Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 96

Episode Date: August 19, 2023

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911 what's your emergency? It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. In a killer, we were still on the loose. In the 1980s, we were in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. We weren't safe anywhere. Would we be next? It was getting harder and harder to live in Mompine.

Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The True Crime Podcast Sacred Scandal returns for a second season to investigate a led sexual abuse at Mexico's La Luz del Mundo Mega Church. Journalist Robert Garza explores survivor stories of pure evil experiences at the hands of a self-proclaimed apostle who is now behind bars. I remember as a little girl being groomed to be his concubine, that's how I was raised. It is not wrong if you take your clothes off for the apostle.

Listen to Sacred Scandal on the IHR radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up y'all, this is Eric Andreik, but I made a podcast called Bomming about absolutely tanking on stage. your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch. If you want, if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is being recorded far too early in the morning

With me to help me stay conscious is is my friend and coffee entrepreneur prop AKA Jason petty prop how are you doing buddy man? I'm wonderful on this fine day I almost did a aka song for getting which show I was like, oh wait, that's a zeitgeist bit. It happens to me all the time. Yeah. So which bit for which show am I supposed to do right now? Here's what we were talking about before the show, which is that we're both exhausted despite sleeping normally this week. I feel like this maybe something to do with these aliens everybody's talking about. Something's going on here. It's, yeah, aliens or just this like kind of week long sort of holiday festival. I've been a part of that apparently all of black America has been participating in.

We're all experiencing a level of bliss. I don't think we've had in a long time. That is a, that is our subject of today, which is I think the term generally being used for it is the Montgomery Riverboat Brawl. That seems to be what we've all settled on. Yeah. The fate in the water. I mean, there's new there's new spirituals and hymns. There's new spirituals and hymns. We didn't know it. The ballad of black aquaman. Yes. Love that kid.

But we should, before we get into all this, we should talk about what actually happened. Because I'm going to guess, there's at least a chunk of people listening who are like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? The short of it is, a couple of days ago, video dropped two different clips, I think, or mainly what people are watching, of a fight

at a riverboat dock in Montgomery, Alabama. And basically, what happens is you had this riverboat, and it's, you know, Montgomery, Alabama's got a lot of tourism. It's one of these big boats. It holds about 270 people, I think. Takes me up and down the river. You know, you go up and down the river. You look at the pretty things.

I assume there's there's beer or something, you know, it's all sorts of cities do this. So this boat is heading back into dock and they've got all these people who want to get off the boat because they've been on for a while and they have enough people to get back in line. And a lot of people to get back in. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, they have a set spot that is their spot and no one else is to park their boat at the dock as is usual for a large business like this. And some dudes with a pontoon boat have taken it up.

They've parked there. So, the captain gets on the PA for quite a while and is like, hey guys, move your pontoon. Hey guys, you got to get that pontoon out of here. Hey, y'all, if you don't get that pontoon out of here, I'm going to call the cops. And if you have open containers, the cops are going to fuck you. You don't want that. So why don't you just move? And these guys get like shitty at him and start like yelling at him and cursing at him, flipping him the bird. So he sends over his co-captain. And the captain of the boat from the videos I've seen appears to be a white sends over his co-captain. And the captain of the boat, from the videos I've seen appears to be a white dude, the co-captain is a middle-aged black man.

He gets off the boat and he goes over to just like move the pontoon boat, right? Which is the thing that boat people do when situations like this occur. It's not like an unheard of situation. And while he's doing it, a whole bunch of the presumably the dudes who own this pontoon boat, who are all white, surround him and start attacking him. And at one point, it looks like five or six people trying to, and he's for the record, he's holding his own. He's doing it. He's holding his own.

As long as you can. Yeah. And then a number of nearby people start running to his aid, including at least one of the kids on the river boat hops out or like hops into the water and like swim across. Yeah. You know, you're talking about the rest of this. Yeah. Yeah. There's a hood politics episode recorded where I try to do like initial reactions and try to add some, some like color to this, which will come out a little later. This will come out before that. But there's, yeah. So you're watching the video.

You can't, it's all inaudible. So you can't really hear, except for the people recording. You hear them talking, yeah, them talking, right? But judging from, there's so many context clues to understand what, talking, right? But judging from there's so many context clues to understand what's happening, right? So as the cocapped and the black dudes getting off the boat to come talk to these white boys, right? The way that you can just, you know when someone's like, and unfortunately for white people, y'all can't, when you're drunk, just your skin shows it. You know, say it like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, this dude's like your skin's very flush with color right now. So you're, you're

clearly drunk. You know, I'm saying, and it's hot as hell, because it's Montgomery, Alabama, right? It's also Montgomery, Alabama. So you just from seeing the interaction and the body language of both people in this conversation, you're like, okay, this conversation is getting intense. And then once the white gentleman decides he's gonna put hands on his black dude. The black dude throws his hat up into the air. He sure does.

He sure does. As a universal bat-signal. Now Robert, is that not a universal bad signal? I would go so far as to say it's like, that's damn near like a mortal combat opener, right? Like, say, half it is universal. It is universal. Man, it's about to throw your hair. Yes, it's like, all right. We bounce it though hands, right? So, so good. So good. So at that point, that's when like, clearly, like clearly either these white boys are very inebriated or have grossly underestimated the feeling of collective identity black people

have. Because when they decided to jump this man, you're in front of hundreds of black people. Oh yeah. Who are all waiting in line to get on this boat, right? Who are already pissed at you because you not moving. Yeah. Right. So, so when he does that, as you can see, there are people running, you know, black men

running as fast as they can to kind of help, you know, this, this, this co-captain, who by this point is being stomped because he's overpowered by five people. And then you see this young man swimming to the shore. Which is like, he's, I mean, that guy's a national treasure now. So I don't know that guy, but I can tell, we can tell a couple of things about him. One of them is that he reacts quickly in a crisis. Yeah, yeah. And the other is that pretty good swimmer.

Pretty good swimmer. And he's in a lot better state than a slow speed. Yeah. He must be a teenager because how you go ahead and energy to swim there and then still start doing work. Well, and then pull yourself up onto a dock when you have clothing. So things all soaked. Very impressive feet.

Yeah. So anyway, so as that happens, people finally catch up. The boat finally gets a chance to dock. Now these other people who were on the boat and watched all this happen are like, now it's our turn. So they get off the boat, go to the pontoon, shirts off again, another universal signal. If I've taken my T-shirt off, we're here. We're gonna throw down. So they start throwing down. I mean, it's women getting involved and then now it becomes this entire brawl, right? So, and if you've ever been in situations where brawls break out, they kind of move and shift as different people decide they want a part of it.

And other people get tired and somebody's finally, you know, those nosebleed and whatever. And while this is happening, there's a few clips where you can see whether they're security officers or police, they're kind of just watching, kind of like, eh, I don't know if we need to do anything about this just yet. Now, finally, the brawl gets around the corner

and a brave old man, old hit, who sees his opportunity while who is, who is brought, who has brought this air now. And he's got the soul of a sniper. This man is like watching and waiting to ask. Yes. Yes. Yes. So at this point, there are some security officers involved who have finally been like, all right, man, maybe we just, maybe we should stop this.

And it's almost like again, you can't hear it, but judging by their body language, the cops are kind of like, I don't know, man, and why voice kind of ask for it. Like, and you don't say it. So they just kind of watch it like hey man They asked for it man, and this is what happened. You should have moved your boat. Should you be talking shit? I'm gonna be like like like like a cat William says should you been talking shit? Yeah, so so anyway

they do this and this this hero of a man grabs a white folding chair and just wax a dude over the head with it who was attempting to attack some other people. Now, clearly, again, if you've been in a brawl, I may be adding color, that's not on the video, but like if you've been in a brawl, you understand at some point, you kind of black out and you just, you just get punched drunk. So while he's hitting a guy with a folding share, there's this other white lady who's attempting to intervene with the interaction that one of the security or cop guys is having with turns out, which probably one of her

compadres. And this is, by the way, a mixed gender brawl. There's, there's like, yeah, this is not, not just dudes throwing hands, pre-eously to this point. So it's, it's, it's, it's girls on girls, it's girls on dudes, it's dudes on girls, it's a brawl, you know? Um, so the officer, like officers do when you try to intervene with them,

having interactions with, with somebody, pushes the lady away.. Now, the ladies in river broke crocs, right? So her feet just fall right through the crocs, right? Uh, she gets pushed down and just happens to be in the eyesight of this of this 60 old man with a folded chair. And while she's down, he just turns and just wax her over the head with this chair. Oh, he sure does. He sure does. He gives it the WWE special. I mean, just new world order, suck it, just smacks her with a folding chair. And at that point, you, it's almost like, and again, it's all inaudible, but you just see the officers go like, shit, man. Yeah, now we gotta do something.

Now we gotta, like, fuck, man. Now we gotta arrest you, dude. Right? So the cops finally go like, what the fuck, man? They take the chair from the guy. And the dude, his body language is so like, like he doesn't even know what's happening. Like I'm just swinging, you know? So when the officer finally takes the chair

and they like, they're like, dude, you hit the lady. You hit the lady. You hit the lady. We gotta do something here. We gotta arrest you now, right? And which of course, the internet watching it and even the person holding, even the person shooting the video,

we all like, oh yeah, nah, he won't know. But he's definitely going to jail. That guy going to jail. Everybody else, yeah, might be fine. He's going to jail. Yeah. And that's pretty much where the video stops. Yeah.

So it is obviously gone everywhere since then. There's a lot of writing about like, yeah, why this has like taken off so much and been seen as so inspirational to people. I think it's because it seems we've all seen like too many videos that are just kind of the first part of this. We're like, yeah, there's like a bunch of racist white people. And by the way, there's at least, you can't hear it on the video, but people have said that like these folks when that co-captain came down,

we're like shouting the inward Adam and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So we've all seen the variants of this that are just like, yeah, some black man or black woman getting abused by a bunch of racists. Yeah.

And this one starts looking like that and then turns into like a beautiful comeuppance. Like these people picked a fight against a man they thought was like alone and kind of heavy set and older and that they could like wail on and just wound up getting absolutely housed. Just the house. Based on at least what I'm looking at here, it looks like three of the white folks involved in this have been charged with crimes. The police are talking to the chair guy. It's unclear yet like what exactly charges he's going to catch.

He was on a radio show, a morning show, in Alabama, with just sort of an internet personality that like in the black community, we're all very familiar up. And so they asked him, like the lady asked him like, okay, you had to share. And the lady was already down like, what happened? He said, it feels like we wrote this script to where he goes, man, I blacked out. And he said, I just thought about Rosa Parks and that lady that wouldn't give the seat to her.

I was like, I'll give her a chair. Like, you know, fights are ugly things, but also in some ways, beautiful things. It's a, there's a lot going on in this video. I'm not surprised that it's been taken by so many people. There's some lessons, I think bystanders can take from this. From one thing, if like 50 people are having a giant brawl. Might want to get out of there. Just leave.

Yeah, just bounce. You should know to leave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a good thing to get in the middle of. But second, if you're parked in someone else's boat spot, maybe instead of shouting racial slurs, get your fucking boat moved. It's not, it was like, yeah, I think what, it speaks to so much, cause this was such an avoidable situation.

Yes. This is completely avoidable, bro. Just slide over a little bit. I feel like if you've driven a car on a highway, then you've seen a semi truck. And when the semi truck come, just get out of this way. Like, why, why is you picking this fight,

man? Just he can't. It's a big old AT will or just, it's just courtesy. That's a bigger. So I'm just saying, like, that's a bigger boat than you. You're more nimble. You can move and clearly it's a line of people waiting to get off. I just. Yeah. No, that's one of the things I think that's involved here that's interesting to me. Is that there's this, this is not just, I mean, like obviously the fact that these guys were bigots is a factor here, but there's also just this

increasingly common freedom that the most selfish people in our society feel to be like aggressive about the fact that they don't owe anyone else like basic, like politeness, right? Like the very basic though, 270 people are being inconvenienced because I park by shit in the wrong space. I should bounce. You know, I should probably at least say, oh, sorry, I fucked up. Oh, man. Like, no, we're going to make this a thing because like we get to park wherever the fuck we want and fuck you. Like that, like, no, we're going to make this a thing because like we get to park wherever the fuck we want and fuck you. Like that, that kind of attitude is, is like,

yeah, it's so frustrating. Like I can't even get myself under the head of someone who would do what these guys did and not like, feel like they were an asshole. Like I had to do the thing every now and then. I think most of us do, where like I parked my car in like a red zone or something because it's like, I gotta be, it's like, there's no spaces. I'm 30 seconds, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you get out and someone's seen you like in the fucking red and they're like, and yes, you know, like I know it's so, sorry. Well, I know, I know, I know. I know, I know, I know. I know, I know, I know, I know. I'm sorry, yeah. Dude, I'm so sorry, bro, I'm so sorry. Look, I at one point, man, I'm sorry. Like, yeah. Dude, I'm so sorry, bro, I'm so sorry.

Look, I'm gone. I'm gone. My bad. Yeah, and to have the fucking Hutzpah to just like look at a boat of 270 people, you like fuck all of you. Like, I want to keep my stupid ass part doing here for some reason. Yeah, and then the willingness to be like, what the fuck you don't do about it? We'll jump you if you get that mad and just and whether it's whether you're

adding to either the lack of like situational awareness or just that that overall hutzfah, like you said, of just like, whatever, I'll take all of you. Like really, really? Like, yeah, I think that there's a that there's a lot to color here too with the fact that, first of all, this is taking where it's taking place. I mean, we're still in Montgomery, Alabama here, and which, and on a dock that was obviously and verifiably a doc where slaves were dropped off at.

You know what I'm saying? So you have that history, right? You have the history of the Montgomery bus boycotts. You know what I'm saying? This is the city where Rosa Parks did the thing. You know what I'm saying? Like this is where it happened. So there's so much history in the city.

And on top of that, like, I mean, there's high schools in Alabama named Robert E. Lee. Like Robert E. Lee high school. Like we're talking about, we're talking about a place that, I mean, it was in the news in the arts that like, I mean, there was a high school that just desegregated like in the year 20 something. Like they get there. Yeah, yeah, they just desegregated high school, right? They made the news in 2010 because they finally had a desegregated prom, but that was just

the prom. And it's just that the prom white school invited the black, they can't go to school together. They can just do a dance with this. This is the state that this happened in. So you're like, you're in this like, and I hate to like, otherwise them, but I'm otherwise them in the sense that this is some like multiverse, bizarre world where you, what desegregation is recent, you know what I'm saying? So when you have that type of thing, you first of all,

you have to have, you have to remember like both of those things are sitting in sort of the collective consciousness of that community, whether, especially for the black people who are like, this, this the world we live in, but we've also proven that if you push us far enough, you know what I'm saying? Like, we're not gonna stand for it. You know what I mean?

We'll pick up a folder chair. We'll pick up a folding chair. Which has become something of a symbol in the last week. It's the new open carry. Yeah. Yeah. I saw at least one TikTok video. That was just a, it was like,

there's like a couple of people watching as this young black guy, in a Walmart, like, was holding up and like testing it like the way that you would like a gun at the gun store. He's like, yeah. Man, the memes have been glorious. I've seen folding chair earrings, I've seen dot, but the one is the, I said, I said Robert a video of the folding chair getting interviewed. Yeah. Ace. Oh, he's one of the, first of all, that's one of the funniest accounts you can ever follow.

But you was just like, man, you know, I was just sitting there and then we started doing charity work. And which account is that? Oh, yeah, Ace Vance. A-C-E-B-A-N-C-E. He does just the most incredible voice overs. Yeah. With the chair was just like, who's handing out charities? All doing charity work.

I'll say it's glorious. Freely giving ass whoopens like, have a seat. He might step up, have a seat anyway. That's so good. But I think that that is important. I think another thing that I think is interesting specifically for like that it can happen here. Audience, one thing I love about this show is like you give so much historical context

to whatever we're looking at. You know what I'm saying? As almost like proof of concept that not only can't happen here, it is happening here. You know, I'm saying. And I think for this one, there was this interesting moment. This is another good follow for you guys. Got him consciously. So his name is the consciously. He was like, like, world were now, like debater, a master debater. I'm just kidding. But he was a world were now debater. He was one of the first, like, him and his partner was like the first black, like, co-champions in like professional or college level debate.

Anyway, so he's a brilliant, brilliant thinker. He's like, you know, YouTube early years, styles, whatever, right? Anyway, um, content created. Anyway, he brought up this, this point among sort of the, the, the black community that what came out of this too was this hashtag of like, you know, we are not our ancestors. You know, which as I understand the sentiment, it also shows, um, sort of a lack of historical knowledge of like really how our ancestors handled slavery. Like, yeah, like the amount of resistance, the amount of resistance we actually had, you know I'm saying and even just like I would even

Curd just like a simple Google search of the amount of rebellions, you know, you just whether you're talking about the famous ones like the Haitian rebellion Which we did a bastard's pot about you know, I'm saying we're like these fools these fools threw off their Their oppressors you have Turner, yeah, Turner, you know what I'm saying? Which I talk about more on Hula Pottix, but like my seventh grade, like historical figure report was on Nat Turner. And I was busted like a suburban like middle school

for a little bit. So I'm walking into the suburban middle school with my Nat Turner paper. I'm a into the suburban middle school with my net turner paper. I'm a poor English teacher. So yeah, I had to be thinking, I don't know what she was thinking, but anyway. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? You have like, there was ones, there was, there were one in New York. There was the one in the, during the 13 colonies.

Like, we have such a history of like rebellion and resistance. Like, don't think not to mention slave ships that were overtaken. You know, I'm saying by their captors, you know what I'm saying? So these things have, there is a rich history of us of us rebelling. So it's almost a point of lesson, a point of learning for the black community too. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a really useful teachable moment while everyone's kind of amped up about this thing to talk about. I've heard it described as like left-handed power,

kind of in some books that would talk about not just what we've been chatting about, which are these kind of big moments of insurrection among enslaved people, but like the everyday acts of resistance by people who are enslaved, like while they are on the plantation, stuff, different ways of pulling autonomy of teaching their kids how to read or getting things like money or extra resources out of the people who are attempting to own them, like methods of escape and resistance, all these methods of preserving traditional art and religion while in chains,

like all that kind of stuff is also. Yeah, I hope it spurs some of that. The folding chair can be added to a rich history of resistance. Yes. be added to a rich, a rich history of resistance. Yes. Yes. And, uh, yeah. I'm also curious around like, I, obviously, you and I on this, on that are currently being recorded, plus a lot of the, the community that, that both of, both of us represent like, yeah, we're not pacifists. Like she, at all, you know what I'm saying? And I find that discourse to be interesting too,

and especially around, you know, if you're, and I'm like, you know, neither is the broader racist community. Like, you're not pacifist either. either is the broader racist community. Like, you're not passive is either. Like you asked for the smoke, you got the smoke. Yeah, like what is more American than this? It's, I think I'm more optimistic chapter, especially like as we head into 2024, as we deal with like kind of these continuing efforts to disenfranchise,

particularly black voters across large chunks of the South. I'm glad that we've got this. What will hopefully continue to be a powerful image for people to kind of rally behind. This is a nice thing to have. I don't know. It's interesting. Things are said in a video like this that is just kind of like chaotic brawling. But it speaks to people in a way that a history textbook maybe isn't going to reach them. Because there's just something so kinetic and powerful about watching. Watching a large group of people realize that an injustice is going down and then be like, well, I guess we've got to throw

hands to stop this shit. Yeah. Yeah. It's a microcosm of like a century and a half or so of or a couple of centuries of history. Yeah,, yeah, whether it's a, absolutely, the couple centuries of history, and then you're like, at least 10 years of witnessing, you know, black bodies being brutalized when no one was there to help. You know what I mean? Yeah, just seeing a video and like,

you just watch a terrible thing, yeah. Yeah, and then seeing no recourse. Like, okay, well, there's well, there's never, I mean, where are we going to wait for the justice system? You know, the best thing we've gotten so far is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no know, like so, and a lot of promises of police reform, you know, saying, so you just, you don't, I mean, like during Trump's presidency, there was, I mean, there was an uptick in lynching, like, you know, I'm saying, like these fools are getting old school, you know? So it is without hearing any video without knowing anything that those men were actually saying, whether they were just run-of-the-mill pricks or just racist pricks, whatever it was, it is a, again, if you're a black person in Alabama, it is completely reasonable to believe that if we were there to help, that man would have

been on the bottom of that river. Yeah. And that man would have been strung up in a tree in the woods and we'd have never seen him again. Yeah. I mean, just the sheer like rapidity with which he was surrounded and put on the ground by a large number of men did not suggest that they were, that the, that the additional dudes who had arrived to whale on him were in a mood to like deescalate the situation. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like, I mean, I feel like

that's like a reality that, you know, you, this, it's almost like for the rest of the country, it's like this, if you understand, like this is the reality we need you to understand. When we say, I could die, you know what I'm saying? Like when you talk about racism and that thing, it's just some people are stupid. There's fucking bigots everywhere. Like no, when we say it's life or death, like that's what you're witnessing, like he could have died that moment, you know what I'm saying? And I think at a, at a, whether it's front of mine or back of mine, that is something that as a person of color, like you just kind of know that like this, this would, this,

if it would have just been a fight, you know what I'm saying? Then I think if it was just, just been a brawl, like most people would have just stayed out of it. Like if them two just, if they just were struggling. If they just were struggling. If you've been two guys swinging on each other, that's just, you know, the smart play. If it's just two guys swinging on each other, right? They just, yeah, you take your phone out and you watch. You just like, all right, man, hey, get your legs in.

You know, you check for your boy, but like, I'm gonna jump. But when somebody jumps in, it's like, okay, I'm gonna help the homie, but you jump in, helping the homie in Montgomery, Alabama, but it's like, oh yeah, he might die. So we're going, it's different. Anything else to get to on this? Man, I think I might be, I think one more thing I think to add color to this and I might be like a grandizing, but I think it's also important because what I'm really interested in is just the collective cathartic sort of feeling this has had is because there's so much built up tension.

You have to talk about the Florida of it all. You know what I'm saying? And being aware of the idea that like you're right in front of our face, like you're trying to erase history. Do you know what I'm saying? And I just, five minutes ago, watched that Prager U video for kids about about Christopher Columbus and slavery,

and it was just like, well, you know, and this has approved, approved, approved content for children, like, well, you know, and this is approved, approved, approved content for children like, well, you know, at least we didn't kill them. Yeah. Don't say it. And like, well, you know, in Europe, we draw the line at like cannibalism. And these people that we're enslaving like,

they practice it, you know, so I guess it's kind of, you know, and maybe slavery's not bad. And slavery, I mean, it's all over the world. They've always had slavery. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm saying so like they learned useful skills. Yeah. I mean, you know, okay, so there's no skills in Africa. Like, do you try and tell me? Well, this, this civilization civilization, that is the bedrock of civilization where all the humanity come from. You know, we ain't no how to do nothing. Right? You also, yeah. I don't know.

Like, if you're, yeah, it's, it's, it's so frustrating because it's, it's what you could, I think they're trying to like draw a line between, I don't know, the way slavery was often practiced in like the Mediterranean where there was a lot of manumission. People were often freed and when they were freed, there was not like ongoing stigma against having been a former slave with like a racial slavery system in the Americas that was completely different, where manumission very rarely happened. And when it did, you were still subject to heinous restrictions on your personal liberty. Like it's just not a comparison. Yeah, trying to use the lack of awareness

of just even the term slavery and what didn't mean by that. You know what I'm saying? Using it to your advantage. It's like, well, anyone who's read a book or two can be like, what you did was different. You know what I'm saying? And you know it, You know it's different. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, it's like surfed them, you know, involuntary servitude, debt slavery. Whenever, if there was ever two tribes and a tribe got raided by another one, there was slavery. Like I know that it exists since the dawn of time. Not what you taught them out though. You know what I'm saying? And you know it, you time. Not what you talk about though. You know I'm saying and you and you know it, you know, so you're playing on that. So I just think like collectively us just like keep hearing this shit and keep having to like, you know, keep your cool and try to fight it in the ballots and just, and just the, just the mind fuck of like,

these folks, y'all really, you're gonna, you're gonna vote for a dude that's out on bail, that's a felon. Like this, stick his face in 70 years and y'all really finna, y'all really finna, you're really trying to put this man in office again, like just at such a mind fuck that you're like, man, I just need to hit, I just need to hit a white lady with a chair. I just, I'm just going to hit a white lady with a chair. Yeah. And yeah, and we, you know, something I've brought up many times on to the politics is understanding sort of like the collective sort of black American psyche is, we just process trauma through humor. Like we, when we make a joke out of everything and it's really so we're just not

like pushing random white people into moving traffic, you know, just because if not you'd be like, uh, what's his name? Um, James Baldwin says that he was like, to be black in America is to calm, I'm butchering the quote, but to be constantly under the surface at a rage level that you're constantly trying to push down. You know what I'm saying? So I feel like the humor, why we got so many jokes about like, nah, Chair, Chair, homie going to jail,

like Higgle, you have bail money, but that's it was amazing, cause like you just, good job. You know what I'm saying? And Aquaman coming out the water, like why, why we make jokes about it? It's like, well yeah, I mean,

this is, it's funny. And if not, we'd be enraged all the time. Well, prop. Yeah. I do feel like this is a good lead in for the fact that we are, we are actively, well, preparing to do our Robert E. Lee episodes, which have taken a lot of reading, but I think you've got to enjoy. I can't wait because again, I just like, I'm already locking and loading the jokes like

I can't wait. Yeah. He's such a baby. I think it's like, that was the thing that surprised me. Like I expected like, okay, well, this guy's, you know, a bad person for obvious reasons being the military leader of the Confederacy, but like the degree to which this dude is a fucking baby is, uh, yeah, we're going to have a good time with this one. I also, I also, as a thought experiment, my question would be, okay, Robert Evans, if

you were in Montgomery at that moment, I just, how would you handle that? I mean, if I see a bunch of people wailing on a single dude, even outside of a situation where it's clearly racist, I'm going to try to stop that because I don't want to watch someone get beaten to death in the street. Yeah. Like, unless they have it coming, I don't know if it's like a guy with a swastika arm band and people are kicking them on the ground. I might not intervene. And that I might in that case, I might just to try to stop people from catching a fucking murder charge, but like, um, yeah, I feel like now at the point at which there's like 60 people fighting on the dock. I don't know that I'm running into that.

Like for one thing, it seems like enough people are there. I'm running into that. Like for what they get seems like enough people are there. But yeah, you see a bunch of people like kicking the shit out of a man trying to do his job, you should try to intervene. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those fucking security should have gotten in there faster. But like, yes, I would hope that I would run in at that point

and attempt to stop the, the, what was happening. Yeah, absolutely. That's good. And I would only I don't think I would have had the presence of mine to pick up that chair though. The chair is, yeah, no. I just, I would hope that like, it would be, I just wonder like, cause again, once you black out and get punch drum, it's like, I would hope that like, they, that black people around when I have the wear with all to be like, no, no, no, no, he's with us. Yeah, yeah, well, we'll see. Yeah. That dudes with us, no, no, no, no, he's with us.

Yeah, well, we'll see. Yeah. That dudes with us. No, no, no, no, he's with us. He's good. He's good. I think that's part of why you don't roll in when there's like 60 people fight. You just get to go in.

You just get to go in. Yeah, it's hard to tell how do you help? And if you've got like five people beating a man on the ground, it's easy to know how to help. You try to get that guy up and away from them. You try to get them off of him. If you've got what are effectively like two or three dozen fights going on on a dock, it's like,

well, do you just like start throwing hands? Yeah, yeah, just put it in. Yeah. Everybody put somebody. Yeah. Just like, you know, you just grab like fine children and just kind of like, let me just move y'all out the way. Y'all back up. Yeah, yeah like, you know, you just grab like fine children and just kind of like let me just move y'all out the way y'all back up Yeah, yeah, yeah, you should I think when you're anytime you're in encountering a situation like this like your first

Like what can I do that will help, you know again? It's easy if you if there's a guy getting beaten or if there's someone seriously injured that needs medical care If it's at a point where it's like well, this is just fucking chaos, then maybe you just watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, get it out. Get it, get it, get a higher vantage point. Just make sure you can watch the watch where it's going. You don't want to get sucked in, you know, because you might get trampled.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, keep your fucking, don't fall into your phone because shit like that spreads. Yes, yes, yes. So true. Yeah. Lots of usable piece of information. Yeah. For this otherwise. Just jokes full podcast. Yep. Yeah. Well, we all had a good time today.

Prop. Where can the people find you if they, if they would like to do that? Man, please, I am on the same network you are. I'm on the hood politics pot. My sociers are all the, they're all prop hip hop. Like you said, I am a coffee business owner. It's terraform cold brew. You could use promo cold hood and get 15% off. Your cold brew needs. Please help me sell.

Please buy this coffee. Good Lord. I've got a lot of money in it. It's shit. Please buy his coffee. Good Lord. I saw a lot of money in it. It is shit. Please buy the coffee. But yeah, man, profit pop and yeah, and hood politics pod. I'm on the network, man, and please check out Props Delightful Coffee. And yeah, you can find us right here tomorrow unless it's a weekend, in which case you can find us here when the weekend ends, the next weekday, we're here every weekday, we never stop. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go The World The World The World

The World The World The World The World The World The World The World

The World The World The World The World The World The World The World The World

The World The World The World The World The World The World The World The World The World on earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, the Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States until one day.

A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers call him the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder, and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the iHeard Rainy Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her!

Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere.

We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do some want the town's secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you Nancy. Listen to the murder years on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts. moments of bombing in all sorts of ways, bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life. Like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. I wanted to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. It was there every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up. Subscribe to my podcast, bombing, with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends. I'll have guests like Sam J.

To say, Sloan, Michelle Butteau, Max DeMarco, DJ Doug Pound, Saturday Night Live, Sarah Sherman, and more! Listen to Bombing with Eric Andre on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the I-Hard Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, it could happen here, a podcast about frustrating people and frustrating times. That's not all it's about. Sometimes we talk about nice things, like raising sheep or immunization efforts, you know, the endless struggle of working people to better the world. But not today. Today we're having a real, real piece of shit episode about a real piece of shit. It's going to make everybody unhappy. Hello, Garrison. Hello, James. How are you both doing today?

So much better for hearing that, Robert. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, just ready to have a fine evening here, and think about something that's probably very fun. Yeah, Garrison, be good. You don't have your soda stream disappointed in you. Yet, James and I are now soda stream-pilled. I've not gotten the company soda stream yet.

That hasn't much generation of thing. Yeah, unfortunately, the company beverage is Billy beer, Billy Carter, Jimmy Carter's brother's beer that was on sale for roughly a year in the 1970s. Is it made of peanuts? If only. No, so today, let's start. I got a question for you. Have either of you seen the Barbie movie? Yes, I have. Hmm. Well, I wasn't. Well done. All right. I didn't go, buddy. The soul, yeah. The said dressing was nice. It was a great lesson in like liberal recuperation. I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure it'll be great for kids who don't know what feminism is. But yeah. Yeah, it seems I have not watched it either.

It doesn't seem like my kind of movie. It seems broadly accurate. Correct me if I'm wrong here, that it has what you might call very, very modest and fairly mainstream approachable feminist messaging. Yes. Yeah, that seems like it's fair, which most people would not be particularly angry about. But a sizable chunk of the very online right, the chunk of the right particularly that makes their living by having takes on shit, has been up in arms ever since it came out. And particularly ever since it made more than a billion dollars in the box office.

I'm sure a lot of people are aware that our old friend Ben Shapiro filmed a 42 minute video tearing it apart. And his signature pre-teen stolen valor voice. You know, so after a I'm saying. I'm not a pre-pubescent boy. I've probably watched the movie, made some friends, tried to watch the Ben Shapiro video for fun. We made it like six minutes in and everyone forced me to stop. Intolerable shit.

Cowards. Cowards, they are cowards, but that's it. So elsewhere in the right, and kind of the less mainstream acceptable chunks of what we'd call the insurgent right around here. Various thought leaders attempted to declare the movie stealth conservative propaganda as a way of assisting that it success was really due to it being anti-woke. That's silly too. None of this is worth discussing in detail. I promise you all this is not going to be a podcast about the fucking Barbie movie. discussing in detail, I promise you all this is not going to be a podcast about the fucking Barbie movie. None of this is worth discussing in detail, save to say that Shapiro's anger at the movie, and particularly its comic relief character, Ken, seems to have been the more widespread

response from those kinds of people. Now, because I have made over the years a lot of poor decisions in my browsing and engaging habits over the years, Twitter sends me a lot of weirdo right-wing responses to everything that happens in the world, including this movie. And one of these posts that I caught, somewhere in late July, around the 22nd, 23rd caught my eye. Now, this post features a vaporwave filtered kin,

photoshopped in front of a burning, Viking longhouse, accompanied by the text Exit the Longhouse. Now, when you see something like this, and you don't know what they're getting at, like you have two choices. If you're like, you get like, I don't know, kids, a really demanding job, anything at all going on in your personal life.

You scroll right past it. If you're me, you spend like four and a half hours reading various, like fascist essays about feminism to try to figure out what the fuck a long house has to do with the Barbie movie. Now, the guy who had made this post is a low level fascist political columnist named Loméz. He is kind of on the, he's a little bit of volipiled. He's, he doesn't, he's not like a very major figure. He's kind of several steps below anyone you've heard of. I would say like two or three steps, standard deviations of fame below like Jack Pasobiac. But his writing has a degree of purchase among the kinds of conservatives who trick Ron DeSantis into running in comprehensive

campaign ads with Saun and Radson. He has, he's like, he's got a little bit of influence among that kind of crew. And he's sort of in the conversation with a lot of those people. I took notice of his post because I'd seen the term long house being used by a couple of these guys often on. And because LoMess's post got like 3,000 something likes, which meant that, yeah, there's some community out there that gets what he's talking about. So on a whim, I clicked to view the quotes tweets for this post, and I found a post by a user named Siege, which

is of course a reference to a book about carrying out acts of terrorism in order to bring about a white ethno state. The post says, can is you, he is an exaggerated Western man in the 21st century, anxious, confused, chasing women who don't care about him. He exits the long house and discovers his own will to power. Like you, he decides to bring this knowledge back to his fellow man. And it's, you know, I'm gonna, I'll show you guys this, this post here. It's pretty, pretty Nazi. Yeah pretty pretty, pretty, pretty Nazi.

It's not the best work on Ken, like he, he, he's just like a blob. No, I, I will say I have a little bit of respect for the craft here that he didn't just go to an AI. That looks like somebody like crudely cut a picture of, of, of Ken that they have like, a, like color inverted and then Photoshopped it into a picture of a long house with a fire behind it. Yeah, it's too pretty.

It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty.

It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's too pretty. It's pretty accurate to what's in the film. That's good. So what is the long house? What the fuck does a long house have to do with what are otherwise pretty standard neo-Nazi

ask messaging about the decadence and failure of modern man and all that kind of shit? And is this dumb fascist meme something that you need to care about? Now unfortunately the answer to that is yes, because all of this ties back to one extremely influential insurgent right-wing ideologue whose followers have been close to the presidency once before and may yet find themselves there. Again, that asshole is an MIT graduate named Kostin Alamario who posts online under variations of the name Bronze Age pervert. You guys, how, how, how aware are you of Bronze Age pervert or BAP as he's often known?

I, I've heard of BAP, but maybe only in passing, so I was familiar with Bronze Age pervert. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing it with me today, Robert. Oh, oh, you're going to be so much less happy. Garrison, are you familiar with this fella? I, I think I may have only seen stuff from him in passing. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not overly familiar now. Yeah, that was kind of my experience until like a month or so ago when I started

really digging into the guy. And I, I don't feel better as a result of having done that. But, yeah, we know that this guy's actual name is Kustin Alamariu because of a very recent Atlantic article. It was like a month ago that this guy got revealed in this article because this writer for the Atlantic was a friend of his like at MIT. Like it was just somebody who like and recognized his voice on a podcast. Now this article I find it frustrating for a number of reasons. I

don't think it's great analysis of of BAP's work or what people find appealing in it, or a particularly honest intellectual look at what this guy has to say. But it does have some interesting reveals, including the fact that Bronze Age perverts first public media appearance was a parody audio tour for an exhibition at the Boston Museum of fine arts written by BJ Novak who played Ryan in the office So that's that's on And it's it's one of those BJ Novak is not not a stealth Nazi don't worry But the the video or the thing that they put together

Don't worry, but the video or the thing that they put together does kind of fit for like a fascist art project. And I'm going to read how the Atlantic describes this audio tour they put together to get there or put that they assembled together. No, that can recruit it or remain in classmate with a deep voice. And together they recorded an audio tour for the exhibition tales from the land of dragons, a thousand years of Chinese painting. With the help of friends, they then slipped cassettes containing their tour into the museum's official audio guides. Art lovers must have wondered about the thick Eastern European accent

that greeted them over the twang of a Chinese string instrument. The Romanian soon became opinionated. Personally, he said, I think this painting is a piece of crap. Then deranged, he alluded to his disgusting anatomical abnormalities. He called his listeners decadent imperialist maggots and confessed to desire to smash a glass case with a sledgehammer and rip a scroll to shreds with my teeth, which,

by the way, are extremely long and sharp, more like fangs than human teeth. At last, he offered an interlude of idiot music while he fumbled with his script. This should keep you occupied, you drooling in basalt, he bellowed at the listeners. By now, either amused or complaining to management. So there's like little whiffs of degenerate art stuff in there, but it's also just kind of like, like a little bit like Max Headroomy,

kind of stuff like where you're kind of tricking people into consuming this like parody artwork thing. a little bit like Max headroomy kind of stuff like where you're kind of tricking people into into consuming this like parody artwork thing like again, I think this was a pretty innocent joke on Novak's fault part. But cost in number one probably got picked for this because he's he's got a thick Romani and accent that he very much plays up. He was noted in this time as kind of talking like Dracula deliberately. He also would always wear these like long and elaborate black coats so that he kind of looked like a Dracula-type figure. He was, you know, he was doing a bit.

He was putting on like a, that was the image he wanted to portray himself as to people. It's kind of like mysterious and Eastern European sort of figure. Now, Austin first started posting as Bronze Age pervert on a series of obscure web forums in 2010. In the November of 2013, he joined Twitter and immediately fell in with a loose community that some people call frog Twitter. And these are, you know who these guys are. It's like a general term for anonymous alt-right adjacent posters with like Pepe avatars.

Yeah. And the other group, the kind of related people that he fell in with and that he started to have traction with, are adherents to a fascist philosopher known as Curtis Yarvan or Mincius Moldbug. Curtis is his real name. Mincius Moldbug is the pseudonym he wrote under. Now, I know it's a terror. It's these three words very frustrating.

They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated.

They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated.

They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. They were very frustrated. early enough. Like a lot of these, I think Baldur's Gate 3 is going to save us from a lot of these guys in the future. It is the Antifa computer game. Yeah. So Curtis Yarben, aka Minseus, is a UC Berkeley graduate in computer science who joined the tech industry and got piled on a strain of anti-democratic libertarian theory. This is like a, this is a pathway, man. Yeah, this is perfect. Well, Bronze Age pervert also goes into tech after graduating from MIT, right? And like, you know, a decent number of these guys

come out of like Stanford and shit. Like, it's all, it's all these guys who are in fact to some extent like intellectual elites. Bronze Age pervert's dad is a teacher at MIT, like just kind of like you look at like Stephen Miller's background, right? A lot of these guys come out of like liberal academia, families. But anyway, it's very common. Yeah. Curtis comes out of, yeah, gets into the tech industry and he writes a book kind

of while he's working and like he's a founder and stuff for some company. He writes a book in 2001 titled Democracy the God that Failed, follows it up with a series of blog essays and his writing becomes very influential among Silicon Valley proto-fascists. Yarvan's ideas in brief is that the US is run and a lot of Western society is really run by what he calls the cathedral, which and a lot of Western society is really run by what he calls the cathedral, which is a mix of professors and journalists who act as a Brahman class dominating the United States with a progressive state religion. He sees their egalitarian impulses as toxic, the destruction of natural civic order, and

advocates for his followers to design new architectures of exit to replace the cathedral with what is effectively a right wing dictatorship. The number one supporter of Curtis Yarvan's ideas and financial backer of him is Peter Teal. Teal has a funded Yarvan's work as a big fan of what he has to say and his philosophy, which is generally referred to as the dark enlightenment. And this is when we're talking about the dark enlightenment, we're talking like mid-Auts is kind of when this stuff starts to really take off.

This is before the alt-right that kind of becomes really well-known nationwide is a major term. This is like in the pre and right around gamer gate period is when he's really starting to take off with a lot of folks. And he certainly he feeds into the alt right to Trump, you know, and to that period of time. But he's much more on the the pseudo intellectual end of things as opposed to the like hitting folks in the street end of things. That's why he gets a lot of Peter T. O'Money. So, uh, yeah, um, Bronze Age pervert is kind of a, he espouses a philosophy that rhymes with moldbugs, with Yarvan's philosophy in many ways, but where Yarvan dresses his words and is writing

up in a costume version of mainstream academic discourse, Bronze Age pervert is unapologetically online and weird, and he writes like somebody who spends too much fucking time on the internet. A lot of his stuff is cloaked in things that are like half jokes or at least want to be have plausible deniability of jokes, so that like if you take them seriously, you can make fun of you for falling for the bit. But he describes himself on Twitter as an aspiring nudist bodybuilder, free speech, an anti-Zeno-estrogen activist. So just the most irritating guy.

Yeah, it's the normal guy. Much of his politics centers around a worship of ancient Greece, which he believes settled on the scientifically ideal human form. He believes men should engage in bodybuilding and nude sunbathing to emulate the Greeks. And you'll see sometimes his followers be like, oh, you're an idiot if you fell for that. But legitimately, half of what this guy posts about is just pictures of bodybuilders

and pictures of himself being looking very jacked. Like he's, it's, that it, if that's all a bit, then all he has is this silly bit because it is it is dominant in his content. BAP's ancient Greek or BAP's ancient Greeks are incredibly straight and hate women with a passion. One of those things is more or less right. Greek like a request Greeks, not super pro women.

Yeah, not woke. Yeah, not woke. The cathedral in his eyes is an oppressive dictatorship of femininity, if not always of women, overmasculinity. Cancel culture is a particular topic of his eyeer. And he seems to see it as basically these that there are traditionally feminine methods of argumentation and conflict, whether or not

women are the ones doing them in any given situation. Cancel culture is like the purest expression of this and he believes that these kind of feminine methods of conflict destroy masculinity and make cultural progress impossible. They chain men to this kind of like, he sees, you know, a lot of anarchists will talk about how ancient societies, hunter-gatherer societies, and like we're often more egalitarian than a lot of like medieval societies, classical societies. And this is often a lot of folks do make the mistake of like idealizing these cultures, but like that's a thing that gets talked about a lot positively by some anarchists.

And I think obviously we're studying. He takes the opposite tact of like these ancient cultures, like people lived in the fucking mud and were miserable and it was because they were egalitarian. It was because the women were dominating the men, right? This is going to lead us to the long house in short order, but we have some more to cover right here. So he focuses a huge amount on anti-agallitarian arguments and on supporting a culture dominated by strong, beautiful, powerful people who look like Greek statues and suppress women and anyone else who doesn't look sexy, basically, you get to feel like that's a big part of it to this guy. Like he

once he once a date a dictatorship of hot violent men, that's his, that's a big part of what he argues with. Has he watched Lenny Rifenstow's Olympia? Because this is, oh god, he does. Yeah. So I feel like that's playing in the back of this fucking mind at all times. Yeah. Now, be it, back argues that the state in its present form preserves the lives of the weak and feeble minded, allowing them to oppress the naked, Aryan bodybuilders, who by all rights ought to run things. The prime repository of his philosophy is his 2018 book, Bronze Age Mindset, which was at one point in the top 150 books on Amazon.

A former Trump White House official toad Politico in 2019, if you're a young person intelligent, adjacent in some way to the right, it's very likely you would have heard of it. In chapter 35 of his book, Bronze Age, Bronze Age mindset, Bap writes, quote,

should the tyranny that has descended on our age ever gain the power it seeks and then be challenged enough to feel itself in danger, the mass annihilations that will be carried out by homosexual, transsexual, and especially lesbian commissars will exceed in scale and cruelty, anything that has yet happened in known history. Imagine lesbian mulada commissars with young Martin Sheenface and haircut, manning the future Bergen Belsens, installations that will span tens of miles. Yep. Sending you to the transgender gulag. Yeah.

It's something else, and it's very funny, because like that fucking the Atlantic writer here, like talks about how he's got this like almost hypnotized in quality to his writing and he's, he's got this really, like, uh, fascinating mind that you just want to engage with. And it's, I'll read you a fucking quote from this guy's profile on Bronze Age Pervate. And try not to gag. I consider myself a connoisseur of brilliant lunatics, and I have a high tolerance for their lunacy if it has compensating virtues of, say, humor or ingenuity. But even I find Bapwarrism, what starts as comedy can become something more sinister,

and Bap's stick, while sometimes hilarious, shows every sign of transforming into a mode of new far-right radicalism. He goes on at a various point to be like, yeah, he likes this book that I like. So I was willing to put up with the fact that he was, he was bigoted for years because like we would talk about literature together. You know, I just had so much respect for his mind that I was willing to be strung along for a long time. I know I find this guy kind of a sewer. A conno sewer. Yeah, a conno sewer. A conno sewer of pig shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I really love sifting through all the different types of donkey dogs. Yeah, I just can't make quite enough shit. Yeah. Rub it. You know what, make you become a connoisseur of dog shit internet content? What, what James, what James?

What will not? Well, it's a, it's a Washington State highway patrol. Uh, I love that. That's, that's the, I hope they are ready for the lesbian commissars. Um, oh, you know, I am. Yeah. They're there. The work police.

Ah, and we'll back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. Oh, yes. It was Joseph Conrad's novel, Nostromo, that this Atlantic writer and Bronze Age pervert, both loved.

Yeah. Yeah. and Bronze Age pervert, both loved. Yeah, cool. Yeah, we're a region other fucking paragraph. For many years, we corresponded. Costans messages arrived irregularly and the tone ranged from friendly and inquisitive to Borish in insulting. I went to South America on assignment. He sent long messages extolling the virtues

of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, which is south there, set there, a friend who reads books like Nostromo and can talk about them is a friend worth putting up with. South America. Yeah, fucking not even a fucking country. Just yeah, and like right after that he says after about 10 years he took to calling my friends and then he uses a series of slurs. At some point he had begun bodybuilding and he sent me a picture of himself shirtless with the message, do you like this pick of me?

Oh, again, he's a normal thing to say. Yeah, it's just a real genius. So broad-aged, pervert writings. Yeah, he's a different sitting person. One of the Greeks he's obsessed with. Because he claims that like, frames himself as an expert on Greek society, which he portrays as something of a paradise. But he only knows about like six guys,

and one of them is al-Sabietis. And al-Sabietis was an Athenian general and a statesman who was a big player in the Peloponnesian war. He defected from Athens to Sparta, and then from Sparta to the Persian Empire before being recalled and reinstated as an Athenian general. He is a real motherfucker, and an interesting guy. And because he was so interesting

and kind of, he was very charismatic in his own time and this kind of like very shady figure too, he becomes an early celebrity. He's like one of the first famous people that's really out there. And a big part of why he stays famous is that Plato will write a lot about him and Socrates, right? And Plato's writing a thing after their dead. So a lot of alcebieties is like a character written by Plato, as opposed to the actual historical fact about the dude. It's also worth noting given how anti-queer BAP is that alcebieties and Socrates were lovers. Socrates was like famously kind of a

simp for alcebieties. While alcebieties was kind of a piece of shit to Socrates. A lot of fun stories about that, but these guys were not at all straight. Yeah, I mean, Peter F.D. was an institution in 18 Greece. Peter F.D. is the same as being a piece. No, I don't think that's the same as what was going on with these two dudes. Yeah, these dudes were just. Yeah. Yeah. That's not.

Happy fun. Yeah. Bronze Age perverts, Rants, are profoundly silly to anyone who wasn't a deranged, chud, obsessing over white girls' tone, like him while shooting steroids into his ass. But because that's a fertile demographic, he has influence among some important conservatives. Why that's a shot in the technical sense of the word? Yeah, not after all those steroids. Yeah, you hit that just after in too much.

Well, and then these guys will let themselves touch a w, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then, then This Yarvan called him his White House Cell Leader. This is interesting to me because Bap himself has encouraged his young followers to avoid supporting him in public. Instead of hiding their sympathies while taking positions in the government to institute his ideas.

It's also worth noting that you can find some fans of Bronze Age Pervort on the so-called anti-woke left. There's clips out there from the Red Scare podcast, which the less said about the better, where the two hosts read segments of his book with a, and what seems like a degree of appreciation, calling it the good kind of racist. Yeah, that also makes sense in terms of their, yes, they're like anti feminist stuff that they do. Yes, yes. Yeah. And I think his, his writing, he has that he has a very like floored purple pro style. I don't think it's good writing. I don't find it particularly engaging. It's very channy and kind of exhausting, but people who are dumb fall for it. So yeah, he's, he's

hit his demo well. Now his influence is significant enough that some conservatives have sought to explain it. I found a fun write-up on Americanmind.org that describes his appeal this way. So what exactly is the teaching of Bronze Age mindset? And why is it so attractive to so many young men? The answer, I think, is simple. It is a revitalized paganism obsessed with strength and beauty. It appeals to today's young men because these things, strength and beauty, are exactly

what contemporary society has tried so hard to deny them. The gospel of sun and steel, of vitalism and strength and power, are exactly what have been denied to the boys of the Western world, and their spirits millitate against this. Everything great ever achieved, Bap tells us, was done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power. Now, I should note part of what he's, BAP gets at when he's talking about how these strong groups, friendships of between two men or small brotherhoods of

men, he is a big advocate. And one of the reasons why he is popular among like the Adam Wathen said is he's a big advocate of his followers forming small two, three four man groups and training with weapons together and preparing for the future, you know, day of the rope style thing. He doesn't use that term, but he's he's speaking to those people from like a more educated mindset. And there's I think an extent to which you could see his writing as trying to pull in that kind of educated upper crust kids of the upper middle class, you know, with Ivy League educations who go into politics, trying to draw them in closer to the

the actual violent and surgent right at least in terms of the sympathies of their ideas and support for methods of organizing that are more traditionally found against, you know, the alohim city set, right? I think there is a degree of that going on here. Now, Bronze Age pervert is more supportive of Trump than a lot of these guys, largely because he finds him funny and sees him as an avatar of disruption and destruction. Um, yeah, it's, it's like an accelerationist support. Yeah, exactly, exactly, which is actually, honestly, that's perfectly logical because Trump is accelerating both the death of the kind of conservatism that is a state loyal, that

is sort of system loyal, right? The George W. Bush kind of conservatism, which is very much system loyal. The near conservative system, like, of like the 2000s, yeah. Yeah, and Trump has done terrible damage to that and damage to the structure of the state in the whole. So it doesn't, it's perfectly logical for him to support Trump. He's not like, this is not inconsistent with the other things that he talks about. One of the people that that Atlantic writer talked to is Michael Anton, a former Trump administration national security official who wrote a 2019 essay in the Claremont

review of books about Bronze Age pervert. He acknowledges that BAPS work is racist, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, misogynistic, and homophobic. But suggested that like, you know, that's not necessarily what he really believes maybe it is. But the big reason why he does this is it distracts leftists from his more serious secret heresies that are the real, deep, dark arcane wisdom at the center of it, like hang out with your bros and train with guns or whatever. Or yeah, hide in the fucking government

and waiting for the right moment to strike, but then blow it all up when you make an ad for Ronda Santas. That kind of cleverness. Anyway, Anton writes that Bronze Age pervert, quote, speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction, especially among white males with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day. A hectoring vindictive, resentful leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence, and publicly denies all differences, while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent and competent and corrupt elite. There you go. So what does all this have to do with longhouses? Well, let's finally get to that.

Longhouse describes a category of dwellings that have existed on basically every landmass and the planet in some form stretching back to the neolithic period. These are, in general, large halls, sometimes with private family rooms built into them, sometimes with communal sleeping arrangements, but always organized around a large, single communal hall. In ancient days, these are where feast would be held, and where groups of families or tribes would huddle together in long-cold winters. Bronze Age pervert conceives of the long house as an example of the miserable lives primitive and shameful cultures, not his

beloved Greeks, lived in before modernity. In his writing, he makes it clear that his fear is ruled by degenerates and our fallen modernity will cause society to regress to this prehistoric misery. Now, part of his hatred of what he calls long-house culture is that in his mind, these dwellings were dominated by women who forced men to live inside the smoky, cloying, stinking confines. This is not really accurate to any kind of history. I expect his conception here comes largely from the fact that long-houses are often suspected, because we know relatively little about many of the cultures that had them.

Are often suspected of having been organized among matrilineal lines. In other words, if you as a dude, Mary-Elady, you move into her family's long house, right? This does sink out. There are modern cultures that lived that had long houses or have long houses who also lived this way, the Iroquois being a good example, right? There was a long house culture and where, which house you lived in was that matrilineal. But it is a mistake to characterize matrilineal as meaning like the women are completely in charge because they were not in Iroquois culture, nor many other cultures where longhouses existed.

Yeah. Vikings lived in longhouses and you might recognize their society is not precisely anti-masculine. Yeah, the woke Vikings. So this is more of a problem though with the conceptions of the longhouse that are spread by BAPs followers because again, he's using it as a shorthand for the fact that this kind of prehistoric darkness of egalitarianism is going to destroy the only thing that in his view can bring progress, which is small groups of beautiful men enforcing their will through violence, right? That's what he talks about when he's talking about the long house. His followers tend to use the long house as a shorthand, more of a shorthand for

the kind of stuff Curtis Yarvan gets at with the cathedral, a catch-all term for progressive modernity, women who get to say no to sex and have their own credit cards, trans people on hormones, vegan meat substitutes, and yes, the Barbie movie. Now I open this episode with a post about that movie by Lomas, an adherent of Bapism who wrote an interminable article on the longhouse for a website called First Things, which describes itself as America's most influential journal of religion and public life.

I bet it is. I bet it is, you can tell, because they always let you know it's right away. That's true. Yeah, they really gotta hit that up for you. I'm gonna quote from that now. Even for those of us who use it, the Long House evades easy summary. Ambivalent to its core, the term is at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate in joke. Its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces.

It reviles. It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic government, but also to wokeness to the progressive, liberal, and secular values that pervade all major institutions. The most important feature of the longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant and controversial symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Dinmother. More than anything, the longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations, toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing and modeling behavior. As of 2022, women held 52% of professional managerial roles in the U.S., women earn more

than 57% of bachelor degrees, 61% of master's degrees, and 54% of doctoral degrees, and because they're overrepresented in professions such as human resource management and compliance officers that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture, more generally.

So the wall, he's taken over the human resources. He sounds like he lustified with his first source when he's writing that like at every point like he's just using unnecessarily long word. Yeah, it's I mean it's also just like women have are dominating society because they they're getting more bachelor's degrees. Yep that's what it is. Okay, yeah, the famous useful bachelor's degree which always leads to employment and power position to tremendous wealth. Oh, also, and the idea that like, human resources are in some degree to somehow setting the terms

culturally as opposed to responding to the needs of corporations to mitigate risk, right? Like, that's what HR actually is. It's not setting an agenda. It is avoiding lawsuits. It is her minimizing exposure, whatever. Loam as also goes on to quote, Richard Heneña, an influential conservative thought leader who is revealed recently to be a neo-Nazi,

or at least someone who regularly wrote neo-nazi things and neo-nazi parts of the web and wants to be seen as respectable now. We'll talk about him later. Lomas approvingly notes that Hennania echoes a BAPIS talking point when he discusses how female domination of HR has given them control over public and private institutions. Now, again, the way Lomas is talking about this shit is not actually in line with how Bronze Age pervert conceives of the Long House. And one of the funnier results of everything that I've been talking about today is that Bronze Age pervert now

spends much of his time on Twitter, angrily tweeting at his followers that they're using the Long House wrong. I'm going to read you a post at his from July 27th. Long house has gone crazy out of control, usually misused. It's not a synonym for feminism or matriarchy, nor for group consensus, though those are part of the story. It's a concrete image from pre-Aryan Europe

of lower life and of most traditional societies. The author of the text right here. You're being got away from you. Yeah. And some of his ire is likely due to the fact that his followers who are largely very young tend to apply what they see as his analysis to children's movies. Here's a real good one. Yeah, this is a, it's a pose for a picture of like the female villain from the movie

Tangled by activated sleeper. If you want a good example of the nebulous longhouse, look no further than mother Gothel, fein narcissism driven by resentment and envy of the young, whose primary and most effective weapons are gaslighting manipulation and the rhetoric of fanatical safetyism. weapons are gaslighting manipulation and the rhetoric of fanatical safetyism. It's good stuff. Thank you, activated sleeper. Thank you, active sleeper. Exposing.

Thank great cutting commentary on the 2000, 2012's tangled. Now, one of my favorite recent examples of how many of these guys used the longhouse was a post in the off my chest Reddit, which went viral on Twitter. The post is by a woman who says that she interrupted her husband while he was telling a story and he was like, hold up, Tony, minnow talking, as like a joke, and she got angry at this and they had a fight. One popular, baffist response to this story, 1500 likes and counting when I found it

stated, minute attempt to take one comedic step out of the longhouse and the locks get 10 times bigger. She's so sliced. It is very silly to like bring up actual history with this, but one of the points you'll find in like writing about longhouses traditionally is that

because everyone was cooped up in the winter comes spring, the women were generally like doing everything they good to get them into fucking leave and go hunter something. Like get the fuck out of that. Get out of here. Like go do something else. We need like a fucking week or two

without you hanging around. Go to war, we didn't get it. Yeah, go to war, do something, Jesus Christ. Nobody likes being cooped up at a fucking long house. Anyway, that's the long house. That's Bronze Age pervert. It is kind of worth noting, because these guys are convinced that like,

they are the intellectual vanguard of this movement that's going to overturn what is classically described as liberalism, this idea that like people have like rights that are worth protecting and shit, that that's a failed idea. It's obviously failed. Look at how ugly buildings are today. And they'll post some picture of like the Chicago world's fair.

These people are like weirdly adjacent to the Tatar the the the the the Tataria conspiracy theory that a hundred years ago the world was ruled by this like vast advanced Russian empire that made all the nice buildings and then World War II was a secret excuse for the rulers of the world to destroy all the good architecture and that's what buildings are ugly. I've definitely seen this back guy in those circles of people who are culture, critic, or Greek enjoyer or whatever. The post picture is of old expensive architecture, and mixed in with either...

Mostly brutalist, modernist architecture would be like, what happened? What? Why don't we be bored with this? We're going to be doing this anymore. Which way would it be to the city, boys? Well, for one thing, like the society that people like you insisted upon this one in which like value was maximized at all costs.

So we took windows out of my school that was built in that brutalist period because it was cut down on heating. Or because like, it's like, because some like prince bankrupted their country. Yes. Building this pretty building. And that's why we don't do that anymore. It is like you thought like, yeah, Jack dudes with guns should run everything started a

series of wars that bankrupted those countries. And they had to sell their nice buildings to the Americans. Why we got the London bridge, I assume. But it's definitely all in that same rough, rough Twitter milieu. I mean, it's certainly, now that you've explained all of this and the long-house stuff, it certainly makes sense why they're kind of faunting over the Barbie movie. And I mean, very clearly Ken is gonna become one of these like, memeable characters because of what he does in the film.

He's gonna join the pantheon of like, Americans, like, oh, and all of Ryan Gosling's other roles. It is fascinating how Ryan Gosling kind of has become like the literal poster child for much of like the dissident like anti feminist right. Just because of the types of roles that he's taken. But yeah, I mean, it's really makes us. It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called,

It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called,

It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's really called, It's fascinating, But, yeah, it movie in terms of how they kind of structured all of the like social critique in that movie. But yeah, this is very silly. I mean, I'm excited I won't have to hear much more about like the stunning poetic prose of Bronze Age perfect. Yeah, I can't fucking, the Atlantic every time. It never fails to disappoint. It's so like weird because there's this whole thing that opens the article where he's talking about how like, you know, the first strains of this new anti-democratic, you know, anti-liberal thinking in academia came

out through philosophy students who, you know, realized that their professors just took for granted, you know, the truth about things like the value of human rights and didn't work ready for their arguments against them. And it was these like, these people who didn't want to be told not to think in certain ways. No, man, they were assholes. They're asshole rich kids who needed somebody to hit them in the fucking face. They need a folding chair deployed on them. Like, yeah, yeah. I demand a shutdown of all coastal universities until we figure out what the fuck is going on. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. If you were pretending that you were like somehow in the insurgent underground, as

the son of an MIT professor going to MIT yourself, like, you fucking dilatant. That's all, that's all this fucker is. Is it dilatant? And that's all most of the people following are it's a mix of dilatants and guys who are going to shoot up Wal-Mart's. Um, anyway. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Cool. Give them a follow. Give them a follow. Yeah. I've been checking out activated sleeper and I've learned a lot already. So, uh, oh yeah, yeah, you're getting pillowed by him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much. I, I, you know, as much as one can be pillowed by a 14 year old, but, uh, yeah, really interesting stuff here.

I think fair to say that this is an insight into a world. Oh, buddy, fuck me. All right, yeah, wait, we're not talking about that. We are not talking about his bedroom wall. Bye, everyone. Oh, wait. Now I got a James. What did you? We can believe it. You have to at least tell us what you. Oh, well, his his pinned. It's fucking I'm not sure it's a good Better and fucking. Yeah. What's on the bed? What is it? What looks like? Is that a German national? No, but he's not like a German. Oh, no, this fellow in there. Is that imperial

Germany? Yeah. I think this guy is a Kaiser Reich, dude. No, these Francoists are certainly impressive. I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure he's getting all the ladies in there. I gotta show you guys this pinned tweet. And then I'll read it. It's all caps. Fed post. Let me tell you how much I want a Fed post. There are a hundred billion neurons within my brain. If a Fed post was written on each and every one,

those neurons that would not equal one billion of the compulsion I feel the Fed post at this micro-inston. Fed post, Fed post. That means posting about doing a terrorism so the feds come and shoot you. This is the time between that it could either come from the sun like mentally unwell leftist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really unclear. Yeah. The flag he has just to be clear with the Franco is flag of Spain, which is something that I'm going to have to talk about, which is the American right has been embracing Franco

as like based and good for a while now, like is this kind of returned to Catholic tradition and like it's this anti-woke crusader. I really call it the suggested follows here on Activated Sleepers page, son-optimist. Aleric, the barbarian, importer, filipus. All of these people are such sad urns. Here's, he's reaching a post from Bronze Age, Jacob Yoroski, Jews are like the one ring for politics.

Oh, I can't believe have to have enough here. I think we have reached peak usefulness. I don't think we have. I hope you've all learned a lot from this. Have a wonderful week. Have a wonderful week and fuck you for making me write this. Yeah. To our listeners. Sacred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo

and its leader, Na' Son Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, La Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States. Until one day,

their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder, and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know about that. They will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the iHeard Rainy Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my god! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose.

My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next?

Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town's secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy.

Listen to the Murder Years on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm talking about your most manageable experiences of the performer. I tell gnarly stories and I talk to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life, like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. I wanted to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. It was there every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up.

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Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome dick it happened here, a podcast where if you're listening to this episode it's the middle of the week you probably know. You know what this podcast is, you know what it's about. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Now if you've been reading the news about China at all in the past few years, you've probably at least heard of China's Belt and Road Initiative, probably followed by a stream of almost panicked fear mongering about China displacing America's role in the world and luring countries in the debt traps that allow the CCP

to seize control of the country's assets, and then its entire foreign policy. And all of this begs the question, what actually is Belt and Road? This is not a simple question, because Belt and Road isn't really a coherent, single project at all. It is effectively a marketing term, slapped on to an enormous array of loans, investments, some things that are effectively grants infrastructure projects and special economic zones across the world.

The money for these projects comes from a variety of Chinese banks and sometimes just like government agencies like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and involve a vast array of different Chinese companies and contractors. So what are these banks and companies and governments actually up to? I'm going to run through three examples to get a sense of the kind of program that composes Belt and Road. One very common program is extending lines of credit to state oil companies of oil producers in order to secure China's supply of oil. I'm starting here because this is not typically what people think of when someone brings up Belt and Road,

and it gets at a couple of the central complexities of Belt and Road. One is, you know, a lot of this stuff is just, in some sense, almost banal attempts to just sort of secure natural resources by paying money for them and investing money in them, which is, you know, very, very standard sort of capitalist behavior. But another complexity of this aspect of Belt and Road is that these loans to oil producers were happening well before Belt and Road ever existed. The credit lines were simply absorbed into Belt and Road when the project was announced in 2013, and now these loans are considered Belt and Road projects.

This is a very common trend in Belt and Road. Much of the vaunted $1 trillion of investment in Belt and Road projects comes from the extension of pre-existing projects, which really puts into perspective all of those very, very scary maps that you'll see where there are like 100 blah, blah, blah, countries have accepted Belt and Road projects. And it's like, well, yeah, okay. Like how much of that's new and how much of that is people who had some random agreement with China beforehand.

Now, let's you think the fact that China is giving a bunch of money to Brazil, state oil company means that this belt and road thing has something to do with socialism. Here's a quote from China's 13th five year plan. Quote, we will speed up efforts to implement the free trade area strategy, gradually establishing a network of high standard free trade areas. We will actively engage in negotiations with other countries and regions along the route of Belt and, along the routes of the Belt and Road Initiative on the building of free trade areas.

Now, this is the ancient neoliberal dream. It is a dream of a world where corporations can freely move through commodities across borders while maintaining, you know, zones of just unlimited exploitation of workers and special economic zones. Now, speaking of sort of the condition of workers, let us move to a more typical Belt and Road project, Jamaica's North South Highway. In 2014, at the astounding cost of $700 million, the Jamaican government opened the North South Highway. Here's from an article that was published in Laoson.

Quote, since Jamaica needed a Chinese loan to finance the highway, Chinese Harbor Engineering Company was granted the right to own and operate the highway for 50 years as part of the arrangement. Also, the tolls collected on the highway cannot be used for debt servicing, and rather, go to the China Harbor Engineering Company directly as profit. Additionally, the tolls are astronomical by local standards. The drive to length of the highway in a standard car costs the equivalence of over $12 each way.

This is well out of reach for the vast majority of Jamaicans, where the average monthly salary is about $600, and only 60% of workers have a wage or salary position at all. Many of my respondents wondered for whom was this highway, the answer may lie in the additional concessions granted to the China Harbour Engineering Company, primarily 1,200 acres of land across the highway to be held in perpetuity. Apparently, this will be used to construct hotels and adjoining infrastructure by Chinese companies for Chinese tourists. A kind of economic enclave from which locals would not benefit directly, as acknowledged by the then Jamaican

minister of transport. Now, this sucks for Jamaican workers who didn't get any of the money from the contract, which went to Chinese firms that imported Chinese workers. And it's also not a great deal for the Jamaican government, which is enormous amount of debt, and gets seemingly very little for this. And this begs the question, why do countries agree to this? Now, the short answer is that they need money

for development projects and, you know, for a poor country, that money is very hard to come by. Part of the popularity of the project is that economies who've been through the, you know, the just devastating process of IMF structure reforms, who've had literally their entire economy and social system torn apart, who have literally watched food being taken from the mouths of their children in order to pay off IMF loans, are looking for literally any alternative. And as we've discussed on

this show before, to make it itself was the first country, you know, to be looted by the IMF as the social democratic government was forced to shred its welfare state and its economy in the 70s as a condition for getting IMF loans. This history and the current day threat of more of these structural adjustments, should you attempt to go to the IMF for more loans Make it more likely that countries will turn to Belt and Road rather than the IMF to deal with their complete lack of development and to stave off economic crises resulting from the fact their government has completely run out of money And this is something even liberal imperialist institutions will admit Here's from the council on foreign relations Belt and Road Task Force report And this is something even liberal imperialist institutions will admit. Here's from the Council on Foreign Relations, Belt and Road Task Force report.

In contrast to loans from traditional providers of development finance, China's loans are generally not concessional, and the Chinese Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China expect to make a return on their investments. The loans also lack policy conditionality. They contain fewer know-up exceptions of host country economic policy of political reforms. Now, the Council on Foreign Relations concludes this with a very slick line that goes, quote, for many Belt and Road initiative countries, especially authoritarian regimes, this is an attractive package, especially compared with other lenders who insist on reforms tied to loans. Now, okay, when you hear the words, you know, when you hear that authoritarian

regimes don't want to do the quote quote, reforms tied to loans. That makes it sounds like the quote unquote reforms are like, you know, you get a seed power to a democracy, you woke an IMF funding. That is not, that is not how IMF loan conditions work. What those reforms actually entail is much closer to sell every stado to asset in the country to a bunch of American investors We will leave your children to die Now, you know, and then this leads into some other stuff that the council informed relations talks about a lot Which is you know, they they have entire giant sessions about corruption on belt and road programs to which you know The immediate response is like, man, do you

know how much money the IMF gave Pinochet? They gave him over a billion dollars in 1980s money. That is like three billion dollars in today's money. Now, clearly, the other people who gave Pinochet boatload of money was the Chinese Communist Party. Although, you know, orders and magnitude lasts because this is, uh, this is, this is like the 70s Chinese Communist Party who, uh, do not have much money, but they had enough money apparently to give a bunch of it to Pinochet. And it's at this point that I want to remind everyone that China is the third largest voting member of the IMF, which is a real issue for both the sort of liberal and pro CCP accounts of the conflict between the CCP and the IMF over providing loans.

Because contrary to the way both of these groups seem to think about sort of the modern capitalist economy, China is not a you know an old communist radical like throwing stones in the liberal order from outside the house. They are parts of the global financial institutions and to the extent that like you know China can be fighting an institution that it is also a part of, right? To the extent that that even makes sense to talk about? What you're really talking about is just intercapitalist competition over who gets to give people loans. Now, there's other interesting stuff in this report. Like an admission that the Chinese, you know, the sort of Chinese debt trap narrative is overblown. And this is true. The sort of like case study in about like a Chinese company taking a port in Sri Lanka is

not, it's not exactly like the story that everyone thinks it is and you know, like the Chinese company like got the port after after a bidding process and stuff. And this is true. And the fact that it's been used hyped up to do fear mongering is absolutely true. However, the thing the Council and Foreign Relations can't actually say is that the actual conclusion that you get if you look closely at sort of this combination of, you know, call country like Sri Lanka that has both IMF loans and like I'll loads from China is that I

all of the lenders in the global capitalist economy absolutely suck and they all exploit the working class in the dead or countries like in their own ways. Do you know who else exploits the working class of dead or countries? It is the products and services that support this podcast. And we're back. Now, what is notable about Belt and Road is that Belt and Road's infrastructure projects usually do actually get built. But for all of this sort of screaming about like Triton's geopolitical expansion and attempt to subvert the democratic order, the actual reason why these projects, unlike, you know, so many other large-gold development projects, actually happen, and you know, actually do get built, is much more banal. It is a product of internal Chinese economics.

So to explain this, I'm going to turn to another example of a type of built-in-road project. Giving countries loans to buy telecommunications and internet equipment from Chinese companies. Here's from Fizz.org. China's demand for infrastructure, including communications and information at gear, is not as high as it used to be said Chinese development big president Zhang Ji Ji. So what can we do with the excess production capacity? We can only send it abroad. We may give you loans to buy Chinese equipment

and materials, but there must be a Chinese element, Zhang told AFP of his bank's loans to help Chinese firms abroad. Now, this is an interesting quote for a number of reasons. Recent sort of American and also Canadian, the Canadians went wild over this. Concern around Chinese telecom companies have, you know, argue that the spread of Chinese can make communication technology is like a geopolitical power grab by the CCP. The Chinese development bank, however,

kind of like lets the actual game slip, which is that the reason for these loans and, you know, a major impetus for the sort of broader Belt and Road Initiative is finding a solution to Chinese production over capacity, which is the giant structural problem, which hangs like the doom of damically over the Chinese economy. This is incredibly important.

Foreign policy analysts have a tendency, which is replicated in the media, to think about Belt and Road as fundamentally a geopolitical tool. Take for example this line from foreign policy. Quote, Well, the developing world fall, they're trying to sway, many policy makers in Washington, D.C. Certainly fear so, which is one of the reasons they have created the new International Development Finance Corporation, which is slated to begin operating at the end of this year, like the Marshall Plan, which in post-World War II years used generous economic aid to fight the appeal of Soviet communism and Western Europe. The International Development Finance

Corporation aims to help Washington push back against Beijing's sweeping Belt and Road Initiative. Now, fascinatingly, the authors don't seem to understand what the Marshall Plan actually was. Now, the Marshall Plan, you know, despite what you will probably read in sort of like mainstream, like diplomatic histories, was not like originally was not really driven by anti communism at all, it was in large part a product of massive industrial over capacity in post-war in the post-war US, particularly in the automotive sector. Demands from the domestic American market couldn't support the enormously expanded auto

industries industrial capacity. And so the auto industry went to Congress and tried to get them to rebuild Europe as like, you know, another market that they could sell, they're, you know, that they could sell cars to you that could absorb the product of the rubber capacity. The only way they could actually get this to work was to tie it to a raft of anti-communism. And this is now how the project is remembered as this, you know, as this sort of like grand anti-communist, like political strategy, you know, and in this sense, Belt and Road can be understood as China's Marshall Plan, or as a bold attempt to forge an international solution to its domestic economic problems. And this means to actually understand what Belt and Road is, we need to go back to the

beginning. In response to the financial collapse of 2008, China carried out what was until COVID, the largest stimulus in human history, an incomprehensibly large Keynesian program focused on internal infrastructure development, designed to shock the Chinese economy back into shape. And it worked for about one year. In 2010, the Chinese economy hit 10% year-end year GDP growth and it has been falling ever since. In 2011, the round of global uprisings kicked off by the Europe Spring hit China in the form with the Wukong riots and a wave of strikes. And by 2013, a year into the first term of new Chinese president Xi Jinping, the economy

was doing terribly and the government was still not out of the woods politically either. In response, the government announced two programs within about four months of each other. Belt and Road and the so-called mini stimulus. Another Chinese stimulus package aimed at improving Chinese rail, is that the proper term for it, and it ended improving the Chinese train network. Now, these two programs were effectively the same response to the economic crisis faced by the CCP. Rising wages and strike activity, and later in environmental protests, were threatening the profitability of the Chinese manufacturing sector in its traditional coastal urban

sectors like Shenzhen. The solution then was to move Chinese capital towards the interior of the country into more rural areas with lower wages and then build an infrastructure network to export Chinese commodities abroad. This move serves several purposes at the same time. On the one hand, cheaper rural workers are less likely to organize either strikes or environmental protests. On the other hand, some kind of rural investment could secure rural factional support for

the party at a time when the rural Rookhan riots meant that such support was anything but assured. But even in 2013, it was clear that the vaunted Chinese transition to a consumer economy was going to fail, because this is really blindingly obvious if you think about how the Chinese economy works for like 10 seconds, okay, in order to have a consumer economy, you must have a class of consumers. Now, this requires average people to have a thing called money. And both Xi Jinping and the Chinese capitalist class were broadly just absolutely, resolutely refused to do anything that that involves paying Chinese workers more, which is what you need to make this happen.

And they just refuse to do it. It is genuinely stunning. Shishin Ping would literally rather force the reddenly the head, like the CEOs of corporations to give money to charity and call the government program before he would like fucking raise a minimum wage. So, you know, if you're in 2013, right, you can see the writing on the wall. You can see the Chinese economy isn't going to like turn into a consumer economy. There's been, you know, there's been some transition into like a service-based economy, but like, you know, ask, ask the US how growth that a service-based economy works for you.

And because they've seen the writing on the wall, Chinese capitalists start looking for ways to make money overseas. And this overlaps with a growing demand to do something with the enormous reserves of American dollars that China has from like basically propping up the US economy by buying like a trillion dollars of US bonds in the 2000s and early 2010s. And like you think I'm joking when I say like each trillion dollars, but it is actually around a trillion dollars. Well, okay. This is where I need to make an enormous disclaimer.

Oh boy, okay, it is atrociously difficult to get reliable economics statistics out of China to the point where like the Chinese central governments when they get data from their own provinces who are legally required to report data to them, they have to mess with the data to make it make literally any sense at all. They have these equations that they were, that they like applied to the statistical data from the provinces they get that are effectively attempts to calculate how

much the provinces are lying to the central government and how, you know, I'm trying to figure out a way to fix it. And, you know, they're doing things. They are doing things like they're doing things out of like the old late Soviet Union. They are, they are, they are using satellite pictures to check how much light there is from factories at night. They are like measuring how many freight trains are like going into a province and trying to use that to estimate their actual industrial capacity is wild and that is just the CCP trying to figure out its own numbers and that that means right that

The numbers the CCP actually decides to release right that the numbers that CCP actually decides to release when they're done, I'm trying to get the data to look kind of real so they can understand what's going on in the road economy. The, you know, so there's that data, which is unreliable because again, like you're dealing with everyone just lying to you, but the data is, but the data that CCP actually releases, oh boy. So we're gonna come back to this in a little bit, but Chinese youth unemployment right now is 20%.

And the CCP's response to this is they've announced that they refuse to release any more youth unemployment numbers until they finish like recoculating it or something. So great stuff, amazing stuff happening in the world of Chinese statistical lattices. It is awful. I don't wish this on anyone. Yeah, now all of this is to say that the case I'm about to make is probably true. Like, there's like a 90% chance that one I'm about to say is true, but we don't 100% know

because it relies on Chinese economic data that is incredibly sketchy. And a lot of this has turned into this sort of like game of financial hide and seek with all these assets that are in weird places. But what seems to have happened is that a lot of built and road projects are being funded by Chinese foreign exchange reserves,

which is those trillion dollars of like bonds I was talking about earlier, if that, you know, removed from the people's bank of China, which is China Central Bank to like other banks. And then those banks use that to do investments. And this appears to be some of the money that we used to fund built and road projects. And this is where things get very sketchy. Now these banks seem to initially have been flush with capital, which, you know, contribute to a massive, like as the products is initially starting and up through about

2018, like it's just, you know, it just keeps the amount of money going into this keeps increasing, increasing, increasing. And then 2018, it starts to slow. And then after the pandemic, and particularly after like 2021, 2022, like the amount of money that's going into Belt and Road projects has imploded and the amounts of loans that the CCP is writing off has just diminished enormously. Now, okay, this is a sketchy part. You will see a lot of people, if you look into this, who are going to argue that the reason that these loans have sort of dried up, and the reason that this has been decreasing, is that China is like burning through its reserve of foreign exchange.

Like it's burning out of it. It's burning, burning through its reserve of like US dollars, and it has its banks. This may be true, maybe it's probably not true of like 2018 because, and this is the thing that's been discovered very recently. A lot of Chinese, what's like, a lot of things that like I have technically foreign

exchange reserves, or like technically aren't classified as foreign exchange reserves because they've been weird't classified as foreign exchange reserves, because they've been weird stuff that's happened to the balance sheet. I know, it's kind of a mess. But like, it seems like China has way, way larger. They have these things called shadow reserves

that are the things that they've been using to like turn Forex into like investments. And this seems to, this seems to indicate that China has like way, way larger foreign exchange reserves than it technically are on the balance sheet. So what the actual relationship between how much foreign exchange reserves China has and how much money is putting into Belt and Road, we don't know. It's a disaster. But what we do know is that these investments were not like sort of like mere geopolitical tools, right? These investments were actually designed

to make money. And that means that they were and still are in attempt to solve sort of the weakness of the Chinese economy by finding ways to invest capital with better returns than the absolutely terrible and increasingly dogshit rates that you can find in China. And this is something that we've been seeing, you know, in the last year, we've been watching sort of the dogs come, like the chickens come home to roost for the Chinese economy. We're like, you know, all this debt buildups paying off. Well, I say paying off all this debt build up is, you know, like really starting a damage economy, like the housing market is kind of imploding. And, you know, built in

road was supposed to be sort of the answer to this, right? If you combined, if you combined the fact that we know for fact of these loans are an attempt to actually generate returns. And we also know that these loans are a way to sort of stimulate demand for Chinese goods that there's no domestic market for. We get this clear picture of what's really driving Belt and Road. It's the crisis of Chinese capital, which in and of itself is just a reflection of the global crisis of our production under consumption that's haunted the world since the 1970s. Now, there's one last aspect of Belt and Road that we need to talk about that gets way

less attention than any other aspect of initiative. Belt and Road also acts as a work program for a very specific kind of Chinese worker. Belt and Road projects, as you see in Jamaica, are run by Chinese corporations almost always, I mean, occasionally other firms get contracts mostly as Chinese corporations. And they import Chinese workers to do the work. And you know, we've looked at it from the Jamaican end where Jamaican workers are getting screed at jobs and wages.

But we should also look at it from the perspective of Chinese workers as well. Working in China, as we've discussed elsewhere extensively, sucks ass. Wages are dog shit. The hours are in human and there's intense competition for what jobs do exist. On the other hand, salaries for Chinese workers on built and road projects are much, much higher than they are for the same job in China. Amazingly, Chinese corporations abroad actually have less ability to just not pay people for their work, which is the thing that usually the first thing that rich people try to do when they have our face with having to pay someone in Chinese corporations absolutely

constantly attempt to just not pay their workers. And as a bonus to that, on top of the fact that you're like actually getting paid and you're getting paid way more than you would for working a job in China, these, these Belt and Road jobs have a much faster promotion track and the cost of living is much lower than it is in China, which allows workers to save money and send remittances back home. That means, this means that Belt and Road jobs, which are specifically in sort of like nationalist circles conceptualized as quote, Africa, which is, oh boy, it's seen as a way out for Chinese workers. And we actually talked about this a long time ago in our lying flat anti-workup

episodes. Part of the origins of lying flat was his reaction to this sort of like nationalist discourse, but like finding your own personal Africa to break out of like Chinese evolution. And you know, from this kind of like ultra nationalist, like really racist, like concept, you get this like left wing backlash, co-opting of like the refusal to work that is, you know, lying flat. But for our purposes, right now, the important thing about this is Belton Road was a solution to a sort of new,

like highly educated Chinese working class who were suddenly realizing that like this education that they put literally everything into and the song their entire lives into was just gonna get them nowhere. And you know, Belton Road appeared as the sort of mirage of a way out, but it's not. It's not a way out for Chinese workers. It's, it's its own kind of imperialism.

It's the same sort of shit that oil companies do where they said highly paid American workers to oil wells in Nigeria to avoid having to deal with, you know, a class of skilled and politically sophisticated Nigerian oil workers as the same kind of racial divide and conquer that funds Chinese workers at the expense of workers in Jamaica. And that ultimately is the core of both Belt and Road and the American response to Belt and Road. It is a desperate attempt to keep the embers of capital burning by lighting the working class on fire, feeding it to the flames. Segred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the

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I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the murder years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up, y'all? This is Eric Andreik, but I made a podcast called Bomming

about absolutely tanking on stage. I'm talking about your most man-ass-of-roll experience as a performer. But they made a podcast called Bomming about absolutely tanking on stage I tell gnarly stories and I talked to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways Bomming on stage bombing in public bombing in life like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A maker punch to my nose I want to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. There was every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up. Subscribe to my podcast, Bombing with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and

my friends. I'll have guests like Sam Jay, who will say Sloan, Michelle Butteau, Max DeMarco, DJ Doug Bound, Saturday Night Live, Sarah Sherman, and more. Listen to bombing with Eric Andre and Will Ferrell's big money players network on the IHR Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, it's me, James today, and I'm joined by Megan Bodett, who's the director of research at the Kurdish peace institute. We're picking up where we left off at the end of last week to discuss more about the autonomous

administration in North and East Syria, and perhaps more specifically to talk about the detainees, the ISIS detainees in our whole campaign and other camps around there. How are you, Megan? I'm doing well. Thank you, James. Thank you for having me on for this important conversation about a really critical security and humanitarian issue that we're seeing in Northeastern Syria these days.

Yeah. Thanks for joining us. So I think to start out with, would you become to all giving us sort of baseline explanation of like what's happening with these ISIS detainees and why despite the fact that many of them are citizens of other countries, they haven't been a return there. Yeah, that's a very important place to start with. So essentially after the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2019 by the Syrian Democratic Forces and the International Coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Autonomous Administration,

which is the political body governing Northeast Syria, ended up with tens of thousands of ISIS detainees and the family members of these ISIS members as well. And in the Al-Holk camp, you now have a population of essentially ISIS-affiliated women and the children of ISIS members who are now housed in that camp as well. And this camp is a serious humanitarian issue. You have these children. You are in very difficult conditions.

It's a massive security problem for the surrounding Syrian and Iraqi communities that were victimized by ISIS and the world. ISIS openly wants to reconstitute itself. It is operating inside the camp clandestinely to reconstitute itself. It wants to break prisoners out and go right back to its genocidal policies against minorities

in the region like Yazidis and Christians and to continue terror attacks, not only in Iraq and Syria, but around the world. It's also a real drain on the resources of the autonomous administration and the SDF themselves, who we have to remember are not a state actor, but are dealing with the sort of problems that even the wealthiest and most militarily established state actors would have trouble with. So they've ended up in this unenviable position of having to take care of essentially criminals from around the world who came to their country to commit mass atrocities while the victims of these ISIS crimes across Northern and Eastern Syria and victims of the subsequent

Turkish invasions that a Northern and Eastern Syria suffered during and after the fight against ISIS really lack basic resources. Now, this is something I heard a lot on the ground when I was in the region in February and March, speaking to people from Afri, which was invaded and occupied by Turkey in 2018 and to people from Seri Konya and Tel Avia, which were invaded and occupied by Turkey in 2019. Many of them asked rightly why there were so many resources from international bodies and NGOs and governments provided towards the ISIS detainees in Al-Hul and the ISIS-affiliated individuals there. When their communities, their families, who had done nothing other than simply living in areas that Turkey decided to invade and occupy, who were

displaced because of that in what experts, including myself, would refer to as ethnic cleansing, these communities are receiving nothing from the international community. You know, they feel forgotten, and they have some serious questions about that. Of course, the Autonomous Administration has many needs and many pressing security problems that it simply can't devote enough resources to when it's tasked with managing the world's ISIS members. So in a recent study that we published at the Kurdish Peace Institute by journalist Matt Brumfield who spent a lot of time on the ground in Northeastern Syria during and after the defeat of ISIS, he found that just 4% of foreign ISIS fighters held by Syrian Kurdish authorities have been repatriated since

2019. 4%. The most of the repatriations have been women and children, not the fighters themselves who are housed in prisons, but of course the women and children are a humanitarian issue and a security issue too. So think about that. Those are really dangerous numbers. Yeah. I think that differentiation between fighters and women and children is

interesting. And perhaps one we should pick apart a little bit because we talked about this before we recorded. There's a betrayal certainly of Western women who went to join ISIS as having been victims in their own right, which some of them were very young, and might not have been making adult choices at that time. That's one thing. A lot of these people willingly participated in an extremely oppressive and violent regime. They are often not portrayed as such in the press. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Look, what I always go back to when I talk about this issue

is reading accounts from Yazidi women and children who survived ISIS captivity, who've said on multiple occasions that the women were no less brutal than the men, and that they were willing participants in every aspect of the worst of ISIS crimes, of genocide, of crimes against humanity, against the Yazidi people, and of course all the other peoples that ISIS targeted. So that, I think, when you have these genocide survivors saying that no, these women participated

fully in these crimes, They facilitated these crimes. They made this system of genocide of crimes against humanity possible. That's something we have to listen to. I'm glad that you bring up the Western media portrayal because you really see this idea that the women could not have been perpetrators themselves when what we hear on the ground is that that's not true. And what legal cases have begun to find is that that's not true either. There's been trials in Europe for ISIS-affiliated women for their complicity in acts of genocide

against the UZD community. And you know, one point that you hear very commonly on the ground is that how can there have only been one or two just a handful of trials. I'm not sure the exact number, but after all of these people missing, all of these people killed, how are all of these ISIS members? And that's what I said, you know, ISIS-affiliated women because I don't think I do agree with you. It's a disservice to just refer to them as ISIS brides or whatever sensationalistic media framing you have. These people simply aren't being put on trial. And one of the reasons for that is that when we come to female members of ISIS,

there is this perception both in media and from governance from international institutions that these women are victims, that because they're women, because they subscribed willingly to a political and ideological system that was very, very oppressive of women, that puts women only into certain roles as housewives, as mothers of the next generation of ISIS, that these women couldn't have committed atrocities, but they have, they did. And you know what we're hearing right now in some of the reporting that's coming out of Northeast Syria is that even within

the camps, these women have continued to commit some of the most serious abuses that ISIS has been committing. There's reports that they have raped sexually assaulted the teenage boys who are in the camp in order to essentially become pregnant and raise more children to create that next generation of ISIS that they seek to create. And so this continued perpetration of sexual violence against these boys who've done nothing other than had the misfortune to have their parents be members of ISIS. This is a very, very serious allegation. The reporting about this is something that needs to be taken very seriously.

Like I said, this is a massive human rights crisis for these children. It is, these women are no less dangerous and no less culpable for their crimes than their male counterparts who joined ISIS. Yeah, I think that's very fair to say. And it's somewhat of a sexist outlook to be like a woman couldn't have had agency and in the way that men clearly have been held accountable for. And I think it's that the last issue you raised is obviously pretty horrible. But also, we should at least dig into a little bit,

I think, like the ongoing, not only the abuse of children, but the attempt to indoctrinate children into that same extremist ideology, the attempt to even, like I've seen videos of kids training with little wooden guns and raising another generation of people who believe in this could have paid for outlook. And can you talk a little bit about how common that is or how I guess you don't know entirely, but can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, that is something that none of us know how common it is because of the sort of difficulty of accessing that information. But if you look at what is coming in from sources from North and East Syria, from international reporting on the camp,

these women are indoctrinating their children into the ises ideology. They have said many times over and many of their communications that their goal is to raise the next generation of ISIS fighters. There's no reason to raise the next generation of ISIS fighters. There's no reason to believe that the majority of these women have given up on their beliefs. And there is evidence that this is what they're trying to do. And of course, when you look at the broader situation that these children are in,

it's a situation that's exceedingly conducive to radicalization because of the poor conditions in the camps, because of the fact that they remain with their mothers, many of whom believe firmly in ISIS ideology and who see the role of women in ISIS as doing exactly that, as passing down this ideology. And when these children, they can't be safely repatriated to their countries. They can't be put into safe environments where they can receive the support they need, the positive influences they need, any kind of medical or psychological help that they need. In these conditions, it's inevitable that you're going to have the continuation of this

ISIS ideology being perpetrated. And the adults there, these women continuing to pass this down on these children, who again have done nothing to be put in the situation that they're in. They're continuing to be victimized by the actions of their parents and the international community too, is it fault here, you know, for refusing to repatriate at least these children and to try ISIS perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide? Yeah. In some cases, they've even been like, have their citizenship stripped from them of the country, so they came from like the UK have done that, for example, right, which is kind of just failing to do anything to to acknowledge that like this

is an international problem that they have completely. And that's something we can get into is the international dynamic surrounding these issues because it's obviously very closely related to the ISIS issue, but it touches on so many other very internationalized conflicts as well. Yeah, let's do that. Perhaps before we explain the way the nation's sort of more distant from this engaging with it, we should talk about how nations that are more proximal to this are engaging with it, specifically how at times it seems like Turkish drone strikes, which we've discussed previously on our podcast. People will be familiar with them have the very least not helped the SDF to keep these

camps secure, right? And in some cases, it's, you can see like, there's a video that the YPJ have of like, these people celebrating a drone strike inside the camp. And can you talk about the impact these drone strikes have? Look, something that has been reported by journalists, by local sources, and by all sorts of international researchers and experts

since the earliest days of the war against ISIS is that Turkey wanted ISIS to succeed in its mission of taking over northern Iraq and northern Syria in order to not only destroy Kurdish political and military structures operating there, including the YPG, the YPJ, the later the SDF, and the Autonomous Administration, but also to destroy the social base for any form of Kurdish autonomy, any kind of multi-ethnic project, to potentially be able to exist there either now or in the future. And this facilitation of the rise of ISIS reached such a level that you've had legal experts through the Yazidi Justice

Committee, which published an in-depth report on this last year, find based on a review of the evidence that Turkey was, quote, complicit in the commission of genocide, and quote, by ISIS, by allowing fighters to cross its borders, to join the group, allowing ISIS-related economic activity to go on, and other forms of facilitation. Of the rise of ISIS, when it was committing its most serious crimes. So this is not something new. The way that these drone strikes specifically impact this issue, they're part of the broader Turkish campaign of aggression against northeast Syria.

Obviously, the two ground invasions of Afrin and of Serikhania and Talabiyad had very negative impacts on the fight against ISIS. And the drone strikes now, first of all, they make it difficult for any SDF or autonomous administration structure to simply do the day-to-day work of providing security and providing the government.

You know, if a government official or a member of the local security forces has to modify their behavior, has to modify where they go, how they interact with their constituents, what kind of missions they can conduct to avoid being assassinated in a drone strike. They're simply not going to be as effective, right? So, this is a problem in many areas. It certainly impacts the counter-ISIS mission. And Turkey has specifically started to increasingly target A&ES, SDF,

and ASIU's internal security forces personnel who were directly engaged in counter-ISIS missions. We saw this in late 2022 when there were severe Turkish air operations following a bombing in Istanbul that Turkey, based on all evidence falsely attempted to attribute to Kurdish groups despite there being no real evidence supporting that claim. These attacks targeted civilians, civilian infrastructure, and STF forces engaged in key counter-ice submissions,

including STF forces involved in securing the Alhul camp. And now we've even started to see, in addition to these anti-SDF, anti-autonomous administration drone strikes, Turkey's been using drones to fire essentially warning shots at the international coalition led by the U.S. and the other coalition countries itself. We saw this in November when there was a drone strike on the joint SDF coalition base, where the SDF and the international community worked together to plan ongoing counter-ISIS missions. And earlier this year, in, I believe, April of this year, the drone strike on Selimania International Airport in Iraqi Kurdistan, where

there was a joint SDF coalition convoy, where SDF commander-in-chief Muslim Kobani was present and U.S. forces were also present. That strike for all intents and purposes was Turkey's attempt not only to threaten the SDF and the autonomous administration, but to threaten the coalition as well, specifically for its continuing counter-ISIS partnership with Syrian Kurds. So this is risen to a level where Turkey is not only using these to disrupt governance and security at the local level in the Autonomous Administration. It's not only using them against locally-led SDF, YPG, led counter-ISIS missions, but

Turkey is using drones to threaten the entire global counter-ISIS campaign of which on paper it's formally a member, so there you go. Yeah, and Turkey is kind of, we talked about this again before how it pressured like the new a NATO members, Finland, Sweden, to even stop accepting Kurdish refugees, right? It's while at the same time being a member of NATO and as you say also like drone striking other members of NATO. It's certainly like it's making it as hard as possible for people in this part of the world to have the stability and peace and the things that they fought so hard for for such a long time. I wonder if you can talk about like, so what is the

into it as far as the international community exists, which is a pretty nebulous thing to really kind of pin down, but is what is specifically like this US-led coalition to the FIISIS, I think they call it, doing to help. And like I guess a little more broadly building on that, this coalition has a very narrow focus in a place where there are a lot of different aggressors to include various other Islamist groups to include the Turkish state and obviously the state in Syria. Can you explain a little bit about how the the mission of this coalition is narrow in a way that kind of that helps it doing the things that people on the ground then need to ensure peace and stability? Yeah, exactly. That's a really important question because as you said, this international relationship with Northeastern Syria

is very narrowly built on a counter ISIS focus, which means a military focus. So there's relationships between security forces and security forces, what we don't see are political relationships. And this connects to a wide variety of issues related to this immediate problem of ISIS, of securing ISIS prisoners, of bringing ISIS perpetrators of genocide and war crimes to justice, but it also connects to the deeper problem of the kind of long-term stability in Syria that's necessary to end this ongoing civil war, to bring justice to the victims

of ISIS and to all other abuses and atrocities during the 12 years of conflict in Syria, and to prevent the next endless war in this region from inevitably taking place in the future. So we have this narrow military partnership. The reason that this relationship evolved in this way was going back to the role of Turkey because the United States and its European allies had no other option but to partner with Kurdish groups if they wanted to achieve a territorial defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. There was no force other than the SDF and the YPG and the YPJ at that time that would be capable of the military responsibility

of defeating ISIS. It was essentially if people remember the resistance of the YPG and the YPJ at Kobani in Northeastern Syria that held out long enough where the United States and the International Coalition realized that their only option, if they wanted to defeat ISIS on the ground, was to partner with these forces. Before that also, we're recording this in August, the situation in Sinjar, where ISIS had gone in, had committed genocide against the Aziti community. And we're the only people who were able to actually come in and help Aziti's defend themselves

and evacuate refugees to safety in Syria. Where again, the YPG, the YPJ, and the PKK guerrillas as well. Because these Kurdish forces were able to help local civilians in Sinjar defend themselves and evacuate so many refugees to safety, it forced the international community's hand to act. The PKK intervened in Sinjar to start the humanitarian mission on August 4th. US Air strikes began on August 7th. It was this local response from these non-state actors that forced the international community. You know, these states would actually treat the obligations to respond to and prevent mass atrocities to take action.

But because Turkey views the PKK as a terrorist group, it views the YPG and the YPJ as indistinguishable from the PKK and therefore as a terrorist group. The entire counter-ISIS mission from the very beginning was faced with this question of how these states that wanted to fight ISIS could do so without offending their relationships with Turkey as a member of NATO and an ally in other respects. So this connects specifically to the ISIS issue, not only because the contradiction here dates back to the counter-ISIS campaign, but because actual international trials for ISIS members, actual security policies that could address the problems in L.H.O.L. would legitimize the SDF and the Autonomous Administration on the international stage, and would legitimize the SDF and the Autonomous Administration on the international stage.

And would legitimize the political philosophies behind what they're doing, all of which Turkey deems to be a very serious national security threat to its existence. I mean, imagine you have a Kurdish woman judge questioning an ISIS member responsible for potentially European and American casualties, certainly responsible for casualties and all sorts of abuses across Iraq and Syria, about the evidence that we have, that the international community has, that Northeast Syria has about how Turkey

facilitated ISIS actions, you know, with the YPG and the YPJ there for security, with international observers from the U.S. and other coalition countries facilitating providing legal and security support, that would absolutely destroy Turkey's narrative about what individuals and entities are terrorists and which ones have actually contributed not only

to the territorial militarily defeat devices, but to social and political and governance projects that are able to prevent the resurgence of the next ISIS. So this kind of fear of building political relationships with the autonomous administration, with the fear of legitimizing the autonomous administration project and helping it address security problems in a way that would increase its standing and legitimacy locally and internationally, and would show how the actions of states like Turkey contributed to prolonging and intensifying the Civil War in Syria. States simply don't want to do that yet. But, you know, when we look

at the long-term consequences of whether it's allowing Turkey to continue aggressive actions against Northeast Syria and more broadly to pursue a military solution to its Kurdish conflict, term consequences of whether it's allowing Turkey to continue aggressive actions against Northeast Syria and more broadly to pursue a military solution to its Kurdish conflict, whether it's allowing ISIS atrocities to go unpunished, you know, leaving communities that were impacted by ISIS to be essentially retraumatized and left to live in difficult conditions, you know, not receiving justice, and allowing these ISIS members to continue to have the space to attempt to reconstitute their group and go back to the kind of atrocities they were committing and attacks they were carrying out worldwide in 2014-2015.

In the long run, this sort of appeasement of Turkey over the issue of the Kurdish question and the role of the autonomous administration, it's going to over the issue of the Kurdish question and the role of the Autonomous Administration. It's going to create the start of the next endless war in the Middle East. And if policymakers want to avoid that, they need to be addressing these problems from a pro-peace perspective, from a perspective that brings about justice, political solutions based on democracy, on gender equality, on the equality of all communities in the region, all of these values that, while imperfectly, the autonomous administration is really trying to fight for. Yeah, I think it's super important to point out that this isn't a necessarily a Turkey versus Kurdish people dichotomy, or those aren't the only people impacted by this, because the majority of the

A and E is not Kurdish people, and the majority of the A and E is not Kurdish people, right? And I think the majority of the SDF also are not Kurdish. I mean, there's a very good paper by Dr. Amy Austin Holmes, who wrote in an analysis of this conflict and the sort of Turkey SDF security dynamics that what we would refer to as the Turkish Kurdish conflict or the Turkey PKK conflict is actually a conflict that impacts every ethnic and religious group in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. And of course you have, and we could do an entire other episode on this, you know, there are certainly Kurds who support Erdogan and the AKP, whether from an

Islamist perspective or on the basis of class interests. And you have Turks, ethnic Turkish people, who went to Northeastern Syria during the height of the fight against ISIS as members of socialist groups to provide humanitarian aid, and to join Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIS on the ground. You have Yazidis, Christians, Syriaks, Assyrians, Armenians, Arabs, all different ethnic groups in Iraq and Syria that are very much impacted by this conflict. And particularly because of the autonomous administration's multi-ethnic and multi-religious model, and while the autonomous administration system certainly has its shortcomings and hasn't been able to perfectly overcome years and years of sectarian and religious and ethnic challenges, it has made a real attempt at including all of the people's

of the region. And that's one of the reasons why, despite all of these Turkish attacks, despite the devices, these communities have continued to ban together and participate in SDF and autonomous administration structures in order to try to build governance and real post-ISIS security. So it's certainly not just a very narrowly defined Turkish-Certish issue. It's an issue of civil rights, of political rights, of long-term security and stability, of what kind of society and what kind of governance can and should exist in this region,

where many Kurds and many other ethnic and religious minorities would argue the European imposition of artificial borders and nation states onto areas that were multi-ethnic and multi-religious for thousands and thousands of years was the source of a lot of these problems that we see today, not only with ISIS, not only with the Syrian war, with the Kurdish conflict in Turkey as well, with many of the issues that we're seeing in Iraq, in Iran, all over the region. So it goes much deeper than that. And I think that understanding, you know, the very deep historical roots of these issues

is what can start to point us to the actual very radical solutions that would be necessary to get long-term peace and security. Yeah, and that those aren't, I think, solutions, like you said, many nation states still exercising kind of pseudo-colonial control over these places or trying to, or trying to at least sort of use force to extract wealth that are really open to.

And so it creates this sort of half-assed, like you've said, that this sort of limited support for only some part of a project which it doesn't work. If you only support part of this project, right, as we're seeing. I wonder, I think if people are interested in following more about this, I think it's something that, like, so much of the coverage of this whole area

focuses on specifically women in our whole, right, or women who went to joylices. Where can people find out more about like the what sources would you suggest for following goings on in this area? So yeah, I would say following local Syrian and Kurdish news sources would be a good place to start. You have sites like North Press where I've written before that provide good perspectives from Syrian Kurdish writers. You have a human rights organizations working on the ground, groups like Syrians for Truth and Justice. That's done a lot of documentation of issues like, for example, ISIS members who've joined turkey backed groups in the occupied areas. You have arguably one of the best English language resources

not only for their own publications, but for researchers and journalists to reach out to. The Rochava Information Center, it does a lot of good work on their own and also a lot of really incredible work to facilitate the work of international researchers and journalists. You have the Kurdish media sites like Hohar News that will give good updates on what the autonomous

administration is doing and saying. From their perspective, of course, there are a lot of official pages and sites for autonomous administration and SDF institutions as well. Those tend to be in Kurdish or Arabic. So of course course if you know either of those languages you can follow them. For English you have some of the SDF affiliated sites that have been translated the YPJ Information and Documentation Office have done a lot of work

on this issue of ISIS and the related security challenges. they publish in English, they provide good information from that security perspective. And then really I think any sources on social media online that provide good perspectives from people who are on the ground who are providing reputable information, whether it's from a human rights side of things from the security side of things, from the security side of things,

from the administration side of things, it's good to get that full spectrum of perspectives of what different actors are doing and seeing. And then of course, I'd be remiss if I did not promote my own institution. We have published coverage of certainly the ISIS issue in Northeast Syria, but also a lot on the wider political, humanitarian and security challenges related to these interlocking conflicts in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan that have sort of formed the very unstable basis on which these developments relevant to global security issues like ISIS are taking place. So you can certainly read what we've been publishing. Yeah, I think that's an excellent list of resources and lots of the ones that I've been using,

other ones that you've mentioned. I would just, I suppose, warn people, especially the latest YPJ information and documentation center video in our whole, like, comes with a heavy content warning for a violence that you will see there, which is it's documenting things that happen. It's not like they are doing the violence, they're not, but still, if that's something you don't want to see, that's probably a video you don't want to watch. Megan, is there anything people can do to help? I was thinking when we were talking of like, I met a Kurdish man a month ago at the border, being held by immigration and customs enforcement, but it's not a topic that gets much coverage in the US

and as a result, like people, both there and people coming here don't get the compassion that let's say Ukrainian people who are also fleeing conflict do get. And you can see that in the way that they're literally treated differently in immigration law. So is there anything people can do to help? Well, I would say that the first thing is exactly like we're doing now on this discussion and like you as a listener listening to this conversation are doing by hearing from us and following this issue. Encourage media, research, human rights groups, analysts, and all others who do work in any of these fields to cover this issue in its

full political and security context. Look, we can't only talk about North and New Syria when there's a crisis. ISIS did not come out of nowhere in 2014. The Turkish invasion did not come out of nowhere in 2019. And had we as a society, and certainly our institutions, been more informed and more aware of the root conditions causing these outbursts of violence, these outbursts of violence may not have happened. They might have been addressed before they happened.

And so what does it mean to build that awareness? That means everything from writing a letter to your local newspaper, to producing a report at your university, with input from institutions in Northeast Syria, some of these local media and human rights organizations that we've talked about, to hosting an event for your community group

on the state of this broadly defined conflict in Turkey and Iraq and Syria in Kurdistan, between the Turkish state and these Kurdish groups that in addition to fighting against ISIS have been struggling for autonomy, self-determination, equality between men and women, equality of people of different religious beliefs of different ethnic backgrounds,

long before ISIS was on the agenda and Northeast Syria, it was on the agenda. We at the Kurdish peace institute are always available to help you do this. You can reach out to us on our contact page. We have information on everything from submitting content of your own to resources for reaching out to us for media appearances. Of course, there's all the sources I mentioned as well, and there are other episodes of this wonderful podcast with very talented expert speakers and interviewers as well who've spoken about issues related to Syria, Turkey, and Kurdistan. You can advocate for greater political support

for the Autonomous Administration, for an end to Turkey's aggressive actions against Northeast Syria and its ongoing human rights violations in the occupied areas of Afri-Nen-Rasa Line, and for international political support for a democratic, just, peaceful solution to the Turkish-Critish conflict. This is, I think, at the end of the day, the root of all of these problems that we're seeing here. And if this conflict were to be resolved, if Turkey were no longer to take an aggressive

militaristic approach to the very concept of Kurdish autonomy, the very social base of Kurdish communities that has the capacity to seek and organize for autonomy itself, this would mean an end to authoritarianism in Turkey, which has been leading Turkey to all sorts of destabilizing behavior and certainly emiserating countless Turkish citizens. This is one of the reasons why not only Kurds, but many Turkish people of all ethnicities as well have been fleeing Turkey to Europe and even to the United States,

has been the escalating persecution, poverty, and difficulty of life under Erdogan, which is directly connected to Erdogan's choice in 2015 to end peace talks with the Kurdish movement in order to consolidate his total power over the state using war and far-right nationalism. This would end not only these difficult conditions within Turkey, this persecution, this economic devastation, this oppression of all oppressed segments of society, it would end Turkey's aggressive foreign policy in the region as well, which would be hugely important for allowing Northeast Syria the stability it means to put ISIS members on trial, hold them accountable

for what they've done, begin to rebuild, give post-ISIS communities a future, allow these people who have suffered so much to defeat this group, of course, for themselves, but really for all humanity, to be able to build new lives, recover, and have a say in their future, and by doing that, to pursue a political solution to the Syrian conflict. Right now, Northeastern Syria is the only major part of Syria outside of government control that has a system that is semi-functional, despite all of the setbacks of the war and the economic crisis, which again could be a whole other episode. Yeah. Which has empowered women, you know, which has empowered different ethnic and religious communities. They could be part of a political solution in Syria.

Turkey's war on the Kurdish movement is preventing that. This goes into a lot of challenges in Iraq as well with increasing Turkish military operations there related to the conflict that have made life extremely difficult for many different Iraqi communities. But again, all of this conflict, you could argue argue is the largest and most impactful, and certainly one of the longest running, you know, for 40 years now, of the modern Middle East. It is an international conflict. The United States, European governments, like we saw with the example of the US and European

position on NATO accession and the concessions to Turkey made there have been very involved in supporting militarily and politically Turkey's efforts to Turkey made there have been very involved in supporting militarily and politically Turkey's efforts to resolve this conflict militarily and to deny the Kurdish people they're rights by force. And we, you listening to this, our communities in all of these different countries that have a stake in this conflict,

we're the ones who can change that. And you can do that on two different tracks. So one, you can build awareness in your own community. You can build connections between your community, groups and institutions in Northeast Syria, in Turkey, in different places impacted by this conflict, in order to find ways that you can help respond to specific needs, work on specific projects together.

And two, in the long run, use those connections, your knowledge you gain from those connections, the resources you create as you reach out to the media, as you meet different people working on this, to reach out to decision makers and show this is an issue that their constituents care about. This is an issue that's not something that governments can do without a response from public opinion. And this is an issue where there is organized pressure to change policy,

you know, in favor of peace, in favor of stability, in favor of political solutions. Because when we do that, and there's lots of examples of how different communities and organizations have done that, when we do that on a large enough scale, we're not only addressing a humanitarian problem, we're not only contributing to peace and stability in the region, but at the end of the day, we can find solutions for these conflicts that mean that there won't be another rise of ISIS. There won't be another Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Syria. And there will be models for political and social transformation

that can help us and conflicts in other parts of the world as well. So there's lots of ways to contribute. I hope you're inspired to do so. And I think that just listening to this conversation, hearing about what's going on and thinking about what you can do, that's already the first step. You're already there. And that's the most important thing.

Yeah, great. Thanks, Megan. That's a really good, I think, place to end because I give some people something to do. I think far too often, it's really easy and immediate to just point at something and say it's bad and then walk away and not leave people a way to help or do something. So I really appreciate you doing that. Is there anywhere people can find you on the internet? So you can find all of my research and writing at Kurdishpeace.org, as well as all of the research and writing of our brilliant contributors,

many of whom are on the ground in Northern Syria themselves, in other parts of the region, or who have extensively traveled to that region for their work. I encourage you to read all of our content and to follow our social media pages as well at Kurdish Peaceorg on Twitter. And yes, you can read not only my work but the work of a lot of other really great people that I'm very lucky to collaborate with. Amazing. Thanks so much for your time, Megan. Thank you, James. The End They believe that he was Jesus Christ on earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex.

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Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss.

In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I saw rage.

And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hey, what's up y'all the Zerogondrake But they made a podcast called bombing about absolutely tanking on stage

I tell gnarly stories and I talked to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways stories and I talked to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life, like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. I wanted to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. There was there every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up. Subscribe to my podcast, Bombing with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends.

I'll have guests like Sam J. We'll say Sloan, Michelle Butteau, Mac tomorrow. DJ Doug Pound, Saturday Night Live, Sarah Sherman, and more. Listen to Bombing with Eric Andre on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the I-Hard Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's just me James today and I'm joined today by James Cordero and Jacqueline Aveano. They're both from Border Kindness, which is a group that does border eight,

uh, chiefly like water drops and support, uh, to keep people alive as they're making their journey across the desert here in San Diego. Is that a fair characterization of what you guys do? Yeah, uh, we do work all across the border in California. Currently, we're based out of San Diego, but we do our water drops in eastern San Diego County and Imperial County. The organization is based primarily in Mexico on the Mexico side, and that's where it was founded. It's a response to the arrival of the migrant caravans in 2018.

We've personally been doing drops since 2016, but we brought the program over to border kindness a little over a year ago. And we operate programs on both sides of the border. Primarily, James and I are involved with water drop, but we also, as an organization, have a school on the Mexico side. We have operated a pro bono clinic on the Mexican side and currently we're providing direct aid with the families of migrant farm workers in Imperial and Riverside counties. Nice. Yeah, there's a lot of very important things that you don't get enough money or attention.

Sure. You said you started about a year ago, but you've been doing the border drops for what's that seven, that's a long time, seven years here. And since 2016, and I wonder like, if we could start by and we can get into some of the details later, but I've been reporting on the border for that long and there certainly have been notable changes. And I wonder what changes you've seen like we go back to like pre 2015 2016, like that was before there certainly have been notable changes. And I wonder what changes you've seen. We go back to pre-2015, 2016, that was before the whole wall shenanigans. So do you guys want to describe what changes you've seen in patterns of migration?

I guess how safe that journey is or isn't and how that's changed. Well, as far as patterns, I think it's definitely increased, definitely by the, um, as far as the seeing the amounts of supplies being used, the traces of, you know, migrants crossing through in the desert mountains, seeing the amount of board patrol, apprehensions and interactions with people to cross, and the overall militarization of the border. Yeah. Yeah, and I think like as far one of the biggest changes that we've seen on the border overall and that has reflected in the water drop as well is a change in the demographics of people that are coming through even as recently as when we started in 2016. There were

much more of like the trend that was generally kind of like stereotypically the case of like who was crossing which was men of my origin of working age crossing to work and send money back to their families. Yeah, that's obviously still a large part of who is coming through. But in the most recent three to five years, especially the demographics are changing not just by country or origin to include all over the world and reflecting like this global migration crisis that's going on, but also the reasons

and like the desperation is changing. So now it's not just like economic migration. There is asylum seekers, refugees, and it is just changing in tone of why they're migrating and in what ways they're migrating. Yeah, definitely. I've noticed that. As the climate continues to change, more and more people come from those countries, and for you've seen that too, they're both heavily impacted by climate change.

Yeah. Yeah. And that makes a journey, as it gets harder and harder and it yeah, and that makes a journey as it gets harder and harder in the desert, like that makes a journey more and more perilous, I guess. They've come from farther, too. And there are at least some times like not at all familiar with the weather,

with the terrain, with our up against, with like how you have to move in border towns. If you're not from a border town, you don't really know how to move. And who to trust or more importantly, who not to trust. Yes, yes. And there's a lot of pitfalls to just arriving at the border, even from like internal migration, like within Mexico,

people arrive to the border and don't really know how to operate like the day to day there. And it's really made an already incredibly dangerous situation like just totally perilous. As more people have migrated from different countries around the world, you're also seeing people who have been on that journey just to get to the United States line for longer amounts of time, that instead of maybe just weeks

or a month, you're talking about months on months that people have been traveling, you know, by foot, by train, by bus, you know, sometimes by plane, however they can. And we've seen, you know, we've seen like invoices for like hotel stays that people traveling from Turkey came and they stayed like in Cancun for like a month. So like I mean people are gone from their from their homelands, you know, it's longer amounts of time now that you know, it isn't a comfortable thing. So it's not like you can wax and not like you can rest and mentally and physically everything like that. So it's definitely making that part harder for people crossing.

Yeah, for sure. I'm seeing more and more migrants from Africa. And they are very much like it's... The community for them is hard to find sometimes. Like, you know, there are different spaces for them. And they end up in like distinct spaces from, from other like migrants who are coming from other areas. And I know it can be very perilous for them.

Like you say, just, just moving around border towns and navigating the pitfalls of that. Yeah, it's, it's becoming like a more and more difficult and I guess could have complicated issue. But I think what's not particularly complicated is that like no one should have to walk across the desert without water, right? Like it's pretty basic. So maybe we could go through what a water drop is and like what just if we could walk through like, you know, how far you guys walk, what you're leaving out there, what you find that people take, what you find that they need

in their journeys. And you were talking about the receipts, I found tons of those, and plain tickets and stuff, like the things that you find that help you understand how better to help people, I guess. You want to talk about how far the drops are generally, and I'm proud of that. Yeah, so right now, it just depends on the season, the weather, you know, the length of the drops, we hike, you know, a lot of our drops, we also utilize four by fours to get us closer to areas to start our hikes, so we don't have to walk even more miles, that helps us out. And, you know, being able to carry more supplies, you know, with less walking in some areas. But when it's a cooler times and the temperatures are,

you know, below 80 degrees, you know, we can hike, you know, anywhere up to, I think the max that we did was, right, just about 20. But on the average, you know, the cool weather, hi-x will do, you know, right around 10 miles or so, and then when it gets hot, and the desert gets really hot out there, you know, like over 110 degrees on a constant basis and starting to get over 120 degrees, you know, we can maybe do about five miles by foot. We've kind of ran a trial and error. This season is first trying to push further to see how far we can go. Yeah.

We attempted seven miles and that, I mean, we all were gassed right around the five mile mark. So like we have to, you know, set limits because not only is the distance, but the time spent underneath the sun without shade. And that exposure is what drives the internal body temperature up and everything like that. And if you don't have a chance to cool down, that's when your body starts to wear out,

you get heat exhaustion and we wanna avoid heat stroke at all costs and we're trying to make sure everyone's safety is counted for. So we have to kind of cap that in the summer time to like five miles. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. We have to definitely make pushes in the winter to stockpile the areas that are just simply not accessible in the summer months and these strategic and like paying attention to what are entry points and can we hit those entry points or exit points. So maybe we can't entry points and can we hit those entry points or exit points. So maybe we can really access a route throughout its entirety, but we can hit certain points of it more

safely as a team during these like incredibly hot months. But we leave supplies of water, food, and protective clothing and the protective clothing varies depending on season. So I mean, a lot of people don't really take into consideration how cold it gets. In these areas, it gets well below freezing in the winter. In the mountains that be San Diego County, it snows. You know, some drops have gotten snowed out. We haven't been able to complete them because of the snow. And so, the protective clothing varies in the summer, it's things like bandanas, cooling towels, hats, socks, we leave throughout the year, people's footwear not being appropriate. Almost, almost, almost, almost, almost, yeah, blister can be a death sentence out there. So if you get a blister and

you're not able to keep up with your group, there's a really good chance that you're going to get left. So something like having dry socks to change into can very well save somebody's life. So we leave socks throughout the year, pop top cans of food and of course water. And the wintertime we leave swatheres, beanies, like mittens, gloves, scarves, jackets, sometimes puffy jackets, sometimes blankets, you know, stuff to keep people warm when the temperatures, you know, can be freezing for, you know, most of the day, you know, in those, you know, harsh months of of January and February where East from San Diego County gets the winter storms, the freezing cold, when roads get shut down, we can't even access. So as Jacqueline mentioned, when it is cooler, we try to go as much as we can as far as we

can to stockpile as much as possible for when the weather prohib we're hit with us from doing so otherwise. Yeah, I just give people a sense of the temperature swings. I've been in the mountains down by the border at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which is minus 10 isch Celsius, I think. And yeah, also at 120, which is like almost 50 degrees Celsius. You couldn't swing that much in one day, but there are days when it's above 40 degrees Celsius and also they're freezing in the same day. Like it's, it can be really, yeah, it's a perilous place.

That's why people don't live there as a rule. Like it is not a place that's kind to people. So I wonder like a lot of people, I know we did a series on title 42. We spoke to a lot of people and a lot of people reached out and they, like, they want to help. And I understand that the border, I think, for a lot of people, is like, I think reporting on the border as a rule is not great. Like, like, we tend to see migrants as numbers and not as people, a lot when people report on the border. That's happens with more liberal outlets as well as more right-wing outlets.

I wonder how people who aren't in town, if you live in the border lands, it's a middle of America. How can they help? What can they do to kind of support the crisis you're doing, making this horrible thing a little kind of? We have on our all of our social media and as well as on our website, ways that people can help. We have wish lists for items. If people want to contribute in that way, and that's literally like contributing the items that we leave. We also have donation links, so if people want to help financially, that goes a huge way in order to facilitate everything that we do. I mean, gas is incredibly expensive.

To the supplies that we don't get donated by a wish list have to be purchased, that sort of thing. So providing material aid is one way of contributing. And then aside from that, I think just following along with this work and sharing it and changing the conversation, because like as you said, reporting on the border can be really tricky. People tend to not just utilize migrants, but utilize the border as a region in order to have talking points for either like media outlets or campaigns or that sort of thing. And the border gets treated as sort of like its own foreign area. That's not related to either country.

Like nobody wants to take responsibility for it. And residents of the United States also are complicit in that because they don't really, they just talk about the border. They don't say like this is something that's happening in my country. So I think sharing and discussing and becoming informed of what's going on and also feeling like that kinship and ownership of like, hey, this is happening. I mean, for people, it doesn't have to be as far as like the middle of the country. A lot of people in San Diego don't really engage in that. They don't really bother. You know, it feels like so far away, even though it's like 20 minutes

away. I mean, while people are dropping dead, so close to where people live, and they choose to turn a blind eye. So I think, kind of demystifying that for ourselves and sharing in that, it goes a long way as well. Yeah, definitely. I think that's that's very true. It's always amazing to me, like, how like 2018 or the other big one, I guess, would be the end of Title 42, which was this year in May. People will become more aware of what's happening and turn up. It's so very radicalizing for other people in a positive way, getting gay to zoom in a way they haven't been gay before. It shouldn't be I know, it's like, it shouldn't be like, we shouldn't be something we ever get used to, how like cruel our border infrastructure is and what it does for us, but

people are just blown away every time. Absolutely. Yeah, I think you're right. Witnessing it is very important, even if you can't donate financially or if you can't get down here. Yeah, definitely just sharing stuff that, you know, if, you know, our organization posts something on social media, you know, I mean,

it has to be taken as the truth because we're out there firsthand, we're the ones on the ground, seeing reporting back. And by sharing that, you get people, you know, in different parts of the country, or even, you know, different parts of the country or even different parts of the world seeing the realities of the US-Mexico border because most people in the United States

don't know if they don't see it, they'll live near it. So that's something that most people rely on the media and what they see on the nightly news and you know even that You know the big media outlets don't take the most Realistic or don't share the most realistic parts of the border Yeah, you know only to you know cater to their You know their sponsors or cater to their crowds you know, their sponsors or cater to their crowds. And so a lot of people will get like the headlines, but they don't get the real deal,

like, you know, what's going on down the border. And so sharing is is a big part of, you know, how the word spreads of the work that we do in other organizations as well. Yeah, I think that's very, very valid. It was interesting to me recently. I didn't have you guys saw this, but like the floating border barrier in Texas. Yeah. Like, very, like this week, people have been reporting that it has the blades on it, which it does. And that's fucked up. Like, they shouldn't, it's horrible. But like, it was kind of illustrative that,

I guess none of the other national outlets had someone who'd seen it because the blades have been there for like months when the progestives sat there. They were in the 2020 solicitation to, like, it just seemed odd to me that someone had to tweet a video for them to like understand because like obviously no one had walked up

and checked it out, which I don't know if it is, I think it's hard to do border reporting in New York, personally, but that's, guess you, you're interested in the Northern border. So I wanted to ask about Title 42 because I think I listened, there's a pretty well informed on what that was and what happened before and after that. So did you guys notice when that came into effect, just to recap, I guess, for people, Title 42 allowed Border Patrol to bounce people straight back south without processing them and nearly all cases without hearing

that their claims were asylum if they had, and then those people were sometimes later translated across the border to a border town where they may not have had contacts or family or any resources. And it after resulted in those people finding themselves in an even more difficult situation than they already were or trying to cross in more difficult and dangerous places to avoid that. So did you guys notice any changes like around and that came in what March of 2020 as soon as they could as soon as they found the excuse in COVID? Oh, not so much from what we see because we don't come across people too often face to face, did notice that once the pulse he was put into place, meaning

title 42 and you know, with the pandemic starting, we did notice a big uptick on the amount of people coming through. We've seen, you know, before that, you know, just a handful of people maybe, like that we'd come across, a lot of times those people crossing at nighttime and it wasn't something that we came across much, but after that went into effect in 2020, we started running into a lot more people.

We started seeing people that knew somewhat of the policy and that people would try multiple times every day to cross through. And if they apprehended and got taken into Mexico, they try again that same day. And so we noticed a lot more of our supplies being used, a lot more foot traffic, and a lot more interactions with us. We started seeing a lot more interactions with board patrol and people crossing through. And so when the policy was coming to an end, the only thing that we really saw increase was the amount of people trying to get in before, you know, quote unquote, got closed off, you know, before like the bands would go into effect and, you know, like the, the

no, you know, you can reenter for, you know, certain amount of years and all that kind of stuff. So like the camp in Hacumba, you know, of people showing up. As that, you know, stopped, as Tom42 stopped, we really can't notice too much yet that less people are crossing through compared to the beginning, the middle of the policy. Our supplies are still being used at a high rate. Yeah. Still see a fair amount of traffic come through these corridors and everything like that. So it's kind of hard on our end. But we also know that people who do cross not at a port of entry by

foot, whether it's over offense, whether it's around offense, whether it's through the desert over the hills, we know that people are still being apprehended, processed, and released with their asylum claims. So it's hard, as you know, on the board to know exactly what's going on because a policy can say one thing. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Exactly. Like the presidential administration can say one thing, the DHS can say one thing and completely different is happening right there. I don't know. I mean, I can't really say honestly how much it's changed from our perspective. I think when these things happen, like it's always really difficult because like I think the three of us are aware of there's the things that are put in place and that's how they're going to be applied in theory.

And then those of us that have been doing this work can anticipate how it's going to have an impact in practice. So like things that are occurring now in order to so-called, like, curb the influx of people, like, using an app or a gig, having, like, yeah, those are things. Like all of these things, like, we know, and we don't have, like, any faith that they were put in in good faith. And we know, like, that we can anticipate, okay, you're gonna be banned if you don't go in through these like really ridiculously inaccessible means. And that that word is gonna get around,

that people are gonna freak out. They're not gonna bother, and they're gonna hit the desert. And that's what we're seeing, whether we can actually like attribute it directly to like these policy changes, what I think we can attribute it more directly to is one, global migration, regardless of policy, is increasing all over the world.

And that desperation doesn't really wait for any kind of policy change. Two is the misinformation and chatter that people are hearing about. I heard that if you don't use this app, they're going to put you in jail. And like just like literally these things that we're hearing on the border, that is funneling people directly into the desert because they want to avoid any kind of interaction with border patrol, even if they have like what would be a, you know, like an asylum claim, people aren't trusting because there's so much change in uncertainty at like a policy level. There's no accessibility

to this information. There's no clarity to this information. Nobody knows what's going on, whether it's people that are working in border aid or people that are seeking asylum, so people are just taking their chances and hitting the desert. And regardless of the policy change, like ever since the last, like we said, like three to five years, the increase has been like exponential every single year. It just continues increasing. I wanted to add is that so the Title 42 policy was used, you know, in conjunction with the, you know, national emergency with COVID and all that kind of stuff. With the country, you know, ending the national emergency, they couldn't justify keeping Title 42 in effect. And in a way, I feel that the administration was just playing political chess and using people, vulnerable people as pawns. And so the rhetoric coming out and, you know,

the, you know, we're taking a hard stance and this that and the other and a crackdown on immigration. That I feel was the current presidential administration just trying to appeal to a larger audience or when the election comes up next year, you know, can say, hey, look, did this, did that, did this. And the way the numbers have been skewed for apprehend, you know, that's when you'd have like, say in San Luis and Yuma, Arizona, you would see, you know, hundreds and thousands of people every day showing up to present themselves for sound. Those all got recorded as apprehension numbers. So you've got in one month, you know, however many, you know, thousands now, title 42

ends, now that number shrinks down. Now that looks better. That looks tough for on, you know, immersion. That looks like you're doing this down the other. Meanwhile, you have people just, you know, being vulnerable, being, you know, in limbo, you know, on the other side of the border, or you have them taking to the mountains and deserts and taking a dangerous trek, just so they can be apprehended and plead their case and try to get asylum and try to get released in the United States.

So people that way are being used as pawns in this political theater that we always talk about as always. It doesn't matter. The administration, whether it's blue, whether it's red, whether it's orange, whether it's red, whether it's orange, whether it's old, whether it's, you know, it's all money. And unfortunately, you know, we have to constantly like dispel a lot of that false narrative that comes out and it gets exhausting, but I mean, it's what we have to do because you're not going to find that out any other way.

Yeah, you're really not. I think that's an excellent point. And the point about apprehensions is good, right? They always reported, and I've heard like NPR do this, report apprehensions as if they're individuals, which they were not under Title 42. Like, if you cross five times in a day and get apprehended and sent back five times, that's five apprehensions. It's one person.

And they were deliberately using that to make this seem like more people were coming. And as you say now, it will seem like less because that doesn't happen anymore. And I think your point about like the Jack and the points about the misinformation is super crucial and one that again, often isn't reported. But like, I'm not a lawyer and I can't give people legal advice, but constantly when I'm in Tijuana, when I'm in Sonorro, when I anywhere, where I'm like on the southern side of the border or on this side of the border, people will ask me, or when the people are trapped in between the two fences that constitute the border. People will say, hey, have you heard this? Hey, I got this and they'll play like voice messages

on WhatsApp often or show me a WhatsApp and we'll go over like, that's not my understanding, you know, like I don't think that's a case. But I understand, you're vulnerable, you're scared and this shit, like I have a PhD and speak all those concerned languages, but I don't understand it fully. It's complicated and petrifying if this is your only hope of a dignified life. I think it's something that people don't understand. It's how hard it is for

those people to get decent information about what they're quote-unquote supposed to do, especially when we have this app, which like I don't have a ton of foyers in around the app, but I don't think I'll ever get any documents back from the Fed, to be honest, but yeah, it's it's a treasuse. I think it's ridiculous. Yeah, and then our nation that people receive isn't even accurate. So whenever there is, that somebody say, has come to our office downtown in Newfoundland and run in their paper work and say,

I have a court date. There was a time like during MPP and all of that, people were giving court dates on Sundays or giving court dates in Texas when they were sent back after their arrest in Arizona to Mexico. Like just crazy stuff like if people are given inaccurate information to wait through this process that doesn't seem to make sense to anyone. It's wildly like convoluted. I mean, that's the intention, right? Like it's not meant to be navigated in any way. No, it's not. It's meant to be a little off, I think. And like, even with the work that our friends at Alotro La do do and other legal aid groups, like I was speaking to a Ethiopian friend who I met in Tijuana and he lives in the US and he helps other folks now who arrive more recently. And he was saying that like getting a lawyer to represent you can cost you

like getting a lawyer to represent you can cost you maybe five grand, maybe 12. And you might not have the legal right to work, right? So where is that money supposed to come from? And then if your language is a Romo or something, it's that much harder to navigate that system to find useful resources to explain it to you. And it's, yeah, it's people like to talk about like how, I know that their family did legal, legal, quote unquote migration,

when they weren't these checks in place and they didn't have to do any of this shit. And I don't know, it's, I don't think people realize how brutalizing the system is until like they've seen it first time. That's a close point. Like the cruelty and the confusion, like putting people in danger is the whole point. And it first time. At the close of the point, like the cruelty and the confusion, like putting people in danger

is the whole point. And it's intentional. Like, so if somebody's there and like you said, like they speak there, they're not able to even like wrap their heads around the process, let alone access, like the resources in order to navigate that system. Then a co-youther approaches them and tells them,

like, oh, I can take you over here to Romeroosa. All you have to do is pay me 300 American instead of 5,000 for this like, eh, you're probably not going to win that case. The town's a mile away. The town's a mile away and it's a straight shot and you'll get there in half a day. And then you're good to go. And I mean, we've heard the most wild stories like even from people in the middle of the desert lost, saying they told me it was two mile walk and that they were hiring in the town on the other side of that hill.

Yeah. And I mean, who wouldn't at that point? It's like, you don't have a country to go back to. Yeah. It's no longer like, oh, I'm fleeing. I'm migrating from my country because there's no work. No, there is no country to speak of, at least for you. And Europe here and this goyote presents you this opera. Like so it's misinformation and exploitation like every single step of

the way. And a lot of the time people's most straightforward avenue is through the desert even though it's like unbelievably hard and very, very often deadly, that's like the surest shot that they have and they take it because I mean, it wouldn't. Yeah, no, it's not like, like you say people aren't like, you know, doing the numbers and thinking they'll make more money in the US. It's like, I will die if I stay at home or like someone has already killed someone I love and I have to leave now. And especially when the Trump administration, the people on the way, towards the end of the Trump administration, Trump started making claims in presidential debates about the number of miles of wall he was built. As far as I can work out,

he pulled out of his ass. And then they started rushing to build more wall. And I asked them how they came up with that number and they did this thing where they were like, oh, we repaired this much wall and they were like eight miles of board of wall prototype and they get a cool man. Like they didn't build that much wall, but they started skipping the harder parts, right?

Like Valley of the Moon, even that ball of pile outside of Kumbh, like, there are areas that that don't have wall, and those are areas that are harder, and then that's where people try and cross. And like, I love to go outside and a pretty fit person, like, valley of the moon is hard going, like, if you're not going up the road, like, that's tough travel, and that's where people don't have a choice but to cross, right? Right. Yeah. That's where, and that's where like, in May, it was, I think, with the first second week of May, when, you know, just a few days before 1042 was ending, that's where thousands of people came through. Yeah, it was through that one area down into the town of Okumba.

And a lot of people, I mean, we're talking about, you know, thousands came through there. And a lot said that they paid upwards to a thousand dollars ahead. Two coyotes that brought them there and said, hey, when you get down there, you just follow this road. Once you get down to the bottom, there's going to be a buzz waiting for you. It'll take you in. And then they got stranded for days.

After going through that terrain, the temperature, that's when the season really started shifting. So the night's really cold. The daytime highs were pretty hot. And I mean, that was the designed, you know, cruelty invasion that gave us someone's invasion. I mean, because you could yeah, a hot little piece will gather and then claim that you weren't detaining them that right?

Exactly. They weren't free to leave. They said the board patrol told them that they had a rest on if they left left the yeah, I mean, I say camp lose really because it was just like out in an open field Yeah, but people you know cut down branches and turn into shelters and use areas that they cut down for like fires Camp fires at nights to stay warm. Yeah, and you, Border Patrol probably didn't expect that a people locally in Hukumbu were going to care or be that the word would get out. And so their cruel practices that they were enacting on like the first day or two of people showing up and being stranded, no food, no water, then it kind of backfired. And then, you know, I believe you went out there as well.

You saw how many people showed up to care. And like we were working around the clock to try to, you know, organize and make food, prepare food, pack, collect donations, everything. And you know, that's, I've gone through that terrain. And you know, after all that was closed down and looking through as, you know, as we did, like, trash cleanups and people, you know, would have their last remaining food and water that you could see, like coming through across the area where they were brought to. And like people were shedding clothes because of temperatures were so warm during the daytime. And then just wondering like, okay, so they shed their clothes and now they're

like freezing down the bottom of the hill and the terrain's too tough to go all the way back up. And you know, it, yeah, there's no fence over there. And the fences, you know, it, yeah, there's no fence over there and the fences, you know, we've said, have always been kind of built for the most part where people can see them. It gives the appearance to the rest of the country that's not out there, that there's a fence across the whole border. Right, and you know, go into a lot of areas where we see that that's not the case. And also we see where board defense is stopped and migration makes its way right around the edge of that. Yeah, in the meantime. But the disc now has increased longer for the locks because instead of just being able

to walk through like an open area, now you have to go miles all the way to get around to the opening in the fence or go up and over a mountain and, you know, doing them the summertime, you exhaust yourself from the stringent is hike on top of the unbearable heat and then you pass away, you know, an eighth of a mile from a fence, you know, as someone that we know, that happened to them a couple of years ago. So it's, um, we as you're saying, like the fences and, and like, where they're not put, it's, it's just a point of cruelty and part of the prevention through the terms policy that's been going on for, you know, almost 30 years now and, um, I bet that's something. Yeah. And the CBP one app and all the kinds of

sessions and other extension of prevention through the turns by making it harder for people and pushing people to ways that they can try to get through or you know what they think they can try to get through easier. And as Jaclyn said, it's just it just become more and more death here. And every year, the numbers go up of confirmed deaths, but that doesn't count the amount of people that go missing every year. Yeah, or the people who like board a patrol and find and they, they, you know, their numbers are any, the people who they found and see areas that going. Like if people die further north or yeah, or the deaths deaths that they they deliberately miscategorize as non-migrant death. They're just gendos, gendos, whatever you know they just say like oh you know um cause of death unclear or cause of death for exposure but they don't necessarily call it a migrant death even though

it's someone you know traveling with a backpack in the desert yeah Yeah, yeah. Just out for a hike. And they, you know, like, say that they were migrating just because they had, you know, under and passport on them. Yeah. That's all the time too. So all of this is like, we don't know the scope of their cruelty. Like, it's just what's scary is that like, it's so much bigger than we even know, even like those of us that are like in it every day. Yeah, there's no numbers. Like I would, in a sense love too, in a sense it'd be horrible. I don't think it should matter.

Like I don't think it should matter how many people, like every single one of those is a tragedy and it's somewhat small or dad or brother or sister. And I kind of wanted to, to maybe talk about like one incident, if you're comfortable doing it, like that you might be familiar with, that I think can give people a sense of how dehumanizing this is and how cruel this is. You guys, I know you're familiar with it, but the young women who died on the shrine trail, was it winter of 2020 or winter of 2021?

Yes, that was February 2020? Yeah, it's right before COVID. So for people who aren't as familiar, I spoke a little bit about it in our series, but can you describe kind of the process that if you're comfortable, I know it's like a, it's a pretty horrible thing.

But can you describe like, how they cross to and what happened to them? I mean, we can give you like some of the background that was like in a newspaper article that we had come to learn. Yeah, sure. We have like direct communication with fans. No, yeah, yeah.

You're not in contact. I think it would be helpful for people to realize. This is what happened to them. And then also that you guys have been able to respond after that happened to at least try and help deploy resources to that a bit less of a treacherous crossing. So as the situation was unfolding, it was next time and there was like a freak storm that came through Eastern San Diego County around the area of, I think, like, live folks, springs, Mt. Laguna area. And it was just raining and cold before, but later on that day kind of turned into snow and turn into heavy winds like zero visibility snowstorm

And these three sisters that were from Wohaka Who've crossed over for work multiple times came worked went back home You know for you know, whatever season came back, worked, went back home, and it was my understanding that they were trying to save up enough money from what they made here in the United States to open up their own business. And so the day came when they were crossing over, they came through, I think, in the Camp spot and knew the trailer which to go. But I believe it was their first time actually leading people through and not

just themselves coming through. So they, you know, they remember the way and got up close to where the the shrines of the shrine trail. There's a little shrine up there that people would leave little little symbols and tokens and little items behind mostly to the version of our loopay. And from that point, it is that that's the last time you can be hiking on that trail that far north and turn around and still see Mexico. Anything beyond that's kind of like the point of like you can't see Mexico, like you've got to keep moving forward.

You've already gone, you know, at this point, it's close to 30, I think, air miles. So, like, you know, walking miles a lot more than that. Yeah. And they were at this kind of like rock, boulder, outcropping, just about five minutes walk shy of the shrine when the sisters couldn't keep going anymore. And because of the extreme weather and the extreme cold, they were soaking wet from the rain and then the, you know, sub freezing temperatures with the snow storm. They couldn't keep going anymore. And so they were kind of huddled up underneath this boulder. It's the only spot that kind of gave like a little bit of shelter from that storm. Yet, I mean, those rocks are ice cubes, you know, being out there for that long. So the two brothers, I believe, left to try to get cell phone signal,

because you're up pretty high in the mountains. I think that elevation up there on the mountain. I think it's somewhere around 5,000 feet more. So that location where they passed away. And the brothers that took off to try to get self-on-range to call them, you know, EMS, which turns out to be, you know, Border Patrol in that region. And so we got to hold a Border Patrol, a Border Patrol arrive to where the brothers were. And first thing, you know, before, you know, rushing to try to make a rescue, anything they you know, detained and arrested the the brothers for, you know, for, you know, human smuggling trafficking, you know, just, you know, being coyotes. And then they put in efforts of trying to rescue. By the time, I believe that they got to the three sisters to them and already passed away.

And there was one that was still barely alive unconscious. And due to the, whether as board patrol has stated, the agents, the Borestar rescue agents, the search and trauma rescue, they had to take off. They couldn't airlift the last remaining sister out because there was zero visibility. The helicopter couldn't even get, like, find them, couldn't get, like, anywhere close to them, couldn't hover because the wind was blowing so hard. It was just about a white out condition.

So, I mean, the most, you know, fuck situation possible. And board patrol in order to make sure it didn't turn into from a triple fatality to however many of them there were. I think there was three or four to however many of them there were. I think there was three or four. It's there out there. So to, you know, in order to save their lives, they took off. They put the last remaining sister like in a,

like a puffy, overall type of situation and they had taken her wet clothes, they could have wet clothes offer and were actively trying to warm her with like heat packs and wrapping her. And so they took off and kind of just like left her, you know, with basically, as they said, the best, you know, chances possible of survival, even though someone would be left on their own in that condition, there's zero chances of survival. Bore Patrol took off, allegedly injured themselves in doing so, got frostbite, etc. I think it was the next day, came back out for the, it would turn out to be the recovery and all three sisters and passed away.

You know, from freezing to death. And so, as we learned about that, you know, as the situation was unfolding, we reached out to the journalist who wrote the article in local San Diego Union Tribune. His name is Alex Riggins and through you know some back and forth contact he was covering the trial of the two brothers that brought the sisters through their in court for their deaths and reached out to see if we could find out any information. If he could, if Alex could let us know, like maybe where the shrine trail was or maybe where the location of the recovery was, just something that we would have so we can, you know, put it on a map, figure out how to get there, and get boots on the ground to leaf supplies,

a few times a year, whether it's going to be really hot or really cold, we wanted to make sure that we responded to the crisis as we found out about it. The something that we unfortunately have had to do. All do come to this work is that's unfortunately in a way that we learn. Yeah, when it's too late sometimes. Yeah, yeah, a lot of you have to learn efforts too late.

And that's part of our expansion of areas that we cover. That's how we learn stuff. And that's how we work at preventing further suffering and further deaths. So we got more or less a good location. And one of our team members at the time, he went out on a weekday that he had off and he just went kind of driving around the area and Start hiking out in this area that look like from the photos that were in the newspaper or could have been this location and He put in a long hike that day and he found

the clothing that was removed from the last he found the like the puffy overalls he found a bunch of medical equipment like emergency equipment those used for, you know, the three sisters during that process. And shortly after that, I think it was just like a couple of weeks. We got together some of our strongest hikers and we decided to go out there and leave a bunch of supplies. And that is is it is a hard hard hike whether you're you know carrying 35 40 pounds on your back or you're just carrying you know a backpack with like a bottle of water and some food like it's hard no matter what so we got up there and we left supplies and we know we've been going back usually before seasons change, whether it gets hot or cold and we track to see if anything's been taken

and it doesn't appear that that trail gets too much use, but it does get some use. Yeah. So, I don't know if the researchers passing way there had anything to do with like future travel for people to find travel or what, but, you know, we, we made that commitment in their honor and to prevent anything like this ever happening again. Yeah, sent me a very sad, very sad situation and like situation. And like, yeah, so many things have to go wrong. And so many people have to like turn a blind eye, I guess,

for three people to die. Like, you know, there's blatant negligence on the part of Border Patrol very regularly, given that they are supposedly, like as James mentioned, the emergency medical service that's out there. And there is outright blatant deadly discrimination that occurs when it comes to providing emergency services for migrants. In this case, they prioritize apprehension over saving people. In this case, they prioritize apprehension over saving people. Any moment is going to count, and regardless of what the conditions were, those are the conditions, and that's the story that they're reporting.

I think we rightfully are skeptical of anything that they say when it comes to rescues and how they prioritize doing so when we have seen entirely the opposite occur on a regular basis. When they have the opportunity to provide aid, them electing to do so. You know, going back to Huckabee, when people were out there and they had nothing, they weren't being provided a sip of water for days and days and days. Port of control could have done that. If they are the emergency services, they weren't being provided a sip of water for days and days and days. Border Patrol could have done that. If they are the emergency services, they could have provided emergency aid. When it comes to a rescue like this, they have the agency, they are the agency, they have

the agency to deprioritize processing somebody for apprehension and prioritizing rescue and they chose not to do it. Like time and time again, we see the situations. And I think like when, you know, before we start a recording, you ask like, what's the thing that like we want to talk about that doesn't often get talked about. And I think it's this. I think it's the, it's not just like the surveillance

and the patrolling and all of that stuff that dehumanizes migrants, but like when they're in danger, they're regarded as less than human by the, because the only agency that's out there to help them is like the reason that they're in danger in the first place. So we have come across multiple search and rescue that aren't migrant related.

Just being out in the desert, where either a US citizen or, in one instance, a tourist was lost in the desert, and their response is night and day. When there's a migrant that's lost, and we are calling for assistance, any kind of, can a search be initiated? Can we get, like the response is so blase and minimal and there's no accounting, there's

no holding them accountable for acting or failing to act. Right. And it's blatant. Like, and I think that's the thing that like the general public that isn't involved in this work, like, should know about how cruel it is and how little the response is when somebody is lost, when they're dying, when they're dead. Like, us having to call the coroner repeatedly to have children's bones picked up, that would not happen if that child was not

presumed migrant. So this is like we have story after story after story of like situations like this is just one tragedy, but there is a lot of, could have should have what have like on the end of like eight organizations that we carry and it doesn't seem to ever be like a shared way With any of the agencies that actually have the ability to respond to this kind of thing and like an organized way

They don't care. They don't do anything about it. Yeah, and there's like so much money spent on our border right like I'm a bit in her company. I was like sitting underneath this thing for shade. And then I look, I'm like, oh yeah, this thing cost a million dollars, right? That little trailer with the solar panels that intercepts the signals. Like, and they didn't give these people a bottle of water. Like, like all the water came from other people, from random San Diego people who bought it, right? Like, it's just such a strange priority, well, not strange, it's a cruel and horrible priority choice, right? The priority is that kind of,

like, enforcement over human lives, like, which are being lost. And it's the same, like, you know, reported in Arizona, a return, it's been a lot of time there. I spent a lot of time here, reported in Texas a couple of times, like, it's the same lot of time there. I spent a lot of time here, I reported in Texas a couple of times. It's the same all across the border. The priority is not rescuing people. It's not even particularly enforcing the law, it's written, it's just stopping people coming here. So, collectively, yes, selectively, because they do let a significant amount of people through like even like in Hakumbah when people that weren't familiar with this Whole kind of like smoking mirror show of the border were coming and responding. They were saying like well, why are they letting them through? Why is this open over here? Why is like the mountainous surveillance?

You know, we've had people come out on water drops and say like, oh, should we be hiding the water? Should we be doing this and that should we like they have eyes on the whole desert. So yeah, I mean, it's They do their the point is to stop people from coming through, but not completely Right. That's labor that's coming through. Yeah, that It's there that they're selective in how much they, like, you know, how much the gasket is being opened and shut. Yeah. And in different sectors at different times, like, it seemed like things are done, but I'd even like, yeah, there are the other

thing I think that people who don't live on the border don't realize is to what degree every single person here, whether they give a shit or not, is surveilled because they live near the border. We saw that in 2018 with a lot of friends who can't go to Mexico anymore, who have flagged passport. Yeah, you too. So many people I know, I don't know how I went over a ton in that time, but I guess I managed to avoid it. But yeah, it's, it's that, and then like,

I have been in the middle of nowhere in the desert and found cameras, surveillance towers, right? Like, stuff that would not be, I think the constitution is largely irrelevant, but like, there wouldn't be legal or just like unjustifiable anywhere else. And like this spans from here to like our autumn friends in Arizona to Texas, right? Like if you live on the border, like or within a hundred miles of the border, right? The border can come to you. It doesn't matter if you care or not, it doesn't matter if you consider yourself to be

like an immigrant to the US, or if you've sort of decided that it doesn't apply to you, you don't care about those people. Like, then it doesn't matter. That surveillance still impacts you. And often it impacts like our indigenous friends, right? Like my, my, my old friend, Kumi, I friends had their grave yardsikes for those to build the wall.

And yeah, even if you don't care, even if you think the wall is great, that yourself, I'd still go through a distinct rate out. I know it's wild, not how much people who are like very, you know, right wing anti, like, you know, pro like freedom and all this stuff. Like well, very rattly give up those freedoms in exchange for like constant surveillance. Like if it justifies the means of like, you know, their big tree or like whatever like their world view is,

like they're suddenly like very pro-border patrol, very pro-cop, very tri- well that's like indirect conflict with like everything else that they're saying, right? But yeah, it's freedom for who I guess. Yeah. Well, it also goes with the same people are saying, well, like, well, if you're not breaking the law, then what do you have to do? Yeah. Well, everything starts with the border. So the surveillance, the facial recognition, the plates, scanners, all that stuff started the border. And now we see that just recently, like the San Diego City Council approved to have the like the street light cameras and all that kind of the lamps and all those hundreds of cameras

that are gonna be out there like with that same type of technology. And like, well, if you're not breaking the laws, like, okay, we'll give a little bit of time until you're not breaking the laws and like stuff still happens. I mean, that's how things snowball. Hey, everyone, shortly after we finished talking about why

San Diego's Nampos are also spies, my internet once again died. So that's what we're going to end it today. It's really been a long episode. But what I would like you all to know is that you can find border kindness online. You can find them on Instagram. You can find James there at Borolo L. Cordero. You should probably be able to work out how to spell that.

You can find them on Facebook and you can find them on Instagram. And you can pretty much find them anywhere you go on the internet by searching border kindness. And like James said, they in his I'm looking at his Instagram profile right now, that's bro low L Cordero, I guess B-R-O-L-O-E-L-C-O-R-D-E-R-O. James has a wishlist, an Amazon wishlist, so if you're not close to San Diego, then you can, you can just click on that and buy them from them. I'm sure you could collect donations and send those as well. There are so there are a lot of different ways you could help. But I hope you all enjoyed this. If you're in town and you want to help go hike with them, you can reach out to them on social media as well. I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from you. Thanks so much for listening. Goodbye.

video as well. I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from you. Thanks so much for listening. Goodbye. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the I Heart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly monthly at coolzonemeet.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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