the right. It represents less than one third of the constitutional convention so they don't have the power to block anything. As far as only by the right so we will see but they literally just started writing the constitution last week so yeah yeah it's still. But that's I mean that's that's a significant is there a kind of a broad agreement that one of the things that needed to happen here was a redress of grievances between the indigenous people and the and the the state. Because it sounds like that's a significant chunk of what's what's been already agreed upon just by like how this is coming together. Yeah so well Nico could probably tell a lot more about this than I could but there's a big deal with the United with the indigenous people in the south and the government basically waging war against the indigenous people actually. Two weeks ago, then Yara, the current right wing president declared a state of emergency in the south and he just extended it for 15 more days so we have the military in the south.

And they are, you know, with the tanks and attaching attacking the the Mapuche and other indigenous people there. And so yeah, a big aspect of Chile right now is the, the, the fight between and the oppression of the government against the native people. And it's a cultural thing too I mean it's really heavy everyone. Most people here in Chile are mixed you know between the natives and the white men and everything and you know the Europeans. But the Mapuche and the other indigenous groups have really not received a lot of respect in the last 30 years and. Yeah that's a big aspect. Yeah I will say like for me it's very inspiring to have like the president of this new constitution to be a Mapuche woman. So yeah I mean, I guess the most important thing like the thing that the indigenous people want to claim is the land. Land for them is the most important thing and that's what the government, I mean for the last 300 years they have been taking from to them and they are now like trying to claim again their, their, their space so I mean, let's go that this new constitution will bring them back their land and their respect that they deserve. Now, there's been a lot of discussion about this new constitution as I think the term used as an ecological constitution. And it's, it's the necessity of it addressing a lot of the climate, not just climate change but like a lot of the things caused by climate change like unequal access to water. There's been discussion in the Ezio Costa of of the FIMA NGO has has is arguing currently that the Constitution needs to enshrine a human right to water and recognize it as a common good.

It's obviously again they're writing it this week so it's kind of unclear if that's going to happen. But I'm wondering kind of what you what y'all think it's actually because as you've talked about, you know, with the protests ongoing with the military being deployed in the south, this is not a finished fight. It's just a fight that a lot of progress has been made on. What do you think is reasonable to expect from this new constitution in terms of of climate change in terms of ecological justice. I will say the right of water. So water is privatized here. So Chileans here in Santiago, we have to pay a Spanish company for our water. Sure.

I would say like the economy in this country is based on like extractivism. So you have like the most productive thing is mining and then you have like forestry. And all these things like they have an enormous impact on the environment. And the people in Chile, I mean, the people who live right next to these kind of things, they don't get anything from them. I mean, the poorest places are like right next to the forestry, right next to the mining. So it's kind of like we're creating a lot of income from these things, but we're not getting anything from them. And also it's not like a thing like let's get everything back to the state. I mean to the state because it's more than that.

It's just like ecological quality, equity. Yeah, it's not saying we should take all of the private water and give it to the state as much as it's saying everyone who lives here has a personal right to enough water to survive. Exactly. Yeah, so you have towns where small little towns and they don't have any water to drink because all of their water is going to the farm owned by Nestle to make, you know, to grow avocados to sell to Europe and the United States. So yeah, it's a pretty crazy thing. One of the things that's most interesting to me about your situation is you are in a place where not entirely dissimilar dissimilar from the United States, you have a police in a military that are heavily dominated by right wing ideology. Obviously, like the United States is partly responsible for that in your case, we funded it for a very long time. And so it's still an ongoing fight, but at the same time, clearly the people are unhappy enough with that situation and hold like they were able to make, they were able to force the folks with guns to recognize that they can't hold on to everything that they wanted to hold on to.

And I guess I'm, how can we do that? I'm very impressed by like, and, you know, watching from the sidelines, I was just so happy to see this not go where I think we were all scared it might go, you know, and either the direction with like Syria where it turns into this horrible bloodbath or where everything gets crushed, you know. And I'm wondering like why you think on a broader scale, what do you think was responsible for those people with access to the guns deciding we can't hold on to this? Like, yeah, I'm just, I'm so intensely curious about that because it's important for a lot of people in a lot of other parts of the world. Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I think it was just the protest and the daily protest and just getting out there. Keeping the pressure on and at some point, you know, it's like, hey, this is not good for the economy, you know, like, so all of the rich people and, you know, the 10 families that are in control of, you know, 60 or 70% of the wealth of the country. Yeah, and they, at some point, had to recognize that this was something that, you know, had reached its boiling point and they could no longer respond with just force because they tried it and it didn't work for months. And it was just months and months of protest and obviously that caused a hit to the economy and that caused a hit to the wallets of the ultra rich.

And so at some point, they realized that they had no other move to play than to accept it in some way. And that's how we got, you know, this new constitution that is being written. One thing I was, I'm interested about is the geography of the protest because I know Chile is very urban population and also was, is it like a quarter of the population or something lives in Santiago or like in that area. I don't third, I think. Wow. Sorry, I just want to note, if I'm not mistaken, there were only five, you have kind of communes instead of states is what they're called like 10 voted in favor of the referendum and only five voted against it if I'm not mistaken. Well, communes are within cities. It's like boroughs in New York, but we have different regions instead of states and and I think they all voted.

Yeah, there might be like seven who voted. But when you might be thinking of commerce. Yeah, Robert, you might be thinking of communes in Santiago, where Santiago is very. It's all on the Rio Mapocho, the river which goes east to west across the city. And basically you have this like very rich part on the east and up into the hills, and, and then it gets poorer and poorer as you go to the west. Yeah, for the vote for the Constitution, it was everyone voted for the Constitution, except for these communes, these ultra rich in the east. Oh, wow, amazing. Okay. I was curious about this was so when when the protests were going on, you know, she always had, like, huge protests before I mean even the last decade, what was interested also with this time is, like, well, hey, what do you think is different about this and say like 2011 2013, and then be in terms of like the geographic breakdown of where people are and where they're going. Is it that, you know, so you have this you have this classifying the city.

And we're we're we're the working class districts, like, we're people staying there in those districts or were they like moving from those places, like to protest inside of the richer urban areas. I mean, yeah, we have like, many protests in the past, but they were more kind of like, I don't know, like, students protest, and then you have like, you know, like, university protest, but when we have like this protest, like the one we have in 2019 is like something that unites everyone I mean you don't have to be a student you don't have to go to university to protest I mean it's something that is affecting everyone I mean the fairs of the metro they affect everything and the quality in the country affects everyone so I mean that I guess that that's the thing that make this protest of the 2019 unique in this term. I think it was actually a problem when all the protests were happening a lot of people were saying, we can't keep going to the Plaza you know the cops are just going to wait for us in the Plaza. And, you know, it's going to be a shit show and we need to, you know, protest all over, and there were protests across Chile and every single major city. And we'll say the majority of the protest have been here in the Plaza and close to La Moneda, where the presidential palace, and, but some of the most memorable process. And, and the Costa Nara Center the tallest building in Latin America which is a mall and a monument to this idea that Pinera has of the way of Chile being an oasis in South America.

We're not like other countries were were like the United States you know where this capitalism capitalist oasis and exactly. But, but yeah so some of the most memorable protests they weren't super common, but we're exactly that where the people said, you know what we're not going to the Plaza. We're going to Costa Nara Center, or we're going to Vita Cura, we're going to where the millionaires live where they work, and that those were really powerful and so that's when you started to see, like, all of those banks and malls and just blocks of what the rich folk like to call Sanhaten, you know, Santiago, Manhattan, the skyscraper part of the city, and it was just all boarded up, you know, because there were definitely a couple weeks where the protest went that way. And, and, and yeah, it was inspiring. But I keep coming back to when I look about like why it worked. It wasn't because the frontliners just kept the pressure up because the frontliners did in a lot of places here the frontliners stayed out well after everyone else stopped coming out. It's that the population kept up the pressure like the there were like Chile as a as a as a nation, as a as a people kept up the pressure in a pretty significant way, as opposed to kind of fading back after the first couple of weeks. And I mean, it I think I'm sure the question of why it happened has a lot to do with, like you said, inequality, you know, things that have been going on for decades. It's a complex situation.

But it does seem like that's one of the big takeaways that if you can you can secure even in even in a pretty terrifying situation, a lot of concessions, a lot of what you need, but but people have to have to keep putting themselves out there. Yeah, absolutely. I would say it's a couple of things. One is, as you mentioned, I think it's like the culture of protests here, you know, especially in the last 10 years, like with the revolution penguin in 2011, you know, and there and the Ocho Eme and the feminist protests, the Ocho Eme. And so it's not something that just happened two years ago, it's the last decade or two has has been the people, especially the young people going out there and protesting. And that's, that's one thing that's inspiring about borage, the candidate for president. The election is next month. So the left wing candidate borage and he came out of that movement he was a student protester and a leader of the student movement. And so I think it's like, it grew out of that it grew out of kids in high school, saying, This is just what we do this is normal we go out there and protest when when shit happens. And the other thing is, yeah, you know, we always say here in Chile, after the protest started. It's not 30 pesos, it's 30 years, you know, 30 years of neoliberalism of this revolving door of center right and center left and just continuing on with the economic oppression. And the other thing I feel like people don't understand is that, you know, people either think Chile is like the United States, or they think it's like Peru or something, you know, and it's really neither in Chile. The minimum wage is half of what the United States is, which is already terrible. Yeah. Yeah. But the cost of living here is almost the same as you guys in Portland, I mean, not the housing probably but like, you know, food and stuff. Yeah.

It's like Europe, you know, I could move to Berlin and live cheaper than here. You know, it is hard to have three times that, you know, so, so I think it's that's the other thing is people just, they, they had no other choice, you know, and they were just bored down by by 30 years, you know, after 20 years of a dictatorship, 30 years of this terrible wages and just neoliberalism and so so I think it's partially that and partially just like the culture of protests that grew out of the student movements in the early 2000s. Yeah, there was one thing I was interested also interested about that I don't remember seeing much of at the time was what was Chile and organized labor doing during this is a good question. Honestly, labor hasn't been a big part of the protest, at least from my point of view, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it took a pretty strong hit during the Pinochet years if I'm not mistaken so there was kind of that, like, I guess that does make sense. Sure. Yeah, honestly, I don't know a whole lot about labor history here in Chile, but, but yeah, it definitely is. I mean, you would see, you know, union groups in the streets here and there, but, but, but definitely they weren't a leading voice in the protest, I would say. Yeah, so I guess that leads into the other I guess one of the other things that from from my understanding has been happening all across Latin America but but in in Chile in particular is the rise of the informal sector and people just sort of not having access to sort of stable wages and labor and I'm wondering about, okay, so organized labor, like the classical unions aren't really involved in this. And I guess I'm interested in how, if I'm right that that you're dealing with a lot of people who aren't doing traditional labor stuff.

What was the process that was able to get people mobilized is like especially people who just have no sort of like people who are in the informal sector and people who aren't involved in the sort of older classical organizations. I don't know, I guess I would just say, it's like that that culture of protest that comes from the young people in the last 20 years and then of course, the older folks who, you know, live through the dictatorship and of course, there were incredible protests at that time too. And so, I don't know I mean honestly I was, even after living here for, you know, six years. I was shocked I never thought it would come to this I never thought I would see, you know, over half a million people in the streets of Santiago. And, and I would never never thought we'd see a new constitution. So, I don't know, I don't have the answers it's, it's surprising to me but what I will say though is I don't want to paint a rosy portrait of Chile right now because if, like we mentioned, you know, tomorrow night if you guys go to Galleria Cima CIMA on YouTube or Instagram, they have a live feed of the Plaza for blocks from our house. And every Friday, you know, use the protest come out. And sometimes the cops are there right away and they make a whole perimeter with 200 cops and all of the, you know, tanks and everything blocking entrance to the Plaza in every direction. Sometimes they let the people protest but then at 10 o'clock, you know, after the sun comes down, they come out there and, you know, it's the same thing we a young woman was was killed a couple weeks ago.

Jesus. Yeah. So, and the other thing is that we have this election coming up. And this guy cast extreme right winger Pinot Chetista. Just like they call him the Chilean Bolsonaro. Just like a real piece of shit. And he has, he has really risen in the polls in the last month or two. The right wing candidate Sitchell who won the right wing primaries and was kind of going to be the successor to Pinera the current right wing president, because in Chile, you know, you can't run consecutive, you can't have consecutive terms. But Sitchell just kind of was not a great candidate and kind of blew it and he went down and now cast is going up. And it's really scary to think about cast getting into the second round, where it will probably be him first borage. And, and so yeah, you know, even though the, the Constitution was approved by 79% of the country. You know, it's very possible that this election is going to come down to a runoff between a, you know, moderate socialist like borage. Not the most extreme leftist. In fact, known as Amarillo, you know, very yellow bellied here in Chile. That's his nickname. But it will probably right now it's looking like it's going to come down to him and cast who is like, almost a return to the dictatorship. So it's pretty scary.

Geez, so it's just this. There's just so much fighting to do. It's just so much fighting to do. I mean, I, yeah. Do you have, do any of you have anything else you want to make sure you say or talk about before we kind of close out for the day? I don't know. I will say like, three days ago, I just paid my, I finally paid my whole student loan. Like I've been working for more than 10 years in my life since I finished the RCT and I've been wasting, I mean, all my savings. I just pay this fucking student loan. I guess that you guys in the United States are like the same. Except for people don't pay off their student loan. Yeah, we just don't. Just stays there forever.

And I just, I just, I would like to wish to the upcoming people that, I mean, I don't wish that future for my, from, I mean, for the future people in this country, I don't wish anyone that. I mean, University, I mean, all students should be studied for free. I mean, it's like unconceivable for me. Yeah, so that was a big part of it. And then also the IFP pension system here, which is totally privatized. And so you, you, the government just takes your money for retirement, you get to choose between four or five options, which are private companies. And then if you make money, then the company takes, you know, their chunk of your retirement as the payment for managing your fund. But if you lose money, then it's on you. So literally, you know, Stephie's mom is like, you know, checking on her retirement, how did I do this year? It's like, Oh, you lost $2,000 this year. That's, that's your retirement savings, you know, so you and you have, you know, people here trying to live on, you know, retirements of $100 a month, while the military is receiving $10,000 a month, you know, so that was a big part of it. But I think what I always come back to here in Chile is, like we've said, the activist renamed the Plaza Plaza Dignidad. And that's what it all comes down to is just, we're not asking for, you know, ponies as Hillary Clinton would say we're not, we're not asking for the moon. We're just asking for basic dignity that everyone deserves. And it's as simple as that. So we just have to cross our fingers and hope that we've done enough that that, you know, at a minimum, you know, people can live in retire with some dignity.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and that enough ecological justice can be gained that people can survive what's coming. Which it's, it's nice to see at the very least that that's a central topic of discussion. Whereas in the United States, everyone in power seems fine with just ignoring the increasing profits for now. So, I don't know, you know, I, again, I also don't want to be painting too rosy a picture as you've, as you've made me repeatedly clear, there's a lot of struggle left still. But at least you've, you've, you've achieved a lot. And I've just heartened by hearing your story and hope that more people pay attention to what's happened there and try to take lessons from it. Because I think we all need to be, we all need to be gearing up as, as I'm sure y'all will continue to continue to do anything else before we close out. No, that's it. I mean, I completely agree. I think that just like the message is that, like, you know, better things are possible. Like real, real, real change can happen, you know, like this started two years ago with high schoolers protesting. And now we're going to have a vote on a new constitution. And it's going to be an ecological constitution, a plurinary natural national constitution with respect for the indigenous people. It's, it's, it's written by.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads?

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. An equal amount of men and women and everything. It's so easy for us who have grown up under the gloom of neoliberalism to just get really depressed and fatalistic about it. And so for me, I feel the same way, like it's just such an inspiration and the Chilean and especially the Chilean youth. But yeah, it's just an inspiration and proof that change can happen. But it's not just voting and you know, like Chileans have elected socialists, you know, the former president was a socialist, but it was just the same neoliberalism bullshit. So I think, you know, voting is great, but like that's just not enough. And so you have to, you know, get out in the streets and try to organize and make real change in other ways as well.

All right. Yeah, I agree entirely. Thank you all for coming on. I couldn't appreciate it more and I hope you have a lovely rest of your day and a lovely continuing to stick it to the sons of bitches. Thank you. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and Fatherly.

Listen every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Lethal listeners, Tig here. Last season on Lethalit, you might remember I came to Hollow Falls on a mission, clearing my Aunt Beth's name and making sure justice was finally served. But I hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself and my friends in danger, though it wasn't all bad. I'm gonna be real if you Tig. I like you. But now, all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win.

I'm Tig Torres and this is Lethalit. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the show that is only introduced competently when either someone besides me is the one hosting the episode or when I have a guest that I feel embarrassed about being incompetent in front of. And this is the latter case because today I'm talking with my friend and admired colleague, Molly Conger. Molly, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I got to do that like a professional. Welcome to the show.

That's like an NPR shit, right? I know. People have been saying on the Twitch stream that I have a very soothing NPR style voice. You do. You would be great. I would love to hear you talking at NPR about how it's rad that those people broke the windows on those police cars or whatever. No, I can't be allowed in respectable spaces. I can't be allowed there.

They let me talk on a panel at Harvard one time and I accidentally said fuck in front of a bunch of people. I mean, I assume Harvard students know a fuck word or two. They know that one. Speaking of fuck words, there's a couple of fuck words who are under trial right now for inciting mass violence that led to human death and suffering. You want to give us the overview. We're talking today about, you know, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 that led to three deaths. One is the result of direct violence. Heather Heier, who was murdered by the fascist James Field currently in prison for forever.

Yeah, forever. That, you know, his trial concluded a while ago, but there has been churning through the legal system a trial against Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler, who was the main organizer, Cantwell. There's other plaintiffs, right? Oh, goodness gracious. Yeah, a lot of a lot of fascists about, you know, all of the things that they did, the fact that they clearly intended this to be a violent riot assault, whatever. Like they wanted to have it be a fucking lynching, essentially. And there's a lot of evidence, including things they said to each other about building armies to murder people.

Anyway, Molly, you want to take it from here? I think I've introduced the situation. There's a trial going on. You have been listening to every day of it and covering it on Twitch very ably. And so I just kind of wanted to catch up with you. You also wrote an article in Slate with our friend Imli Gorchinsky about what's like largely the jury selection of the trial. So I was wondering if you could just kind of give us an overview of what's happened so far, if your thoughts on it. Yeah, that seems good.

Yeah, so there's just right at the outset. This is a civil trial, right? This is not a criminal trial. No one's going to jail at the end of this. Some of them are already in jail. The Who's Gail, we call it. What's that? The Who's Gail.

We call it the Who's Gail on the show. That's the proper term. The Who's Gail. Okay. Some of them are already in jail. Obviously, like you said, James Fields is serving 29 life sentences. That's a lot of life. That's a lot of life.

So he was charged in Virginia State Court by the Commonwealth of Virginia. He was convicted at trial of first degree murder and several counts of aggravated malicious wounding. So that trial happened in 2018. He actually went to trial for that. But then he pleaded guilty in federal courts. He was charged in two separate courts for the same underlying events. And in federal court, he pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate crimes. He pleaded guilty to hate crimes.

So there's no debate about whether these were hate crimes, right? Yeah. And he pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty because a hate crime murder is a capital crime. So in this lawsuit, right? This civil lawsuit against deep breath, Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, Christopher Campbell, James Alexfield, Van Gogh, America, Andrew Anglin, Moon Bay's Holdings, Robert Asmodore Ray, Nathan D'Amigo, Elliott Cline, Identity Europa, Matthew Parrot, Matthew Heimbach, traditionalist worker party, Michael Hill, Michael Tubbs, League of South, Jeff Scoop, National Socialist Movement, Nationalist Front, Augustus Olin,

Victor's Returnal Order of the Alt Knights, Mike Pinevich, Loyal White Knights of the KKK, East Coast Knights of the KKK, East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire. Several of those parties have been dismissed from the suit. That's a lot. It's a lot of bad guys, right? Several of those parties have been dismissed from the suit. Augustus and Victor's defaulted. Pinevich got dismissed early on.

What does that mean? The fact that he defaulted, does that mean he was like, yes? Right. He offered no defense. Yeah, so that's what that means. I mean, he's been dealing with a lot. He's had some problems. He's been in a mad jail.

He abducted his wife at gunpoint. I think he's out of jail now, but he's had some personal problems. He's had some personal problems. So the underlying claim of the lawsuit is a section 1985 complaint, a conspiracy to deprive people of civil rights. This is fundamentally, at its core, an anti-clan statute, right? It was designed to disrupt clan organizing. And that's kind of what it's being used for here, right? Yeah, I mean, the KKK is a party to the suit.

Yeah. So the lawsuit was brought by nine plaintiffs who were harmed, people who got hurt at the rally. Most of the plaintiffs were physically injured in the car attack, although not all of them. But these are people who are seeking damages, right? For all the emotional weight, all the sort of social ramifications, fundamentally, this is a case about damages. So the jury is going to say, okay, these people were harmed. Do we believe they were harmed by a conspiracy to commit acts of violence, conspiracy to commit racially motivated acts of violence, right?

Yeah. So all of those elements have to be proved. Did the KKK guys want to do racial violence when they assaulted people? Yeah. Was there a conspiracy? Yeah. Was it motivated by racial animus and were overt acts of violence committed, and did those acts of violence harm these people in a way that entitles them to damages?

That's all the jury has to decide, right? Should be an open shut case. Not a law nowhere. But it does seem like kind of an open and shut case. It does, right? So if there are people out there who are not familiar with the events of that day, a lot of alt-right groups, you know, overt neo-Nazi organizations, the literal Klan, the literal American Nazi party, like neo-Confederate secessionists.

Yeah, David's Duke was there. David Duke was there. David Duke, who Elliot Klein described as an ideological grandfather when he was asking other organizers if he can invite him. These guys came together. They came to Charlottesville. They brawled in the streets. They beat people.

They hit them with shields. A literal Klan wizard fired his gun at a black man while screaming die n-word. Well, now, okay, it seems like you're reaching a bit to call that racially motivated. Well, that's something they're trying to litigate now, right? Yeah. So I don't want to... You're probably familiar with the video of Deandre Harris being beaten nearly to death by members of several different hate groups, right?

So one of the guys that beat him was a TVP member. One of them was a League of the South member. And they worked together to beat this young man nearly to death while he was lying on the ground. And so that today they were talking about like, well, can we really say that was racially motivated? Can we really say? Can we really say? Yeah.

Yeah, I think we can. I think we can. His mother has been on podcasts since his conviction. I'm referring to Jacob Goodwin, the TWP member, the man who used a TWP riot shield provided to him by Matthew Heimbach to beat this young man. His mother goes on Nazi podcasts still to describe how her son is a martyr for the white cause. There's no ambiguity. But where are you getting racially motivated from that, mom?

Right. Like, there's a picture of her with her arm around her son. Her son is like seven feet tall. He's a giant boy to get her arm around her large adult son. And he's wearing a t-shirt with a giant picture of George Lincoln Rockwell on it. Ah, you love the deep cuts. So, you know, at Billy Roper's Christmas party. Yeah.

Another Nazi. Right. So, there's not a lot of ambiguity here for the average person. But so, you know, like you were saying, Emily, and I wrote about jury selection. Jury selection is... So, court proceedings are generally speaking open to the public. Anyone can go to their local courthouse and you can sit through a trial. You can sit through the voir dire process.

You can see how a jury gets chosen. Yeah. You can go trial hopping, get wasted, you know? Free entertainment. As long as you sit quietly, they can't make you leave. That's right. It's like a library. It's very discouraging because the whole point is to pick jurors who've never encountered reality.

You pick people who don't have any opinions, right? Because you want them to be able to be impartial. And the best way to make sure your jury is going to be impartial is to pick people who don't have any opinions. And if you don't have any opinions on whether or not it's good for Nazis to beat people in the streets, I would say that in and of itself is an opinion that you already have, right? Yeah. The ability to not have an opinion about that. So, jury selection took three days because they had to go through this process of speaking to each juror individually.

Usually, they'll do it in batches where they ask questions of people in batches. But this was so sensitive, they didn't want to taint the jury pool, so they did it one by one. So, it took three days. And they chose jurors who didn't have opinions about the existence of racism in the United States. Okay, that seems unbiased. Again, it's this thing you keep seeing where it's like, well, we can't let people have a bias. So, it has to be people who have never heard of white supremacy, which is like, well, then that's a bias in favor of white supremacy. But of course, that's the default of the system.

It's like, that's the tear, right? Like, you stick white supremacy on the scale and you tear it. But then you add awareness of white supremacy and suddenly there's weight on it, you know? Sorry, it's very frustrating. I know you know it's frustrating. I mean, yeah, I shouldn't. It was frustrating to sit through listening to them to ask people, you know, because they had to fill out a questionnaire ahead of time, so they can sort of sift through obvious knows.

And one of the questions was, you know, how do you feel about, you know, how concerned are you about these different kinds of prejudice? You know, prejudice against black people, prejudice against Hispanic people, prejudice against Jewish people, or prejudice against white people. And a lot of people indicated that they were very concerned about anti-white racism. Oh, good. And a lot of jurors were asked to follow up questions about like, well, why aren't you more concerned about anti-white racism? Why did you say you don't care about that? Well, because it's not real. Yeah, because I've never seen it in my entire life.

But, okay. So, but we seeded a jury. We did seed a jury and there were, you know, there's always concern in a case like this that you just won't be able to get an impartial jury. But we got, it could be worse, right? It could be worse. There is a guy on the jury who said that in high school he was the victim of a racially motivated attack by a Samoan person because they didn't like white people. I wonder what that person was doing slash saying. Black people who believe that they have a right to exist without being subjected to racism, not impartial, can't be on the jury.

But a white guy who says he was the victim of a hate crime because someone didn't like Howley's jury. He's on the jury. Oh, God. So people talking about like, I don't like it when folks not from my island come here and fuck shit up and make it expensive. Yeah, that's anti-white racism. He was living in Hawaii. Incredible. Incredible.

Fucking hell. So, you know, it could be a worse, it could be a worse jury, but it's not ideal. God, where did we go from there? It's been, it's been a little bit of a blur. So, Cantwell and Spencer don't have lawyers. Right. Well, yeah. Okay.

Oh, right. Because Cantwell, Cantwell is for people who aren't aware, Cantwell is representing himself. And correct me if I'm wrong here, but he started by acknowledging the old saying that a person who represents themself has a fool as a lawyer, but then said, but I'm not a fool in this case. Yeah, he said, you may have heard this, but that's not true here. That's not the case here. Unbelievable. Just incredible. And he said, and I didn't even stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Oh my God, really? He seriously made a Holiday Inn Express joke while he was on, oh my God. But the follow-up, the follow-up was, but I did stay in the central Virginia regional jail, because that is where he's staying. Yeah, I mean, because he's in prison for sexually or not for harassing and threatening and blackmailing another Nazi, right? Yeah, yeah, he was transported here from the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, where he is a guest until next Christmas. So he had filed motions to exclude the fact that he's currently incarcerated, as is his right, right? Like, if you are a... Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I don't think that's bad. If you're involved in a criminal case or in a civil case, it is your right to have the jury not see you in a jumpsuit. And that's perfectly reasonable. Absolutely. So he went to great lengths to make sure that the jury would never see him in cuffs, that the Marshals wouldn't bring him in in irons, that he would change before the jury arrived to the courthouse. All very reasonable. And no one was going to get to talk about it.

But he brought it up in his own opening statement. He told them, hey, hey, I'm here from prison. I'm here from prison because... By the way, I'm in prison for the other crimes I committed, but they're not related to these crimes. They're not related to these crimes, except to the extent that he's unable to shut the fuck up. He's only in prison because he emailed the FBI or recording him for him doing the crime that he's in prison for. He's really a very cunning man. But I think as much as those crimes aren't relevant to this case, I think it is very relevant to his trial strategy, right?

That he has this belief that all the things he did that were wrong, they were right, actually. He just needs to explain to us why he did them and then we'll understand, right? He's in prison because he tried to talk his way out of a thing that he did that was wrong by telling everyone that he did do it. Like, yes, I did it because I have to. But you didn't have to make an extortionate threat to rape another man's wife in front of their children. You didn't actually have to do that. Yeah, that's really...

I mean, I might argue, and perhaps I'm an extremist, but there's no situation in which you would ever have to do that. Nobody made you email the FBI about how you did that. But you did. I think the FBI would have told you that was a bad idea. I mean, there's some snarky stuff in some of the affidavits about how he called the Keen Police Department trying to tattle tail on other people so often that they were tired of taking his calls. Unbelievable. What an amazing man. Like, he's piece of shit, but he is legitimately an incredible person.

I mean, if you wrote this, no one would believe it, right? This is so heavy-handed. It's so goofy. Like, when he was paying Elmer in guns. Yeah, he paid his lawyer in guns, and then he ran out of guns and had his lawyer stopped working for him. Yeah, so he doesn't have a lawyer anymore because he ran out of guns to pawn, although I guess he can't anymore, because now he's a convicted felon. Also, I gotta say, running out of guns to pawn for your lawyer, it's pretty cucked. He even had to sell the bucket of loose bullets he used to keep as a prop on his desk.

I mean, really devastating stuff. You're down to the rails when you're doing that. Really the bottom of the barrel. So he's proceeding pro se, which unfortunately, for everyone involved, means he gets to talk a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, which means he gets to cross-examine his own witnesses, right? So the first two witnesses the plaintiffs put on were two of their plaintiffs, right? They were two young people who were injured in these events. The first witness they put on, Natalie, was a UVA student who had her skull fractured in the car attack.

She had to learn how to walk again. She had to see a neurologist to retrain her eyes to track movement. I mean, she was very badly injured. And so she testified at length about the damage that was done to her because, again, this is a case about damages, so the jury needs to learn who is this person, what happened to them, what did it cost them physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, because what they're going to be asked to do is to put a dollar amount on it. So they had to meet her and hear about her injuries and hear about her motivation for being there.

She's a young, queer, Latina woman. She's the first college student in her family. She's a very impressive young woman. And she was very composed on the stand, as awful as the content was. But then every single one of the defendants gets to cross-examine her. Richard Spencer gets to cross-examine her. Christopher Cantwell gets to cross-examine her. James Kalenich, who took the case.

He's Kessler D'Amigo, an identity Europas lawyer, James Kalenich. He's an Ohio-based attorney who said on the record that he took this case with the express purpose of opposing Jewish influence. Great. Kalenich gets to cross-examine her. Matt Heimbach's new lawyer, Josh Smith, used to be the campaign spokesman for Paul Nieland. Paul Nieland was an endorsed by Trump at one point in his writing. Trump at one point in his run for Congress and as also just a straight-up Nazi.

Who's repeatedly threatened to murder you? Yeah. One time he spent all day posting pictures of a deer that he said that he named after me. He said, I named this deer Molly. He spent all day stalking it, posting pictures of it, posting pictures of his gun. And then he posted a picture of the deer staged like a lynching. And then he spelled my name out in its entrails and posted pictures of that. So you're just like a really normal guy, Paul Nieland.

Totally, completely with it. His campaign spokesperson when he ran for Congress was the Holocaust denying former Jew, Josh Smith. Josh Smith was born Daniel Nussbaum. He changed his name to hide his Jewish past. Oh, wow. That is an old story among the Nazis. I mean, we talked about the guy who invented sea monkeys.

But yeah, it's basically the same case. And you know who else hides there? Oh, no. Okay. This was meant to be an ad plug. Normally, Sophie would jump in and stop me from doing that. None of these advertisers are plaintiffs in the current case that you're covering. That's a guarantee.

That is an absolute promise. David Duke is not about to sell you dick pills. No, no, no. Although he could use them. We're back. All right, Molly, sorry. Please continue. God, where were we?

I got distracted thinking about David Duke trying to sell you dick pills. Yeah, that's not good for anybody. Right. So everybody gets to cross-examine the witness. Josh Smith is Heimbach's new lawyer. Kalinich used to be a lot of these guys' lawyers. And then he sort of dropped them over time as they became uncooperative. They're all these motions to withdraw.

Yeah. Kalinich slowly dropped clients over the last two years. He dropped Cantwell as a client because Cantwell wouldn't stop posting about hurting Roberta Kaplan. Right. She was the lead counsel for the plaintiffs. Roberta Kaplan, famous Jewish lesbian lawyer. She was on the USB Windsor. I'm losing it.

Absolutely losing it. No, no, you're doing great. This Supreme Court case that gave us gay marriage, right? Roberta Kaplan brought us gay marriage, essentially. Yeah. So she, you know, famous Jewish lesbian. That is a well-known portion of her identity. And Cantwell kept posting anti-Semitic remarks about her.

And finally, Kalinich was like, you're making it really hard to be your lawyer and you don't pay me. And Kalinich dropped Heimbach as a client in 2019 because Heimbach just stopped answering his calls. Great. Smart people. Yeah. So Matt Parrot, who's Matt Heimbach's father-in-law, but also the husband of the woman that he was sleeping, this complicated. There's a chart.

There's a chart. Matt Heimbach and Matt Parrot, founders of the traditional worker party, best friends for a long time, fuck each other's wives, big problems, big problems for them. Yeah, the night of wrong wives. The night of the wrong wives. So Matt Parrot was technically Matt Heimbach's father-in-law during the time period which Heimbach was fucking Parrot's wife. Very classy people.

Not a great situation. So they lost their lawyer. Parrot very publicly told all traditionalist worker party members to destroy evidence. So we knew that, right? That was on the record from the beginning that Matt Parrot was like, hey, everyone in TWP, if you did any crimes, delete it. Right? Delete your social media.

Delete your pictures. We weren't there, right? Yeah, and that's a crime. That's a crime. Yeah, that is a crime. That is a crime right there. But an interesting thing that we learned today that I don't think we did know before. In November 2018, so they played a recording of a conversation between Matt Heimbach and

Christopher Cantwell. And this was during examination of Heimbach. So Heimbach was on the stand and they're talking about like, you know, you didn't produce discovery, you said you lost your phone, this, that, and the other, you know, after you beat your wife, she threw away your phone. So he said, I couldn't turn over my social media accounts because my wife deleted them because we had an argument about me taking out the trash, right? Like we had this domestic dispute about the trash and she deleted all my accounts so I

couldn't turn them over. Well, today we found out that he told Cantwell in 2018, so a year after the lawsuit was filed. When a lawsuit is filed against you, you have a legal obligation to not do things like this. He told Cantwell that after a conversation with his lawyer on the advice of his lawyer, he deleted those accounts. Oh. Oh, great. So there's just a record of him climbing.

Yeah. That's a crime? Yeah. And it's also a crime for his lawyer to have advised him to do that. Great. Again, that's, there's no direct evidence who told him to do that, but we do have a recording of him saying a lawyer told him to. So that's not great.

That's not a good situation. Is he going to get charged with anything for that? I am curious. You know, I'm not a lawyer just for everyone listening. I'm not a lawyer. I didn't go to law school. I didn't even finish undergrad. I'm not a lawyer.

But I have listened to a lot of lawyers. But I am curious with what frequency can perjury charges be sought in a civil case, right? Yeah. It's still under oath. It is still perjury. But how common is that to be pursued? Because they're perjuring. Yeah, they're for sure perjuring.

They're perjuring. They're just doing the thing the right always does, which is trust that the law will never actually come after them for their many crimes. And there's a good chance they'll be right. Like Heimbach said, when he was asked, have you ever provided security for Richard Spencer? And he said, no. Well, there's like 100 pictures of you doing that at multiple events. They're claiming they don't know each other.

Here's all these pictures of you guys hanging out. God, where else are we? Yeah, I'm curious. You know, one thing that kind of, especially because of the written house thing, and we're actually, we'll be talking tomorrow about the written house thing. Every cool person shares the same lawyer. But yeah, because of that, I'm kind of curious, what is your, what sense do you get of this judge? There's no good judges.

But it could be. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying like, yeah, but how is it? It could be. It could be a lot worse. You know, Trump appointed a shitload of federal judges pretty recently. Judge Moon is 85 years old. He's a Clinton appointee. He's a Clinton appointee, so it could be worse.

Could be worse. He's been on the bench, you know, since I was in elementary school, and he's very old and he doesn't, he has, he's a little bit hard of hearing, but he's not stupid. And there's a lot of people I think were really frustrated with some of the things he's allowing to happen. He's really allowing these, these pro se defendants to sort of run rough shot over the procedure. But you know, like I said, before we started recording, it's really hard to apply. Your sense of how things are supposed to work doesn't really apply in court, right?

Those are very rigid, sort of outdated set of rules and procedures, and they don't feel right. They don't feel logical or reasonable or fair, but there is a specific way that it works, and it is hard to watch, especially if you've never seen it before. And because of the emotionally fraught nature of this, it's particularly frustrating to be, to be listening on this line and saying like, why are they allowed to do this to this witness? Well, legally, you can cross examine your witnesses, even if you are the person who hurt them.

It's not a good system, but it is how it works. But he's, and I also think there is, there's concern about appellate issues. There's concern about mistrial. And so they're really going out of their way not to give anyone any excuse to say, well, this was not fair to me. They're going to say it anyway, but they're really letting them have a long leash in a way that feels very bad. But at the same time, I couldn't kind of understand it.

Yeah. I wish they hadn't done so much Holocaust denial, like on, on the record. Yeah, that would be good. They put an expert on today who's Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, who's an expert in Holocaust denial to sort of talk about what the Holocaust is, I guess, in case the jury doesn't know. Oh, that's bleak. Oh, my goodness. That's fucking bleak.

Because they chose this jury based on them never having heard of Jews, you know. My God. It's a bunch of like middle-aged people from Green County who have never met a Jewish person. They had to put on a professor to say, okay, when he says, gas the K words, we're talking about gas chambers, gas chambers from the Holocaust. They didn't start out with gas chambers. They started with mass shootings, but it was too messy. I mean, she was literally recounting sort of the evolution from the Anzantz group and,

you know, shootings in the fields to the guts of the gas chambers. Like we had to talk all the way through it because it seems unnecessary. But again, for the jury, it might be necessary. And so with Asmador, Robert Ray- You don't want to take anything for granted, you know? Yeah. Right. And you really have to sort of lay out these connections, right?

Because the idea is you have to prove a conspiracy and you have to prove the conspiracy was racially motivated. And so when Asmador is the racist wizard name that Robert Ray uses when he writes for the Daily Stormer, when Asmador keeps saying, we're going to gas the K words, everyone knows what I mean when I say that, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So he keeps saying, you know, the plan is to gas the K words, you know, GTKRWN gas the K words race for now. He keeps saying, he keeps saying, he keeps saying it.

And then the torch march, he pepper sprays a bunch of people, which he is currently a fugitive of justice for. He's wanted for felonies in Albemarle County. He's missing. So he says he's going to do it. Then he does it. And then afterwards he's on video saying, yeah, I guessed half a dozen K words. You can see from A to B to C. And then we have this expert saying, OK,

what he's saying is a direct reference to the Holocaust. Yeah. Right? Like you said, it's pretty open and shut. It's pretty straightforward A to B to C. You know, we have these discord leaks. If you want to browse them, they're on Unicorn Riot. And almost immediately after the rally, Unicorn Riot had these discord leaks.

The entire server, the Charlottesville 2.0 server, where they planned this out, where they're in the discord saying, yeah, it's going to be so great. We're going to do so much violence. We're going to hurt people. We're going to bring shields. We're going to bring base. Really explicitly talking about the plan, making jokes about hitting people with cars. Now, the entire discord will be admitted.

It has been authenticated. They received another copy of it via subpoena directly from discord. It's real. It's evidence as much as Cantwell doesn't like that. But more than that, we have some first-person authentication. We heard deposition testimony from Elliot Klein's ex-girlfriend, the woman that he was living with in 2017. So in the summer of 2017, he was living with this woman that he had just met

and entered into a romantic relationship with. She has since left the movement. She has a lot of regret about her involvement in that time period. And people have a lot of mixed feelings about what it means to leave the movement, what it means to atone. Is it possible to redeem yourself for having been a part of something like that? We don't have to litigate that. No, this is not the time or place.

Well, we do have to recognize that her testimony is damning. I mean, this is not Elliot Klein putting on a show in public. This is not Elliot Klein posturing for his friends. This is Eli at home in bed with his girlfriend talking about his fantasies of killing all the Jews. And her testimony was pretty harmful. You would think. Yeah. It's not great.

You know, really, you have to wonder how the jury is taking this, right? These people who have no concept or context for this. Living and breathing this for years, yeah. Hours of this woman sort of near tears talking about how her boyfriend said that he was going to put her in a breeding camp once they had the ethno state. Not nice. Really not nice stuff. You know, we have the messages from the Discord where people are posting memes and jokes about hitting protesters.

But Samantha testified that at private parties at Richard Spencer's house in the summer of 2017, these private parties with the organizers of the event at Richard Spencer's apartment, people explicitly discussed the legality of hitting people with their cars. This is not random people in the Discord that Richard could say, oh, I don't know him. I never met him. I never posted in Discord. This is somebody sitting on your couch, Richard. Yeah. Yeah.

And you know, Samantha said that during that time period, Klein was building an army for Richard. And Kessler texted Spencer something similar, right? That we'll build an army, my liege, fucking dork ass shit. But so one fun surprise from Samantha was that during that time period, Klein was, you know, planning to provide his militia in the form of a dignity Europa, right? These street troops he was going to provide to Spencer to build the movement. But that when the time came, he always knew that he would kill Richard to take control.

These people are all such fucking... It's a shame that what they actually are is deniable assets for the most dangerous folks, you know, the fucking banning types. Right. Because if all of the fascists were this dumb, I wouldn't be so worried. And it's hard. It's hard to walk the line between, you know, really getting a kick out of some of these moments where it is genuinely funny, right? But then you remember, like, these people are very dangerous.

These people are responsible for death. These people... It's this emotional whiplash, right, of the plaintiffs getting on and saying, yes, my life was ruined. I still have nightmares. You'll have to go to physical therapy. And then Cantwell getting up there and asking Heimbach if he's a federal agent. Yeah. Right? Like, I think...

So we've only seen one of the defendants on the stand so far, but I have a strong feeling Cantwell is going to use every opportunity that he has his frenemies under oath to ask them if they snitched on him. Yeah. That's going to be pretty funny. It's going to be great. You got to laugh sometimes. Life's too hard. But Cantwell is really using this, I think, you know, because he has nothing to lose, right? This is a case of our damages.

He has no money for them to take. He has $30,000 in credit card debt and his car got repossessed once he went to prison. He has nothing for them to take. The only person he knows who did have anything is Ian Freeman, who's currently facing federal charges for some sort of complicated Bitcoin money laundering scam through a fake church. So he doesn't even have any friends to help him. That's an interesting case, but I don't have time for it now. Yeah.

He has nothing for them to take. He's already a felon. He can't have a gun anymore. I think he's just using this as an opportunity, as a platform, to get his message out there and to harm the people he thinks harmed him. So every chance he gets, he's trying to force witnesses to dox people, right? He asked one of the plaintiffs, Devin Willis, another young man who was injured at the torch march, a plaintiff in this case, he asked him, he forced him to name the names of the non-parties

who were also counter-demonstrating at the statue. These people's names have not been on the record. The judge made him do that? Made him do that. That's fucked up. And, you know, you could, if you were, I don't know, a complete baby-brained idiot, you could say, well, that maybe there was a legal reason that he needed those names. There's not.

And we know there's not because he tried to do it again today. There was a non-party witness, a young woman who lived in one of the dorm rooms right by the Rotunda, they're called the Lawn Rooms. It's a prestigious opportunity. Only super high achievers get to live in those beautiful historic lawn rooms. So she lived right near where the torch march was happening and she heard it and she went outside and she looked at it. She's not a party to the suit.

She has no knowledge of these people or what happened. She just saw this thing happen and she testified to that. And he tried to, you know, she had made some passing remark that she'd heard from another student that maybe there would be a thing on campus, right? That they knew about the rally the next day, but like, I don't know, maybe these guys will try and come here just like be on your toes, right? Not anything specific. She was not, she's not an activist.

She's not, she didn't know anything, right? And so he was, grilled her. Tell me who told you that. Tell me who told you that. How did you know that? And he said on the record, direct quote, I want to know who infiltrated our communications. So he's trying to use this moment where he has someone under oath to extract information about who snitched.

He wants to know who infiltrated their secret communications, which is him admitting there were secret communications that weren't turned over in discovery, which wasn't smart of him to do. But he's using this process to get names of people who he can harass. And we know that's what they're doing because while he was getting these names from that other witness, you know, the names of the people at the statue, Jason Kessler, the lead defendant, right? The defendant whose name is on the lawsuit, the lead organizer of the rally,

is posting all this time. He's posting through it, posting through it. If you had a good lawyer, he would tell you not to post through your own conspiracy trial. So while Cantwell is extracting these names from this poor young man, Kessler's posting them. He's posting their pictures and their legal names and describing their involvement. These people who are not party to this lawsuit. And there's no way to interpret that other than as a vehicle for harassment.

Yeah. I think there will be collateral damage of this lawsuit, but I hope that it does have the intended deterrent effect, right? Sorry, I've been talking at length for a while, but just for insimation. I think inside the courtroom, this is the case about damages, right? The judge is very clear that, like, stop talking about broader societal impact. You can't tell the jury about that. That's not relevant to this case.

This legally speaking is a case about, did this thing happen? Were these people hurt by it? What is the dollar amount of their pain? Legally speaking, that's it. But outside the courtroom, this is about deterrence, right? This is about setting a precedent that if you do this, if you plan a rally knowing that the people who come to your rally will hurt people because you told them that's the goal, right?

Even if you're not the one who swings the stick, even if you're not the one pressing the accelerator, you are responsible and you can be held accountable. And that is an important message. Yeah, we will, like, your life will be ruined if you participate in this shit. That even if you don't have anything for us to take, we will put a garnishment on you that will follow you to the fucking grave. Yep.

Yep. And I think, yeah, that's, I would agree, what I think is important here. Molly, I think that's everything for now. How much longer do we have to go through this? Well, it's scheduled for four weeks. It's been one and a half. And there was some anxiety and hand-wringing about how maybe four weeks won't cut it. Yeah, Jesus.

I'm regretting my decision to actively live tweet. So, like, I'm transcribing in real time for eight hours a day. That happens. Oh, your fingers. Are you using a laptop or are you doing it on a phone? I'm doing it on a laptop. Thank God. So, because of COVID, no one can go into the courthouse because there's so many parties in this case

and there's the plague and no one can go into the courthouse except for there's a press room where 15 people who got pre-approved by a federal court can go and sit and look at a monitor. But I'm sitting at home. I'm comfy at home. Good. So, I'm using my computer. Thank God. Okay.

Thank God. I wanted to. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic.

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

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. To see. I love to see. I love the courtroom ambience. But I'll be honest, I'm way less worried about getting stabbed here at home. That is true. That is true. People are less likely to get stabbed at home, or more likely, one of the two. I don't know. Tell us in the comments where you think people are most likely to get stabbed. Molly, thank you so much. Thank you both for what you're doing and for coming on the show. Is there anywhere the listeners can find slash support you? Would you like people to mail you knives? What? Oh, mail me knives. Yeah, but not as a threat, like as a fun thing. Fun knives for fun.

I did get a large machete in the mail the other day. And before I saw the little gift note, I was confused. Oh, good. Okay. I'm glad you're getting machetes. Yeah. Yeah. My friend, Shep, a sheep farmer in North Carolina, sent me a large blade. Good. No, but if you're interested in reading moment by moment live transcription of people screaming holocaust denial at a federal judge, you can check me out on Twitter. That's at socialistdogmom. That's what happens when you make a little joke with your friends, when you have five followers, and then you end up using it professionally. Then you become national news repeatedly. Then people are posting your mugshot, making fun of your username. I know. Your bullshit mugshot.

You look great, but it's bullshit. Nobody looks good after they get left in a hot van like a dog. Yeah, that's true. Well, Molly, that's going to be the end of the episode. So why don't we sing a song and roll out? Hopefully not the song that Heimbach included in his Christmas letter to James Fields in prison. Oh, God, that must have been really special. Oh, geez, I'll have to look that up. I did come across in my browsing through fascist telegram the other week an entire album,

dozens of songs that were all Nazi covers of Blink 182's entire discography. Everything, everything. Of course, they called it Blink 1488. Of course they did. I don't even know. I don't even know how to talk about that. It's just a thing that I found. Do you know Hampton Stall, the guy who studies malicious stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got a particular fascination with white power rap.

Oh, God, yeah, it's never any good, although there was a there is a fun in one of the H bomber guy videos. He found finds this flat earth Nazi who has a rap that's amazing. I'm partial. I'm partial to Cantwell's diss tracks. Yeah, Chris Cantwell. Well, thank you, Molly. And off we go into the wild blue yonder. I'm going to go smoke some legal weed and fall asleep face down, hopefully not thinking about this trial. I am not going to smoke some legal weed because that's federally a crime, Molly.

All right. Have a good day, Molly. Thank you all for listening. Good night. When P.T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American side show. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it all in a place where spectacle was king.

We will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grimandmild.com slash presents. Executive Producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast, How Men Think. And that's good news for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone. Get an inside look at what goes on in the mind of men from the men themselves. It's real talk, straight from the source.

The How Men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun, informative, and probably a bit scary at times, because we're literally going inside the minds of men. As much as we like to think all men are the same, they're actually very different. Each week, a celebrity guest host provides honest advice in his area of expertise. When I agreed to do this reboot, I had a few conditions. No sugar coating, no mind games, and absolutely no mansplaining. Men are hard enough to understand without the mind games. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal. And I am Troy Millings, and we are the hosts of the Earn Your Leisure podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sport and entertainment. From DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross, and Shaquille O'Neal, I mean, our alumni list is expansive. Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships, and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in depth, and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint.

We want to know what you want to know. We talk to the legends of business, sports, and entertainment about how they got their start, and most importantly, how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game? Unclear as how the stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered.

The Earn Your Leisure podcast is available now. Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that is occasionally introduced competently, as it sort of was today, because our guest today is someone who is very near and dear to me, and to almost every other person that I know and work with. Moira Meltzer Cohen. Moira, you are a lawyer focusing on civil rights and movement kind of cases, and you are the lawyer of everybody I respect in the world. You are the person that I text whenever I need to know, hey, was this a crime?

It never is. Law-abiding, very law-abiding. We wanted to have you on both because you are always a breath of sunshine and because there is some law stuff happening these days. We just had our mutual friend, Molly Conger, on to talk about the Charlottesville case, which is quite a thing. Today was the day. Yeah, today had some moments. Chris Cantwell and Richard Spencer representing themselves separately, each cross-examining each other.

I have so many thoughts, but mostly my thoughts involve laughing. It's very, very funny. It's the funniest of an incredibly tragic and infuriating situation. Something funny finally happened, so at least there's that. Chris is often very funny in spite of himself. Yeah, I would love one day to just get you on in duo. We can do a reading of some of Chris Cantwell's better legal filings, because he's got quite the legal mind. Robert, I think I maybe didn't ever tell you about the fact that we did a Purim spiel, which is a performance of the story of Esther, which is traditionally done at Purim, which is a Jewish holiday, and it was based on the complaint that he filed.

Oh, my God. For those of you who don't know, Chris Cantwell, the crying Nazi from the United Right rally, has been incarcerated for a year or so now and continues to put out his own legal motions, literally handwritten, alleging all kinds of conspiracies from the people who did not call the FBI and admit to committing several crimes. Yeah, we should absolutely do a crossover with Daniel Harper and Moira to discuss Cantwell's legal genius. But today, Moira, we wanted to have you on because there is another case that a lot of folks are rightly concerned about because it has some pretty dire implications, depending on how it goes in a number of ways, the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. I mean, everyone knows Kyle Rittenhouse took a gun illegally across state lines to a protest so he might have the chance to shoot people and then shot people. This is my opinion about what happened. Obviously, the legal case is unfolding.

There's been a lot of talk online on Twitter and whatnot about how obviously unfair the judge is being. This is what the talk on Twitter is about. And it's because of a couple of things. One is that the judge, and again, before I go to you, Moira, I'm just explaining kind of the way the discourse has been. The discourse has taken like, well, the judge said, you can't call Kyle, you can't call the people that he killed victims, but you can call the people that he killed looters and arsonists. And so people are saying, look at this very clear example of how bad the justice system is. And I wanted to bring you on for a number of reasons, including the fact that there's a lot of stuff that seems fucked up and in fact is fucked up, you could argue, but is also like pretty normal justice system stuff. And some stuff that seems fucked up, but actually isn't. I'm not necessarily talking about the Rittenhouse case here just in general when we talk about the law. So I guess I wanted to have you on to explain to us what's happening in your opinion and how normal abnormal good bad are kind of the things that we're seeing the decisions we're seeing this judge make in this case so far. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So the trial, I think when you asked me to comment on this, the trial had not started. The trial has now started. It has been characterized by the defense saying the N word.

A juror being this morning, I think was dismissed for making a cruel and nakedly racist joke. And apparently the judge had a fit of peak about the media's response to his evidentiary rulings which are what you've asked me to come discuss, which is itself actually one of the more unusual things about this, how this trial is going. It's always a little bit hard for me to opine on a case that is not my case. I feel tentative about it. This would never be my case because I would not represent a white supremacist and I am not a prosecutor and would never be a prosecutor. And I was not able to look at the briefing, because although all of the briefing was ostensibly publicly filed, it is not actually publicly available. I had a very interesting conversation with the clerk of court in Kenosha who told me that if I mailed her a request, she would fax me the briefing at $1.25 a page and I said, thank you very much. Goodbye. So I'll do my best to speak to these rulings and the sort of larger issues as I see them. As you noted, there have been a lot of kind of salacious headlines about the evidentiary rulings in this case. And I think those headlines are really less about what's actually happening in the case and they're more reflective of the sort of pearl clutching liberal impulse to notice the totally self-evident hypocrisy of the legal system. And then to conclude that because certain groups are shown more leniency, the way to resolve this hypocrisy is to make sure everyone is pleased and prosecuted and punished as viciously as the left is, not actually the goal that I have. And just to clarify, when I talk about liberals, as I will probably do a little bit, I don't mean like, I mean liberal as opposed to radical people who are more or less okay with the underlying big systems like capitalism and white supremacy and

heteropatriarchy and like maybe are more concerned with the iterations of those things that are particularly gauche, but they don't actually mind the systems themselves or the way that those systems are reiterated and enforced by, for example, the American criminal legal system. So, you know, I think the kind of liberal read on these rulings is not only not legally sound, I think it's actually incredibly dangerous and it's watching this unfold and watching the liberal commentary on it, I think is one of the things. It's one of the ways that I can really see liberal liberals and liberalism losing credibility, because, because they're sort of calling out this hypocrisy and at the same time there's a little bit of a double standard that they want to that they want to propose and enforce. So, okay, so I'll talk about the rulings that you discussed. The first one is that the judge said that the prosecution is not allowed to refer to the people that were in house killed as victims. I will remind you as I remind all of my clients continuously that the law is at best adjacent to common sense understandings of justice and even frankly, common sense, understandings of reality. Obviously the people that Kyle written cows killed were victims. But as my beloved colleague, Sandy reminded me the concept of victim hood the status of victim hood is among the things that needs to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt at this trial. Yeah. Right.

And so in, in fact, this is a totally straightforward ruling. Yeah, it is a ruling that I would argue for as a defense attorney and I expect to win where I trying in your case. So, you know, yeah, it's one of those things like you have to overcome this. You have to overcome when you're thinking about a trial, like the fact that you know he's guilty because the point of a trial is that everyone like there's a process right we don't just do street justice because that's what written house did. Like we're we're you have to like one of the it is troubling to me the extent that people are like well he he should be presumed like we should be referring to the people he shot as victims before he has been adjudicated as guilty because like that's that's important like the presumption of innocence matters and it's it's it's also something that's very unfair like there's a person in Portland, Alexander dial who got in trouble for taking a hammer out of a Nazi's hand during a rally and has been charged with several felonies and because his trial kept getting delayed spent two and a half years under pre trial conditions so the presumption of innocence is hardly equal but it is important. Yeah, exactly and I think that, you know, we'll talk about this I think in a little bit but that's exactly the issue right is that we need to be enforcing the equal application of the presumption of innocence, not being, you know, rapidly going after the right in the same way that

we are used to law enforcement and the judiciary going after the left. The other ruling that the judge made, which you mentioned was that he said that the defense is authorized to characterize the people that written has killed as looters or rioters if there is evidence presented that they were in fact looting and or rioting. Yeah, I would if I were, you know, in this case, which of course I'm not, I would object to this on the grounds that it is prejudicial and bullshit. It's fucked up in bullshit. Yeah. And that said, I am not super surprised by that ruling. I would say it's likely within the sound discretion of the judge. And if, you know, and if the prosecution disagrees in some matter for appeal. You know, I think one of the things the judge said about this actually that I think is really important and correct is, is that he has a tremendous amount of discretion in making evidentiary rulings. One of the rulings he made was that he's admitting the testimony of an expert witness, which, you know, I think a lot of people are also quite upset about. But that said, again, this is not that unusual. And it's very difficult for him to deny that motion to have his evidence or his testimony admitted, because the prosecution routinely uses use of force experts in similar trials.

So now we're, they're just on the other side of the table. Yeah. So, you know, first of all, I get that these rulings don't make us feel good. But they aren't that strange. And as I said, the judge has tremendous discretion in these matters. I was thinking about how to illustrate this and it occurred to me that I think the last time I was on one of your podcasts, you asked me whether cocaine was illegal. Yeah. What are we landing on that, by the way? So I think the first time you asked me, I was a total killjoy and was like, of course it's illegal. But if I'd actually taken your question more seriously, I think a better answer probably would have been nobody knows.

For precisely this reason, because the real question is not what the law says. The real question is how or whether or against whom or to what degree and under what circumstances will that law be enforced? And these are always open questions and arguments and judges have a ton of power. This case is no exception. So, you know, again, not only are these rulings pretty standard, but I think within the judge's discretion, some of them I really dislike, some of them make total sense to me. And I think that what is happening is not necessarily sound legal analysis, but liberals sort of trying to argue that written house should be more harshly prosecuted by saying that these specific rulings are unfair or unusual. It's a little bit like the liberals crying out now because people are putting like, let's go Brandon on printing it on rifle receivers and saying like, well, the secret service should investigate. Well, if they do that, then like 30 people, if they do that and like one company gets a fine, 40 people are going to go to prison for having red flags on their body armor. That's the way it works in this country. Any anarchist with a 3D printer is going to immediately go to jail.

That's not like that is correct. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the thing that I want to point out here is that what is actually unusual about this case is not these rulings. It is that written house is going to trial at all. And the reason written house is going to trial is able to go to trial is largely because this prosecution is fundamentally calculated not to be repressive. So I want to kind of zoom out and get away from the weeds evidentiary rulings. So in its simplest expression, when we talk about the difference between state and federal jurisdiction, we're saying kind of jurisdiction for dummies overly simplified is stuff that happens inside or only impacts a given state is typically prosecuted by the state. And if it impacts, if your offense conduct or alleged offense conduct impacts more than one state, then it is or can be prosecuted by the federal Department of Justice. So, Kyle written house crossed state lines with a pretty serious firearm, and he shot three people. This puts us immediately into federal jurisdiction land.

He did this in the context of an uprising for racial justice that has been characterized by the fact that those rising up on the side of racial justice have been subject to intense repression by the federal government. DOJ has shown themselves to be fire breathingly enthusiastic about resizing their jurisdiction over heady offenses based on totally tenuous grounds for people on the left or who are perceived to be on the left. DOJ has asserted jurisdiction in order to prosecute people for absolutely trivial but politically motivated offenses that would be left to the state to prosecute absent the politics of the accused. I have asserted federal jurisdiction on really flimsy bases like that a local police building or vehicle belongs to a department that has received federal funding so property damage against it becomes a federal offense. One thing they're doing that is unusual is the federal government is asserting concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute offenses so I know there's someone in Portland who is simultaneously being prosecuted by Multnomah and also the federal government for allegedly throwing some yellow rant on a police building. Right, so it is very curious that written house who quite clearly did something that would, you know, fall under federal jurisdiction is not being federally charged and it matters a lot for how the case proceeds. Because the way that federal prosecutions operate is that the feds will typically stack these indictments in a way that really puts tremendous pressure on them to plead guilty, which is not typically the case, or doesn't happen in the same way in a state prosecution. So, you have these stacked indictments with multiple multiple counts, ranging, you know, all kinds of conduct, often involving, you know, a conspiracy which can be very, very easy to prove, and a guilty finding on any of those counts could be like a mandatory

minimum of five to 10 years. And then if you're looking at, you know, a guilty on more than one or all of those counts you're looking at a sentence potentially concurrent sentences that are tantamount to dying in prison. Right. And so this creates tremendous pressure on federal defendants to negotiate a pretrial disposition to take a guilty plea. So again, Kyle Rittenhouse crosses state lines with this firearm, which gets used in the in the commission of an act of violence. And I feel extremely confident that any federal prosecutor could come up with a stack of counts against him, within about 10 minutes without breaking a sweat. But, you know, so, you know, if you think about him being in that position. You think through, okay, if I go to trial, what is what are likely outcomes. If Kyle Rittenhouse went to trial, federally, and even if he prevailed on a self defense, right, which, which could happen.

If you were found guilty on one or more of the lesser charges, he would still be looking at really, really serious time. But that's not where we are. Right. We are in a really weird place where like in a federal context, we wouldn't even be like talking about evidentiary rulings because he would almost certainly not be going to trial. Right. Yeah. Or, you know, if he had a reasonable lawyer, he will probably be negotiating a plea. I'm curious, what do you think about because one argument I've heard and I'm certainly in no position to evaluate this personally is that if federal charges had been placed on him, you know, win the crime in 2020, Trump would have pardoned him. I don't know. Yeah, like I've heard people argue that that like well at least with the state charges he can't be pardoned by President Trump like I'm in no position to really evaluate that but I'm curious what you think about that.

I honestly can't even. Yeah. Beculate about what might have happened. That is very interesting. I do think that if DOJ wanted to charge him at this point, I mean not. They still could, right. But like, there I think was an opening for that to happen after Trump left. I suspect there is a very interesting FOIA request to be made to DOJ to see what kind of memo was circulated about whether or not they were going to pick this one up. They clearly declined to prosecute. The only thing that I could come up with to be honest and I looked and did not really see any meaningful discussion of this, of their decision not to prosecute.

The only thing that occurred to me is that they might have been reluctant to assert jurisdiction over a minor. But they can prosecute anyone over the age of 15 as an adult if they engage in violent crimes or if they are alleged to have engaged in violent crimes. It wouldn't entirely undermine their ability to do so. For whatever reason, they didn't. I think it is worth noting. I think it is, as I said, very curious. And it's particularly curious in light of the intense federal repression that has been faced by people perceived to be on the left. Yeah, absolutely. So again, I want to be very clear. I'm not suggesting that I want him to be federally prosecuted. I don't particularly. I'm not interested in arguing for more prosecutions or for making the state the arbiter of political righteousness or giving the state more enforcement power or more resources. But, you know, and look, no shade to Kenosha, Wisconsin, all right, but one of the things that federal prosecutors are really have a lot of experience doing is digital forensic investigations.

In this case, one of the sort of critical questions is, did he have specific intent to go across state lines and engage in violence. And I suspect that if you were to access all of his texts and metadata and social media posts, that you could probably find evidence of that specific intent. And I think that the federal government is probably better positioned to do that than the prosecutors in Kenosha. And they decided not to. Right. So, you know, and that is exactly the kind of investigation that they mounted against Daniel Baker, who just he's a the yoga teacher in Tallahassee who just got three and a half years for posting. Yeah, vague, sort of incoherent mutually contradictory, not at all frightening. Yeah, it's not. I wouldn't characterize this threats, but I hesitate to. Yeah. That, you know, he posted some stuff on social media. And now he's going to do is in federal prison. Yeah, my attitude on this, the care, the nature of what he poses that like if prior to his prosecution, you had brought that post to me, I said, well, probably not a great idea to post but also, literally every week a right winger in the media posts something significantly more actionable right now Chandler Papas currently being charged with assaulting six police officers in the state Capitol in Salem, just announced that he's doing armed training as a convicted felon outside of Portland later this

November, which if he's if he touches a firearm, he should go away to like based on the letter of the law he should go to prison for years like that's the way the law is written. He's going to happen to him he's going to get to train people with guns and continue to carry guns and it's it's fine for him. Anyway, I whatever. I'm sorry. It's okay. I guess your listeners can't see that I have my head in my hands. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I look what Daniel Baker did was certainly ill advised if. Yeah, it would characterize it. I have clients who have been visited by the Secret Service or have been visited by the FBI for saying stuff that when they call me and they're like, Well, I just said this and I'm like, Yeah, I know that you're not going to actually do that but maybe don't, you know, it's it's ill advised. It's ill advised, but it's protected by the very first amendment, more or less. And, you know, I've said this before I don't think the solution to to being surveilled on social media is self censorship.

I think it is courage, but I also think that discretion is the better part of valor. So yes, pick your battles and maybe. Understand that it's not fair, you know, yeah. And also like what do you gain by, you know, being bump just on the internet. No, it's one of those things where yeah, if that guy had had a high dollar lawyer, if he if he'd been a rich person. Yeah, maybe he would have gotten away with it. Who knows but like he it's it's he certainly would have gotten no I can certainly say he would have gotten away with it if he'd been a right winger because a bunch of every single day. I can't make any speculation about that particular case. But I can say that the people who are being surveilled intensely and targeted for that kind of repression are not the people on the right. People on the right are able to make those kinds of statements and not be particularly taken seriously, even when they should be.

And people on the left are presumed to be, you know, antifa super soldiers. So, you know, I think the decision not to assert federal jurisdiction in the written house case is interesting. It is noteworthy. I'm really curious about what was going on there. And it has had a sort of cascade of effects, including I doubt that the forensic digital investigation was as good as it would have been had it been federal. And I doubt that the, I mean he's facing multiple charges, but I don't think that he would have been as likely to go to trial had he been federally charged. So again, I don't, you know, this is not an argument for more federal prosecution. Yeah, of course. But like, I think the breathless outrage that we're seeing in, you know, these headlines, where people are correctly identifying the hypocrisy of the criminal legal system. I think it's sort of an exercise in point missing.

You know, this prosecution, like many of the prosecutions that we see or the prosecutions that don't happen at all, that involve members of the dominant class or people who uphold the values of the dominant classes. It is sort of proof of concept that it's possible to effectively allocate the burden of proof to the prosecution. It's possible not to go super hard on people and punish them for exercising their trial right. Right. I mean, it's, it's possible to treat all people accused of offenses in this way. And I would much rather, I mean, obviously my ultimate goal is to dismantle the entire system, you know, but, but in the meantime, I don't think what we need is more vicious prosecution of the right. I think we need consistent and commensurate prosecution or lack of prosecution. We need a, you know, I think that seeing the way that the right is treated should be evidence for and an argument for the possibility of treating all people with more leniency, rather than, you know, intent the intense federal repression that that we are facing and have been facing, you know, since the federal rates. So, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Moira, that is the stuff I wanted to ask about. Is there anything else that I mean, sure, I go off on liberals somewhere. Please. Please. I mean, Garrison is a huge fan of liberals. He's got actually a full back tattoo of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. But they're, they're in the volleyball scene from Top Gun. It's an incredible tattoo. He did it all freehand on his own back. Amazing. This is like the Garrison. I hope I don't receive any. I hope I don't receive any awful fan art now. Oh, no. Someone do it. Come on. Come on. Photoshop Garrison's head onto, onto Roger Stone's back and Photoshop Nixon's head out and the volleyball scene from Top Gun with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Do it. Do it.

So what's going to do it, Garr? Workplace abuse. Somebody is definitely going to do it. This is. You consume me for this and you'd be right to do so. But let's get back to liberals. And I might represent you. Trial of the, Trial of the Century. Yeah, that sounds great. I think this is a trend that we see with people who are not necessarily focused on looking at the ways that the law is always going to be used first and worst against the already most vulnerable. Right. So we've seen things like, I think there's just this very well documented liberal impulse.

And I think it's very well intentioned, but it's very dangerous to do things to like assume that the system somehow works or should work and that it just needs to be like followed more closely. Yeah. And if we push for things like if we like use the law to constrain things that I would agree are the most harmful excesses of bigotry. Right. Yeah. That the law would be a good tool for, for addressing violence and bigotry. Yeah. The law does not, that is not what kind of tool the law is. When we push for things like laws regulating political speech, including so called hate speech, laws regulating what are referred to as hate crimes, laws regulating who can carry a firearm and what they might look like. So pushes for limiting the places or circumstances under which you could protest or demonstrate, right, which, you know, which was done.

There was a real big push to forbid anti-choice activists from protesting outside of clinics. Right, which I understand, right, but what actually is the upshot of doing that when we see this kind of push to use the law as a tool to enforce a particular political agenda. It is not, you know, it's, it's just a very ill conceived way to approach this because the law is never going to protect the most vulnerable. Well, these structures of power that remain in place. And so, you know, it's just always going to be leveraged against the people who have the least amount of power. And, and so, you know, this, this sort of response to the written house stuff to me is just essentially a recuperation of that impulse. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a little like that old, I think the joke is attributed to Gandhi. I don't know if Gandhi actually said it, but like he was asked, what do you think of Christian civilization? And he said, I think it would be a wonderful idea. What do you think of the fair and equal rule of law? Sounds nice.

It was either Gandhi or Groucho Marx. Yeah, one of the two. Yeah, maybe both, maybe both. I don't know that we ever saw them together. Right. So, I don't know. I, I, it's, it's obviously it's too early to, it's one of those things where all of the complaining about the unfairness of the trial of written house winds up getting rammed into a legal wall. Metaphorically, may seem silly and content or in retrospect, or he may, this may be the thing that ignites a new wave of vigilantes showing up at protest with guns. Yeah. But it has to be untouchable. Like really, we don't know. The big fear is that there's a set of precedent that will allow other people to use quote unquote self-defense claims in effort just to kill black activists, to kill activists on the left, to kill people wearing, you know, black hoodies and bandanas. Right.

Yeah. That's the, that's the big fear out of this situation. My, my expectation is that if written house gets off, or even just gets very minor, like, if it's, if he's, if he's out of jail quickly, within about six months, he's going to be a millionaire. Absolutely. Yeah, that's the way the way it works. I would gently ask you to think about what happens if he doesn't, because he's convicted. We are going to see a deepening of the repression that is faced by everyone on the left as well. We lose either way.

Yeah. No good choices on the table. There's no winning. I guess I think it, I mean, part of it, I guess depends on, on what he's convicted for. Because some of the stuff has, I would, it seems to me, some of the things he's charged with, if convicted, there's more potential negative implications across the political aisle than, than with others. Like, if, if it's ruled murder, I don't know, that feels less worries. I mean, I have some concerns about the crossing state line stuff. I don't know.

I mean, none of it's, none of it's good. I guess where I am is I, I, I remember vividly how much the, the situation on the ground changed after Kenosha, just in, in Portland even. I mean, Garrison can, can back we up with this. They were there for that too. Like it was a, it was a significant shift in the feeling of deadliness, you know, whenever there was a right wing, left wing confrontation. Yeah, and someone died, someone died a few days later. And, and a fucking gunfight. And I, I don't know.

I don't know Moira. I don't know. I don't, I don't want written house to get off scot-free for shooting three people. You're absolutely right. There's no, there's no winning with the legal system. The only way to win is not to play. The only way to win is not to play. So form your own breakaway civilization.

Yeah, escape and also Gandhi and Gandhi. Yeah. And no run Hubbard take to the sea. Yes. Yeah. Always. Look, I don't, I don't think I'm not looking for him to prevail on the self-defense. Yeah.

Not like none of this is going to make me feel good. Right. But I think that whether or not he is punished, whether or not he is convicted. There will be negative repercussions. And all of those negative consequences will redound to the detriment of the people who are already facing the most intense federal repression. Yeah. That is, I mean, and in fairness, like this is the case of a child who killed two people

and is now we are determining whether or not this child will spend the rest of their life in a cell. None of this should make anyone feel good no matter what happens. It's a thoroughly bleak story. Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. Because this kid is never going to have a chance to grow up and be like, oh, I was being

like a horrible. No, they'll never be able to adjust to anything else. So rather than being this person that like culturally has been created, right? They are they are like a cultural thing. They are an item. They're not a person anymore. Yeah. And they'll never be able to escape that.

Yeah. I was a piece of shit when I was 17 and if I had had access to an AR 15 and a chance to feel like a hero, I might have done something horrific too. And instead you were just doing sloppy stakes and it's fine. And now it's fine. You watched. I think you should leave Moira. I'm sorry.

Have you watched? I think you should leave Moira. No. Oh, it's good. It's good. I'll check it out. I'll take a look. Yeah.

I don't know. Well, thank you, Moira. This is always appreciated. It's good. I don't know. Like were you could we've talked a bit about anarchism? How many of how much of like your belief about the way the world ought to be and is came as a result of getting into the guts of the legal system?

You mean did I become more devoted to anarchism when I went to law school? Yeah. I didn't become less devoted to it. I remember when I was going to law school, people kept saying, oh, you're going to become really conservative. And I was like, I don't think that's true. That seems seems fake. And in fact, I remember being in my criminal procedure class and just thinking how in the

world can anyone at any law school read Miranda, which is a case. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into

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

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is where someone is, you know, just horrifically abused by police in order to extract a statement.

How could anybody read this case and not come out of law school with a deep contempt for law enforcement? You know, I know that it happens. I don't know how. Always uplifting. Yeah. I mean, it's important to know, you know, when I was younger and poor and dealing with things like taxes, I would often go like years without paying them.

And I would like ignore debts and bills until like my student loans until it became like a serious problem because I didn't want to look at it. I didn't even want to like look at the scale of the issue and grapple with it. I just wanted to run away from it. And when I actually like sat down and figured out my situation and like really came to understand like what I needed to do in order to deal with those problems. Like it was stressful and it sucked and it was fucking days of work. But getting understanding the scope of the problem I'd gotten myself into was a necessary

step to like fixing the situation. And I think the same is true with like this kind of shit. It's not fun. Nobody who is I think a reasonable person like wants to dig into the US justice system and get into the guts of it because it's bleak as hell. But you need to because it's it's you can't escape it unless you flee the country and live in a place with no extradition treaties or international waters. I feel like you're talking about a lot of the people you've profiled.

Yeah. Your other podcast. I mean Ecuador does sound nice. I'm sure it's lovely this time of year. Yeah. I think you're right. We need to be able to have a sort of clear eyed assessment so that we can accurately identify and effectively address the problems.

Unfortunately, I think the problems are so all encompassing that I don't know that there's I would venture to say that there is not a real totalizing solution. No, that doesn't involve total abolition. Yeah, I agree with you. But in the meantime, I mean, I think there are there are things that we can do to to advocate for our clients or my clients. As an individual, you can do to protect yourself. And that's why it is important to have some sort of working understanding because you

can keep yourself and the people around you at least somewhat safer if you do understand the beast, even though your goal is to is to destroy it. And that's, I think, the only reasonable goal when you really understand it. It still behooves you to to understand it. I mean, it's the same with like the same with what Garrison and I do with the fucking Nazi spending all this time in weird telegram channels, like reading what they're trying to understand them, because you do need to understand them to effectively combat them. It's not for the faint of heart.

No, no, no. Yeah, neither is what you do. The message is that we're all well adjusted and we're all great. We're all doing great. We're saving up for that boat. Nobody has any secondary trauma. No. There's no secondary trauma in international waters, Moira.

I have that. That my old friend LRH told me that. Just you and the open sea. And a bunch of 20 year old searching for gold that I buried in a past life. That doesn't sound fun. Yeah. He is both fascinating and terrifying. Yeah.

Yeah. Just just like just like our legal system and that legal system and that wraps up this episode. That brings us around Moira, do you have anything you want to plug any any place maybe our listeners could send donations that would help somebody who's going themselves against a wall at the moment. I would certainly suggest that people look into whatever bail funds are local to them. There's one I know in New York called COVID bailout NYC.

That's doing incredible work right now to get people off Rikers Island, which is having a humanitarian crisis of just unbelievable scope. To me, like the conditions on Rikers right now are at least as bad as the conditions that led to the Attica uprising. So I would always, always direct people to give money to local bail funds. I also want to plug the National Lawyers Guild, anti federal repression or federal defense hotline, which is 212 679 2811 212 679 2811. If you call that number or you can call that number if you are having unwanted contact with federal agents, and you can be advised by an attorney. Who is me about your rights and responsibilities with respect to federal agents and I will try to connect you with appropriate resources in your area.

This is not the hotline to call if you've been injured by a police officer. This is the hotline to call if you have been visited by the FBI. Don't talk to cops. If you are contacted by law enforcement say I am represented by counsel please leave your name and number and my lawyer will call you. And remember that you cannot talk your way out of an arrest but you can talk your way into a conviction. All great points all great things to be aware of. Speaking of great things to be aware of be aware that we'll be back tomorrow unless this is a Friday in which case we'll be back next week from now until the heat death of the universe. Thank you so much.

You're so welcome. You're navigating adoption presented by adopt us kids brought to you by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the council. Make sure to check out drink champs your number one music podcast on the black effect podcast network. Host no re and DJ EFN sat down with artists and icon yay which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing. Yay returned and everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out drink champs conversation with yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday. We'll see you in the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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The forest near you and start exploring at discover the forest dot org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the ad council. Hello and welcome to it could happen here a podcast about the continual state of bad things happening and how sometimes you can make them less bad or not happen. Today we're going to I'm Christopher Wong by the way and today we're going to be talking about Bosnia a place where things went about as bad as they possibly can. And about how they're heading in very very scary directions. Now and with us to talk about this is our Nessa Christian. Our Nessa is a genocide survivor and a academic expert on genocide in general Nessa. How are you doing. You know, I'm doing.

Okay, I think all things considered. Yeah, you know, being sort of bombarded on a daily basis with, you know, possible threats and talks about, you know, a new conflict war brewing in the Balkans. Not an easy thing to condemn. Yeah, definitely not. Yeah, but other than that, I'm doing great. Thanks for asking. Yeah, I'm glad I'm glad I'm glad you could be here with me today because the Balkans extremely complicated place which I guess is true of most places but yeah and so I guess that that's that's where I wanted to go with my first question because reading about what's happening now my first instinct was go back to the Dayton Accords but I'm actually not sure but that's that that's that's even the best place to start and so I wanted I wanted to

I guess ask you if so okay so if you're coming into looking at the Balkans for the first time and you're trying to understand what's going on now. Where do you think is the best place to start on it because I think, you know, the best, God it's so hard. We're talking about so much history, honestly, but the thing is, let's, you know, let's start with the death of Tito. That's always a good place, I think, because that's really when things started to kind of shift in the Balkans and the former, you know, socialist Yugoslavia was really once Tito died and his place became, you know, empty as this sort of unifying factor of all the various ethnicities and nationalities within Yugoslavia, you know, once he was gone that sort of left this vacuum that needed to be filled and unfortunately instead of being filled by another socialist, you know, pro equality pro unity leader, it was filled with a nationalist vacuum, which is kind of where we still are. Unfortunately, you know, it started obviously with, with little things, I think with little sort of conversations and little subtle, I guess, you know, ethno nationalist rhetorics, and it just kind of like grew and

spiraled from there and obviously, you know, that sort of thing led to Milosevic and Kosovo giving his infamous speech, which kind of really gave that full fledged stamp on, okay, yes, this is a ultra nationalist, you know, ethno nationalist president that we now have, who's threatening war across the other ethnicities, what do we do next. And at that point, you know, that's when you sort of see the other countries start to secede, you know, Slovenia, Croatia, they're attacked by Serbia, and then obviously eventually it goes down to Bosnia. And yeah, I mean, it starts with the ethno nationalism, as it always does in the Balkans, you know, I don't think we're, we're anything special in terms of having conflict with our neighbors, look at France and Ireland or America and Mexico, or anyone really, it's just, you know, I think people make it sound as if we're special, or we have these ancient hatreds, but you know, that's not really true. It all comes down to the fricking politics and the leaders and unfortunately, you know, Milosevic was removed, but his policy, his beliefs continue to kind of stick around, you know, I think, you know, people think of people like Milosevic and Radovan Karadžić, who were, you know, genocidal war criminals, as a thing of the past, but really you look at, you know, the Serbian president, or the Republika Sipska president. And they're really just a continuation of Karadžić and Milosevic.

So nothing, you know, has fundamentally changed since Tito died, except, you know, we got some new agreements, we got some new territories, some new ethnic lines drawn up, and new pretty buildings too. We have those now as well, but we don't really have that coexistence, at least not on paper, not in politics, certainly. I want to go back for a second to, I guess, the moment of Tito dying, because it's always been a sort of interesting thing looking at it for me, because I remember, I mean, you know, so it's from studying Chinese history, right? There's a period where, in the 70s, where, okay, like everyone's looking for reform in China, and, you know, what you would consider like the sort of the, I guess you could call them the, I don't know, left and right is complicated in China, but. You know, there are a lot of sort of what you would call like the sort of left socialist, like, democratic reformers, who, you know, I mean, people, like, they're looking at Yugoslavia as a model, and they're going, oh, we can have, like, workers' participation, and we can have these, like, democratic enterprises, and then that just implodes. And yeah, I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about that, because my very limited understanding of it is, like, there's an economic crisis from the oil shocks, and then once Tito dies, it's just like the wheels come off the whole system? I mean, that's a really good way of, like, putting it. You know, like, life in Yugoslavia, I don't think was, like, ever perfect, and I definitely don't think it was a perfect system. I think, you know, me being a Bosnian, who was born to very, I think, pro-Yugoslav parents, I just, like, many of my, you know, fellow Yugoslavs or ex-Yugoslavs have a tendency to look at Yugoslavia with, like, rose-colored lenses, you know. We think about the coexistence, the unity, the multi-ethnic part, the worker-owned, you know, socialist models, the fact that our parents, you know, were able to provide for their families and take vacations and travel and, you know, get together and all these sort of wonderful things.

But in the background, really, in the sort of depths of the, you know, politics and the economic issues were kind of always there. You know, the one thing that Tito did was, obviously, he relied, unlike, I think, other socialist leaders of his time is, you know, he basically worked with anyone, you know, the non-aligned movement, but also with the West. With Europe, you know, so he was a very picky choosy, I think. Yeah. His ultimate goal was, you know, the betterment of the country by kind of any means necessary. But I think, you know, he made mistakes, just like other leaders do, and I think, obviously, we had, you know, two issues. One, he was sick, he was dying. And two, there was an economic crisis happening.

And three, then we had, like, the economic reforms, which really shifted the entire, I mean, they just, they very much shifted the system that the Yugoslav people were very much used to. And it became more and more, you know, privatized after his death. And, you know, Milošević, he was, he was a banker, he was a businessman, he was, he was who he was. And I don't think that he ever really pretended to be a socialist. Yeah. Which is why I get so upset when American leftists call him a socialist or call him an anti-imperialist. Those aren't even words that, you know, he himself would have really used to describe himself, I think. But, but I think, you know, there was just, it was that sort of thing where there's an economic crisis brewing.

They have no ways to really fix it. People are broke, people are starving, suddenly the ownership, the worker, you know, owned sort of model is being shifted to a more privatized model. And people are just not happy. What's a good way to distract from that? Yep. Nationalism. You know, it's just, we see it happen everywhere. It's not a new, it's not like a new, you know, tactic.

It's a tactic that everyone has utilized, blame it on the other. So Yugoslavia didn't really have, you know, immigrants that they could blame it on, but they had Muslims. And so, and they had the Kosovo, you know, Albanians and the Bosnians. And that was, you know, enough. And suddenly the conversation really shifted. And obviously I'm simplifying all of this. Yeah. So much more complicated.

But, you know, there are books out there and that obviously go into a great, you know, level of detail into the actual sort of breakup. So I can give some recommendations later. But yeah, but I think in that sort of very simplistic kind of sense is there was an economic crisis happening. And the way to sort of distract that was the use of ethno-nationalism. And it just kind of spiraled from there. I think, you know, what Milosevic and what people like Milosevic always want is more power for themselves. And so his whole thing wasn't really ever about keeping Yugoslavia intact as Yugoslavia. It was keeping this vision of a greater Serbia alive.

Because the thing is, you know, if we had not had a person like Milosevic, if we just had somebody who was, you know, the second Tito, maybe more or less worse or better, who cares? I think people would have been fine. I think, you know, I don't see this like war breaking out. But instead we had Milosevic who was like way more concerned about consolidating power, exerting that control. And when he realized that he could use ethno-nationalism to get to his goals, of course he was going to use that, of course. Like, who would it? You know, we see it today with like what Trump did.

He utilized, you know, Muslims and immigrants and refugees and black people, all his scapegoats to distract from all the other things that are wrong with him, his leadership and the overall country. And Milosevic did the same. He just did what any other politician did. And, you know, that's the thing. I think, you know, in thinking about Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and all these countries that started to secede, I think if they had felt comfortable with, you know, staying in a country that is multi-ethnic, at least in the case of Bosnians, I'm not going to speak for the Slovenians or Croatians because they have their own, I think, complicated identity.

But with Bosnians, our thing collectively, I think, while we're not a monolith, but collectively was always where are united, we are multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural. And it's such a big part of like our entire history and identity. And so if the choice is being, you know, under Serb control, being secondary citizens, not having that equality, not having that multi-ethnicity, of course, we're not going to take that choice. Of course, people are going to want to, you know, when you have like that, you know, that boot on your neck of saying, like, we're going to control you, we're going to take your land, and we're going to basically rule over you. That's the deal with that. And, you know, unlike a lot of the other countries in former Yugoslavia,

Bosnia really was the most multi-ethnic. It had one of the highest rates of, you know, mixed ethnic marriages and multi-religious marriages. And that kind of remains true even today. So especially in places like Sarajevo, Mostad, Beneluca, you know, the bigger cities, it has this very proud history of, you know, coexistence and multi-ethnic coexistence. So I think what happened for so many people was just a huge amount of shock. My own family, so many people in my own family just did not think it could happen there. They grew up with this idea of a united, you know, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. Brotherhood and unity. These are our neighbors, our friends, our teachers, our lovers, you know, whatever. They work with us. They live next to us. Of course, they're not going to turn against us.

And I think even while the politicians were fear mongering, while Milosevic and Karadjic were sort of leading their campaigns of, you know, especially Islamophobic propaganda, you know, in newspapers, on the radio, on TV, any speech that they gave, they talked about how the Muslims were coming, we were going to make their daughters wear hijabs. We were going to take over. We were going to kill them, you know, before. That's why they have to kill us because they don't kill us. We're going to kill them. It was a whole, you know, really brilliant propaganda campaign in so many ways that has now been replicated in so many other countries. Can we talk about that specifically for a second? Because I think there's something interesting in the way that, like, the way that you get people to do a genocide always seems to be, is like, you can't, it's extremely hard to get someone to, like, just murder their neighbor because they don't like them. You have to do this, like, they're about to exterminate us, and that's why we have to, like, strike first.

And that aspect of it, I think, is something that I see a lot when I do this. And, yeah, you have done infinitely more genocide studies, so I want to hear what you think about this. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. It's so funny. I gave, like, an interview on this specific topic, I don't know, like, two years ago. And I remember turning to the guy who was interviewing me because he was just like, his look on his face was, I just don't understand. Like, I don't, I can't wrap my mind about how people could do that to their friends, neighbors, students, you know, people they were sworn to, like, protect and people they lived with their entire lives. How could they do that? Well, you know, I turned to him and I said, yeah, I mean, if I told you right now, go kill him. You know, you probably would. But if I came to you day in and day out, and I slowly started to kind of whisper in your ear. And I started to tell you, you know, he's been really, really, I don't know, he's been saying a lot of stuff about you.

He's been quite negative. Or, I don't know, you know, do you think he's kind of acting weird? I feel like he might be planning something. He might be planning to take over your house. He might be planning to, I don't know, probably attack your sister. I think he's going to kill your sister. I think he might make your sister wear a job. So it's these very, like, slow, subtle things. And that's the thing that people don't understand. You know, violence never interrupts, like, never erupts out of nowhere. You know, it's always planned. It brews and it brews and it brews and then it explodes. You know, then there's the thing. But it comes slowly. And that's how it was in Yugoslavia. It wasn't this sudden, you know, oh yes, we're brothers and sisters forever. Go Tito, go Yugoslavia to, you know, oh, I hate you because you're Muslim and I hate you because you're a servant. I hate you because you're a Croat. No, that was not the case. The case was that this was a very slow campaign of propaganda that started in the 80s, almost immediately after Tito's death, let's say.

It started very slow. It started with the, you know, with the sort of, I think, disenfranchisement of the Kosovo Albanians and kind of the targeting of them. And again, yes, there was this economic component of it, but the way they wanted to kind of sidetrack that was, you know, well, you're hungry because the Kosovo Albanians are not, you know, and they're taking your jobs. Again, similar, you know, tactics that we see. Yeah, so it's not, it's not that much different. But yeah, you know, it starts slow and the Milosevic and the Karadžić and the Miladžić kind of campaigning was, God, it was brutal. I mean, like I always say, it was kind of brilliantly executed in that it really got to people so much that then, again, you know, they turned neighbor against neighbor. It was, it was subtle in the beginning. It was that sort of, what are the Muslims up to? Can we trust them? Can you trust your neighbor? Can you trust the Muslims, you know, talking about Islamization, talking about Ali Azad Begovic's book he wrote when he was like, I don't know, 18 or whatever, like, and, you know, talking about World War II, this was another thing. Like, everybody knows that there was a period in World War II where, you know, a lot of Serbs were killed by the Ustasha and by the Nazi collaborationists.

And I think, obviously, that's a real fear for, you know, for a certain group of people who went through that. So there was a lot of that as well. You know, that's going to happen again. That's going to happen again. Meanwhile, there was no grand plan. There was never even talks of, you know, committing violence or even, you know, talks of, you know, succeeding from Yugoslavia or anything. It was all, it was all set in motion by the Serbian leadership, you know, and I think that's what people don't understand. The Bosnian leadership, while not perfect, were simply reacting to what the Serbian leadership was in many ways making them do. And that's kind of what, you know, what happens in these situations, you know, they kind of push you and push you and push you until they're able to get, you know, some sort of rise out of you or a response out of you or get you on that sort of offensive where you have to defend yourself, you have to defend your identity, you have to defend who you are, you have to justify it and also in many ways. So yeah, the, you know, this sort of propaganda campaign, God, there was, you know, obviously the funny things were like things like they're going to make you wear the hijab,

it was also very insidious because they would target like these, you know, villages where they were like Bosnians and Serbs, you know, living together and they're quite small, but they knew that like in the village, obviously you usually have a gun or, you know, a shotgun because of the animals or, you know, working or whatever. But they would like target them specifically with like the, you know, the radio. And instead of like the big cities, like they worked up to the big cities, but they really started in like specific sort of areas like in Eastern Bosnia, especially because there was like a lot of, I think, majority Muslim like villages in that area that would also have like nearby Serb villages. I mean, there was that there was, you know, then sort of taking over all the radio stations and kind of going full force they think like in the sort of early days of the war, like we're talking April May of 1992. And they, you know, they would get people like pretending that they were Bosnians, they were actually Serbs and they would like talk about how they went to, you know, kill all Serbs or something like that. And when they were like having people in concentration camps, when they started kind of putting them in those concentration camps initially, they would make the victims in the concentration camps, the Muslims basically, you know, say that, oh, they're just there as a refugee

and the Serbian army is like protecting them and they're making themselves really welcome and stuff like that. So it was right at the beginning between especially 89 to like 92, the propaganda was so visible. And it really escalated and it was like settling everywhere. And you would hear Katarjic and Milošović talk about, you know, the Muslims and the things that we wanted and, you know, the things that the goals that we had, which after all were not, you know, nobody was saying it, there wasn't like a single person that was saying these things that they were attributing to us. But that didn't matter. What they were just doing was instilling enough fear and enough doubt in the population to eventually get them to take up arms when the time comes. And unfortunately, that's precisely what happened. When the time came, you know, a lot of people did take up arms, whether or not they wanted to, they had enough of that doubt and fear so in their minds over the course of, you know, several years that they ended up feeling like I have to protect myself. I'm not saying that's the case for every certain person. I think some, a lot of, you know, especially in higher leadership positions, a lot of them were just sociopaths who wanted to kill and I don't think it mattered why or how, because you're always going to get those kind of people. But I think when we're talking about how that shift happened so fast, we have to obviously discuss the propaganda, the huge amount of propaganda that went into, you know, implementing it. Yeah, I was like, such a tangent. Oh my God. No, that was really great. Yeah, I think, you know, yeah, I mean, I guess like, I think it's incredibly important for everyone to understand that propaganda works. But if you just say something over and over and over again, like it does, you know, eventually it pays off and, you know, the quote unquote payoff here is the genocide. And I guess, yeah, I'm not sure how far into detail you want to get into this here.

I think one thing I want to kind of focus on, because I think from reading what you've been saying about this, that this wound up being a big deal with like why things are sort of still fucked now, which is that like the international response to this. Like, I mean, one of the things I was always just like haunted by is there's this quote by Midorand, who's the Prime Minister of France, he's like, this is supposed to be the socialist, he's like the guy that like they finally put in power after like all of the stuff in the 60s and he has this line about like, I wish I wish I'd pulled up the exact quote, but it's basically like, I know the quote. Yeah, do you want to say it? I know the quote. It's, what was it, a peaceful but necessary reconstruction of a Christian Europe. Yeah. And Bosnia does not belong. So I remember that it's really stayed with me for such a long time because he said that at a time where the Bosnian Muslims were just completely defenseless. They were being dragged away to concentrate the shim camps, the massacres were already well underway. We're not talking about stubbornness in 95. We're talking about Visegrad, Sarajevo, Focha, Goroshta, even stubbornness in 92, you know, this is all in 1992. The things that happen in places like Buchkaun, Zvonnik and all these like places that I think the vast majority of people don't really know about and hear about. Like in Visegrad, a lot of my family is from there. And within a span of three months, that entire town, the entire town, which was once almost entirely Bosnian Muslim was ethnically cleansed. And that was done through forced deportations, concentration camps, mass rapes and rape camps of women, and obviously a lot of murders. So we're talking about one small town that took three months. And my family, when it comes to that town, on both my mother's and my father's side, interestingly enough, has such a long history. My parents fell in love there when they were like kids.

So, you know, they, you know, my grandmother's house was there, my grandfather's house was there on like both sides. And they, you know, so it's this beautiful little town where, you know, Bosnians, then Bosniaks and Serbs and Croats lived in Jews, Roma and, you know, my parents talk about the beauty of it and this wonderful sort of experience that they had when they lived there. My mom is from Sarajevo, and so am I as well, obviously, but Michigan was like the place that she would go kind of like for the weekend just because of the family that we had there. So very special, I think, in her heart, my grandpa's heart as well. And, you know, within, it's just like so hard to like fathom that within just a few months that town was completely ethnically cleansed. And that the international community knew this, and did nothing. You know, there is in, I believe it's in the Clinton tapes as well, but there's this thing about how they have provided aerial footage of the massacres that were being, that were being enacted in places like Butchko and Svodnik, where, oh my God, the paramilitary Serb forces did some horrifying acts of like violence and torture against the civilians. And they had, you know, showed it to the Clintons and they showed it to the French and the English and they did nothing, you know, they knew in 1992 that a genocide was unfolding and the Dayton peace agreement wasn't signed until 1995. So the international community, I think, has just as much of a responsibility in the, you know, the genocide of the Bosniaks, as Serbia does, because they sat there and they watched when they had all the power to stop it. They always had the power to stop it. They had the power to stop it before it even before even one person got killed.

And two, they, it's not even that they just watched, it's that they purposely left the Muslims defenseless because Serbia had all the Yugoslav army, all the weapons, all the, you know, everything, all the tools that they needed to commit genocide. They already had it. They had all the arsenal, everything. And Yugoslav army was like the most powerful in the region at the time. And I think the fourth, third, third or fourth most powerful in like the Europe, Turkey area. You know, quite a powerful army. And there was Bosnia, which had no weapons, no military. You know, you see these pictures of like civilians fighting against, you know, tanks and mortar shells and snipers. And it's like these, you know, youths, basically, and like converse and jeans and like an army jacket playing soldier, because that's all we had, you know, we had the homemade weapons, we had, you know, how to make your own bomb books kind of thing and trying to basically defend ourselves with anything that we could. They specifically did not lift the arms embargo, knowing that they were leaving us defenseless, like they just knew there was no way there was no doubt on everything that we have read about the international community response, everything that Clinton, McDonald, John Mayer, major, major, not mayor, major have said, you know, about it during that period shows us that they absolutely knew that we were defenseless, you know, and this wasn't, you know, a lot of people say I didn't know about the Bosnian genocide, but it was discussed, you know, I've looked at the archived footage. It was talked about on television, it was brought up in parliament and in Senate, there was people at the time were like, Why are we leaving the Bosnians defenseless? Why are we, you know, not helping them? Why are we allowing them to be led into slaughter? This is genocide. So even as early as 92 93, there was still people who knew about this stuff. We're telling the leaders, but nothing.

Yeah, I think like that part also, like it's not just that like they did nothing, like they did worse than do nothing, like I mean, Mitterrand's actively cheering it on, like, you know, the arms embargo is just like the arms embargo, if you're applying an arms embargo on a conflict where one side has tanks and the other side has like Molotovs, like you are actively supporting one of the sides. And I think that like that just like is completely lost in how like almost everyone seems to talk about this now because there's like, you know, because because when you sort of get like interventions later, like people are like, Oh, look, the West was like planning to intervene here the whole time. And it's like, No, like they were literally cheering, like Mitterrand was cheering, like, it's like, it's so frustrating because, you know, we you take what we know about. And here's the thing, I know that Islamophobia escalated after 911. But Islamophobia has existed for a very long time. And I think talk to the black Muslims of America, they will tell you more, you know, better than than I could ever tell you about the history of Islamophobia in the United States. So Islamophobia was always an aspect of life. And in Europe, Islamophobia, just like anti semitism, I mean, it is like the staple of European cultural cuisine, so to say. Yeah, it's like, it's like, yeah, it's like, there's, there's, there's, they have they have like, they have like the like the Triforce of Europeans of European civilization is anti semitism Islamophobia and hating the Roma. Yeah, it's like, however, the force. And so I think the sort of thing about the explicitness of European leadership, especially at the time in, in, you know, effectively ensuring that we were killed off, because a Muslim country in Europe could not exist. Yeah. And that's the thing that they said, literally said a Muslim country in Europe cannot exist. Like, the fact that that was so open and brazen, like kind of takes me back, but it really like tells you how much Islamophobia

has formed, I think the international community response on this. And it's so interesting to me now, I think, I've seen it over the past, I would say, especially five years, the sort of leftist genocide and sort of leftist anti imperialist kind of defense of Milosevic and they were the, you know, the serves with the actual victims, blah, blah, blah, NATO, blah, blah, Western intervention. And I'm just like, Oh my God, read a book, read an article from their actual quotes. There's no way that you can actually convince me that Europe, fortress Europe, and the United States of America would do anything that would benefit, you know, the Muslims. Well, this is one of the things I think was, is really interesting to me about the way that the sort of like left genocide's nihilism works, like it always seems to be rooted in Islamophobia, like, and I remember sort of seeing this with Bosnia too, where they're like, Oh, yeah, well, it's because it's because what's okay, they have two things. One, it's like, well, the Bosnians were Nazis, but the second one was that Oh, well, the Bosnians were like all jihadists. And it's like, like, it's the exact same thing you see with China. And it's like, Oh, it's because all the Uyghurs are like, Salafi jihadist ISIS CIA. And it's like, No. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's honestly laughable at this point, it really is. And it also just, you know, obviously, I'm a leftist, you know, I'm going to cheer the left on to an extent, but that is my red line. The genocide is my red line. And the reason it's, you know, my red line isn't just because I'm a genocide survivor, but because it's like, Oh, for God's sake, the data, the statistics, the research, the forensic, the analysis, the specific quotes, videos, articles,

you know, all of those things exist and are out there. And all you have to do is actually do your research and you will find out that actually know you're in the wrong. And the other thing is what you just said about the sort of thing of painting, you know, the Muslims is like the Nazis and the, you know, the extremists. You know, the thing about like the Bosnian Muslims is like, we don't hide the fact that there were people of our community that participated in Nazi Ustasha crimes. There isn't this goal of concealing those crimes of minimizing the crimes or pretending that they were right. There is, I'm sure a fringe group of people who defend these kinds of people, like there is a fringe, but I'm talking about the collective sort of Bosnian, you know, state level response as well as like an individual response is that the, you know, the Nazi division had like 17,000 Bosnian soldiers, and there's millions of Bosnians in the country, the vast majority ended up joining the partisans and stood against the Nazis. And the thing is, you can't, you, when it comes to Yugoslavia and World War Two and the Holocaust, you can't just say the Bosnians were Nazi collaborationists because the thing is so are the Serbians. So are the Serbs, so are the Croats. At that time, let's be honest, who the hell wasn't a Nazi collaborationist.

Now this doesn't excuse it. Absolutely not. But what it does sort of show is that that history, that period in Yugoslav history is really complicated because, you know, you had the Ustasha. And then you had the Czechniks, and then there's a period where the Czechniks were against the Ustasha, right, because like, the Ustasha were killing Serbs and Romans and Jews. But then the Czechniks turned around, and they're, you know, these Serb nationalists, they start killing the Jews and the Roma. And then they start working with the Ustasha to hunt down the Jews and the Roma, and then they start working with them to stand against the, you know, the Tito's partisans. Meanwhile, you know, Tito's partisans had a multi-ethnic coalition. Yeah, yeah. Again, we're talking about Serbs, Bosnians, Roma, Jews, Croats. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup?

Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. Ben Boland. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's the aliens, all sorts of people who were very anti-Nazis, pro, we're going to win, we're going to rebuild our country, we're going to make this beautiful multi-ethnic kind of state, which they did, which is amazing. But yeah, but it is a complicated sort of piece of history, so you can't really say, oh yes, they're the Nazi collaborationists, because at some point or not everybody was, and at some point or not, everybody was also present. When you start getting into, it becomes a way of getting people to, I don't know how to describe it, when it starts being this specific ethnic group as a whole is responsible for all of these crimes,

no they're not, that's not how this works, there's going to be people in the ethnic group who did things that were awful. There's also going to be people, especially in a situation like this, there's probably more people who fought them. That's such an interesting statement, because I'm going to compare to the Bosnian response after Dijonicide, which has consistently been, no, we don't believe that every single serve is bad, and we are only talking about those that took place, took part in these crimes, and those that concealed them. And that has always been the collective and state level response of all Bosnians. Now, you have to think about, I have a friend who's, who's 99, 99 members of her family were killed in February 2nd, July of 1995. That's an absorbent number of people. These were women, children, and men, and elderly. There was no discrimination when it came to her. I've sat with her, as she's read all the names of her, you know, killed family members.

That woman, with all the pain that she survived, with being there as a young girl in the midst of genocide, in the midst of these horrifying crimes, has never once publicly or privately, to me, said yes, old serves are the same, yes, all of them are war criminals, yes, all of them hate us. Absolutely not. And the thing is, I think about myself as well, like, you know, my earliest childhood memories, me being shot at by a sniper, knowing my father was in a concentration camp, knowing that my grandmother was just killed by a bomb, knowing that, you know, my biological dad was dying in a hospital from an attack, and my mother could also be killed because she was pregnant with my brother at the time. So these are my earliest childhood memories. They're not very happy memories. And I know why those things happened. You know, I know why I was being shot at by a sniper, and it was because I was Bosnian. It was because I was Muslim. And because I was seen as the enemy, even though I was, you know, a little kid at, you know, six, seven years old, and absolutely not a threat to anyone, and nobody should have been shooting at me. They did anyway. Even though that happened, I never had that feeling of all Serbs are awful. All Serbs are, you know, I'm going to paint them all with a brush. But a lot of them, unfortunately, especially on the, you know, the, the ultra nationalists that continue to not just deny the genocide, but also glorify it and celebrate it. They do paint everyone with the same brush, you know, and, and the worst thing, the funniest thing is that they paint themselves with the same brush, you know, they, they think that they get to speak for every single Serb person.

And that's the tragic path. Like, I'm not, I'm not, I get accused of like constantly talking shit about Serbs. And I'm like, I absolutely am not. I'm talking about the nationalists that I will call out all the nationalists, whether they're a Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, American, whatever. But we're talking about, you know, what you're doing to me and your response to my criticism of nationalism is actually the thing that's ruining your reputation. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the nationalist gambit. It's, it's, you have, you have to conflate all of the individual people, the ethnic group and the state. They all have to be this, like, you know, this must be this, like, organic totality. And it's not true. It's just not. But that's, you know, that's, that's, that's the sort of, it's, it's the modus operandi behind their entire ideology. It's what they deploy, you know, it's what they deploy when they do genocides is what they deploy when they have to sort of like, you know, sort of promote it openly or less openly afterwards. Yeah, it's like that. Justificate. It's how they justify it. I think, you know, and like, we all know about the 10 stages of genocide. But my colleague, who's brilliant actually has often talked about that denialism is not really the final stage of genocide. It is, in fact, triumphalism. And that's what we're actually seeing in Bosnia, you know, we're not, I get genocide denialism from American leftists and like British leftists who are on a certain spectrum and of a certain.

I don't get genocide denialism from at no nationalist service. What I get from them actually is very openly celebrating and threatening another genocide. They're not in my mentions saying, oh, there was no genocide. Yeah. They're in my mentions saying, no shit's a step and thought which is basically a slogan that says knife, wire, shabbat needs that and it's like, basically, a threat that another shabbat needs that will occur. They're in my mentions in my emails and in my dms, sending me threats about how they can't wait till I'm put in a rape camp again how they can't wait till they kill my family till sorry, I will get bombed again how, you know, we're they're going to finish the job. How that come on, which is a hero because he killed all those, you know, people in serbineza and Sarajevo and Shagrad, Karajic is a hero because he's the same lotion which is a hero because he believes in a greater Serbia. These people don't hide it. And that's the thing so it's very like, just today, you know, I'm first thing in the morning I open my Twitter and the first thing that I see is a Bosnian activist arrested for protesting the dot com la ditch mural, which the Serbian police were guarding, they were guarding a mural, get like a mural of a war criminal who committed genocide who everybody knows committed genocide, a mural glorifying that they were got the police were guarding, you know, the mural, and inflicting damage on innocent civilians who were there to, to protest against the mural. And so I think that really tells you so much about the issue in the Balkans.

This has been it could happen here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview in which we discuss the dangers of what's currently happening in Bosnia. In the meantime, find us on Twitter at happened here pod. And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram for the rest of our shows at cool zone media. I'm Colleen with join me the host of eating while broke podcast, while I eat a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, kidding in Asia. This is the professor we're here on eating while broke and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to eating while broke on the I heart radio app on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What grows in the forest trees.

Sure. Know what else grows in the forest. Our imagination, our sense of wonder and our family bonds grow too. Because when we disconnect from this and connect with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discover the forest dot org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the ad council. What could it could happen here, a podcast about bad things happening and how they can continue to happen if you don't stop them. I'm your host Christopher Wong and today we're doing part two of the interview with genocide expert Arnes Acustra focusing on the absolutely horrifying things that have been happening in Bosnia recently. Here's the interview. Hope you enjoy.

Can you give an explanation of what's happened in the last couple of weeks because it's terrifying and I don't think enough people are talking about it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, so that's where are we now. You know, I'm just going to talk briefly about the date and agreement because I think the audience needs to understand what the date and agreement is. And I was going to talk about it earlier, but I went off on the tangent. So my apologies. And so obviously, you know, where the war is happening to genocide is happening. 8000 people are killed in just a matter of a few weeks, few days really. The international community does not act at that time. Towards the end of the year. Another attack happens in Sarajevo and Marcalis civilians are once again targeted waiting for bread fruit. I think it was humanitarian aid at the market. And that's kind of when the international community starts to open their eyes a bit and negotiations start and not to worry with the details of negotiation process was absolutely ridiculous. It was a very simple time to discuss that it was about splitting Bosnia down ethnic lines. And that's ultimately what happened with the date and agreement. Yes, peace quote unquote, peace was achieved, but the date and agreement mandated so that there would be a three member presidency instead of having one president, we would have a three member presidency. It's a rotating presidency. There would be a Croat representative, a Bosnian representative and a Serb representative.

That also means that there's no representatives for anyone who's an other, whether they identify as Yugoslav, Roma, Jewish, Bosnian, but not Bosniak like they, you know, it's just there. There's no space for the other in this constitution with the state and peace agreement, but that's for another day. They also split the country down by ethnic lines. So all of those genocides and ethnic cleansing that the Serbs had just been committing all over eastern Bosnia up in the north. You know, basically the international community said, Good job. Here's your own territory that you ethnically cleanse. Yeah. So they split the country down, you know, these ethnic lines and, you know, the war stops and then now we have to sort of contend with this, you know, peace agreement with the new constitution. We get this call the OHR office of the high representative. The high representative is basically a person who holds the highest power in the country. They're not a Bosnian. They're actually kind of, they're put in place there by the international community. So the OHR kind of, you know, comes and breaks us up when we're squabbling over issues. And this has been anything from things like the flag, like the new flag of Bosnia. The flag of Bosnia that was the flag of Bosnia had to sort of be replaced because the OHR deemed that it would be, you know, offensive to the Serbs or the Croats.

And the same thing was like the national anthem. So they hold a lot of power. Now, just recently, we switched OHR representatives. So we have a new high representative before it was Valentiniansko. And his final kind of part of his, you know, time as the high representative was to enact a law against genocide denialism, which the Bosnians have really been campaigning for for years because, you know, I think in your birthplace in the place where the worst crime ever could, you know, happen to you, happen to you where, you know, 50,000 women were raped, 100,000 people were killed, 600 plus mass graves were, you know, dug up to hide the crimes and the massacres. People want to be able to, you know, know the truth and be feel safe with the truth. So the genocide denialism law was good, but this is kind of when things started to, you know, shift a bit because I think Dada came out, who is currently the Serb member of the presidency, who controls the Pupilka, which is the entity where that's considered the Serb entity, but Bosniaks also live there as well. He came out and he said, well, if they pass the genocide denialism law, we're going to secede within eight days. And obviously that didn't happen. Yeah, months ago. And here's, here's the thing. Milana Dada has been threatening secession for years now. This is not anything new. What is new is the fact that this time he seems to talk, not just talk and threaten about succeeding, but actually has started to kind of draw up the papers.

And not, not to legally secede, which he's not allowed due to the date and agreement. But he is, he has drawn up the papers to start pulling out of all the national level. So, you know, Bosnia is the country, the public has subscribed an entity, the Federation is an entity, but both of them are accountable to the national sort of state level institutions. And he's basically at this point, you know, been saying, I'm gonna, Republic of Sub-Scot to Serbs, we're leaving, like we're, we're gonna form our own army. Yeah, we're gonna pull out all the Bosnian state institutions. We're gonna have Serb only, you know, Serb only courts, Serb only lawyers, Serb only justices, Serb only, I don't know, passport, whatever, control, Serb. Basically, anything that was at a national level, whether that's like a healthcare institution or like, I don't know, procurement for supplies for the office, they're gonna have it as like Serb only. Obviously, I think the danger is right there, Serb only. Where have we heard that before? We heard that in the 90s. And the biggest sort of red flag has really been this thing about them forming the Republic of Sub-Scot army. And they're not even talking about forming a new army, they, he specifically stated the words reforming the Republic of Sub-Scot army. Now, the Republic of Sub-Scot army, you know, was led by Karadijic and Maladijic in the 1990s. These are the same people that put girls as young as 10 and 12 years old into rape camps that killed babies as old as, you know, a few months that killed, you know, elderly women as old as 100 years old.

You know, these were the guys that were going village to village, city to city, killing, torturing, bombing the hell out of Sarajevo. These were the guys that, you know, would throw like 3000 to 4000 mortar shells on Sarajevo and snip it. I don't even know how many times, like tens of thousand times per day. It's just, these are the bad guys, basically. So I think there is an alarm right now going in Bosnia. And it is the reason why so many of us are quite worried, quite frightened, because on one hand, he has threatened, he has made, you know, Dalek has made plenty of threats before. But on the other hand, in prior times, the international community has somewhat gotten involved. You know, the US has sanctioned him. The UK has scolded him. The EU has said like, you got to chill out otherwise, you know, Serbia doesn't get into the EU. You know, there's, there's always been some sort of, I don't know, influence there, the OHR's influence as well. But in recent years, the international community has not stood by its responsibility to the date agreement. I mean, here's the thing, they implemented this agreement. They made it so that we, the Bosnians have to abide by it. But they also have a responsibility to ensure that it is actually being upheld and that they're doing their job in accordance with the international, like with the date and agreement. So, you know, the date and agreement was very kind of specific that it was one, a temporary solution, and two, the international community was to work on finding a more permanent solution that will bring about, you know, actual sort of reconciliation and justice and all of these things. But they didn't. They, you know, they've left sort of Bosnia to kind of live on its own. And now they're not really doing much. I mean, the EU, the US, they're doing their typical thing of strongly worded open letters.

And Doddick seems less afraid than ever before. He seems very brash. I mean, he is a fool and a half and an ultra nationalist. But right now, I feel like he has so much confidence. And I think he also knows that, like, the US and the EU have so many bigger problems to worry about rather than Bosnia. And so we're just out of priority so he can play around with that. And then we're also, you know, seeing like the Secretary of State, Matthew Palmer, hanging out with him the day after this man openly stated on national television that he is reforming the Republican because there being very cozy and very friendly and stuff like that. And here's the thing. I've never been really a big believer on the international community because come on, like I have the experience speaks for itself. I've already lived, lived their help. And I'm like, no, thanks. Please stay away. But I don't live in that world. I live in a world where, you know, I'm from a small country that is unfortunately very dependent on outsiders and on the international community. So while I would love to say, well, fuck the EU, fuck the US, we don't need them. The reality is that we do need them. We do need them to do their jobs. And because if they don't, I am really worried that the situation is going to continue to escalate further and further. And this appeasement of Doddick, especially in the last several years has gone on so much that at this point, I think you have to like start to wonder, like, do these, does the international community, you know, even want peace and stability in Bosnia, or did they benefit from our constant instability? And what is their long-term plan? So that's kind of where we're at right now. I think there's, you know, there's the people in Bosnian politics and activist circles right now who are calling on US leadership or calling on EU leadership. And there's a lot of, oh, no, the EU sucks. The US will help us. The US sucks. The EU will help us. Turkey is going to help us. No, Turkey sucks. There's a lot of like disagreement.

I think the reality is that, oh my God, because it sucks that we are in this position where we have to rely on external sources, because once again, we are feeling alone. Once again, we're sort of being backed into a corner. And once again, we're being threatened with a prospect of, you know, a new war. And I think the reality is the minute, the minute that he gives that green light for that Republic of Sub-Sahara army to be formed, there will be violence. And we've seen what happened before. We cannot afford to even have one act of violence. We cannot afford to have even one person injured, let alone die because these people in Bosnia on all sides have suffered so unbelievably much. They are exhausted. They are still bearing their loved ones 26 years later. They still haven't found that peace. They're worried and scared for their future. And they deserve so much more. They really, really do. So I think, you know, I'm hoping and praying that, you know, we obviously continue talking about this issue. And we try to pressure those people in power to, you know, calm the situation down. But the reality is that this is going to be our future for as long as they exist. And until the Bosnian constitution is completely reformed, and Dayton is completely either thrown out or reformed to actually allow for, you know, actual multi-ethnic united country that's not broken up across ethnic, you know,

lines and it's not ethnically segregated, we're going to continue being the situation. So yes, for right now, I think let's talk about this and let's kind of pressure those powerful people. But really long term, it's time to start thinking about ending the date and agreement and it's time to start thinking about actually building that, you know, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious country that we fought for. You know, you were saying like, okay, like, what is Europe actually wants out of this? And, you know, I mean, I think it's pretty clear, like, okay, so, you know, the Dayton Accords are like, okay, we're just going to give all of the ethno-nationalists like their own fiefdom, right? It's like, okay, here's your award for the genocide you get, you're like, yeah, and I think, you know, like, that's a very classical, you know, that's what Europeans do, right? It's like, yeah, they come in, they support ethno-nationalists, and it's like, you know, they don't want this, like, they don't actually want, like, a functioning multi-ethnic, multi-racial society, because, you know, oh, the horror wait, hold on, what if other people look at that and go, wait, why do we have, like, yeah, I think that, I don't know, I think you see this both, you know, back and what they were originally doing in the 90s and, you know, they come in, later, and they're like, oh, hey, look, we're heroes, we helped them do the genocide, and then kind of sort of did something maybe later, and I think, like, yeah, I don't know, the possibility of that happening again, the possibility of it just being, you know, this is, it's like, oh, hey, we have Bosnia, this is where we do press tours for, like, why the American army is good, and, like, fuck anyone else who actually lives there is just- Yeah, I mean, like, come on, they're America, like, let's be honest here, like, I'm not saying they're an all-powerful entity, but what I am saying is that if they really wanted to, the people who are in power would not be in power, right?

Yeah. But these people, people like Dadek, people like Dragan Chovic, who is the Croatian ethno-nationalist leader, who is also, by the way, directly involved in this mess, and once again, we're seeing that thing of the 90s of, you know, Croatia and Serbia want to split Bosnia up and, you know, break it for themselves, basically. That's, you know, it's just now, instead of Friar Tugman and Losevic, it's now Chovic and, you know, Dadek. I talk about Dadek a lot more because I think he's a more immediate threat, but it's important that we don't forget that Bosnia is also facing the Croatian threat as well. And, you know, but I think about it this way, like, I know for a fact that if these people did not benefit the system somehow, they would not actually be in power. Yeah. But they do, they do benefit them. And I think, you know, in a metal and all bright called Mila had Dadek a breath of fresh air in, you know, the 90s when he came to power. And then, and now here we are, you know, Dadek's threatening war and threatening secession and talking about Serb-only, you know, spaces and Serb-only armies. And it's just, oh, it's exhausting. But yeah, it's, it's also funny. It is funny when you think about it because the reality is that it doesn't, it never had to be like this.

And it doesn't have to be like this in the future either. But unfortunately, it will continue to be like this because that's just, you know, what the powerful want, like what those actually who have some power want. And that's the thing that sucks because when you, you know, I feel like I'm starting to sound conspiratorial, but I'm not. And when you think about like Europe overall and how they looked at Bosnia, I think for the last, you know, 100 years and their policy towards Bosnia, it's really difficult for me to kind of be filled with any sort of confidence about what their plans are. Yeah. I mean, it's Europe in the United States, two countries that historically have never done anything bad, have never done any genocides and have never, yeah, just absolutely annihilated countries. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just, you know, they're the good guys. So like you said, you know, Bosnians, there are so much as like this press chore for, you know, these politicians to come and talk about why we're such a great example of the peace process. When we're really, we're not, you know, and the thing is, you know, they'll come on and they'll say, well, while Dayton wasn't perfect, it was the best solution at the time. And it's like, it was not, you know, but, but they have convinced that themselves that this was like a win for intervention and win for the international community.

Now, don't get me wrong. I, alongside everyone I know is extremely happy that the war ended and that the genocide ended. And I think until you're in that position of growing up in the midst of, you know, all these bombs and murders and tortures all around you and, you know, the only sound you ever hear are the sounds of bombs and mortars falling and sniper shooting at you. You won't really know how it feels when that finally stops and when you have some peace and how difficult it can be to think about obviously any future sort of prospects of war. And I think that's, that also is a contributing factor to the overall instability of policy because for 26 years now, our policy as a people, but as a country as well has been, as long as there's no shooting, which is not a sound policy, because, you know, settling for the bare minimum is not helping any of us. Our youths are leaving in observed amounts to Germany, to Austria, to the United States. People are struggling for jobs. People are struggling to find food. You know, all of these things on top of the threat of war and violence and conflict. So it's just, it's not a sound policy and I'm just hoping it will change eventually somehow. I mean, I'm going to keep doing my part, which is, you know, yelling and yelling at people on Twitter and in person and pressuring them to do the right thing and to obviously talk about this. But yeah, I just feel like we have such a long, long, long road ahead of us and, you know, peace is a process. It's a process. So I think we're just at the beginning of that process.

Yeah. So much more to do. I think that's a good place to end on with just the realization that, yeah, I mean, if there's no fundamental change in the structures and the forces and in the politics that created a war that created genocide, like, it's going to happen again. And so you have to actually change it. You can't just sort of put this bandaid on it and put it in stasis and just leave all the structures intact. You have to, you have to knock them over before you can build something else. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Vanessa, thank you so much for talking with me. Where can people find you and what books do you want to read? Because as we've said over and over again on this podcast, do not get your information from podcasts actually read books. Yeah, well, if you obviously I know our audience can't see it, but here's my little one of my little selections of books on Bosnia. Obviously, people can find me on Twitter. You know, type in my name ARNESA, but my at is at RRRRNESSA.

Yeah, Twitter's probably the best place, but also I have a book out so if people want to read it, it is about the Bosnian genocide. And it is based on real life experiences of my family and friends. It's called Letters from Diaspora. It's more so on the emotional side of things. But if you want to learn about the conflict from a leftist perspective, I always recommend Bosnia, Kosovo, and Yugoslavia by Mike Karadijas. It's the Marxist perspective on the breakup of Yugoslavia. Additionally, I have a PDF on my Twitter of tons of books. So if you want to learn more about Yugoslavia, about Islam in the Balkans, about the history of Bosnia, about the war genocide, feel free to shoot me a DM. I have a handy little guide that I hand out constantly to people. And there's also a list of books on like my website and stuff like that. I think I can post it. We can put a link to it in the description. I have read some stuff on there. It's very good. You should read it.

Thanks. I pride myself on reading really good reading lists, depending on topic. Yeah. Well, Anessa, thank you again. And yeah, this has been It Could Happen Here. Find us at It Could Happen Here pod on Twitter and Instagram. The rest of the shows that we do are can find it at the cool zone on the same places. Yeah. Oh boy. Genocide bad. Hope there's no more work to stop them. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So, who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeart Radio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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