It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 109

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

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It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. How things were also bad in falling apart in the 2000s, which are a profoundly cursed time period.

And specifically, we're going to talk about, I think, a part of the anti-war movement that does not get much attention, which is the Port Militarization Resistance that happened sort of 2006, 2007. And with us today to talk about this is two people who were part of this movement. We have Julianne Neuhauser. Hello. Hello. And Brendan Maslowskis-Dunn. Yeah, both of whom were organizers and activists while this was going on. Yeah, thank you both for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having us. So, yeah, as I was saying a bit in the intro i think that this is a part of the anti-war movement that is not very well known i think i think a lot of people know about the initial stuff happened in 2003 and people might know about some of the stuff that was happening against the war in afghanistan but right when it started but i don't think most people know that it like you know even after 2003 sort of doesn't work that it continues and it continues sort of in forms that are that are very interesting and so I guess I want you to to start out I want to ask how we sort of got from the early part of the anti-war movement into this and how you two got involved

I would say that there's this narrative about the movement against the war in Iraq, that there is the largest protests in human history, at least at that point, I don't know if it's still true, against the invasion. And then it didn't work. And everyone kind of went home and ended there. And to a certain extent, that's true. But like you said, the people that didn't go home went in interesting directions. And so at the time, there were...

Direct action was not as acceptable as it is now. The protest movement was largely dominated either by big liberal coalitions or PSL front groups that were basically indistinguishable in what they actually did, which was basically nothing. And

in the best of cases, and in the worst of cases counterinsurgency. But then there were small groups of people that, when we saw that it didn't work, and we saw that these giant peaceful marches from one part of town to another, or voting for John Kerry or whatever, didn't work, that we started to look for other options. Yeah, and, you know, I got involved, you know, I'd say with the anti-war movement, that idea of how war is unjust was really taught to me from a very young age. I mean, my parents were, you know, children of the 60s and

they had family members fighting in Vietnam and, you know, friends dying in Vietnam and were against the protests back then. So I grew up hearing these stories and of course, stories from family members, particularly one of my grandfathers, both of them who were veterans in World War II. One of them was a Marine in the Pacific theater and still into his 70s, 80s, and 90s until his final days was just dealing with horrific PTSD and had always taught me from a young age never to get involved. And I remember when very clearly, I'm sure it's on everyone's minds now, when the invasion of Afghanistan started, when the invasion of Iraq started, I was at that massive demonstration in Washington, D.C. that Juliana just mentioned. And, you know, I ended up, I'm from Utica, New York. I went to a rural high school just outside of Utica, you know, Rust Belt, generally speaking,

impoverished and also very conservative area of New York. And, you know, I had the recruiters bothering me, military recruiters in high school, recruiting my friends, and they were just everywhere in the hallways. So it was very present with me. When I was younger, I moved out to Olympia, Washington in 2006. And that's when a new student activist group, Students for a Democratic Society, was launched. That's how Juliana and I first met. We were both in separate chapters of that new organization in the pacific northwest and uh the port protests started just uh just a few months after i moved out there in in olympia

in 2006 so wait to clarify this for a second because i've never quite been clear on this history so there was a second sd uh like students for democrat society that was like unrelated to the first one yeah it was that reborn briefly um at the end of the bush administration that explains a lot of things that were otherwise very baffling we're not that old yeah we were definitely in the in the second uh you know the rebirth of it um so you know, the rebirth of it. So, you know, I think it took on some things in spirit, you know, but also was, I'd say, different in many ways. And it was very active. To me, it was very exciting to be a member of the new SDS because they're over a dozen chapters in the Pacific Northwest. And it was a great way to connect with young activists all over the US.

So SDS is emerging in this time period. One of the other things I was interested about is something you were talking about in the early part of this, which has to do with the way that these giant, both the sort of Answer Coalition, PSL Frank Group, and I guess the ISO was still around back then, coalitions work versus how like anything else worked i'm interested so so what was was sds sort of like consciously set up in in opposition to those groups i don't think it was conscious but there was just like i mean these days i mean like there's a lot of controversy around pso with like anarchist versus tanky politics none of that mattered at that time like none of that mattered at that time.

None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was that Answer, which was the PSL front group, was completely fucking useless. They were completely indistinguishable from any peace police, liberal, democratic front group. There was literally no difference, just in terms of their aesthetics, maybe. Is there a donkey or a hammer and sickle on something that's the only difference we saw so i don't i don't think there was it wasn't there wasn't like a conscious like political

opposition to it it was just like they're not doing anything and and so we had to look in another direction actually you know it's hard to keep track of the alphabet soup of authoritarian communist groups at times but this was actually answer for those who don't recall it was a front group for the workers world party the wwp which yeah i mean it's it's hard to keep track right, it's the same thing. I think, so, okay, so for people who are sort of unaware of this, there's a network of connected but sometimes feuding, like, weird Stalinist cults that kind of, like, they hold on to, like, the 80s and 90s, and they start sort of rebuilding again around the anti-war movements in that period. That's the PSL, that's the WDP, that's ANSWER. around the anti-war movements in that period that that's the psl swp that's answer like and and i think there's like most like modern anti-war groups are also still these people which is incredibly depressing something i want to talk a bit about towards the end of this but yeah just for people who have not spent like the last half decade in the in the trenches of extremely weird uh anti-war politics so yeah

so so i think we should get into how the sort of the first action starts in olympia yeah so and there were actually a couple actions that happened in the year preceding that, you know, before I moved out to Olympia in 2006. It was not yet under the banner of PMR, Port Militarization Resistance. That was a name that was officially coined in, you know, in May and June of 2006. you know, in May and June of 2006. So just to give you an idea, Olympia, it's a college town or the Evergreen State College is there. It's also the capital of Washington State.

So you have that going on. It's also a military town. It's a little over 20 miles south of what we called Fort Lewis. It's now called JBLM, JBLOM, or Joint Base Lewis-McChord. It's an Army and Air Force base. Now it's one base.

So you had all these, you know, different kind of elements in, you know, in tandem in that town. And the public port, the Port of Olympia, is one of about 70 or so public ports in the state of Washington. about 70 or so public ports in the state of Washington, some of which are, I mean, they're used for all kinds of things, you know, for commercial private industry, but also the military and the US government. So, you know, I heard from someone, I don't even remember who, that the military was sending a ship to the port of Olympia in late May of 2006. And this happened for 10 or so days. And it was just kind of a natural instinct for a whole bunch of us to go down to the Port of Olympia.

It was the war machine in our backyard. And the idea was to just block the vehicles. It started out with just like less than 10 people, a number of folks getting arrested. And that very rapidly culminated into larger protests every single day, an act of blockades. People, those of us like Juliana, myself and other folks using civil disobedience or what we prefer to call civil resistance to try and stop or at the very least slow down these striker vehicles. And to give folks an idea of what a striker vehicle is, you can look it up online, but it's kind of halfway between a tank and a Humvee.

It doesn't have the slats that a tank would have. in Humvee. It doesn't have the slats that a tank would have. And they were being used in both Iraq and Afghanistan for raids of residential areas. They were really on the front lines of the war in both those countries. And that's what we were trying to stop. I only got involved later because I wasn't living in Olympia at the time. I was in another SDS chapter. But my roommate was from Olympia. And he had been involved in that first round of protests in Olympia before moving up to Bellingham. And so hearing his story has got me very excited. Because finally someone's doing something. They're not just like,

it's like everything else was just so liberal. Like whether it's marching from one place to another or writing to your Congress people or occupying their office, it was like asking someone else to do something, which you knew from the beginning they were never going to do. And finally this was

finally someone was like actually getting into it I think the first one of the things that happened here was that they started to avoid there's

kind of a geographical thing that i think um for people who either don't know washington or because they're normal people don't know like the port areas of these cities very well because it's like like unless you're a longshoreman like why would you go down to like the port of port of Tacoma? Yeah. There's nothing there. Yeah, no. But they kept moving it around because Ompia is also not very big. And so it's, there's really only two roads into the port, which is very small. And so it was, it's very easy to block it um and so then i think the first time that i got involved um was in 2007 um when they had moved it because they kept moving it around

to try and switch things up and wait they're they're they're moving the ship around is that they're moving no it's like they had to make a military shipment they would um it's like like once the ship was in the port they would just have to go through with it but then um you know it's like every every six months or so they had to make another military shipment and they would change the port usually each time to try and basically to avoid us. It doesn't seem like this is normal practice. The first time I had

gone down was in Tacoma which is a much, much, much more industrialized port than Olympia. It's a big port, a more normal port I guess. That one was honestly pretty crazy because you're just trapped in this giant industrial maze,

basically at the mercy of the riot cops. The best success we had was definitely at the Port of Olympia. I think in 2007 in Olymp in olympia was definitely i guess like the glory moment which was um when people were able to on and off like actually hold the port and control its influences and exits yeah and i want to you know just emphasize that like the the one the the military changing their approach right to avoid us so jumping from port to port with these different shipments they actually went so far because we were so successful as a movement in the pacific northwest to ship striker vehicles by rail out of the pacific Northwest and even going so far as to ports in Texas.

But, you know, one thing that we did is that we built up contacts with other activists, with longshore workers all up and down the West Coast in California. There are other activists we're connected with in Texas, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York. There is a desire in the anti-war movement. And in some extent, maybe it was small, but some folks in the labor movement, especially in Oakland, where the ILWU, the Longshore Workers Union, is a lot more militant than, say, in a place like Olympia. But yeah, I mean, people wanted to replicate this model because as Juliana said, we were successful in 2007.

We shut down the port of Olympia for a total of, it was essentially two days. They were not, they're not shipping anything in or out. We set up blockades. We're willing to throw down with the police in the street. And one of the things that was cool about that blockade is that, um, one of the,

there's two entrances, like I said, and one was completely blockaded. And then the other one, um, we had like a moving, I don't really even know what it was, but something with wheels that we could move in and out,

um, to open it up. And so then we could allow like civilian cargo to move in and out, but then like we feel it back in place um to block military shipments so we were you able to actually like stop them from like what while in in that one into come we able to actually like stop them from moving this off altogether would you eventually get cleared up by the police and they moved it it would eventually get cleared out by the police it's like we were never able to it's like we were we we held it for two days that those protests um took place over a

series of two weeks or more or less um we were only able to fully hold it for two days before eventually they would clear us out but one of the things is that this does it did create problems for the army um because when you work with a port you know it's like you've got like a certain time frame that you've contracted with the port to do whatever it is you're going to do and it's not too happy if you take longer than you said you would or yeah yeah and the other thing i want to add is you know i think the other really important element with this whole movement going on is the pacific northwest was um it is specifically western washington where the two of us were living it was was, it was, you know, the center, and in a sense it was the heart of the anti war movement in the country at that time one because of this militant direct action that we were, you know, we were building up in the streets and trying to throw a wrench in the gears of the war machine to at the very least slow it down, which in some ways we did, but we were up against so much. But the other added element,

of course, is the GI resistance and the soldiers who are resisting. IVAW, also known as Iraq Veterans Against the War, was very active there. They set up a GI coffee house across, you know, literally across the street, you know, the gates for one of the entrances for Fort Lewis. There are a whole bunch of soldiers that were going AWOL. We had friends who were active duty soldiers who had fought in, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan that were AWOL, and they were hiding, refusing to go back into these striker brigades that joined us in Port Militarization Resistance. There were a whole long list of soldiers that were very publicly saying, I'm refusing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan for various reasons.

And so we are very much connected with this movement too. And I think the higher-ups in the military, they're hyper-aware of that. They studied us very well to the point of actually spying on us. So that's a whole other element of the story too. One of the things that I've heard from talking to other people who were involved in this was that like wow like during these protests like the level of police militarization just like skyrocketed and like i remember i was like about this it was like you know if you go back and look

at like old system of a down videos you know they'll have these things yeah you'll see these you see these riot police and like you look at them and it's like these people they look so much less armored than like the people that we have now and one of the things that i thought was interesting about this was that like this is i think one of the points where you start getting the modern riot police showing up that are just like you know completely concaved and like armor and yeah I want to talk about just like the police response to this because I think that's another thing I think there's a kind of a tendency

to sort of project back what the police look like in 2021 just onto the whole history of police and I think it's like it's gotten worse even in the last 20 years yeah I mean so I live downtown in Olympia and probably

just like a six minute walk away from the port of Olympia. And also very conveniently, just a few blocks away from the police station. So lucky us. So we actually saw, we could see from the front of down on the road, down on the sidewalk, from the front of down on the road down the sidewalk from the front of our house uh some of the military shipments going by and we we we did see that absolutely and at at times it was it was terrifying i mean i lived in an activist house we jokingly called hq because that's just you know where because of its proximity the port, that's where a number of us were having meetings, you know, around these protests early on in 2006. And, yeah, I mean, we, like, they look like RoboCop. And it's something I had, you know, I hadn't, like, I had been to, like, mass marches and demonstrations, like the RNC protests and DNC protests in Boston, New York,

and like in Washington, DC. And so I would see these like riot cops, but they were, I mean, ubiquitous in these port protests. It was like a whole army of them that was sent out. I mean, when Juliana said that things got kind of crazy at the Port of Tacoma protests, I mean, there was like a police riot, you know, like the cops went absolutely nuts. They're shooting people with tear gas and pepper balls and brutalizing people. I had never before witnessed anything like that. you know, in Olympia where we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police to the extent where, you know, one friend of ours was followed from our house to the bus station to take a bus to school by the police and then was stopped and essentially assaulted by them on the street. And we had another fellow activist and, you know, a roommate of mine who is going out to driving out with a few friends, a few fellow activists from Olympia to Aberdeen about an hour's drive. So Aberdeen,

there's a port of Grays Harbor there, pretty conservative small town. It's where Kurt Cobain is from. Home of the famous Kurt Cobain themed McDonald's. the famous uh kirk cobain themed mcdonald's they served billions and and billions served in that one mcdonald's and kirk cobain's mcdonald's uh but yeah i mean that you know they they were they were following they had orders the washington state patrol to um you know pull over a car full, full of known anarchists. There was a lurk gone out to all the police departments. They pulled them, they pulled them over. They made them walk the line. He was hadn't, you know, wasn't drinking at no drugs, like nothing in his system, but they, he was driving under like one mile per hour under the speed limit. They arrested him for D, uh, DWI,

speed limit they arrested him for d uh dwi you know eventually fought the charges sued them uh and you know won a big settlement out of all that but that's just one example of many of the lengths that the police would go to uh it was pretty severe even there's a house of a bunch of anarchists younger anarchists uh called pitch pipe info shop in Tacoma and that was also a big target. The police were swarming around them all the time. They had cameras set up specifically just outside the info shop. There weren't surveillance cameras there before but then

they were like, oh we'll just conveniently put them on this one specific street corner. Yeah, I think that was one of the things I was reading about this is you have that stuff and then also I think one of the scariest parts of this is that like army intelligence gets involved. And yeah, do you want to talk about the man named quote unquote, John Jacob, who was in fact not that? Yeah, so, you know, I'm curious what memories you have of our good dear friend, John Jacob Giuliano.

you have of our our good dear friend john jacob juliana i don't think i ever actually knew him in person but he was the um the moderator of the listserv wasn't he yes he's one of the moderators of our listserv now that i look back on it i'm like the the port militarization resistance the serve was always just like this dramatic shit show and it's like looking back on it i was like oh a cop that did nothing did absolutely nothing to like establish order or huh i wonder if that was on purpose yeah so i think there's definitely some things that happen like you know looking back uh from our vantage point today it's like okay things make a little more sense at the time though I mean we're in this movement right and so that means like meeting people where they're at we

find all kinds of people that would like want to join the movement like I like I said earlier like active duty soldiers that were joining so I met this this guy named John Jacob and he sent an email out to me. I was one of the contacts for the Olympia SDS group. And it's like, Hey, you know, there's kind of like a parent organization that some old, like elder activists are in to kind of mentor us called movement for a democratic society. It's very small, never really took off, but it's like, I'm interested in getting involved. Uh, we met up in public and he seemed like an all right guy. I mean, he was, um, you know, 40 ish, early forties. Uh, he told me he had like, you know, been in the military for years and he actually still

worked at Fort Lewis. So he was always open about that, but it only went that far. He didn't ever tell us what he actually did there. And it wasn't abnormal for, you know, we had many folks that worked active duty, you know, on base and civilian roles or soldiers, as I mentioned, that were in port militarization resistance. So he gets involved and he gets really involved with port militarization resistance. He goes to protests. He gets pretty close with this group of anarchists I mentioned who lived in Tacoma. Um, and he seemed like a really solid guy to, to most of us. Um, and, you know, things happen as, as we progress and, you know, as the military responded to our, uh, you know, how effective we were in the anti-war movement and the GI resistance movement by changing their tactics, we noticed that, okay, when we first started the protests,

we had the ability to catch the police by surprise by setting up, you know, a blockade here or having a surprise action there at this time or this port etc etc and as time progressed we found out that you know we were having these making these decisions for tactics in our strategy we thought that we're in private and then for whatever reason the police kind of knew about where we were going to be before we even showed up. And I remember that clearly happening in 2007 in the Port of Olympia. Yeah, in Tacoma, there's a lot of things like that. There was one time when there were some people

who had a meeting in a closed room. They had taken the batteries out of their cell phones. They had simply written on the whiteboard the time and place they were going to have their next meeting which is going to be in a diner near the port and so that way it's like if for any reason the room was bugged it wouldn't be caught up because it was just written on a board and then it was like a small meeting too so it's like there wouldn't and then when they got to that diner there's like

full of cops and like clearly waiting for them like at that point it's like it was very clear there was some some level of infiltration involved yeah and i think we from early on like you know we we knew our history i mean you know one of our fellow activists in pmrs and a friend of ours peter bomer is a professor at the evergreen state college he was in the original sds back in the 60s and you know he was essentially a political prisoner for a couple years in both massachusetts and california um i mean the feds essentially tried to assassinate him back in the 70s when he was active in the anti-war movement in San Diego. Like we knew, you know, former Black Panthers and we read our history. So we knew about the history of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program of the 60s and 70s, and the war on the anti-war and civil rights and Black Power, American Indian movements, etc.

So we knew, you know, just intuitively early on. Uh, but there was one thing that happened in particular, which prompted some of us to file for a public records request with the city of Olympia. And, uh, another activist walking down the street in Olympia, I'm a member of the Wobblies Industrial Workers of the World Union. And we had like a, one of those metal newspaper boxes downtown. And it was locked to a pole, you know, with a bike lock. And there are some city workers there with a pickup truck. And they're cutting the lock to this newspaper box.

And they threw it in their pickup truck. And so, you know, this friend of ours was there. I was like, what the hell? What are you doing? What's going on? And one of the workers just kind of shrugged and was like, I don't know. The police told us to do this and they drove off like they stole, you know, our essentially like our union property or whatever. So we had, you know, our lawyer friend, Larry Hildes and the National Lawyers Guild, you know, call and kind of threatened the city and and then a number of us got together like hey you know let's

do like a public records request um with the city of of olympia freedom of information law right and so we did and the request was you know just requesting any all information the city had um any exchanges communications by email etc, between the police and like other agencies about anarchists, the IWW students for democratic society. Um, and their initial search that the city clerk did yielded something like 30,000 responses. So she was like, okay, I got to narrow this down. And I don't know, I was working on the request at the time. And for some reason, like, I don't know, we're poor protests, we're near a military base, communications copies of emails, et cetera, that were little puzzle pieces for this massive puzzle. And it was just a few of them. And it was, you know,

there was an email talking about our guy in the Navy going to a PMR meeting to get some intel. There's, you know, all kinds of things like that. There are a few emails in particular. And the email address was something like johnjtauri at, you know, army.us, whatever the email address was. So there's a crew of activists that got together, put their heads together, did some research quietly for a few months, and eventually found out by publicly accessible information like voter registration records and also finding out something about like a motorcycle club called like the i don't know like the brown butte club or the brown butt club or something and and uh like found out that this john towery guy that was in this motorcycle club and had his, you know, was registered to vote outside of Tacoma

in this town there. It was actually John Jacob. It was this guy that we thought was a fellow activist, an anarchist, and a friend, you know, I thought he was a personal friend of mine. Turns out he was actually essentially an army intelligence officer working for something called a force protection unit at uh at joint face uh joint base lewis mccord and also working with a whole list of different agencies and what turned out to be like a massive surveillance network that was national in scope this guy was sent by the army along with many many others, to infiltrate us, to spy on us, and to disrupt us. It was huge. Yeah, and that's one of the things that I've always thought was really interesting about this.

I learned about poor militarization resistance basically because I was poking around the history of informants, and I ran into this, and I was like, what? like what because and that was what i thought one of the things i thought was really interesting about this is that like like i think this chapter the anti-war movement is even on the left is like not very well known but like the seriousness with which the army seems to have taken it is like is really remarkable yeah i'm wondering what you do think about that one thing we have to emphasize is is that we were not a large group of people yeah like um the number of people who are actively involved in port militarization resistance at its peak was how many people do you think it was brandon well it depends i mean i'd say they're probably like at its peak maybe uh probably 40 to 50 people that would like consistently show up to things you know maybe a slightly smaller very core group

but we would have demonstrations with like 400 people you know yeah and like that would be like the max like there is it's like there is like the peaceful like kind of like support actions

you know you would get like a couple hundred people and then like for the stuff like where it's like kind of like support actions, you know, you'd get like a couple hundred people. And then like for the stuff like, where it's like the first night that the entrance to the Port of Olympia was occupied, it would be like

40 to 50 people. These were not very large groups of people. I feel like, and like I said, it's like one thing that we need to keep in mind was that the peace police were much stronger back then than they are now. Nowadays, like as we saw last year, it's like people in the U.S. have learned to throw down, but that was not the case at the time. And so this is a very, very small group of people. And I think we accomplished a lot with how small it was.

If it had been larger, it would have accomplished way more. But even that small core of like 40 to 50 people with maybe expanding out to like a larger group of a couple hundred had them that scared that they went that far to try and disrupt it yeah and and this is one of the things i've been thinking about a lot recently. This seems to be a very consistent thing, which is that the two things that are guaranteed to just have a hammer drop on you if you touch them is pipelines and ports. And that was something, you know,

we've talked a lot on here about pipeline protests. But I was interested in what you two think about... Because this is a very particular moment right now in which you're dealing with all these logistics chain failures. And I was wondering if you two think there's anything that we can learn from how your versions of the sort of of port demonstrations worked for potentially trying to leverage that in the future especially with like contract negotiations for

like port workers in oakland coming up next year yeah that's a great question you know there's this old saying and in the iww direct action gets the goods, right? And I think it really boils down to that. It's building up mass movements and social movements from below that rely on direct action, that rely on civil resistance, civil disobedience. Yeah, and the pipeline protests that have been ongoing where Indigenous people have been on the front lines of that for many, many years now. the pipeline protests that have been ongoing where indigenous people have been on the front lines of that for many, many years now, I mean, the kind of repression and surveillance that we face really pales in

comparison to the kinds of, you know, surveillance of repression that folks were facing at Standing Rock, for example. You know, I think of course, one of the, well, one of the main differences is that it was primarily the military, you know, with us, right, that was surveilling us because this was very specifically, you know, a war issue and a military issue. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like, I think there's a big questions like, what, what do we have to do that's, that's new. And to me, I say, you know, for both that kind of militant action, but also for the labor movements, like, what's not, you know, we don't

have to reinvent the wheel, there are things that have a tried and true track record of getting the goods. And that is, you know, these more disruptive kind of actions and movements. And so one of them would be, you know, I guess my suggestion would be to like, go back to the basics. And even like, I would say now, you know, this, remember, this is at a a time when like Facebook was around, right? Like, but we weren't really using that for our organizing. We really relied on like face-to-face meetings, you know, phone calls and building up trust with people and building up our capacity to like take actions and make change. You know, I think I'm not saying throw out everything that, you know, at least some of

the good that social media has to offer. But like, I think going beyond that and going back to these older tactics and then for the labor movement, like the big thing is, you know, and it's just like a bigger question for for mainstream unions in particular. I mean, they're the whole idea of like union contracts is that workers also lose a lot. Yeah. They get some things, but business owners and bosses have rights carved out in, in those contracts. And with the longshore workers, I mean, the difficult thing with that, of course, is like there would be some symbolic strikes that of course,

like longshore workers have done and continue to do, you know, around like the war in iraq historically supporting mumia abu jamal mayday etc like in oakland but they have some things for that written into their contracts and you know for all these other like unions it's like well you know we can't strike at all for for the next two years or next three years, whatever the life of the contract is. I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the labor movement to move beyond that and not be put in this straitjacket of contracts like that. Yeah, I think that the no-strike clause part of contracts,

I think, is an interesting thing because it, I don't know, there are some unions that will actually do contracts, part of contracts i think it's an interesting thing because it i don't know there's not i mean there are some unions that will actually do stuff around fighting it but mostly people just sort of don't care and i think you wind up in a situation where it seems like you kind of have to plan your tactics around when contract negotiations are happening because otherwise you can't actually get people to do anything more than like a one-day symbolic strike yeah and or you know the challenge is like you know we have this great american tradition that's not unique to the u.s it's universal really and it's one that resonates with me breaking the law right and like we're you know

we're like civil disobedience that is that what we are doing in the streets and blocking the ports. We were breaking the law and we knew it. And that's what the civil rights movement, the Black Freedom Movement did in the 1960s. like the West Virginia teacher strikes that happened a few years ago, like teachers in every single County in that state went on strike, they broke the law and, and they won something out of that. And I think that's what we really need to encourage people is this idea of breaking out of like the norm and, and breaking the laws, which, you know, the laws that are in place which are not there to you know expand our freedom they're there to contract it yeah one of my friends had a joke about what was the exact line it was uh it's only illegal if you get caught and it only matters

if you lose which i think is a good way of thinking about uh both yeah absolutely and yeah and you know yeah and i think it's also like it's worth mentioning that like the other sides the law doesn't matter to them at all like they just tear it up and like light it on fire constantly so don't don't bind yourself if you can if you can not get caught and not like go to prison for the rest of your life don't bind yourself by a bunch of like paper that the other side just doesn't care about yeah and that's an excellent point because that's the big thing you know with the army and law enforcement general like surveillance of us they were in the police just their actions or brazen

actions on the street like like the riot police. They were just breaking the law all the time. They absolutely have a deep visceral hatred of the Bill of Rights, of civil rights and civil liberties. And so there were a number of, you know, court cases that sprung out of, you know, this movement. There was a case called Panagakis Vitauri, another Juliana Panagakis was another PMR member, co-plaintiff in that case. And, you know, it was a case against the army that, you know, we waged and brought up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, you know, eventually lost and could have brought it to the Supreme Court, but didn't. But, you know, like the other thing is like brought it to the supreme court but didn't but you know like the the other thing is like the violation of the posse commentatus act

it was a whole other thing you know we don't have to get like so tied up into like the legalistic uh thing but like the point your point is valid like they don't care about the laws that are already there they'll they'll just intentionally break them break their own laws that are already there. They'll, they'll just intentionally break them, break their own laws that they have set up. And, you know, they'll just get a slap on the wrist. Cause that's really all. That's all that happens to them.

I think, I think, I think that's a good note to end on, uh, break the law. It's fake. It's also bad. Um,

do you two have anything you want to plug? Other than that, other than, you know, encouraging people to break the law. Pluckage your local port yeah uh yeah i mean i i think it's you know i i guess just encourage people to do as you know it sounds like what we're doing by having us on the show. And like, there are some in our very recent history, you know, movements and wins that we all as activists today can still learn from.

And I think part of that, you know, I don't want to call us elders because we're not that old, but like one part of that is like making sure like our movements are still like multi-generational and like we, we learn from each other. And also as, as Juliana and I did, like I mentioned earlier, like we learned from the movements of the past SDS, the black Panthers,

the black freedom movement, et cetera. But there's a lot that, you know, these, these struggles I think have to offer us today. All right. Well, thank, thank you. Thank well thank you both for coming on and talking with us Thank you for having us Thank you Well this has been It Could Happen Here Find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram

and the rest of our stuff is at Kulzone Media at the same somewhat accursed social media places. I don't know why I'm saying somewhat. They're just accursed. Yeah. See you next time, whenever that is. Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show,

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building

things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey everyone, it's James. I am just recording an introduction for today's episode, which we recorded on Sunday night. I'm recording this on introduction for today's episode, which we recorded on Sunday night. I'm recording this on Monday night, and you will hear this on Tuesday morning. That's Tuesday the 28th of November. I just wanted to include another ask for donations right up front

here because we are tired, broke, and sad. I spent last night sleeping out by the migrant camp in and and sad um i spent last night sleeping out by the migrant camp in uh in hakumba one of the camps um it was extremely cold like and i had a good sleeping bag right it must have been much much worse for people who have blankets uh i uh had had a young woman like completely breaking down and crying this morning understandably because it's terrible and people have been there for five six days now we ran out of food all our distribution sites today we just desperately need more help and we need a much larger scale operation but we can't fund that and so if you're able to help please please do i know it's a difficult time of year i'm not asking you to give money that i wouldn't give i'm a

thousand plus dollars deep in this i'm not asking you to do things that I wouldn't give. I'm a thousand plus dollars deep in this. I'm not asking you to do things that I wouldn't do. I'm spending half my week out there. I'm not just preaching something that I am not part of. This is something I'm very much part of. I think it's very important to me and it would mean a lot to me if people could help however they can, either materially or with their time. Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi, hello, it's me, James, the guy who does podcasts, who talks to you when you're driving to work. And today, on this podcast, it could happen here, which is about the world falling apart and people who are putting it back together. I am joined by two friends of mine.

We are in the desert in Okumba at the Okumba Hot Springs Hotel, which is open now, thankfully. We've just spent most of today and the last two months doing a mutual aid project out here. So if you guys would like to introduce yourselves in any way you think is relevant, that would be great to start off with, and then we can talk about what's been going on here i am haval i use they them pronouns i live in san diego uh but now currently living in j the scene of helping with the refugee crisis at the border. Okay, so I think to start off with, can one of you or both of you describe just what we've seen today? I think it's very hard for people to get a grasp of the scale of what's happening and how bad it is here. Yeah, so today we are in the wake of a holiday wherebp takes off well most of them are taking off for the holiday and probably uh what is it iss action as well who picks up the migrants so there's a huge backlog of people not

getting picked up stuck in these open air detention sites and this is some of the highest numbers that we've seen in a long time since like the beginning of this, what happened in September, right? Yeah. And it's insane. Like the amount of people that we've were running out of food, basically, we barely made a buy on peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the world famous peanut butter. That's why they're coming here because we feed them. They just want the sandwich.

And it was wild. It was, it's, it's like the desperation is getting worse because as it gets colder, you know, people are suffering more. They're, you know, shivering more. So it's using more energy. They're more hungry when we show up. They're tailing our van as we pull up, which doesn't, didn't always happen. And yeah, the desperation is real. We saw what, like 360, I think at one camp willows and then at another camp it was 150 180 at another camp totaling what 700 math is hard yeah

and it varies throughout the day right like um so perhaps we should explain uh maybe aloe can do this what what is it a open air detention site right oads is the acronym we use what does that look like so an open air detention center from what i've seen is literally just people left out in the desert with nothing the shelter that they have has either been built themselves by the shrubs and the manzanita bushes that they find around there that they also burn, which creates awful smoke, as well as what we provide them in terms of tarps, blankets, tents. What I've seen in the open air detention centers is essentially when Border Patrol has the start of a quarter, they have the money to really get people out of there. You have a lot of people just processed very quickly. It doesn't pile up. build themselves, right? This is not provided by border patrol, gets basically ruined. And so you

have soiled blankets that have become the tops of tents because that's their only use at this point. You have not enough shelters. So people are sleeping just among the rocks and trees because it's the best they can. And I think one of the most notable points of these open air detention centers is, legally speaking, Border Patrol gets around this by not really calling them detention centers, saying that they're not detained and that technically they're free. But the reality is there's nowhere for them to go without getting arrested or deported. But because of this loophole, Border Patrol has no obligation to feed them. And so when they do feed them at the start of the quarter, when they have the budget at which they blow, it's oranges, it's crackers. It's not enough to live off of when you're stuck there for five days. I spoke to a Kurdish migrant today who had been there for five days. And, you know, we've heard of people

staying there for an entire week, just stuck in these camps as they overflow with people because they're not cleared due to whether it be a holiday season or whatever it might be that puts us in this circumstance. Yeah. And obviously most people won't have been here. You can look on a map or Google Maps if you want to, but all of this is happening literally in the shadow of the border wall in some cases or right next to the border wall. Sometimes it's a little bit further away. And just to explain why there are these locations where they are, you guys want to explain how people are getting to the...

Because Hukumba, if you've got Google Maps, if you're not driving, you can put it up and you can look. We're like an hour and a bit east of San Diego, about 70 miles east of San Diego, closer to El Centro than San Diego. So can you explain how people are ending up here by the hundreds or thousands? Yeah, so I've talked to many migrants

and they stay in a hotel in TJ. I have no idea which one. I wouldn't give the information if I did. But yeah, they stay in a hotel in TJ and they get separated by nationality. So the coyotes take their passports from them and put them in stacks and separate them by their nationality. So you'll get Chinese nationalists together. You'll get people that are from Turkey together, mostly Kurdish. And then you'll get whatever their nationality is. And I'm sure the outliers get just lumped into whatever is the most,

you know, like. Language group. Yeah, language group, exactly. And then they get in the morning, I guess, at like 5 or 6 a.m., they drive all the way out from TJ to Hakumba and get dropped off at, there's three points where there's breaks in the walls. And these walls, obviously, they don't go over the mountains

because Trump was trying to build distance rather than actual stopping people. And so these breaks in the walls are very easy to cross. It's literally just walking over. There was some remnants of concertina wire or bobbed wire in the area, but it's all ripped and super easy to cross and um so the coyotes will drop them off near um or bits away from that point and have them walk in when that's where border patrol after they cross border patrol will intercept them give them wristbands for the day they arrived we actually just saw this last week they must have ran out

of wristbands because they were giving like sunday wristbands when it was like a wednesday yeah i remember what the fuck like and that makes our job more complicated too not only their job i'm sure because they're trying to process them in order but our job because we're trying to record how long have people been here i remember i was talking to a chinese nationalist and had to call a translator just to see like because they had a sunday wristband and i think it was Tuesday or something already. And I was like, wait, you got, you've been here for two days. And they were like, like trying to explain what the language barrier was. The translator like, no, we got here three hours ago. We kept thinking they got here three days ago. They kept showing the number three on their hands. And so yeah, they give them these wristbands and

then tell them to wait in these areas that are very close to where they are intercepted. And Border Patrol will tell them, there's cameras all over the desert. We're watching you. So don't leave. And if you leave, it'll mess up your asylum process. And so most of them stay. We actually have seen a lot of people walking on the 80 here trying to get to town because they're desperate they're cold they're hungry and they're probably just like fuck this you know but it's interesting

too how like border patrol in all media aspects denies the existence of these camps yeah they'll deny explicitly to me right like that they don't exist or they don't detain people people that they what they'll say is that people aren't detained here that they're free to go which technically they are and they can walk but um i had a kurdish friend that i met at one of the camps that we call moon camp and 20 year old from turkey um and he said that him and a bunch of friends that he was traveling with just walked to the subway up the street got a subway sandwich and then border patrol showed up after they had ordered their food and said, you have to go back with us, but finish your food here. Because imagine them walking in being taken back with Subway sandwiches.

Everyone would be like, oh, we can just leave and get out of here. So they finished their sandwiches, and then he took them straight back. So that is detention. If you can't leave, then you're in detention. That's by definition, I feel like. Yeah, and I don't think people think they are free to leave. And I don't think people, certainly they're not told what situation they're in, right?

I think that maybe they would assume that, but there's also not very many places for them to go. We are in the middle of nowhere. So from what I've talked to different people, on top of just like crossing the border, there's also an entire period where these people are traveling and all of them travel in different ways. And some of them are traveling all the way from South America through Panama, through the jungle. And, you know, people are dying on the route over here. And some of them

are lucky enough to just fly in and, you know, right they have to fly to cancun fly into cancun and then make their way over to tj and make it through the border and i have seen like for myself with my own eyes you know burns from motorcycle exhaust you know, the different methods that they've used to get here. Um, and I've seen spider bites. I've seen, you know, um, injuries that are infected that have been infected for a long time. Cause they've been that way since they were in the jungle and it's inadequate. I had a woman, um, that I was, uh, helping, uh, give medical care to whose ankles were swollen from a steroid that she was given that she should not have been given and that she had a bad reaction to. And yeah, that's just

been their reality traveling here and trying to get here. On top of that, I think that speaking of medical issues and speaking on what you were saying earlier about the threats of becoming undocumented, the threats of being forced to stay in these camps, there's even fear of having a medical emergency. they're not like working in connection with border patrol they're just going to a hospital as if it was you know someone house person on the street going to the hospital um and so they end up there and if they're not given the proper information to uh get a court date to to finish their asylum process and to really like be submitted properly into the country they are at risk of becoming undocumented i think that fear has spread among people. And I've definitely noticed personally that there is fear to have 911 call,

to be taken away in an ambulance because they fear becoming undocumented or being at risk or separated. Separated has been a big thing because if they end up having their process either take longer or just be stuck in the hospital or whatever, it may be they're away from their family. They have to go through a different process. They're not processed at the detention centers the same way or at the same time. So it's just, it's a, it's a, there's a lot of fear. And I think that's led to a lot of

unnecessary harm. And we do our best in terms of medical care but there's you know we're limited we you know it's over the counter it's you know it's we can't do much yeah yeah yeah and uh it's street medicine really yes exactly yeah like and we have some doctors and nurses and other qualified medical people who come and help but they don't have the diagnostic tools that they need right like today we had somebody who had clearly some heart issues and like the best we can do is say this person needs to go to hospital but then in this case they were able to take the person's partner sometimes they won't take the person's partner sometimes the person could be separated from their children and so they're obviously very afraid of that and and to compound that i think like

the release that they're not released uh in the way they had previously been released. They're just dumped onto the street at certain transit centers, right? And then, again, it falls on to volunteers or nonprofits to help them get to where they're going to go. The scale of the mutual aid operation is really impressive. And it's something that I don't think is is like we don't talk about enough or people don't really understand it so maybe we just start like literally what we do every day in a day again haval is here every day yes uh yeah one thing i forgot to mention is i am here every

single day now full time uh 10 plus hours a day it's eight days a week yeah um and so yeah every day we wake up i wake up around like 6 a.m and we try to get to the first camp which is down the street from where i'm staying um around 7 30 or 8 o'clock in the morning and the previous night we have loaded the van up with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because they have a good hold. You don't need to keep them really refrigerated much or, you know, yada, yada. And so it's just PB&Js, water and fruit. And we give them each one at least, sometimes more if we have the capability. And then another person who is also here full time will hit another camp on their way because it's on their way to meet up at a central location we call the Youth Center or the YC, where all of our donations end up, whether it's clothes, blankets, food items, non-perishables perishables we have a fridge and in that place once we get there we'll assess what we need to do is do we need to make more food do we have enough to go feed the third camp which we

call 177 which is all the way in boulevard a little outside of hakumba and if we have enough we'll just hit we'll leave and hit that spot and then come back and start dinner um and meet in the meanwhile we have a lot of volunteers that will show up and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Cause that is our easy go-to staple. It's quick to give out. It's, not a whole lot of prep time to make, you know, 500 sandwiches, um, which seems like a lot, but we've gone through probably tens of thousands of sandwiches by this point. So we gave out a thousand PB and J j's today yeah yeah yeah totally yeah we ran out like today i gave out everything and there was even people where like the two we got everybody

in the line which was i think i think that was around 360 no no it was 360 when we did a count and so in the morning yeah and we ran out and we but we had two so like a lot of the times especially the migrants that have been there multiple days they'll jump in there's like always two people or three people that are like i'm here to help kurdish people are amazing help and are always willing to step up but yeah this morning at willow one of the camps we had two guys that were kind of controlling the line and helping keep them back and want to like send them to us one at a time and at the very end of it i had nothing for them and i was like gonna hook them up with a couple of sandwiches a little like anybody who helps i'll hook them up with a couple

extra sandwiches or food items or water or cigarettes even yeah and uh yeah i had nothing for them except for kids sandwiches or kids sandwiches, kid packs. So we make these little sandwich bags full of like different candies and, you know, granola bars and things that kids would like to eat and give them a lot of nutrition and stuff. So I just gave them extra that. And once other migrants saw me giving those things out that I had been holding and telling other people, no, these are for kids, then everybody swarmed. And it was just like, okay, well, I'm giving all the kids, whoever's there, whoever's arm is there,

they're getting a kid's pack. And got rid of literally all of our food. And I think we put in like 12 plus cases of water, 40 packs, and they were all gone except for maybe like 10 or 15 waters. It was one of the more dire mornings that we've had, especially at these camps. I know that 360 was the number that you guys got in the morning, but I believe that by the time that we were working in the evening, at least when I was doing medical check,

the number that I was getting told either around the camp or from border patrol was 500 at Willows. So, and this is, you know, these are numbers that even border patrol is like freaking out over. They are, you know, worried because they can't deal with this quantity of people and keep them processing while there's still a consistent flow. And that's, you know, it, it, it puts a lot of strain on us because like you were saying, we're running out of food. We don't have enough to feed 500 people every day, even though we're just doing two meals, a breakfast and as best we can a dinner and trying to make sure that that dinner is a hot meal because it is frigid out here. I slept in my van and I kept having to wake up to try and warm up and do something to keep myself from freezing. And I, you know, I can only imagine what it's like for them with what minimal equipment they have. Some of them don't even have tents. So it has been a lot. I know that today running medical, I've seen a lot of people with colds and I am suspicious that perhaps there is COVID running around, that perhaps there is something, there's

definitely something, some kind of very severe illness going through the camps and being in this freezing cold is not helping anyone's immune system. And on top of that, I've seen broken fingers and some other stuff. And that's been that's been my today has been treating that and then helping out with dinner, which I will say, I tried a little bit of the lentils and rice and I can say we are feeding them well. It is delicious, delicious food. Thank you, Sam Schultz, an amazing cook and an amazing helper for us, making sure that we, you know, are able to do this for like you were saying for a long time. You know, this was put on, you know, one family of locals to really. Yeah.

One family of Quakers to really take care of these people day in and day out. And it wasn't until you came here and were able to actually like be here full time that there was even just an extra hand around and, you know, right. Volunteers are here during the week, but the reality is, is we are all still stuck at work. We all still live in this hellscape. We're all still stuck grinding those gears and making ends meet. And so coming out here for a lot of us is, you know, like for me is a weekend task. It's, you know, it's what we can do. It's what we have the ability and the time and the

gas money for. And on top of that, a lot of us spend a lot of our own money. I know that I've spent like at least a grand and a half on just like supplies for these runs on supplies for whatever I can. Um, and you know, some, sometimes we get, we're able to get reimbursed by our mutual aids and, um, sometimes the money runs dry and we just, you know, we need a lot of support out here that we don't have, that we don't get. And I feel like we really felt that today running out of food yeah it was bleak today and of course the thing is like we can feed 500 people and do this gargantuan effort and then we have to feed the same number tomorrow and like if we clear out us we on top of like those of us who are able to go out to do medical to do feeds uh sometimes some of us go out and construct shelters

or to check that there aren't people who are sick in the shelters who aren't getting care that they need, et cetera, et cetera. Like you said, people have to cook, right? People have to make PBJs. People have to resupply our stuff and drive it up from San Diego, which is an hour and 15 minutes away. It's a gargantuan effort that it's exclusively taken on by volunteers and like a relatively small group of volunteers

considering the scale of the task at hand. I wonder like if you would like talk about your volunteering experience a little bit because I think it's been great. Like it's a very diverse group of people. We've had so many, we have the Schultz family who are quakers who are amazing who have been like spearheading this since the start we have like obviously a

lot of anarchist people and a lot of people from various migrant advocacy and aid groups uh this but we had the black panthers the other day and that's probably a ton of people i'm missing but yeah uh in church groups church groups I mean the whole the YC was kind of given to us and I think now we're renting it to my knowledge um but that was given to us by the uh what's the church the Methodist church here in Hakumba and then there's a group of Mormons and they're just kind of unaffiliated from their church in a way like they're not they were just a family that saw the need. And, um, some of the elders were helping load up this, the beans that they made

the other day, you know, um, from the house that the lady that makes it, um, and then another lady, a Mormon lady makes us these rolls and we'll just like, give us like hundreds and hundreds of bread rolls at which everybody loves. Even the volunteers. Yeah. I've been eating the bread rolls, which everybody loves. Even the volunteers love to eat up and eat the bread rolls. Homemade rolls. Yeah, it's super good. So that, yeah, like you said, mutual aid groups, anarchists, just individuals, random people will show up.

They heard it. We had a couple of people show up that heard it on national NPR, KPBS. And, you know, then they were exported kindness. A lot of lot, will come out here and send volunteers and whatnot, but it's hard to really rely on volunteers. Like we have a signup sheet and everything, so we can kind of gauge what the day is going to be like, but sometimes people don't show up. And, uh, and sometimes, especially around the holiday times, it gets really thin because everybody's got their own lives and things to do. And, um, but yeah, I mean,

I started volunteering just on my weekends when I was working full-time at my dead end job, uh, back at home in San Diego. And I would, you know, saw the need. I was down at whiskey eight in San Ysidro, um, pretty much every day after work and on the weekends. Then when they started doing street releases at Iris Station in San Diego, I would just be there full time. And on my weekends, just be there until MDEF and Haitian Bridge started showing up and kind of took in Detention Resistance. And they kind of took over that scene. And so the need was like, oh, Hakamba needs help.

So I just would come after that. I just started coming out here every weekend. I would get off on a Thursday at like 2 p.m., take care of my cats at home for a sec, and then drive out, help out whatever I could by the time I got here, spend the night somehow. I never had to sleep in my car, but I would be ready to. And then I have some friends here that would put me up for the night

and stay Thursday night to Friday, work all day Friday and all day Saturday until I had to go home because I worked at 5 a.m. on Sunday. And then all that week I would just be at W8 going down after work. And so I haven't had a day off since this really started. I mean, I think I got the flu for a week five days right at a fever four or five fucking days in a row which is horrible but um so not really a day off technically but yeah and then um I since I had been coming out here every weekend and dedicating my time to Hakamba and had so many ties with like the locals and I

know the people who own the hotel out here that we are currently at and just, you know, showed face and showed a strong worth work ethic, I guess, to help feed these people and the passion of, you know, and the amount of care that I gave and attention to these people and listening to them. And, uh, the Schultz family who are like the main on the ground people since day one were like, yeah, this, this person needs to be out here. We want Havol out here full time and Alochalado got a grant to, to basically fund that. And so once that money came through,

I just took a sabbatical from my nine to five and I was like, peace. I got more important things to do than give Jeff Bezos more money, you know? So, uh, he, he needs more yachts clearly. Yeah, clearly. Yeah. And more space trips, you know? So, yeah. So ever since then, I've just, you know, I'm lucky enough to have that and, you know, showed that, you know, dedication to where I can be out here. honestly like some people may think like oh because I'm getting paid I'm a boss or I'm a lead and like to me it's like no we're all leading and I'm still just doing the same work I'm just now able to be here uh well on payroll 48 hours a

week but in reality it's 10 hour days, eight days a week. It's all the time. And like, yeah, I think it's really important that people know actually that we have a very diverse group. It's not like everybody is necessarily like committed to horizontal organizing as the be all and end all, but that's how we operate.

And it works really well. Yeah. Especially Sam and the Quakers. They're very good at listening to everybody. That's the American friend society, right? Yeah. And it works so well. Like like when i was thinking the other day i was out here um and it was the day before the holiday and uh first of all we had this moment where this lady pulled up and she was like

hey who's in charge we were all like everyone's in charge and the lady was like what how does that but then like another time we had a bit of a crisis we ran out of bowls when we're trying to feed people and like one of us came up with the beans in the bag yeah and a ziploc bag yeah we made we so we were like we didn't have bowls we had sandwiches so we gave them a sandwich and then took the ziploc bag back and filled it with beans and like it you know it wasn't the person who'd been here for the longest or done the most sessions but it was a great idea and it got us out of a difficult situation. And I think because we organize

with respect for each other, we can listen to each other and incorporate those ideas. I know you had something to say. Oh, yeah. I want to highlight the community that I've seen built here. I know that in terms of non-hierarchical organizing, I personally have seen everyone step up and lead, even people who are there their first day, right? If there is a task

to be done and they say they know how to do it and they have a good idea, they're leading it, they're spearheading it. There is no you know, there's no second guessing or egos that I've seen, at least not to such a degree that it's been harmful. And I think that that has given us a lot of power and has allowed sort of our creativity to get us through this. I think it's a testament to what non-hierarchical organizing means and how, you know, lack of hierarchy and lack of a dedicated leader doesn't mean a lack of leadership. to bring what we know to the table, whether that be from the experience that we've had coming here and working here and knowing the details and the minutia

of what's going on specifically here in Hakumba with this project or what we bring to the table from our past experiences. And I think that that has really beautifully coalesced into a really efficient system as best as we can do as as best as we can manage you know we've really made do and kept people alive in a in a huge way yeah and like i think kept people alive is right like if if i don't know how this would have gone down if we weren't here because i don't know if they would have kept doing it but certainly more people would have been very unwell or passed away like i think we can all

think of a different medical emergency where we've had to intervene to stop it getting much worse yeah like just last week i think did you come out the day after something where it rained on yes all of us and there was like a heavy downpour we weren't even ready we thought it was oh it might be like a little drizzle or maybe light rain here and there scattered but then we set up and we're cooking getting ready for to do lunch or after breakfast and getting ready to do our dinner and stuff and it just started downpouring on us i remember i was driving and i called you oh yeah you showed up that day and literally like we inter as we got to we were like oh, oh, fuck, we got to, like, move now. So we just got all the ponchos. We had a bunch of ponchos, got them all in the car,

drove to the first camp that we had fed that morning, and just started handing out ponchos as the rain's coming down. They're walking in as, you know, the coyotes dropped them off. And that's a long hike. We had the moon camp from where they end up to where the break in the wall is. That's like a, what, 30-minute walk or so? up to where the break in the wall is. That's like a 30 minute walk or so. And so they are arriving in the pouring rain. Their socks are getting wet.

It is super cold, especially at moon because of the location. It's just ridiculously cold. And that's like case for hypothermia. And we're there to, you know, to stop them from getting so wet. We're giving them trash bags for their bags, ponchos for their being, their purses. I remember seeing this little girl. She must have been like five or six.

And then we had cardboard because we didn't think it was going to be so pouring when we loaded up the van. And we had cardboard to keep the ground dry for them to lay on in their tents or whatever. And people took the cardboard out of the van. And we're blocking the rain and shielding this little child from getting wet. And it's super windy at moon, too, at that camp. It's the location that gets a lot of the wind from whatever that passes.

Yeah, it comes up from Anza Borrego. Yeah. Yeah. I think the other thing you said, which we should probably touch on, is perhaps it's because of the way we organize, ago yeah yeah i think the other thing you said which we should probably touch on is like perhaps it's because of the way we organize because we don't have like strict roles or jobs or low leadership things but like and you've mentioned it before but like nine times out of ten we end up doing things with people not for people right like the other day i know uh like a kurdish guy and i

set up a ton of tents a colombian dude and I built this amazing shelter. And then it wasn't for him and his family. It was for anyone who needed it. I definitely have seen that sort of collaboration with the migrants. And I feel like it doesn't feel like charity. It feels like mutual aid. And on top of that, when I'm hearing from them, you know, they're helping us out.

But then on top of that, they're saying, I'm going to get processed and I'm coming back I'm helping and I'm have you been in touch with anyone who is who has come back yet well yeah actually like early on in iris when I was doing iris there was like a few people that were staying a few days before they traveled onward and they just wanted to be around and help there was also a dude, we just called him Columbia because he was from Columbia. He's kind of that nickname stuck and he stuck around. I mean, he got sponsored by, or pretty much loosely sponsored by one of the organizers that was helping out at WA and he stuck around. He came out to Okumba a bunch of times. He killed it on

everything he did, cooking, dishes, whatever, you dishes, cleaning up, whatever. He just saw that need. And, yeah, I mean, I've been in contact with a couple of people that said they would come out. And, you know, I don't pressure them. And, A, I wouldn't pressure them to come out because they came here for a better life and all that. But at the same time, it's just hard to get back to some people because I've given my number out to way too many Kurdish people to get back to everyone on whatsapp and that's you know i got signal i got

regular text and then whatsapp and that kind of gets buried so yeah there was some afghan folks out here in september few afghan folks who had come out i think they had arrived either in may or perhaps earlier but there were some afghan folks who came out and were able to help us of course like it's great because we don't all have all the languages we need and we don't have all the skills we need. And so the more people we can incorporate, even if temporarily while they're here,

then the better we can help people, right? Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, but I think definitely the vibe is there that they want to come help. And yeah, like the other day I was feeding. We're doing a hot dinner and we set up and everything. And then all these Kurdish people, because I will wear this. Gafi, like a scarf.

Yeah, the scarf that you gave me. All the way from Kurdistan. All the way from Karmishlo um and so they recognize it and then I know the sayings Biji Kurdistan went you know oh you you're from Turkey oh you Kurdish because most of the people from Turkey are Kurdish yeah not all but most um and so you know we'll start talking and then you know they get all excited and then they would just want to help you know and I think even regardless of if I said that or not, or had the scarf on, they would still just want to help.

And I remember one time I was surrounded, it was just me serving one of the things, cause we'll serve multiple things, water, uh, like a soup, and then a rice or a bread or whatever. And then maybe some hand wipes or something. And so we just had all, it was just me in the middle surrounded by Kurdish people. And I remember the dude next to me, it was just like someone videotaped yeah we kurdish people help really well like tell the

world you know yeah and they're like even yeah when when we're not doing food service like guys will often come up to me and be like hey do you have uh bin bags we'd like to clean up we'd like it's a mess here and we'd like to clean up blink yeah we're unloading every time i'm loading like that's a cell phone charging station everyone like doesn't matter you know what nationality someone is there to help they're like oh can i grab the table can i do this how can i plug this in a lot of times the plugging in i'm like no i got this there's a certain way i like to plug this all in that makes sense and relatively high risk activity yeah i don't want any electrocution or yeah oh like the other day

i was chopping some stuff with an axe and a guy wanted to help and i was like look if i hurt myself and i can go to hospital if you hurt yourself it's going to be a rough i mean that could have been his ticket out yeah he might purposely hurt himself at that point he had his whole family yeah uh but again we build shelters and like some people are really good at that and they're good at tying knots and they're good at seeing things in 3d and some people are not so like often just get a team of people who can help and then you'll get a team of people who need shelter so we'll just cruise around building shelters for people and it's fun like it can't i'm sure it's not a very stimulating environment out there you know so being engaged in a task completing stuff and helping people i'm

sure is rewarding or like yeah even tonight we had a dude from Turkey who just like was holding his head. Tia, one of our local residents, she lives around here. She doesn't have a whole lot of medical experience other than being a mother or a grandmother and working in as a pharmacy tech and knowing a little bit about it and learning and being super badass. She came to me and she's like, look, this guy has a headache. and knowing a little bit about it and learning and being super badass um she uh came to me she's like look this guy has a headache he has a migraine and he has medication from tj so this is obviously like an ongoing situation and my eyes were hurting just from all the smoke from all the fires that they were starting in the area and he's just sitting there holding his head clearly just absolutely miserable so she she took him in her car just to give some heater and to warm him up and to try to make him feel better, get him away from the smoke. And she's like, yo, we got to get this guy.

He's here traveling alone from Turkey. He doesn't have anybody. So we went and found some more. And I think he was Kurdish as well. We went and found another Kurdish person from Turkey. And I grabbed this, this person. I was like, Hey, I have somebody here who has a gnarly migraine and they just, they need they're here alone. They don't have shelter they need.

And so this guy came over and talked to him and was like, look, I got, we got a tent over here. Come camp with us. Like that's the kind of shit that we have to deal with. You know what I mean? Just like the migrants will like getting a migrant to help another migrant, you know, it's just like, it's community. That's what like mutual aid is about. I think that, um, and that, that specific situation, um, I had been talking to the, the, the group that took him in, I had been talking with them and chatting with them and I sat by the fire with them just talking about, you know, what was your experience like, and trying to get warm. Cause God it's cold out there, even for just talking about, you know, what was your experience like and trying to get warm. Cause God, it's cold out there, even for us volunteers. And, you know, we're far away

from the fires and it's really hard because, you know, this road is cleared. Um, and so there's, you know, there's no warmth out there by where they have to stand to, to get food. But, um, what do I, what I wanted to highlight was that because we are interacting with these people as equals, because we are coming here and seeing them as people and we spend the time to talk with them and to build community with them, we can build those connections which allow people like the gentleman with the migraine to be taken in and to have basically a temporary family while he's there and make sure that he's taken care of. And that's, I think, something that really highlights the strength of this type of organization and this type of work and this type of, the way that our politics, the way that our ideals

really shine in this kind of setting. Yeah, I think that's right. Like I've been around a lot of humanitarian crises and, you know, refugee situations. And I think we're doing a really excellent job, especially given the minimal funding and sort of scale of access to resources that we have. We could do a lot more if we had a lot more money,

but we don't. Yeah, we're cooking on like a fucking burner. It's probably older than us. Yeah, but we're cooking to a propane tank that's made out of an old keg. That's just like, if you turn it on wrong and let the gas bleed, you will blow yourself up. So it's just like, Sam is responsible for everybody

at the youth center where we do stuff. So he doesn't really like other people cooking. I mean, even though I know how to do it, he doesn't even like me doing it because he's responsible for everybody at the youth center where we do stuff so he doesn't really like other people cooking doesn't i mean even though i know how to do it he's like doesn't even like me doing it because he's responsible for me if anything were to happen so it's like our capacity is super limited we don't have enough burners we don't have enough containers so we have a couple one really nice like locking containers that hold hot food and keep the food hot but not enough to serve upwards of 600 people at all three camps and not enough vans. It would be ideal in my situation to send a van that has charging capabilities to charge everybody's cell phone, to feed everybody, to give them water and all their needs, blankets,

medical to each camp all at once. Instead of us cooking a mass amount of food at the youth center and hoping we have enough to hit all three camps because the numbers we can try to call border patrol offices and get numbers but the numbers are always a little skewed or just off you know or sometimes it lately they have just been straight up not giving us the fucking numbers like being dicks especially uh Campo Border Patrol office, which, because we deal with two different, Campo takes care of the Boulevard open air detention site. And then the Boulevard Border Patrol takes care of the willows

in the moon camp in Acoma. And straight up, the Boulevard Border Patrol called Campo Nazis. Like they treat their employees like not they're just nazis and i've seen it in fact yeah but yeah like we have to interact with border patrol a lot to get people the help that they need right but like yeah there are definitely some cases where like there have been certain people who are much like they they the agent i spoke to today for a border patrol agent he was very accommodating he took the person who was in medical distress and their partner he drove them himself to where they could be ems and ensured that presumably they got to hospital like i don't have a whole lot of knowledge what

happened afterwards that we don't have we're not entitled to their private medical information um and nor should we be but like other times it could be much harder so it's just luck of the draw right like we there's so much we don't control i guess yeah and like we don't know exactly like we can't control who goes when who has the highest level of need you know like constantly people will be coming up to me and being like hey like today i was warming up milk for babies in my camping stove right and there were three or four babies and they were like do you think they'll take us first we have babies and like i think most of the people there would rather give up their space and let that baby go out because no one wants to see a fucking baby shivering out there like it's fucked uh it's terrible uh but we don't know and we can't

tell you and we can't help you um and so like a lot of that stuff's outside of our control but the stuff that's within our control i think we've done a really good job of, I wonder like if people are listening, I think I just want to convey that we're all just weird, like a group of, of, of like, we're not like ragtag crew, extremely like motley crew. Um, and, but we, we're really doing excellent work, I think. Um, if I may blow our trumpet, but. But if people want to come and help, first of all, you probably can. People think that they can't,

they don't have anything useful. I promise you, you do. If you can lift a ladle or a pallet of water bottles or drive a vehicle or make a sandwich. Or talk multiple languages. Speak multiple languages. Sometimes it's like yeah or even just one and or even just right or even just one language other than english because i mean even some people

speak perfectly perfect english out there and so just going out there and paying attention to them even if you don't have the capacity to cook food or to serve food or whatever if you can go talk to people and you're sociable and you can make connections and listen to their needs. And there's Google Translate. We have a list of translators, like a form with numbers. So if you have a language barrier, you can just start calling down the line of numbers of Mandarin or this language or that language.

And I got ahold of somebody one time for Mandarin to figure out how many days they had been there. And it was like, called a couple people first, no answer. And then finally someone picked up. And so it's, yeah, anybody, there's always, you could always find something. Honestly, one thing that I miss doing, which when I first started coming out here,

we had a little bit more volunteers, especially I was coming out on the weekends. When the weekends, typically we have more volunteers because people have jobs on the weekdays. On weekdays, we have less. But when I first started coming out to Wakumba on the weekends, I started bringing my guitar and my bongos and my different instruments, tambourines.

And I remember we gave out all the instruments to the migrants at night while we were giving them dinner. They were around a campfire so that they can play and enjoy themselves and lift their spirits and so like that would be rad to have somebody on spot all the time with a guitar and like jamming with the migrants and lifting their spirits because it's they're miserable and one dude from uzbekistan once told me uh spoke really good english and in fact he told me about there's like commercials and so he worked at like a center where they send people over here oh wow yeah like he was on the call center or whatever for it or something like that but well i was like well like how is it like i was like honestly we're just bored

yeah like they're just waiting and at that time like the waits were like four or five days you know um it changes it varies it goes from two to three to four or five and and the distance and sometimes they get out the same day if they're lucky but um yeah it was it just we're bored and we're just waiting and they're anxious and which also just tears at their spirit while they're you know their first day in america you know yeah exactly yeah like welcome to america sleep in the desert it's like just above freezing yeah and here's no blankets no structures no anything no food no water and you're lucky border patrol will bring crackers and water for not enough people yeah and then yeah a bunch of us weirdos turn up with

blankets and that's it yeah um and i know that that even if's, you know, I try and include other people, but even just like I go out there with my guitar sometimes and there's a lull and we're waiting to pack up or whatever and I'll be playing. And I think that little moments like that mean everything for these folks. And I know that I've, you know, I'll bring up that I have, you know, on a day that I don't have my guitar, I'll bring up that I play it and the migrants will be all excited wanting me to bring it out or wanting me to, you know, whatever the activity may be, just to stimulate, you know, their minds a little bit. I mean, this is, it's really bleak and being there for days for just stuck in the desert with nothing to do. Right.

And I mean, sometimes, you know, I've seen a soccer ball out there that the kids play with and that's so heartwarming. Things like that, that really, you know, we want these people to feel like they can still be in community with each other. Like they're not. like they can still be in community with each other. Like they're not, and I feel like things like that really help to repair that sense of desperation.

Because right now with the level of desperation, we do see a lot of fighting for supplies, a lot of fighting for resources because it's, it's hard. It's hard out there. People want to make sure that their kids have blankets. People are so cold. they can't sleep. And I feel like things that bring them together, activities that really make them feel like a community out there and help us feel in community with them

allows us to have a more cohesive relationship and allows things to go more smoothly. And I think it's, you know, in some cases more important than the supplies themselves. Because it makes sure that they go to the right places. It helps us triage. It helps us, you know, it's its own tool for survival. It distracts them from their suffering, you know. If they can have an ounce of joy you know in this horrible condition in these horrible conditions it'll distract them enough to smile and to laugh and to not be

miserable yeah have a normal moment yeah so i wonder if people want to help what are the ways that they can help um ways they can help are if are coming out here directly hands on the ground money donating money uh is another huge need um because a lot of the supplies that we need cost money we need a new kitchen we need you know a dishwashing station because we're currently just dumping all of our dishwashing water into a lawn that has a small drain um yeah um and yeah uh alocellato is one organization that takes money um that you can donate to border kindness is another one yeah i know detention resistance is out here a lot. The most direct way would be donating directly to Sam Schultz himself.

So yeah, and just following those same organizations. Free Shit Collective is another one. They mostly focus on W8, but this is all related, right? We had this man from Turkey

who came with his dog, bomb yeah or bam bam like he said flintstones but they say bomb bomb i guess um and his he was stuck in in one of the camps and so you know we like took his dog because he was not going to be taken from the camp he spent the night alone because they had enough room for him there's like they don't know how to process a fucking dog i guess so we took his dog for him and so he could get processed. And once he ended up out of detention at central, um, which is where they released them, we reunited his dog with him, um, very emotional on both sides of the separation and they're reuniting. Um, so, you know, there's all these organizations you can, you know, volunteer down in central

at the, when they release, you can, you know, there's, and so, yeah. Um, but following all these accounts, sharing the stories, you know what I mean? On your social media as be it, uh, Twitter, I'll never call it the other thing. Um, or, you know, Instagram, Facebook, whatever your media is, discord, yada, yada. Um, yeah, I think even showing the stories is really powerful people could translate they can reach out if they want to do that um i looked up the url it's for border kindness it's link tr.ee slash border kindness and for al otro lado it's al otro lado a-l-o-t-r-o-L-A-D-O dot org slash donate.

And they pay me to be out here, so please donate to them. And Border Kindness. Jackie and James are great. They're always out here. Either one is wonderful. I also wanted to highlight the lovely mutual aid groups

that do a lot of work. There's not as many of them directly putting their efforts out here, but I know that they a lot of work. There's not as many of them directly putting their efforts out here, but I know that they have helped me work out here and make sure that I have the funds I need to, you know, do little store runs that are necessary on a moment's notice at times because we run out of something and we can't wait for a bulk order supply. And these mutual aid groups, they put in the work to reimburse folks when we do things like that, when we have to go make runs because we can't bulk order, we can't do it the most efficient way because we have a need right now. And that has saved us in a lot

of different moments, especially I used to volunteer down at W8 in San Ysidro. And that has saved us in a lot of different moments, especially I used to volunteer down at W8 in San Ysidro. And that was the primary way that we got resources was through these mutual aid groups who fundraise. And I just wanted to highlight them and highlight the... So there's the Rose Keep Collective. I know that they do a lot of fundraising um i know that you were saying free shit free shit collective yeah um uh there's a few free store sd yeah there's a there's a few different ones who you know their funds help keep us running especially in the hardest of times right now yeah because we're all broke we're so broke we have no money yeah none of us have any money uh i'm on the migrant diet because

i'm broke all the time so i'm just eating the food that we feed them when there's leftovers yeah yeah we've eaten a lot of pb and j and beans uh help us help us feed ourselves and that was wonderful thank you so much um yeah everyone listening should donate thank you yeah uh and come down here if someone came from san francisco in may come back uh like there are places you can stay out in the desert if you want to come and help but even if you have language skills like we there are so many ways you can help come down um i've always had a place to stay, even though I, like Haval,

I've always been ready to sleep in my van, but always had a spot to stay. Come down. It's, you know, it's worth it. It's... There's a vortex. There's a vortex in Nakama. They call it, the locals call it a vortex. You know, you come here

and it's like every past lifetime has been here and you're destined to be here and it's like every past lifetime has has been here and you're you're destined to be here there's something special about this town and i've really fallen in love with it since coming yeah uh yeah i hope more people will come it would mean a lot to me if like we could do something cool and like further support something that's very important to me and i think very important for the world. Totally. All right, sick. Yeah. running interview show where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories,

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things

better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts check out better offline.com oh boy howdy welcome back to it could happen here a podcast uh about about those wacky Gen Z kids and how all of the things that the mainstream media used to say about millennials, I have now embraced to say about Gen Z who are destroying the world through their greed and evilness and good knees comparatively. Yeah, Mia, how are you doing? You're Gen Z, right?

Yeah, so I'm on the exact borderline of I'm either the oldest Zoomer or the youngest millennial. You're a day walker, right? You're the blade of Gen Z. Yeah.

Okay, so you could go out in the sunlight, but you still need blood. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you could go out in the sunlight, but you still need blood. Yeah, I get it. I get it. Yeah. Who's the Chris Christopherson? I guess I'm the Chris Christopherson if we're doing the original Blade movie, which I watched over Thanksgiving break. Pretty

good. I hadn't seen it in like fucking 20 years, but solid movie. Solid movie. I feel like it's kind of downhill from the blood rave but the blood rave is pretty sick it's all every everything in culture was downhill from blood rave um but yeah it's got some it's got some good bits to it still um you know what doesn't have good bits to it the institution of marriage that i mean i don't disagree with that, but I was going to say the Washington Post editorial board. You know, yeah.

So we are talking, this is an episode about some Gen Z panic shit that came out recently that I felt was worth digging into because of the pretty interesting ways in which it's wrong. is worth digging into because of the pretty interesting ways in which it's wrong. If you were celebrating being with your family, eating turkey, or just shooting up heroin alone in the bathroom last week, on November 22nd, 2023, the Washington Post editorial board published an opinion column with the provocative title, If Attitudes Don't Shift, A Political Dating Mismatch Will Threaten Marriage. Hell yeah. This rips. I love this.

We're finally destroying the institutions. Yeah, we're doing this through a political dating mismatch. Now, I think an article with roughly this premise drops every year, sometimes a couple of times a year on a couple of different places. This time it came in through the Washington Post editorial board. And the basic premise of this specific article is that Gen Z and millennial men are growing more conservative while women are growing more progressive. This threatens marriage as an institution because all these close minded Gen Z lib broads won't date Republicans, right? That is literally like the point of the article is Gen Z liberal women,

they're less willing to date outside of their political beliefs and men are getting more conservative. So it's really a danger for marriage. Now, I understand if your first impulse is to say something like, well, when has the Washington Post editorial board ever been right about a single goddamn thing? And that is a correct attitude to have.

Sometimes they make the decision not to publish an article. There are some days where they don't write anything. Yeah, you have to. That is a good decision. If they made that decision every day, I would be fully supportive of the Washington Post editorial board. And if they'll hire me, I can make that decision for them every day, I would be fully supportive of the Washington Post editorial board. And if they'll hire me, I can make that decision for them every day. I'm very good at not doing anything. That said, even though it is correct to say the Washington Post editorial board are basically always wrong, I've still run into overwhelming numbers of my peers who think

this article is silly, but still buy into the basic points in this piece. This is generally married to a widespread belief, which is actually cited in the article, that toxic male influencers like Andrew Tate have tilted huge numbers of young men to the right. So even though people will be like, well, it's stupid to expect people to date, you know, folks who believe horrible political things that would hurt them. It's true that men are getting more, young men are getting more conservative, right? And this is, I think, generally down to this belief that has, I don't think people examine often. They just sort of like, they get concerned about the popularity of guys like Tate, which is valid. He's concerning. But assume that does mean that like, yeah, we're losing the young men. They've all been tilted towards these guys. And so without discounting the damage of dudes like Tate, I wanted to give a breakdown of how common the

so-called rightward tilt of young men actually is. Because, spoilers, this is a pernicious bit of disinformation, and I think it kind of blackpills a lot of people unnecessarily. Let's start with the obvious point here. Young men are not growing more conservative across the board than men of other generations. So first off, I want to read you a quote from this post editorial. Since Mr. Trump's election in 2016, the percentage of young women ages 18 to 30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.

Now, that claim is based. You want to guess? Did they cite a bunch of different sources to prove like that? It's a really widespread problem. Or do they have a single shady-ass source? It's the Washington Post editorial board. Those people could not find a second study if you nailed it to their face. No, they sure couldn't.

They sure couldn't. They Googled real quickly, or I'm not even gonna give them credit for Googling. One of their friends who works at a right-wing think tank sent them a survey from that right-wing think tank because the entire statistical basis of that claim is a study by the American Enterprise Institute, which is a center right think tank that tends to produce center right surveys. And even then, the study that

they're actually citing doesn't show what the Post Editorial Board claims. Again, their claim is young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative, right? Young men. So they are talking across the board about Gen Z and millennial males, right? I'm going to quote from that study. Previous research identified a growing gap in ideological orientation between young men and women. The gender gap in liberal identity is notable among members of Generation Z, but it's relatively modest. 43% of Gen Z women identify as liberal,

compared to 35% of Gen Z men. However, the gender divide among white non-Hispanic Gen Z adults is considerable. Close to half, 46% of Gen Z women are liberal, a far greater share than white Gen Z men, among whom only 28% identify as liberal. Among Gen Z adults, white men are significantly more likely than white women to identify as politically conservative, 36% versus 26%. So you see what number one, the study is doing there. Is it saying 43% of Gen Z women, all Gen Z women identify as liberal, whereas – and then it goes to 36% of white Gen Z men identify as conservative. It's switching it on them, right? And while it does eventually acknowledge the differences, because it says that across the board, all Gen Z men, 35% are conservative,

43% of Gen Z women are liberal. That's not a massive gap, right? The Washington Post editorial board just makes the claim that young men have grown more conservative, which is not supported by the study. And also the study is specifically talking about how Gen Z white men have gotten more conservative, right? Very different things being claimed here. So the Post just ignored what was actually in the survey to claim all young men, not just young white men, are more conservative. Not just Gen Z white men are more conservative. Now, this is weird, but even if you take the study, which is misrepresented by the editorial board at its face value, that study does not gel with all of the other data that we have.

Now, when I went through this, it was hard to find good data on just Gen Z men. That is not broken down in most of the studies that we get. But we do have some information on how Gen Z adult men voted as a group in the 2022 midterms, and that data is telling. Based on the 2022 midterms, 71% of young women, that's Gen Z, mostly Gen Z, 18 to 29. So I think Gen Z taps out at 26 right now. So presumably a percentage of the people in this are technically millennials, but they're like you. They're day walkers. Yeah.

And that's like what, like, oh, my God, I can't do math life on air. I think it's like 27 to 40 something is the millennials. But I'm going to say it's close enough to this. This is close enough. It's only like three years of people. Yeah, exactly. And they're the three years that are right in the middle. But of that, of these voters in the 2022 midterms, 71% of young women voted for Democrats.

26% voted for Republicans. 53% of young men voted for Democrats. 42% voted for Republicans. 53% of young men voted for Democrats. 42% voted for Republicans. And among LGBT, and again, this is not broken down male or female, 93% voted for Democrats. And overall, among non-LGBT youth, 58% voted for Democrats, youth, 58% voted for Democrats, 38% voted for Republicans. So again, not massive discrepancies here. And one thing that may help to explain this that again, is not really broken down in the Washington Post editorial is that while Gen Z white men have are more conservative compared to like Gen Z millennial white men, Gen Z itself is a lot less white than prior generations, which means overall Gen Z men are not really getting more conservative.

About 55% of Gen Z is white compared to about 70% of boomers, right? So this is one major reason why, again, because again, if you actually factor in all of Gen Z, there's not this huge worry about like a marriage discrepancy, as long as you assume that people, you know, that interracial dating is not a problem for most people, the way it is for apparently the Washington Post editorial board. And there's a couple of caveats here. One is that midterm voters are historically more engaged and educated than voters of other

generations. However, that may not necessarily hold true with Gen Z or millennial voters today due to a variety of factors. One worthwhile point is that young people tend to be driven far more by what they encounter through social media, which is probably part of why Gen Z and millennial voters consider abortion to be a more important thing to vote on than the economy by a margin that bears no resemblance to older generations. This is why we've actually seen in the last four elections, soaring youth voter turnout, particularly during the midterms, record levels of youth voting, which doesn't mean

it's completely wrong that midterm voters may be a bit more engaged and educated, but that's probably less of a factor for young voters than it is for older generations, right? Some of the conventional wisdom about who votes when is not as accurate when we're talking about younger people. This is not something that you can prove objectively, but there's significant sort of circumstantial evidence around this. Speaking of circumstances, you know what circumstances get me to spend my money? Is it being served products and services? Well, it's when those products and services advertise on this podcast and only this podcast.

So check that shit out, homies. Ah, and we're back. So yeah, one of the, you know, overall points to make that I think goes against this kind of panic a lot of people have that Gen Z is somehow being like pilled away from progressive politics is that as a result of stuff, primarily abortion, Gen Z voters supported Democrats over Republicans in the midterm elections by an astonishing 27 points. This is, again, a large part of this came down to abortion, which Gen Z voters prioritize by a higher amount than any other generation. One of the things that was noted in one of the studies I found is like a potential line of hope for Republicans is that while this, and this is part of where I think some of the fear mongering in these Washington Post articles comes from, although I don't think it says what they think it says, is that lower numbers of young people support specific parties, right? So only about 30 percent of Gen Zers align with Democrats compared to 24 percent of Republicans. And if you just look at that, that's way less of that seems like you're

seeing like these numbers sort of kind of tighten up. But again, they still voted over Democrats over Republicans by 27 points. It's just that Gen Z is less loyal to political parties, which doesn't necessarily mean that progressivism is in danger. It just means that most young people hate the Democrats, too. And that could be everything. It's like the the thing that actually legit and i think this is legitimately a part of it is like well okay so what happened what's happening to all those people and the answer is they're becoming socialists and it's like well that doesn't help the republicans either so yeah and it's it's i mean part of it is that more young people identify with like kind of more politically radical chunks of progressivism part of it is that a lot more of them identify as independent

and may not have – may not identify themselves super much as a specific political chunk. But in general, like they vote progressive. They just don't have any faith in like the ossified political structures in our society, which is a rational thing to do as a young person, right? So I also want to address kind of the elephant in the room with this piece, which is that the Washington Post editorial board's obsession with political divide among the young harming marriage specifically is also kind of gay panicky, right? Because one of the reasons why there seems to be

this divide that they see is like this threatens marriage is that a higher percentage of Gen Z kids are less interested in straight marriage. And these Gen Z kids, male and female, are not getting more conservative, but they're also presumably not going to do the kind of marriage that the Washington Post editorial board wants, right? I'm going to quote from a Time magazine write-up here. I'm going to quote from a Time magazine write-up here. In late 2020 and early 2021, Gen Z was the only U.S. generation in which a majority believed there are more than two genders. As recently as the first half of 2020, this was a minority opinion even among Gen Zers, a remarkable amount of change over just six months. In contrast, there was only a small uptick in this belief among older generations. That type of data is finally available. belief among older generations.

That type of data is finally available. Starting in June 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau offered four options on its household pulse survey question about gender, male, female, transgender, and none of these. The last, a rough gauge of those who identify as non-binary, gender fluid, or another gender identity. Although that is a terrible way of phrasing that question. It's not a great way. It's better than nothing, but yeah, it's not a great way.

It's better than nothing, but like, it's not a great way. It's better than nothing, but like, my God. With more than a million respondents, the survey is large enough to provide accurate estimates. The results are clear. Gen Z young adults are much more likely to report identifying as either trans or non-binary than other generations. While only 1 out of 1,000

boomers report they are transgender, 1 tenth of 1%. 23 out of 1,000 Gen Z young adults, 2.3%, identify as trans, 20 times more. By this estimate, there are now more trans young adults in the U.S. than the number of people living in Boston, which is great because I have long felt that what we need to do is arm trans people to take over the city of Boston. I've believed this for years, and I think we can finally make it happen. Okay, but here's the problem, Phil. You believed this for years, and I think we can finally make it happen. Okay, but here's the problem, Phil. You still have to live in Boston afterward.

Well, I guess we could take the city of Boston and live somewhere else and then sort of like extract feudal dues from it. Yeah, presumably, yeah. You could basically become like collectively the landlords of Boston and then use it to afford rent in a better place. This is viable. I believe,

I believe in our lifetimes that we can do this. And this will finally increase Gen Z's like home ownership numbers, right? If collectively all of the trans and non-binary people own Boston. Yeah. This is a workable plan. I think I'm going to continue that quote. Fewer than 1% of boomers identify as non-binary compared to more than 3% of Gen Z young adults.

Combined with the more than 2% who are trans, that means 1 out of 18 young adults identified as something other than male or female in 2021 or 2022. Which is, again, not true because half of – That's not true. It's not. It's not. Hold on. Because, again, 2% are trans, which presumably, based on this survey and how it's asked, presumably means identify as either male or female. Whereas 3% are non-binary of some sort and may not identify as either male or – it doesn't say that.

This is not well written, but the data is interesting. It suggests 5% to 6% of Gen Z are trans or non-binary, which is a wild departure from previous generations, right? And also, that's a significant chunk of these Gen Z numbers that are not being included in this Washington Post, because presumably, a decent chunk of these people will want to get married. They just don't identify in a way that the Washington Post editorial board respects, right? And again, one of the things that's interesting about this and contra to all this fear mongering about Andrew Tate's destroyed all the men is that male or female Gen Z and millennial voters overwhelmingly support LGBT rights more than they support almost

anything else. And this is consistent across the board and markedly higher than it is for other generations, right? Presumably, this seems to include even like more independent or even more conservative Gen Z and millennial voters, right? They're just across the board less shitty on this. I'm guessing presumably because a lot of their friends are trans or non-binary or just queer and that that makes them less bigoted about this stuff. And again, doesn't really fit into this narrative, right? And this is, again, part of why I'm not as doomer about,

you know, there's this big fear, oh, you know, young people are deserting progressivism, which is going to doom us electorally. And I'm just not seeing that in the numbers. Now, again, everything that's been going on with like the Biden administration's, of Israel certainly may and probably will have have an impact politically. But it's not necessarily it's very clearly not a result of young people getting pilled by Andrew Tate. Right. That's not why that's happening.

And there's there's a thing I wanted to talk about with the Andrew Tateate stuff too, because like everyone's treating this as like a completely new phenomenon. And it's like, most of the people who are talking about this should be old enough to remember Gamergate. Like this stuff has all happened before. And it was like, yeah, like Gamergate did produce a bunch of fascists and also the millennials were

still unbelievably further left than like the generations that came before them. Yeah. So like, it's like, this is, than like the generations that came before them. Yeah. So like, yeah, it's like this is this is this is just a thing. Like every generation has a giant thing where there's like a bunch of right wing like. Yeah. Where the regressions get a big push.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like this just happens periodically. It's just like a part of it. It's a part of politics and it sucks. It's bad, but it's also like not a thing to be doomered about. No, I do think another thing that is happening here is that the kind of people who become members of the Washington Post editorial board have this brain worm, this sickness that infects members of the American media worse than almost anyone else, which is like they're always looking for, ah, contrary to popular wisdom, you think this,

but the reality, you know, it's Malcolm Gladwell syndrome, right? Where you've got to come up with some like clever thing that shows that you're smart because you don't buy into the standard wisdom,

which is always wrong. And there's, and so that they have to believe that whatever is really happening is the opposite of what's obviously happening, right? Which is why this, actually, young men are getting more conservative, and I'm the only one who realizes, and I've got to warn everyone of the danger to marriage. Speaking of which,

here's another quote from that Washington Post article. In another era, political or ideological differences might have had less impact on marriage rates, but increasingly, the political is personal. A 2021 survey of college students found that 71% of Democrats would not date someone with opposing views. There is some logic to this. Marriage across religious or political lines, if either partner considers those things to be central to their identity, can be associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, and politics is becoming more central to people's identity. This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise. As the researchers Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox have noted,

about one in five young singles will have little choice but to marry someone outside of their ideological tribe. The other option is that they decline to get married at all. Not an ideal outcome, considering the data showing that marriage is good for the health of societies and individuals alike. And again, this is only the case that one in five number is ignoring queer people. Yeah, just become gay, transgender. And ignoring, largely ignoring non-white people, right? Like it's just not accurate. Like, yeah, maybe a lot more young white men are going to be single. And there's problems that will occur

due to that, right? Because for one thing, that's the group that tends to like load up on guns and shoot up public places. Not saying it's not a problem, but it doesn't mean that our society is doomed because no one's getting married. It means that there's some serious problems with young white men that we need to deal with. Yeah. And there's there's there's two other things that I think are interesting there. There's two other things that I think are interesting there. One is, okay, you can tell when these people formed their political beliefs because they're complaining about the personnel as political, which is, this is 90s shit. That is old school ass.

This is stuff people were, I don't know, it's like political correctness like, it's the previous version of the same panic that everyone's having now. But this is from the nineties. And so it's like, like all of these people are just like absolute dinosaurs who they've like dragged out to write this like weird fear mongering thing. And the second thing is, I think is interesting too, is like just the, the,

the deep ingrained sort of very conservative assumption here, which is that marriage is good for society yeah which i don't think is anywhere near as straightforward a proposition as the washington post is making it seem like and you know and like they'll they have random statistical arguments i mean the statistics that i've seen like you know just just sort of like statistics that i've seen based on american society is that like women who aren't married are way happier than they are in marriages and you know like men do worse but like you know but like i mean this is one of these things where it's like we don't know like there has not been a version of america where we haven't where the institution of marriage wasn't like our

thing that hasn't existed for like two or three hundred years right yeah we. We don't know the Washington post doesn't know what, what an American society without like where people don't get married. It looks like, like they have no idea, but they're just sort of assuming that it's like the apocalypse because they're weird conservatives in the nineties. Yeah. And a lot of,

I mean, and again, a massive part of, of what's we're seeing here is less it's objectively good. Like marriage is the result of all of these kinds of positive mental health outcomes and more. Well, when people are like have relationships and loved ones and like a family

system supporting them, they're less likely to commit suicide. They're more likely to have someone notice if they take ill, they're just like healthier in general. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's marriage specifically and more like, yeah, not being alone, right? Yeah. Anyway, I want to continue and just kind of go through. I think we've trashed this article enough, but I did find a lot of interesting stuff about Gen Z and young voters that I wanted to get into.

But first, here's some more fucking ads. You pigs, you filthy mongrels. Slap it up. Suck it down. Anyway, we'll be back in a minute. And we're back. So one interesting thing I found, I tried to stick to just stuff from like 2021 or later for this,

in part because of the Andrew Tate of it all, right? I wanted to like try to find stuff that was like, okay, since that guy came onto the scene, has there been some sudden shift? Because people treat him like the Pied Piper of fucking fascism, which again, he's a problem, but I don't think that's broadly accurate. So one of the studies I found was a 2021 survey from MTV, AP and ORC, right? And it was interesting because it showed something I didn't – something I had kind of bought into, was at least less supported by the evidence than I might have thought, which is like the level of dumerism in young people politics. like that they are more optimistic than a lot of older people, both in the state of the world and their role in improving it.

Two thirds of Gen Z feels like their generation is motivated to make positive change in the country. Part of I think where we get some of the feelings of doomerism is that only about 14 percent think that they can have an impact on what the government does. Yeah. I mean, that is an entirely reasonable assessment of, I mean, just like looking at polling data on Palestine or like, you know. We had a very rational take, actually. Yeah, yeah. It's like we had an entire uprising.

Like people fought the Secret Service at the gates of the White House and the product of it was the government was like, no, we should give more money to cops. It's like, okay, we're defunding the New York Public Library system to buy encrypted radio things for police units.

It's objectively true that you have very little influence over the government. Yes, perfectly reasonable thing to say. Yeah. It's interesting, too, another thing that I was kind of surprised by is about half of Gen Z people think their standard of living is better than their parents. But about half also think that the world their generation is facing is worse than what most other people – most other generations have dealt with. So like they think that their problems are worse than like what boomers and Gen X and millennials were dealing with,

but they think they're, about half of them think they're living better lives. This is pretty similar to how millennials feel. Gen X feels very different. Gen X is the most pessimistic generation about the state of the world, which actually makes kind of sense if you realize that like a lot of Gen Z kids are the children of Gen X people, right? So like they think their standard of living is better than their parents

because Gen X is miserable. Yeah. Which, you know, interesting. Gen Z and millennials are more accepting than Gen X of depictions of same-sex couples in media and hold more positive views of LGBT people, which again, Gen X is the worst generation. We all have to agree on that one.

It really sucked. It really didn't work out. The 90s and 2000s were just a disaster. Yeah, a calamity. Worst decades. So I wanted to kind of break down some stuff from this survey that was interesting, just kind of on how the generations support various policies. So in terms of their support for prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of gender identity, 62% of Gen Z and 62% of millennials support that. Only 53% of Gen X does, which is still actually not like a massive gap, right?

When it comes to – this is interesting. When it comes to requiring Americans to mask in public places like stores and restaurants, 54% of millennials support that. 53% of Gen X does, but 52% of Gen Z does, which is all potentially within kind of a margin of error. Yeah, that seems like noise. Yeah, that might just be noise. It's about equivalent, right?

It's pretty close. Most of this is actually pretty – for all of our shitting on Gen X, most of this is actually pretty close. For requiring vaccinations, millennials seem to support it higher than anyone else, 49%. Gen Z at 43%, which is significant. Kind of Gen X is right in the middle at 45. When it comes to supporting a nationwide ban on AR-15s and other similar semi-automatic rifles, Gen Z and Gen X are at 42% for Gen X, 44% for Gen Z, whereas millennials are at

47%. Now, a lot of this breakdown, because I dug into the actual numbers, is the difference between men and women and conservative men and liberal women, right, who are liberal women are a lot more common and more likely to support these kinds of bans, whereas conservative men aren't, but that drags the overall numbers down. It's just interesting to me that there seems to be less support with Gen Z over that. They're closer to Gen X. Increasing security at the border. This is where there's a huge gap.

55% of Gen X for increasing border security. Millennials and Gen Z are at 38% and 37%. So that's really – like Gen X really seems to buy into the we need more border security, whereas the Utes are like, no, fuck that shit. Yeah. Gen X or Gen Z and millennials both tied at 48% support for a universal basic income. Only 36% of Gen X supports this. Again, another significant gap. significant gap.

One interesting thing is that Gen X and millennials at 38 and 36% support reducing regulations on businesses. Only 31% of Gen Z supports this. That's a significant difference. I find that kind of interesting. Yeah, I wonder how much of that also is just like...

You are... Okay, you are a Zoomer. Are you over owning a business like first off? Thank you. I am. I think it may it may be. And I don't I don't know that this has been studied. It may be that because Gen Z are so so many of them want to be influencers who do some other kind of job in like Internet content creation that, and a lot of them have done kind

of work, made some amount of money in that field, that tends to be independent contractor work. And there's some pretty onerous tax regulations. If you've ever been an independent contractor, about how you've got to pay taxes, it may have something to do with that. I don't know though. This hasn't been broken down like granularly that I've seen, but I did find that kind of interesting. And then here's kind of depressing but interesting. Reducing funding for law enforcement agencies, 34% of millennials support that. 30% of Gen Z supports that, which is enough of a gap to suggest might be somewhat less popular among Gen Z than millennials. Only 18% of Gen X feels the same, which is a huge gap. And that is kind of interesting to me. So yeah, that's all compelling.

I think there's one, I think there's one like last kind of interesting thing about this is that those numbers, the numbers on like police funding and a lot of the sort of like, if you just look at the graphs that were in the washington post article a lot of that is it looks a lot like there's there's there's a giant spike during the uprising and then it sort of like tails off after it yeah and so and so that's the thing that i think is like like i don't you know and this is i think a thing i think is kind of important. It's like these, this stuff is all malleable.

And the moment something happens, everyone, everyone's beliefs change really quickly. Yeah. And that's the thing. And like, like in that, that's a,

that's a thing with these sort of like, you know, with, with the sort of doom, bris and rand, you taste like, yeah, like,

but people, people's actual political beliefs and what they're willing to do for them can change very, very, very quickly in, in, in moments where they're sort of – I mean, there's a bunch of people getting shot by cops in the street, right? That changes people really, really quickly. And I do think that's why the gap is so high, both between overall Americans, which are at 28% for defunding police, and between Gen X and and Gen Z millennials is that a lot more Gen Z millennials people got like beaten by the cops in 2020.

And this does show – well, again, it's an uphill battle. Most Americans, a super majority of Americans do not support that. Way more young Americans do, and it's probably because so many of us got our asses kicked. Also, I want to like, like, like if you look at what was happening, like the numbers during the uprising, right?

Like the, the number of people who supported the, the, the burning of the third precinct was like 50%. Yeah. So like these are things that change really quickly in the moment too. And now we're in this sort of long backlash and that's, you know,

and that's, that's driving like some of these numbers, but yeah, like don't, don't, don't be cynical things. Things can and will get better. Yeah's driving like some of these numbers. But yeah, like don't don't don't be cynical. Things things can and will get better. Yeah, yes, they will. And there's a pretty dramatic difference.

Maybe it'll take a couple more general uprisings where people get their asses kicked, which is not great to think about. But like these are pretty stark differences in the generations. And I think that that's kind of worth noting and celebrating maybe the wrong term, but I don't think it's pessimistic. Now, in terms of stuff that is pessimistic, I want to end on a note of like where I kind of think some of the lazy, dumbass pundit brain on this is coming from. And I maybe I'm wrong about this, but I have a little conspiracy theory that involves AI because I did kind of at the end of digging up a bunch of these studies, reading through, I don't know, like 15 articles or whatnot.

And, you know, the actual like entirety of three or four different big surveys. I decided just to hop onto one of the AI search engines that I use occasionally that is usually not helpful just to see what it said. use occasionally that is usually not helpful just to see what it said. And I asked like, what is the most recent data on how young Gen Z men are voting, right? And it gave me mostly useless shit, like the resources were bad. But one of the things it said, because it breaks down the different sources and like summarizes them for you. So it says here, the Atlantic is kind of one of the sources it recommends. The Atlantic reported

that Gen Z and millennials are more likely to vote Republican. This could indicate a shift in political leanings among these demographics. Now, the article that it is linking there is an article called

Is Gen Z Coming for the GOP? Not All Young People Are Democrats by Ronald Brownstein. And it does not say that. It does not say anything like that. It certainly does not say that. And I will tell you what it fucking says, right? Because it's wildly fucking different. An analysis of previously

unpublished election data from Catalyst, a Democratic targeting firm by Michael Podorzer, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, shows that even the emergence of these new voters may not break the larger political stalemate that has partitioned the country into seemingly immovable blocks of red and blue states. Podhorzer's analysis of the catalyst data, shared exclusively with The Atlantic, found that over the past four elections, Gen Z voters have broken heavily for Democrats in blue states and provided the party solid margins in closely contested swing states. But in red states, with a few prominent exceptions, Podhorzer surprisingly found that even Gen Z voters are mostly supporting Republicans.

Now, when you dig into the data, first off, that does not show that Gen Z people are voting more for Republicans. It's the opposite of that. The vast majority of them are voting for Democrats. But in red states, the number – and it's not finding in red states that Gen Z are more likely to support Republicans than previous generations. They are more progressive than previous generations. They're just still majority supporting Republicans in deep red states. Now, again, if you read that quote, it's also saying there are some red states where Gen Z are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats. And in purple states, they are wildly progressive compared to previous generations.

It is, again, the opposite of what that AI summary is. I'm wondering how many lazy pundits are doing this because they suck at shit and we're just like oh well the atlantic says they're more republican it's like no that's if you read the article it does not say that it's a pretty good article actually well and this is this is actually there's one thing i want to mention about that polling data too which is that the 2022 election was really weird because the 2022 election was supposed to be i was supposed to be a red wave election. And yeah, there actually was one. But it was it only happened. It happened in deep red states.

Yes. And it happened in New York. And that has to do with the New York media market, which is part of also why all these people's brains have been completely destroyed. actually like it's actually genuinely unclear to me that this is even predictive of how those same people in deep red states are going to vote in like the next like four to eight years because that was because again this this this this was a midterm election with a democratic president that is when you're supposed to have the opposition like win a bunch of seats and stuff like that and like it didn't go the way it was supposed to and so and i so i i think it's actually even that part is more is more like even the the tiny note of it where they're like more like gen z people voted for republicans like i i don't know i i don't even know if that's gonna hold in the long run no but all of these puns like yeah the fact that they probably are

just reading ais yeah i Yeah, I wonder. Just, like, coming across that dog shit, like, just completely wrong. Very funny. Made me feel a little bit better about the computers coming for us all. Made me feel a little bit worse about the intelligence of pundits. But, yeah, it's, you know, and one of the things that is kind of – if you're concerned about 2024, that is a worthwhile concern and that is a real problem is that while young people are overwhelmingly progressive as voters, this is not evenly distributed across the country. And a lot of the gains in voters that progressives have seen are going to be clustered in states that were already overwhelmingly blue. And when it comes to a presidential election, those are wasted votes, right?

Yeah. And this is a problem that the Republicans dealt with a lot during the Obama years, right, where there would be massively more Republican voters, but they would be clustered in these areas that Dems were never going to win. And so it didn't help them electorally, right? That is kind of worth noting. It's potentially a thing, although a lot of the gains when people are freaking out And so it didn't help them electorally, right? That is kind of worth noting. It's potentially a thing.

Although a lot of the gains when people are freaking out about like, oh, Biden's numbers among non-white voters have gotten worse. That is probably true, almost certainly true to some extent. But a lot of those vote gains are clustered in areas that were so heavily read, it may not have any impact on the overall electoral state. I will say the one place where that actually does matter is Michigan. Yes, yes.

Because Michigan has this huge Muslim population who are unbelievably pissed at Biden for offering them the deal, we're going to murder your family and also you have to vote for us, which is like- I'm not doing the Will Stancil thing and saying there's nothing to worry about.

I'm saying that- There are places where it does matter more, but like, yeah, yeah. It's unclear. And a lot of what may be – a lot of what is certainly happening, although this doesn't mean that there won't be because I think there's a good chance there will be an electoral impact. But a lot of what is objectively happening, both on the left and the right, is increasing numbers of voters who are in states that would never, were never going to be in play electorally. Yeah. This is because the electoral college is bullshit, you know?

Yeah. It's like, like I've, I've lived in Illinois my entire life. It is not possible for me to cast a vote that matters. Yeah. Like it just isn't. Yeah.

In Oregon, it's really not. It's just how the system works, right? It's like, it's a great, great, great job.

Great job. Yeah. People who wrote the constitution. So anyway, I think that's, that's about enough to get into um i i hope this has been edifying and useful to people uh mia you got anything else to say before we roll out here uh molotov 2024 just like molotov 2020 uh yeah don't the washington post okay i want to close in the note that the Washington Post editorial board

managed to find the one socialist in the entire US who's anti-abortion and make her a writer for them but who are you speaking for why is it important that we have this voice of a person like fucking hell. God, it's tiring. Um,

speaking of tiring, I'm tired. So now we're done. Goodbye. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

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and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

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He wasn't like this like 15 minutes ago there's been a rapid radicalization process yeah speaking speaking of rapid radicalization i downed a bottle of this alive ancient mushroom elixir and it is overpowered me it's brought on delusions not a sponsor too free free free advertising advertising but if they want to pay us i will probably stop claiming to have slain the god of abraham um this is this week in terrorism uh a a show title we've never used before and may never use again but we wanted to oh we're probably gonna have to use it. None of the terrorism we're talking about has occurred this week.

It all occurred in previous weeks. We were out last week. We wanted to talk about some of our recent terrorism attacks to discuss kind of what we're seeing

in radicalization of the people who are carrying out usually shootings, but not exclusively. We're actually going to start with the hammer attack. Yeah, what we're seeing out there.

Very British style, actually, for an American attack. Super English. I think we're ending on a stabbing, too. We're ending on a stabbing. Most of these are not shootings. I'm a liar. It's the mushroom juice. But, yeah, we're going to start by talking about the attack on Paul Pelosi, who is, of course, Nancy Pelosi's fuck buddy.

Some people call him a husband. I think that's an archaic term. But yeah, he got assaulted in his house by this guy, Brian DePayup. This was like a year or so ago, and he just recently got convicted of a bunch of stuff. He's going to be going to forever prison. But we're going to talk about that attack. a bunch of stuff. He's going to be going to forever prison. But we're going to talk about that attack. Essentially, I wanted to start with kind of a little bit of audio of the attack itself. This is from police body camera. And basically what happened is this guy, Brian,

broke into the Pelosi's backyard, which was not guarded. Nancy was away from the house. She had their security detail. Capitol Police does not protect spouses and family members of Congress people. And he used a hammer in one of the two very large backs he brought with him to bust into the house and then had a conversation with Paul Pelosi that he insists was very polite until the police showed up, at which point he started bashing him in the skull with a hammer. And we're going to get into more of what happened, but I wanted to I want to start by playing that audio.

This is right at the point that the police opened the door. How you doing? What's going on, man? That's the guy. What? Drop the hammer. Hey, what is going on? so what is actually happening in the video is this guy um brian who is whole like he's got a big very large hammer in his hands and like there's a very

mild struggle going on for it pelosi has one hand on the hammer, which is a reasonable thing to want to do in this situation. And the guy just looks kind of stunned. And the police show up and they're like, yeah, man, drop the hammer. And he says no. And they, to be fair to the police, pretty reasonably take a step towards him. And he pulls the hammer away from Paul and hits him in the head several times. The police tackle him off. Paul got hurt very badly. This is a pretty ugly attack several times. The police tackle him off. Paul got hit, hurt very badly.

This is a pretty ugly attack. Yeah, he's an old man. He got hit in the head with a hammer several times by a much younger man. Pretty, pretty ugly. One of the things that becomes clear if you watch the earlier footage of this guy in their backyard because they have a security camera. And if you watch this footage is that like this is not a guy who had a super clear plan about what he was going to do.

This is a guy who was kind of flying by the seat of his pants. And when the police came in, kind of irrationally, like based on his existing plans, decided to swing at him. And when he was at court, like some of the things the papes said were very interesting. He he he basically like, you know, he busts into their backyard. Paul Pelosi in his pajamas confronts him when he hears it. And DePapp asks, Are you Paul Pelosi? Where's Nancy?

Where's Nancy? Pelosi's like, She's not home. She's going to be gone for several days. And DePapp started threatening to tie Pelosi up. He does this like 10 times. Eventually, Paul's able to get away briefly to go to the bathroom where he has a cell phone and he calls the police. And like while he's on the phone with the dispatcher, you can hear DePap like telling him to hang up. You know, the police get there and he attacks him.

The first thing that happens in the wake of this, this is obviously big news. And the entirety of right wing media basically decided that this was Paul Pelosi's lover. Yeah, I was under the impression from referable sources that this was Paul's gay lover is what I was told. That immediately comes out. Marjorie Taylor Greene spreads this. Tucker Carlson spreads this. Elon Musk spreads this. Representative Carla Tenene spreads this. Tucker Carlson spreads this. Elon Musk spreads this. Representative Carla Tenney spreads this.

Again, because this is very clearly a right-wing attack motivated by right-wing media on an elected leader. Pretty brutal attack. Not on an elected leader. Sorry, on the husband of an elected leader, right? And I wanted to quote really quickly from an MSN write-up this that talks about like why DePapp says he did this. DePapp explained that he broke into the Pelosi home in order to lure University of Michigan anthropology and women's study professor Gail Rubin to their house. Rubin's research, according to her professional bio, focuses on LGBTQ studies, gay and lesbian ethnography, sexual populations, and geography, sexology, and feminist theory. She is known for her 1984 essay, Thinking Sex, which is considered a founding text of queer theory.

Paul was never a target, DePap said in court, explaining that he was only using the Pelosi's to get to my other targets, and that he felt really bad for Paul Pelosi. He explained that he spent six hours a day watching political commentary on YouTube before he was arrested, where he learned that everything was a lie coming from the press. He listed off common right-wing grievances, according to NBC News, to explain why he broke into the home. He claims to have heard about Gail Rubin from anti-LGBTQ activist James Lindsay, who is the same person who claims to have popularized the groomer's slur against LGBTQ people. DePapp said that he regularly listened

to Lindsay's podcast. The takeaway I got is that she wants to turn our schools into pedophile molestation factories, DePap said. So one of the things that's really interesting to me is that this guy's in the home of one of the most powerful people in the entire country who is worth $100 million or more, so also extremely wealthy person. But she's not his target. His target is this woman studies professor who James Lindsay has convinced him is trying

to molest all of the kids in America, right? This is, again, this is entirely stochastic terrorism. This is the fault. James Lindsay wanted stuff like this to happen. That's why he does what he does. This is on him, and it's a very clear example. If you go into this dude's backstory, he was not

always like this. He used to be, I think, a pro-nudity activist, but not a guy who was wildly conservative. Then the pandemic hits, and he's spending all day playing video games alone, increasingly isolated. He starts going down these YouTube

and podcast, primarily listening to these right wing podcasters. Lindsay's one of them. He's also a huge Tim Pool listener who is this super right wing guy who believes that like we're already in a shooting civil war with the left. And yeah, these are all big groomer guys. These are all women's studies professors of those dangerous people in the country. And this is a vulnerable dude who the pandemic isolated from what social networks he had had. And he just kind of completely loses his shit. It's a very clear radicalization path. This is a deeply mentally unwell man who was taken advantage of by a right wing media ecosystem that exists to churn exactly this kind of guy towards violence against their ideological opponents. It is certainly interesting.

This is this attack was more deeply weird than what we all initially thought. Like, oh, like someone was trying to kill Pelosi. Right. I'm not surprised someone would try to do that. I'm not saying it's just I'm not like saying because fucker. I'm saying that, like, I'm not surprised. She's incredibly powerful. Of course, people want to kill Pelosi, right? I'm not surprised someone would try to do that. I'm not saying it's just, I'm not like saying because fuck her. I'm saying that like, I'm not surprised. She's incredibly powerful.

Of course people want to kill her. That's just the way it is. Yeah. We all saw what happened on January 6th. Like, come on guys. Yes. This is normal politics.

Yes. But like the idea that you're like holding, holding Pelosi as a hostage to get like a gender theory, women's studies professor is just so much more like like highlighting the type of American brain rot that is just totally taking over large swaths of the media of the media ecosystem at this point. Yeah, I think one of my favorite details from this

is that if you go into like his court case, why he chose to attack the home of, again, Nancy Pelosi, super wealthy, powerful person with a security detail, is because he believed this Gail Rubin, this professor, lived in a fortress that he could not break into. Yeah. This women's studies professor lives in an underground bunker. It was easier to get to the speaker of the house's home than it is a woman studies professor's house i think it's interesting too that it was it's specifically james lindsey who i don't know have we talked about him really on the show i'm sure i'm sure in passing like he had a big twitter fight with him earlier this year i yeah i've had i've had several yeah yeah my you know so he's an interesting kind he's like kind of like a proto chris ruffo like a lot of ways but he's interesting because he's one of

these people who makes a very classic mistake in in when you're trying to become a media person which is that he tries to do theory bullshit yes and it's on it it's it's nonsense like he like it's it's you know but his thing is he's trying to derive basically like effectively what he's trying to do is derive a theoretical basis for the whole like judeo-bolshevik conspiracy which he he was one of the big sort of cultural marxism people yeah well he he is he is probably most known for uh propagating the critical race theory kind of debacle that happened a few years ago. That was mostly spearheaded by this guy, James Lindsay.

Yeah, and he's trying to, like his project, his intellectual project, he's trying to trace this line from Hegel through Marx through Gramsci through Mao through the Frankfurt School through the 60s radicals. And it's it's it's interesting, though, because what he's doing is he's he's he's he's part of this really systemic attempt to completely. And we saw this. This is the result of this is this Paul Pelosi attack. It's to completely obscure the actual power relations of American society to the point where, yeah, the thing we've been talking about happens where because this person thinks that this Marxist conspiracy from gender studies professors is actually the thing that controls the US.

He is like kidnapping one of like the husband of one of the most powerful people in the United States because he thinks that as a way to get to a gender studies professor, it's, it's this, it's this interesting, I think like, I don't know. It's, I think it's this interesting demonstration of, of how, of how right-wing ideology is specifically designed to act to like conceal the actual power relations of society and then blame like queer people for it.

And it's like, no, it's, it's, it's, it's the same thing. Lindsay comes out of academia too right he's like this professor at a in washington but he's like a he's like a math professor or something he's like yes

no no it's like a staff professor the gist of what why what happens is he realizes you're never going to get rich being a math professor so but if you become a right-wing thought leader you know there's money in that so he makes these series of bullshit claims about how he's being oppressed by fucking evil progressive fascism. And yeah, this is why also all of his grievances are so focused around academics is because he still has academia brain worms where everything that matters is like what this handful of upper middle class professors at fancy Ivy League schools argue about. He also believes that queer people are engaging in a form of ancient hermetic magic,

which is pretty funny. Now that part, Harrison, if I know you at all, that part's true. Like, that's accurate. It's so funny that he got there, because when I was arguing with him, he was trying to argue that Mao had read this Gramsci, who's this Italian Marxist theorist. He demonstrably cannot have read because Gramsci's prison notebooks don't come out until like aren't translated in Chinese until after Mao dies. So it's like it's physically impossible for him to have done this. But it's funny because like he's gone from that to like the queer hermetic like.

Yes. Seriously to destroy the oh who do we want to talk about next because i have i have i have my dayton shooter and i i know we we have we we have a list of guys let's do let's let's do let's do dayton shooter and then close out with the two anti-palestinian yeah so yeah i'm not I don't know shit about this. So date me up, motherfuckers. So a few days before Thanksgiving. We're home. We should, we should take it out

before we date. Oh, yeah. Speaking of Thanksgiving, you know what I'm thankful for? The fact that we're supported by advertisers. And we're back. Okay, let's talk about

this fucking Dayton shooting. A few days before Thanksgiving, someone walked into a Walmart in Beaver Creek, Ohio, with, I believe it was a high point.45 caliber carbine. Oh, wow. A high point. Okay. Yeah.

He shot four people before eventually dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Victims were transferred to the hospital. It looks like nobody actually died besides the shooter. So hey, that's a win. Great job, medical teams. But upon looking into this guy's home, it's very kind of standard stuff

ever since 2016. We have Nazi flags. We have Nazi books. He went to a Christian online school. He was 20 years old he spent almost all of his time at home on the on the internet um he did not believe the holocaust was real he had been to the hospital before for mental health evaluations uh the fbi referred to his beliefs as a quote loosely organized movement of individuals and groups that espouse some combination of racist,

anti-Semitic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic and homophobic ideology, which is a very broad way of saying, yeah, he was like a far-right nutjob. He was very typical kind of Nazi guy. He had two swastika flags. Now, because he

died, it's where people are still putting together like what exactly led to him to like do this this specific act um because they can't like talk to him um but yeah it was very very typical sort of thing of this guy deciding to go into a walmart and do a shooting this is something that other other Nazi accelerationists have done before. It's something that will probably keep happening. Oh, yeah. I mean, for sure.

It's not like a big story. It's just another thing that's happened. But it is weird, the sort of like normalization of it, of like, oh, yeah, Nazi did a Walmart shooting again, isn't actually a story anymore. It's just like, it's just another Tuesday. No. And this is like what the right wants, by the way, is that like when they do these mass

shootings, it does not make the news. And whenever they can blame a shooting on a queer or a trans person, they try to keep it, make it be the only thing anyone talks about. Right. Like this is this is part of the plan you know yeah um and it's a bummer that it's it's worked just because like it's impossible to stay at an equal level of anger every time this happens it's so common you know like you just can't you can't continue existing and and have the same reaction to these that you had in 2019 yeah so i mean like that i

don't have much else on this because it's just it's this guy who played video games alone for most of his life went to a christian online homeschool never really interacted with the public is it was almost solely existed within this this like media ecosystem online um which pushed him towards buying a book on the history of the SS and buying multiple Nazi flags and not thinking the Holocaust is real. Yeah. This is the inevitable result of this sort of thing.

So I guess, do we want to segue to Vermont for our next, like, something happened, I think, less than a week later it sure did but first Garrison speaking of segways did you realize that the guy who bought the segway company died in a segway crash in Scotland yeah are you serious

yeah he did he sure did Garrison he sure did you know this is this is why I think there is a little bit of magic that is real because every once in a while the funniest thing happens oh man what a what a stupid product segues um i remember when those first came out and people were like this is the future of transportation and then everyone who was not completely brain dead was like of course they're not look at how

dumb those things look. Nobody's going to want to drive these. I mean, if I was a self-educated finance guy, I'm sure I would be able to estimate the life cycle of the Segway. You're not going to make it if you just walk like a peasant. You've got to get a one wheel that explodes. You've got to get a one wheel that explodes. It's so funny to me, too, because it's like like I think they're like I genuinely think is a real kind of shift in in in our modes of transportation is that people really did start using electric bikes more. And that has a lot.

Yeah, those are great and stuff. Yeah. It's like, you know, we built the same way. Yeah. Instead. No, it's like, yeah, we don't need you don't need to fuck with the form factor. People are happy using bikes. They're just too slow and sometimes too too much effort is required. So you make that easier and then people don't drive as fucking much.

Great idea. Speaking of a bad idea, let's talk about this other mass shooter in Vermont from from last week. This actually happened on Thanksgiving Day. So this guy, I think it was on Thanksgiving Day. It may have been like a day or two later. Oh, it was Saturday night. So that would have been. Yeah, that would have been like the day you were two after two, two days after Thanksgiving.

So two days after Thanksgiving, you know, you've got these three 20 year old Palestinian men who are in town visiting family. You know, they're doing I think they go over and do a Thanksgiving dinner with some friends. They're over another. I think people's. Yeah. Yeah. The specific thing they were leaving was it was they went to an eight year old's birthday

party. Yes. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're with one of them's uncle who lives in Burlington. And these kids are all students at different northeast. I think all northeast colleges. One's from Brown University.

One's from Haverford. One is from Trinity College. Two of them are citizens and the other is, I think, naturalized or at least a permanent resident. And at some point after, you know, they're they're hanging out at this event, family event, they're like, let's go on a walk. You know, it's a nice night. Let's let's have a walk around. And they're they're walking around. They're near an apartment building. And this 48 year old man named Jason J. Eaton steps off his porch, pulls out a gun and apparently without saying anything, fires at least four shots at these three young men. Two of them are shot in their torso.

A third is shot in the lower extremities. They are all alive still. They're all expected to live. I think one of them was more seriously injured than the others, but they're all going to survive, thankfully. And then Eaton flees on foot. I think the next day, the police catch up with him. He used a 380 pistol, if that matters to you, which is a fairly small handgun, which probably explains why everybody survived. again,

Eaton doesn't say anything before he starts shooting. There's no evidence that he knew these guys. They are apparently speaking in a mixture of Arabic and English as they walk by, which, and also at least I think two of them were wearing like Palestinian color sort of shemogs or keffiyehs. I don't think that, I don't know if that's like,

like not like colors of the Palestinian flag, but like the color palette that is used in that specific it's the it's like the white and black uh yeah scarves yeah yeah yeah exactly eaton was a finance broker and advisor kind of part-time i don't know how much money he actually made from it yeah he was like working on a farm part-time yeah he was employed at edward Edward Jones a few years ago. He's kind of, yeah, he's this libertarian finance bro. Yeah. And so, yeah, people found his social pretty quickly. There's like an archived Twitter, which is really standard libertarian stuff.

He talks about like, he complains about the Fed an awful lot. He quotes Elon Musk a number of times. He seems to be a fan of him, but he's also a huge fan of Bernie Sanders and describes like the only good man in politics pretty much. Yeah, I think it's kind of like it's kind of like the Joe Rogan libertarian of like. Right, right. Yes, very much so. You like Bernie because he's like he like cares about like the people. He's not like, he's not like falling for like the big finance corporation stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's like,

it's this old sort of like the, oh my God, why I've forgotten his name. The libertarian guy from the 2000s and early 2010s. The guy who wore the Riddler suits? No, he was a congressman. He was like, one of the fashions in Occupy was like these weird libertarians. And it's like, this seems like there's like the ideological ascendance of those people who didn't turn into like neo-confederate like people.

And it's in his old archived Twitter account. He describes himself like his profile describes him as radical citizen patrolling democracy, which he spells with a K and capitalism for Oath Keepers. Well, Oath Creepers, I don't know entirely what all of that means. And then hashtag wild type with the little atomic symbol, which I guess means he likes science. With the little atomic symbol, which I guess means he likes science. He describes himself as a dad and a part time farmer, a reformed stockbroker, and his archived account includes a link to his sub stack, which is RDKL radical. He describes it as wandering ramblings of a reformed broker on the ADHD, ASD spectrum. He's claiming at least to have ADHD and autism.

It's he's deleted by the time we got to them. Everyone got to the most of the posts on his sub stack. The only thing on there is a really extensive post where he's like talking about how, how restaurants can keep dishwashers employed. He seems to have worked as one and be angry that they're not always paid fair wage commensurate to back on the line or the front of the line staff i guess which is like yeah not unreasonable but an odd thing for him to be so focused on um no he he has a really interesting online footprint um yes at least like everything like pre-pandemic is like he's like this regular

libertarian finance guy like there's no like there's nothing too concerning he's like or hateful yeah he's like retweeting like the libertarian party of tennessee saying that they like bernie sanders and like he's yeah, he has like this podcast where he talks about penny stocks and it's like, it's, it's, it's a lot of like, you see a lots of these types of guy around and most of them are just like guys in their forties.

Cause that's what he is. He's, he was just like a libertarian guy in his forties who lived in Vermont. So like, yeah. So, you know, as you kind of stated Garrison,

he's pretty normal up until, up until he gets like COVID hits. And that seems to be what pushes him over the limit. I want to I want to read a quote from Vice News here, who's done a lengthy breakdown of his social media presence. One post from March 2022 titled Thought Crime is an anti-vax greed that labels COVID-19 as a government conspiracy. The scale and scope of this operation was next level, he wrote. He also shared other anti-vax sentiments on his LinkedIn and wrote last year that he'd started deleting or unpublishing certain posts because my ideas make some people not want to hire me.

He also has an Instagram account, which is largely dedicated to sharing images from his farm. Only one post hints at any ideological or political outlook, which is a screenshot from the urban dictionary definition of America with a K a word used to describe the worst sense of the United States, i.e. imperialism, corruption,

and the global exportation of American culture. His Instagram links to another blog, which has the same name as his sub stack and contains rambling podcasts about the financial system. He's uploaded documentation of his various qualifications over the years. One document indicates that he was a boy scout leader between at least 2017 and 2021. Don't worry,

everyone. The boy scouts are not letting this guy continue to be an adult leader. Yeah. It's the, the homepage of his, of his website just reads together. No King. Yeah.

And there's a lot of stuff that looks like it's been deleted um a lot of like weird financial advice under the under the name of radical citizen spelled all stupid um but no like i i i've i've i found his youtube pretty quick i found his linkedin pretty quick there's a lot of like vex it's his youtube starts with a lot of like vaccine hesitancy stuff. Yeah. And then on his LinkedIn, he moves into like full, full like weird, like COVID conspiracies, vaccine denial, vaccine conspiracy theories. And I will say, I've never seen a shooter post like this on LinkedIn before.

Yeah, that's an interesting one. It's a really unique, it's a really unique thing. Like, so you'll find stuff like this on unique thing. You'll find stuff like this on Reddit. You'll find stuff like this on Twitter. But having a shooter share this types of conspiratorial content on LinkedIn and then talk about how he has to delete some because he's not getting hired because LinkedIn's

a place to help you get hired. It's a really weird platform. This could just be his libertarian-ness showing and they use LinkedIn because it's for business and finance. But it is certainly weird. The way he was using it is unlike most either COVID conspiracy shooters, vaccine shooters, or whatever his motivation was for this, for targeting three Palestinian people. It's certainly a unique facet of this incident. Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, in some ways, this is a pretty standard case in that, like, not the specific things that this guy, his starting point, but just the fact that this is a guy who's clearly open to some level of right wing politics and thought influencers. And it seems as if COVID-19 drove him off a wall ideologically. this winds up being a very, you know, if we wind up finding out that a specific motivation for this anti-Palestinian

racism because yeah. Well, yeah. We don't know. It probably is, but his mom describes him as a Christian who takes spirituality very seriously. She said that he thought the whole state of the world was kind of like a big

mess right now. Like everything, everything spiritually is kind of falling apart is, is what his mom said because he, he, he was, he was at Thanksgiving dinner with his family like two nights before this happened.

Um, they said he seemed to act, be acting like, like his usual self, not, not saying like, you know, not saying that he was acting good,

but like he was acting normal for him. Yeah. But no, he certainly had some degree of religious affiliation. He talked about using his religious status to get like vaccine exemptions for his kids. So there's stuff like that that does tie to his religious background, um, which, which could certainly contribute to, to, uh, anti-Palestinian violence. Yeah.

And I don't know if I had to assume kind of how this went down without more evidence, my guess would be he was having a bad day, probably, you know, that kind of after the holiday depression. That's not uncommon. He's like listening to or reading some sort of listening to some sort of weird conspiracy podcast, or he's just falling down another rabbit hole online. He's gets angrier and angrier, and he hears some people talking in Arabic outside, looks out his window, sees a Palestinian keffiyeh and decides, I'm going to just start shooting. I don't actually know, like, I don't know what else it could be. He can't have, these people were not like regular walkers in his neighborhood.

So this can't have been like, he wasn't laying in wait for them. This seems like from, you know, it must have been like a spur of the moment thing, right? He waited for the ATF to come to his door. He said, I've been expecting you or I've been waiting for you or something. And he said, I don't want to say anything without a lawyer. He had the libertarian script of here's what you say if the police are coming to arrest you. He didn't kill himself at the end of this act of violence like a lot of other shooters do. He was very put together weirdly. And he's's lawyered up i guess we'll learn more

but yeah no it's it's it's certainly interesting i mean i'm scrolling through the past two years of linkedin posts where he posted a lot on like linkedin's like social platform and it's a big mix of like big mix of like financial financial conspiracy theories uh and and covid conspiracy theories and vaccine conspiracy theories i can certainly see how the way the way like libertarians in general the past three years past like five years six years maybe even since like the tea party realistically have just you have been getting increasingly aligned with like other aspects of the far right where it contributes to like transphobia or contributes to racism, xenophobia, homophobia. Like that, that, that has been that that Venn diagram is slowly becoming more of a circle. And I can certainly see if this guy, this guy obviously was listening to podcasts.

If he was making, he was making a financial podcast at some point. Um, he like, I can totally see if, if you're listening to libertarian podcasts, um, you slowly getting all of these other kinds of beliefs that have been seeping in to almost the entirety of the libertarian political project. Um, if you see like a few years ago, he was retweeting posts from like the libertarian parties of these various states. And now many of those accounts are just run by Nazis. Like it is like watching how the posting trends of like official libertarian party affiliated accounts have changed the past few years. Specifically, the New Hampshire account. Yeah.

Oh, my God. Is quite something. account. Yeah. Oh, my God. Quite is quite something. Yeah. And it's it's not always what you'd think, because the the the Louisiana Libertarian Party is like super chill, reasonable anti-racist, you know, guy.

Whereas, yeah, the New Hampshire Libertarian Party dude is like just a straight up Nazi. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Good stuff. Should we do our second ad break? Did we already do that did we already do is anyway danil if we didn't do a second ad break here's our second ad break ah we're back after either our second ad break or that will be edited out because i we already

did too we forgot which danil will figure it out and you the listener will never know if i fucked up danil keep it in if i fuck up yeah and speaking of speaking of stuff that's fucked up um yeah yeah so the the last thing i want to talk about is this is this is an older this is from like october right yeah this is from it's october 14th and i think it's specifically this is this is seven days after the sort of Hamas attack that started all of the sort of stuff that's been happening in Palestine yeah so in Plainfield which is this kind of yeah it's like a it's a really far suburb of Chicago yeah it's in it's in these things where it's like it's in the kind of i don't know almost a borderline of is it a suburb like it is it's a place that sucks ass yeah and no offense to anyone living there we

know like there are good people there but it some of them i assume are good people yeah so on on the 14th a 71 year old man named joseph kuspa who was the landlord of a Palestinian woman and her son. And, you know, okay. So this story, this story just sucks. They had actually,

so these, this family and their landlord had been like pretty close friends. Like the, the family had considered him like, like a, like they considered him like a grandfather. And this guy comes through the door and the six-year-old kid runs up to go hug him. And he stabs the kid 26 times and kills him, nearly kills his mom.

He's screaming like the entire time about like, yeah, he's screaming, you Muslims have to die. You're killing our kids in Israel. you palestinians don't deserve to live and this is a i think this is a kind of a kind of different kind of shoot of well not a different kind of like killing than the ones we've been talking about because this is a very sort of like wake of 2001 killing where you have this enormous spike in islamophobia very specifically here you have this enormous, enormous spike in Islamophobia. Very specifically here, you have this incredible spike in, in anti-Palestinian racism. And you have this,

this period, like, especially in the week. I mean, and this is still happening to this day, but in like the week after, in the week after this all started, you could say fucking anything about Palestinians.

You could say you could, you could like, you could talk about fucking turning the Gaza strip into glass glass like you could talk about fucking dropping nukes you could talk about killing every single palestinian on earth and it was and no one fucking said anything right yeah all these fucking people all these fucking all these fucking journalists said nothing all like the the president like the president only starts talking about islamophobia after this fucking kid gets stabbed to death. And this guy is listening to right-wing talk radio, which is why

this is an older... This is a specific kind of killing that I think is very, very similar to the enormous number of Muslims who were killed. And I also seek people too, because these people are just really racist. And Palestinians, people who were just killed right after 9-11, because there's just

this wave of the US that gets into one of these sort of murder frenzies, like one of these sort of racist frenzies and this kid gets stabbed to death and yeah, this guy you know, and I mean, and like I

think, I think the thing about this case, right, is like this is you know, this is a radicalization in terms of like going from, like, this is, you know, this is a radicalization in terms, like, in terms of, like, going from, going from literally, like, this kid is running up to hug him because, like, he had built, like, a treehouse for the family before this, right? Like, and over the course of, like, seven days, this guy goes from that to, like, we need to kill all Muslims and we need to, like, stab them to death, right? Like, it's horrible. And, and this is,

you know, like this kind of stuff just keeps happening. And, you know, like the, the only time, the only, the media literally only covers this stuff,

like in terms of like, Oh, it's costing a Democrat support. And it's like, you guys just, I don't know the, the, the extent to which Democrat support. And it's like, you guys just, I don't know. The extent to which the media has been utterly and completely complicit in anti-Palestinian racism has been appalling.

And it's killed people now. Yeah. And there will be no reckoning with this because the US media does this shit all the time and no one cares. And yeah. By a wide margin margin the most disturbing thing about this is just and i think what separates this from the 2001 stuff because this the this

version of this attack in 2001 would have just been some racist stranger who saw you know a muslim person or just a person he assumed looked like they were muslim and attacked but did not have a relationship with them this guy is super close to this kid, right? This is like an example of how fairly integrated this community was. And it's the, again, an example of kind of what we're seeing in most of these other attacks we've talked about, except for that Nazi, is like these people who are a lot more normal.

And then I'm going to guess if we, when we find out more about the dude who stabbed that kid, a lot of his drift happened after COVID, right? You know, and it's, it's a product of this right wing media ecosystem that again, exists purely to do this sort of thing,

but it's also a product of, of COVID, right? It's a product of this lockdown that lockdown that just fucking shattered so many people. The one other thing I will mention because it is relevant because the trial is starting is another extremely targeted attack with the murder of Brianna Jai. Yeah. The perpetrators were very familiar. They were interested in killing her specifically

because brianna was trans and that i don't i don't know if we talked about this on the show that i i don't think we did i don't think it had happened yeah yeah no but with with the trial happening we've gotten text exchanges between the two people who were involved in the killing um and it's it's very very very telling the way they were talking about Brianna as this object and very specifically

almost like stalking and gaining familiar with her specifically to kill her out of fascination. For people who don't know what this is Brianna was I think she was 15 16 16 16 year old trans

girl in the UK who was stabbed to death by two other kids and yeah so the trial's like happening right now and it's it's really really fucking sucks yeah she was she was killed earlier this year

yeah and yeah i mean if you if you want to understand what transphobes think about trans people like those texts are as clean as an example as you're going to get about how all of the fucking right-wing media people and all of the sort of all of the most absolutely committed transphobes think about transphobia and how they talk about us

behind closed doors where they think people will never see it. This is just how they talk about us. This is what happens. It like people fucking weird or trans people. And yeah. Yep. Well,

that. Yep. All right. Well, folks, this has been, uh, it could happen here.

A podcast about terrorism. Goodbye. Do we, do we, do we want to try to end this literally any other way? I'm not sure. You know, no, Garrison, we're not. That's the end of the podcast. Goodbye. Yeah.

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Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast with the it is Henry Kissinger. And the happening here is that he's dead as a doornail. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me on this joyous day after Kissinger's dead is Garrison Davis and James Stout.

Welcome to the show. Woo! Hello. Very excited. Had a fun night in the group chat last night. I did send over the horny Henry Kissinger coffee pasta without reading it to the group chat. I feel like that was a good call. Fully!

Within 30 seconds of you sending that, I got the same message in another group chat. It was spreading around pretty quick. I wanted to jump on it soon before other people were going to share it. So, yeah, that is my duty.

I mean, it's certainly upsetting. He lives to 100, but we will celebrate his death nevertheless. Yes. It would have been nice if he died sooner. Yeah. Yeah, it would have been nice. Well, we don't know how he died. He could have died horribly.

We actually don't know. Oh, really? Yeah. At least I haven't seen anything about how he died. In could have died horribly. We actually don't know. Oh, really? Yeah. In his home in Connecticut, surrounded by his family. According to the official statement. Yeah, well, look, he lived a lot longer and died a lot more pleasantly than a lot of the people

in his life he ended, which is sad. It is sad, but it's also funny he died knowing he's probably one of the most hated men in the world pretty funny parties in the fucking street like there was a so there was there was a giant uh pro-palestine protest in chicago last night and there's videos of them finding out live while they're in the streets that kiss and just dying and this giant cheer goes up. People having a great time. Yeah, I was texting my friends

who were down at the border. I was like, Henry Kissinger is dead. Spread the word. Among the people of the nations that he destroyed. Pretty good. Pretty good stuff. I mean, we all had a fun time last night, as I'm sure many of you listeners did.

But slowly, some organizations started to trickle out very embarrassing statements. The first one I saw was from the ADL, who had quite the statement. I want to find it actually on X, the new hot social media app, because. It's on my timeline on X. Because the community note on it is just magnificent. Oh yeah, that was great. Really, really gives you a good look at the mind of Kissinger. And it's fun to laugh at the people who are like propping him up as some like great jewish statesman so yeah

henry kissinger was a towering intellect diplomat and practitioner who not without controversy helped shape american foreign policy with a lasting impact worldwide a refugee from nazi germany and the first jewish secretary of state he was unapologetic about his heritage and his embrace of the importance of american global power and democratic values which i like that they call him a practitioner which is a funny thing to say yeah but there are a number of funny things in that in that post oh absolutely yeah probably the funniest is that uh uh during a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group, Kissinger said, quote, If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic. Any people who have been persecuted for 2000 years must be doing something wrong. Yeah. Here's another one. That one's fun. There's another one.

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews in gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern, maybe a humanitarian concern. Yeah, that was a real Kissinger moment. Amazing stuff.

It has certainly been wild to watch any shred of credibility that the adl has had just absolutely go down the drain the past two months by their own volition just ruining decades of like of of research into anti-semitic extremism um by just tarnishing every single piece of research they've done by how they've uh how they've been behaving the past two months yeah yeah. I mean, the past three or four years, they've really been on one. Pitcavage has been leading the charge to the bottom there.

They're like fully going back to their selling information to apartheid South Africa days. So, you know. Praising Henry Kissinger, someone who admitted that he would be anti-Semitic if he wasn't born Jewish. It's just like, what the fuck are you doing? Anyway, that was that was one of the one of the first organizations to come out in in memoriam of Mr. Kissinger after after his his devastating passing last night. after his devastating passing last night. Sorry, I made a post about this ADL post,

and I'm just scoping the replies, because there are a lot of normal people on X.com these days. There's a group which appears to exist to lobby for the ADL to lose its non-profit status, and I'm just going to say that these are the people that ADL should be focusing their attention on, because this is this is the old school antisemitism that is a giant fucking problem and we

all need to reject like there is some hateful shit on x.com and sadly it's in my replies yeah there is plenty to go around and the fact that they feel the need to defend Mr. Henry Kissinger this guy's running for governor of Missouri so yeah just The fact that they feel the need to defend Mr. Henry Kissinger.

This guy's running for governor of Missouri. So yeah, just as a podcast, I think we can safely say don't vote for Daryl McClanahan. Clan is in his name. This is the captain here's first anti-endorsement for the 2024 election season. Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to say it. Don't vote for this guy.

So true. Well, I'm glad we could all bond over that as I bonded over the many funny memes in the meme chats that I'm in. It was a good time.

Rocketing on all cylinders. Twitter has been preparing for this night for years. We've been training. We've been training for so long. People have stayed on throughout Elon's catastrophe just for this night and now are finally free. They can finally be released into the pasture. Yeah, go live on a farm.

I'm surprised we didn't crash Twitter with a posting. Hopefully his last words were, I wonder what they'll post about me. Yeah, I'm sure he was thinking about posting when he was going out. That makes sense. He would have been a poster. I'm hoping it was like, oh no, it burns, oh God.

Yes. He's coming for me. Anthony Bourdain with brass knuckles at the gates of hell yeah so okay all right so what are we doing for the rest of this episode so okay if you want to do an episode that is the entire history of the stuff Kissinger did Robert did a six part behind the bastards episode on it you can spend like 12 hours of your life Learning about

Having the worst time Yeah It's the opposite of a self-help book It's a self-harm book, audiobook that Robert has made for you Yes, but with three funny people Giving commentary Yes, it's very funny You should listen to it

However, comma We have been talking about how i mean people are like people are partying in the streets in cambodia like their kissinger's death has been a source of celebration for almost everyone on earth but that is not what this episode is about this episode is about the one country on earth that isn't celebrating, that country is China. And on the contrary, not only is China not celebrating the death of Henry Kissinger, China is quite possibly the most popular American in the history of China. To this day, like right now, if you went and pulled like the favorability rating of like

every famous American you can think of, the person with the highest rating is almost certainly going to be Henry Kissinger. And, you know, I mean, and this is this is and this is not just a sort of like a popular thing. Although, again, he is enormously popular among ordinary Chinese people. This is a thing that goes from the state down. Xi Jinping, he's actually weirdly one of the last world leaders to talk to Kissinger. So Kissinger went to visit China in July. And him and Xi Jinping have this great heartfelt reunion. They have a great time.

Xi Jinping says, quote, the Chinese people never forget their old friends. And Sino-US relations will always be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger. In the wake of Kissinger's death, the Chinese government said from Reuters, quote, Kissinger made historic contributions to the normalization of China-U.S. relations, and Chinese people will forever remember him for his, quote, sincere devotion and important contributions, Wang added. The Chinese premier and the foreign minister also sent messages of condolences to Kissinger's

family and to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. So he is getting like he is getting as good a reception in China as any American has ever gotten. And if you if you can understand how this came to be how like every other country in the region fucking hates kissinger like everyone else despises him and if you can understand why china why he is like the most popular american in chinese history you can understand the entire arc of the 20th century and how we ended up with the horror that we all live in today but first speaking of the horrors that we all live in today. But first, speaking of the horrors that we all live in today.

Is this an ad break? Are you saying ads? Yes. Hopefully one of our first. You're saying ads. Yeah, hopefully the Henry Kissinger collectible coins

that they minted 10 years ago have now been released to the market and this will be the first of many adverts for them. They're only going to

grow in value. Insulate yourself against inflation with these Henry Kissinger coins. And we are back. So this story, the story of how Kissinger became the most popular man in China or the most popular American in China

begins in Shanghai, 1927. Oh, it is the year 1927 for over a decade. China has been locked in a brutal series of civil wars. Kissinger is four years old. Four years old. Yeah, four years old.

Child Kissinger. Child Kissinger is presumably unaware of the developments in China. Oh, I'm... I don't think you can say that with certainty. He was keeping tabs absolutely at four years old. Yeah. Even back then, he was a, quote, foreign policy realist.

A towering intellect of this stature. Doesn't start in his 20s. He starts in his toddler years. Absolutely. Amazing choice of words by the way towering intellect just looking at

the pictures of him in China where he's dwarfed and it's just very funny to look at this guy just grabbed him towering his leg

he's gotta be like five foot nothing his intellect is towering not his not his actual stature not his person short king short king

short king short king would have been a great tweet if the ADL had called him a short king and king short king would have been a great tweet if the adl called him a short king and ironically i would understand that yes you were saying yes so as as as little tiny baby ass kissager is looking on uh china's communist party is locked in a tenuous alliance with the chinese Nationalist Party, which is the Kuomintang. Now, yeah, they suck.

So with the aid of the Soviets, and when I say the aid of the Soviets, I mean the Soviets basically rebuilt the Nationalist Party from the ground up. Yeah, the Nationalists have turned into a juggernaut. They have swept aside like every warlord army they face. They are marching triumphant across the country. They have swept aside like every warlord army they face. They are marching triumphant across the country. And ahead of their advance, a massive uprising led by the communists finally drives the warlords out of Shanghai. The Chinese working class stands victorious.

They and they alone stand triumphant over the greatest city in China. It is the last time they will control this city for 40 years. The new leader of the Nationalist Party is Chiang Kai-she kai shak a proto fascist drug lord who the soviets for some inexplicable reason thought was going to work for them and was going to like build a socialist state at china um deeply unclear why they thought this i i don't know don't have stalin running your foreign policy i don't have Stalin running shit as a rule. Not a great guy. Yeah, so he's no kiss and jerk. What can we say? Also dead though, thankfully.

Killed similar numbers of communists. True. We are one sentence away from that. Under the direction of Moscow, the communists in China convinced the Chinese working class to open the gates of the city to allow the nationalist army inside the nationalist army immediately begins

slaughtering the Chinese working class by the end of the white terror that this is going to unleash the nationalist will have killed 1 million people most of them Chinese workers and peasants basically like the entire you know like basically the entire urban Chinese left dies in this like like in this slaughter and with them dies basically the entire internationalist wing of the Chinese Communist Party, because the internationalist wing, the wing that had, you know, very close connections to Moscow were all like in Shanghai.

And they were all but they were most importantly, not that they were all literally in Shanghai, but they all, but they were most importantly, not that they were all literally in Shanghai, but they were all part of the urban communist party and they get just completely wiped out. And this is the part of the Shanghai uprising that for our purposes is important because it's the first moment where the rift between the Soviets and the Chinese communist party begins to form. Now in the wake of the Shanghai massacre,

Stalin sends the CCP instructions that are just nonsense. the chinese communist party begins to form now in the wake of the shanghai massacre stalin sends the ccp instructions that are just nonsense like he's telling them to stay aligned with the nationalist party but to oppose shanghai shek and like and literally there's descriptions of of the meeting when like this this telegram comes in the ccp leaders are like sitting around this i don't think it's a radio they're sitting around this radio they get the they like they get the instructions and they're just like they like, they get the instructions and they're just like, these people are just burying their hands in their face because like, this is nothing.

It is nonsense. And, you know, and this is sort of, this is the last, that's like the last gasp of the old Communist Party leadership. Those people are just gone. And in their place rises Mao. Now, Mao is not from the urban wing of the party. He is from, like, he's, Mao is a peasant organizer, right? He's from the rural wing, and his wing of the party tends to be more nationalist and less sort of like subservient to Moscow than the urban wing of the party. leftists in the country killed uh you know the people that are left are mao and the sort of peasant organizations who have a distrust of the soviets that they're going to maintain for

basically their entire lives now obviously relations between the ccp and stalin improve as like world war ii happens but there's a basically the moment the war ends there's a series of incidents that sort of strain relations one One is that – and this is less an incident, but Stalin seems to not have thought that the CCP was going to win the war. Like he seems to have thought that the nationalists are going to beat them. And one of the things that he does is basically deindustrializes Japan's giant industrial belt in occupied Manchuria. This is a completely intact industrial belt. It is one of the largest intact industrial belts in the world. And Stalin, in classic Soviet fashion, takes the factories, takes them apart,

puts them on trains, and ships them across the USSR to rebuild the Soviet economy. Yep. One of the first of many such incidents. Yeah. And this is a catastrophe for the CCP. Because even after the CCP wins the war, because they've now, you know, so it's like Shanghai is in ruins. Beijing, like most of China is just in ruins because of, I mean, like what year are they on if effectively continuous fighting? because of, I mean, like what year are they on if effectively continuous fighting?

And after the war, China's industrial base, and this is 1949, right? Their industrial base is smaller than Russia's in 1917, which is just nuts. It is. That's very small. Yeah. And this is the conditions that everything,

the entire course of 20th century Chinese history are defined by these conditions, right? And these specific conditions are – is basically a production bottleneck, right? And I've talked about this on the show before. This is one of the sort of most important things of 20th century Chinese political economy is thatcp is trying to simultaneously expand its agricultural production to feed people and also expand its industrial capacity it's mostly trying to expand its industrial capacity the problem is they can't expand their industrial capacity without expanding their agricultural capacity and they can't expand their agricultural capacity without expanding their industrial capacity and their attempt to just blow through this by

like mass use of human labor is the great leap forward it's a complete catastrophe right this is just gonna fuck like whatever like intentions like the chinese revolution had this is just going to fuck them because the combination of this and their ideology is just going to doom the entire project and you know this and so the other thing about this period, the Soviets are really, really patronizing. Like they talk about like constantly and like diplomatic things. Like they talk about the Soviet, like the Chinese is like their younger brothers. There's like this weird like thing going on.

This isn't enough to substantively threaten their alliance. But the relationship between the USSR and China is never as it's never quite as firm as people think it is now the thing that really like kickstarts the break between the ussr and china is khrushchev's secret speech denouncing stalin so this gets like leaked khrushchev makes a speech where he was like wow stalin did some fucked up stuff the cult of personality was bad actually and this pisses off an enormous number of people's mal forever like problems mal has with stalin he takes a very hard line on this where he's like no i'm like like the soviets are now revisionist they have abandoned the path of marxist leninism i am now the only anti-revisionist in the world. And, you know,

and this whole thing like results in these worsening relations between China and the Soviet Union with the CCP basically calling the Soviets like weak-necked bureaucratic social imperialists

and the Soviets looking at like the Great Leap Forward and being like, what are these maniacs doing? And this tension escalates to the 60s as both sides start massing troops on the Chinese-Soviet border. Now, meanwhile, so, okay, the 60s goes on.

And control of the Soviet Union has fallen to Leonid Brezhnev, who is an absolute maniac, deeply weird, deeply not very good guy. who is an absolute maniac, deeply weird, deeply not very good guy. And he, in response to the Council of Communists uprising in Prague in 1968, Brezhnev rolls tanks in, kills everyone, and then declares the Brezhnev Doctrine, in which Brezhnev claims the right to overthrow any socialist government

who the Soviets decided were trying to become capitalist, which, I mean, this is the Soviets, right? Like, what that actually means is that they don't align with the USSR.r so brezhnev means this to be about eastern europe right mal looks at this and goes oh shit brezhnev is going to try to overthrow me and this this does not go well so and you know i know what he's looking at he's looking at, he's looking at the Soviet troops massing on the border and he's like, oh shit. And this is where things get absolutely wild. In 1969, there are a giant series of border skirmishes between Soviet and Chinese troops.

People are killing each other across this enormous – this is like continent-sized border. Enormous. This is a continent-sized border. Companies of Chinese and Soviet the reason you're hitting each other with sticks is that like the Chinese were like wait hold on it's actually a bad idea to have guys with guns on the border of a nuclear power yeah yeah they have some amazing uh amazing brawls yeah and but you know but like and the funny thing like that's the reasonable version of this in in in 69 they're having the unreasonable version of this, where the Soviets are looking at the situation and they're going, oh, shit, we can't win a war with China. Because their calculation is that they will eventually be overwhelmed by a combination of human wave attacks and the fact that, like, an enormous portion of the Chinese population has been trained in guerrilla warfare. And their second problem is that the Chinese population is too dispersed for them to all be killed by soviet nuclear weapons and the ccp makes the same assessment and is like okay if we fight this war like the human wave attacks are just going to eventually are going to crush them we're going to use the force of numbers they can't kill us all

with nukes so the soviets plan for this is they are like drawing up plans to line the border with china with nuclear landmines to stop the Chinese army from marching through. It's nuts. Everyone is losing their minds. Normal times. Yeah, like, I've seen rumors. This is the thing I don't have actually good sources on. I've seen a lot

of rumors that both the Soviets and China reached out to the US to try to get them to nuke the other side it's everyone is everyone is completely losing their minds um and you know so at this point like both sides kind of back down because both of them realize that like fighting this war is the stupidest thing that anything could possibly do. Because there's like there is there was a little tiny shred of sanity left in both sides. That's like, do we like actually want to have a nuclear war?

And they're like, no. OK, but this marks the permanent solidification of what's called the Sino-Soviet split. this marks the permanent solidification of what's called the sino-soviet split um and do you know what else is it is it is a sino-soviet split it's the split between the part of the episode that's ads and the part of the episode that's episode that is a very important split that does relate to the worker councils of the soviet uh state because if the soviets got their wish for world domination we wouldn't be pivoting to an ad break instead this would be uh purely worker sponsor i don't know here's the ad all right i for one am very excited to get those coin injure limited edition nft collectibles i think it's a real solid investment so i know it sounds a little far-fetched but hey in 10 years you can

sell it to some guy from the ccp and you might make a lot of money so yeah yeah or the adl food for thought or the adl that's right that's right you can sell it to pit cabbage he could buy that for like 10 grand all you have to do now all you have to do now is spend one thousand dollars and in 10 years you could be getting 10 grand from Pit Cabbage. That sounds like a great deal. There's a 10% discount as well with the discount code Garrison Davis. Thanks. Sorry,

please go ahead with your scripted podcast at Garrison. So back in 1969, basically from yeah from yeah yeah uh so basically from this point on the ussr and the people's republic of china are enemies this is what's called the sino-soviet split and mao begins casting a round for allies and into this breach steps a man i accursed through history whose towering footfalls echo

through the halls of power I am talking of course about Charles de Gaulle the one supporter of France yeah most French man ever to exist so de Gaulle has been devising a strategy to pull China away from the USSR and towards the west

and this is the origin of what's called triangle diplomacy. Now, Kissinger steals this idea and goes and does it. But this was not Kissinger's idea. This was a plan that was already kind of in motion that he stole from de Gaulle. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Good artists copy, great artists steal. If Kissinger was anything, it was an artist.

Great artist. that is literally what the tony blair foundation said it's not a joke we can't fucking make jokes because everything's too fucked i'm i'm quoting the tony blair foundation that was it there was there was there was some uh oh god i can't remember his name so someone in the 70s uhared that satire The day that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize Is the day satire died and he was right And this is why satire doesn't work anymore Yeah Tony Blair is now pissing on its grave Yeah so alright

But the you know Okay so this triangle diplomacy thing Kissinger basically takes it over. And the key element of this plan is to use China as a bulwark against the Soviets, both in East and Southeast Asia and in places like Central Africa. But in order to do this, they have to actually, like, establish contact with China, a thing they haven't had in, like, 30 years. Well, i guess 20 ah whatever hey complicated i'm not going to go through the entire diplomatic history of china but you know if and and this is this is the origin of one of kissinger's most famous crimes

which is operation searchlight which is pakistan's genocide in bangladesh they kill about three million people um if you want a really detailed account of this go listen to the behind the bastards episodes the the short version of this is that pakistan has been a chinese ally for a while for a lot of reasons one of which is china's antagonism with india which peaked in 1962 when china just straight up invaded uh at his speed border region conquered it and then like handed nehru his ass in the process of what became known as a sino-indian war yeah and this is an incredible betrayal by the way like nehru who was the prime minister of india uh nehru had turned down a a permanent seat on the un security council because because he was being given the seat as a way to

make sure china didn't get it and he turned down that seat to get China onto the Security Council like out of not out of geopolitical like this was basically a pure like ideological I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do thing and Mao returns him by

fucking invading India so because of this and because of India know india pakistan don't like each other um this is this is known i the pakistani government is very close with china um pakistani troops are trained by the chinese army they are armed with chinese weapons and with kissinger's blessings so he could use the pakistani government as an intermediary to negotiate with china the pakistani government proceeds to kill three million bangladeshis it is yeah this is it is among the worst crimes of the 20th century is a crime that is broadly forgotten china's complicity in it is forgotten the american's

complicity in it is barely remembered basically only when people talk about kissinger but this was this was one of the worst things that happened in like one of the worst centuries in human history. But, you know, for Kissinger, this is an enormous success, right? He gets everything that he fucking wants out of it.

He doesn't give a shit about Bangladeshis. You know, this is a tradition that is like echoed through the eons of neoliberalism ever since. The U.S. successfully opens diplomatic channels with China and soon Kissinger and Nixon

are going to meet Mao in China. And I'm going to read from Mao talking to Kissinger so you can understand who these people are. The trade between our two countries at present is very pitiful. It is gradually increasing. You know China is a poor country. We don't have very much. What we have in excess is women.

Kissinger, there are no quotas or tariffs for those. Chairman Mao, so if you want them, we can give you a few of those, some tens of thousands. Prime Minister Cho, of course, on a voluntary basis, Chairman Mao, let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens laughter sometime later mao do you want our chinese women we can give you 10 million laughter jesus the chairman is improving his offer um bow by doing this we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interest in our country we have too many women and they have a way of doing things they give birth to children and our children are too many i mean this is like a deeply ccp moment like yeah it's like like and this is one of these things was like there are people in the united

states to this day who call themselves maoists and like and think that this guy was like on the fucking left and it's like how do you fucking read that like him just him just doing this fucking banter with the butcher of Bangladesh and be like no no no this is the guy who figured out to keep the key to achieving like socialism

right is the guy who figured out how to end the class system and end imperialism is this fucking guy palling it up with fucking Henry fucking Kissinger? It's terrible. I just... Yeah, it's not great.

The key to being a Maoist is not reading this stuff. So true. I've seen Maoists on Twitter try to defend this. They're like, well, it was only like a temporary thing because the Soviets were threatening to nuke China. And like, you know, one of the things that they – one of the real problems they have is that – so in Angola, there's a civil war in Angola. There is a faction that are the good guys and then there's a faction that's being backed by apartheid South Africa. And China is backing the apartheid South Africa faction.

Yeah. South Africa and China is backing the apartheid South Africa fashion. So, you know, and this is the thing they have to justify and they can't. And this actually and, you know, this actually has impacts in the US because like American Maoists are confronted with this and are like, what the fuck? Like, what is this shit?

And there are some of them who just like ignore it and quadruple down. There are some of them who just like ignore it and quadruple down there are some of it who become disillusioned you can even pick a different tanky like like cuba heavily supported the mpla in angola for instance like yeah at least just like yeah move to like castro or something i don't know trotsky's right there he's right there with an ice pick in his head. So true. Should have happened to Kissinger. We gotta say.

What a fucking incredible alternate history. Trotsky lives and Kissinger dies. Trotsky lives to 100. The world is so much... The world's not like a great place But it is a much better place In that alternate history Can you imagine if Trotsky Had held on long enough for social media

To exist Oh my god It's him and The person I'm the most sad right now That never got on there was Gore Vidal He would have been He would have fucking killed it. He would have posted. Yeah, yeah. There's a

few people who you just think would have been magnificent posters. Vidal has a famous Kissinger moment where he's watching, he runs into Kissinger like in the Sistine Chapel like looking at the part that's like looking at the hell part of it. Vidal goes, Kissinger is apartment

hunting. Very funny. Very funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is the soul of a poster. Poster brain. Poster brain. She would have been incredible.

There's so many of these. There's another famous one where- A proto-poster. The absolutely dog shit American author Norman Mailer punches him and he's like falls over because he's got punched while he's on the ground. Vidal goes, words fail Norman Mailer punches him and he falls over because he got punched. While he's on the ground, Vidal goes, words fail Norman Mailer again.

It's so good. Yeah, absolutely incredible guy. Real time posting. We'd love to see it. Tragic. Tragic. He never made it. Lots of tragedies unfolding. One of them is that you know this whole thing of like like kissinger bantering with mao like this it it works like the u.s and

china establish diplomatic relations and this is a this is a seismic shift in sort of chinese popular culture and media and consciousness because from the korean war until like the 70s right the way people think about america and the way they're portrayed in chinese media is like as the great imperialist enemy right like the last time there was contact between the u.s and china it is a bunch of chinese troops doing bayonet charges like wearing sandals in the fucking snow doing bayonet charges through their own artillery barrages to kill American troops. Like that, that is like the amount of hatred like there is is unbelievable. And, you know, it's funny because like the U.S. like really forgot that war.

But like China did not. Right. And suddenly. Like America is china's friend and and the human face of this absolutely apocal shift in in basically the entire ideological system of chinese communism the the the face of this shift in in in the just the image of what america is which is like it doesn't it's not quite mapping on but it's like like america like it's kind of like how baptist think about the devil right like that that that is the role that america has in chinese like popular sort of culture like up until this point and then suddenly it's completely pivoted on its head and the face of this shift is kissinger and And this is ping pong erasure is what you're doing right now.

Actually, this all happened due to table tennis. And I won't hear it any other way. Oh, God. I specifically didn't include the table tennis diplomacy in this because I was like, I hate this shit. Yeah. When liberals really get on their shit, they talk about ping pong diplomacy.

I think Joseph Nye was a big ping pong diplomacy guy. But it's like, you know, I think ping pong diplomacy is an example of how circumscribed the contact between the US and China is. Again, we're talking about ping pong

teams playing each other. This is like the big diplomatic and cultural exchange that's going on between China and the US and China is, right? Like, again, like we're talking about like ping pong teams playing each other. This is like the big diplomatic and cultural exchange that's going on between China and the US. There's nothing. And this is something that you have to sort of understand if you want to understand this pivot

is how isolated China was, right? Like the US through this entire period is pretending that the nationalists in Taiwan are the legitimate government of all of China. They have blocked off effectively all trade with China. They've blocked off basically all trade from the U.S. They've blocked off a huge amount of international trade

and this is something that really, really cripples the Chinese economy. You can't quite blame it for the famines because for i mean for example like the ccp was exporting grain to the ussr while the great leap forward was happening right like but i mean it didn't fucking help that um and one of the and the other big consequence of this is that

it is almost impossible for chinese people to go to china like you you basically can't do it and this is an enormous deal because there are tens of millions of Chinese people across the world who can't go back to China. These people can't see their families. They can't see their friends. They can't go to the graves of their ancestors. They can't go home. And this happened with my family.

My grandpa didn't see his brothers and sisters for 40 years after the war. 40 years. Just did not see his family. And, you know, and it's only when Kissinger, and this is the way that it's seen in China, it's only when Kissinger reestablishes relations

in which Kissinger goes out there and advocates, and the way they see it is he's advocating for China in the US, which is kind of true. But the way they see this is only when Kissinger reestablishes

diplomatic relations that's when it becomes possible for you to see your family again and you know i like i cannot emphasize enough how big of a deal this is in china in the diaspora like if you are in the diaspora you can't get fucking messages in you you like a lot of people don't know whether their family's still alive because the last time they saw them was the war or and when i say the war like that could be world war ii that could be the revolution that could be people living even before that and you know this is a huge deal in the diaspora to to the point where like a lot of the people who had been like in in the asian american movements in 68 like people who had been like yellow peril yellow power people who are like allied with the black panthers like these people are trying to get jobs

in the Nixon State Department because they want to be there to like help reopen diplomatic relations with China. It is, it is like, this is like, it is one of the sort of apocryphal moments of the second half of the 20th century is this, these diplomatic relations opening up again. And in the

Chinese media, they don't really want Nixon to be the face of it because they're smart enough to be like, this is not great. But so they put Kissinger as like the human face of all of this.

And you know, and there's a lot of benefits to China from this. They're getting these massive technological transfers from the US. And this is one of the things that it's in, I think it's a very underrated factor, but this is one of the factors

that makes their technology like, sorry, let me say that again. This is one of the factors that makes, it's one of the incredibly underrated factors that makes their industrialization program work. And there's a lot of places where people try similar industrialization programs to what China is going to pull off. Like Venezuela, for example, tries this. And Venezuela's program completely fails because they don't have access to the technology that the US got from basically sucking up – or that China got from sucking up to the US.

And Kissinger is directly responsible for a lot of these technology transfers. And for this, Kissinger is labeled as a friend of the Chinese people. This is literally the way that it's talked about in the Chinese media. And even sort of beyond just him being labeled like a friend of the Chinese people, he is like, okay, so there's like one or two

other Americans who you can sort of like publicly express admiration for who are people who like effectively defected to China or just moved to China and like were there for the revolution. But those aren't like major figures, right? Like they're like communist journalists or stuff like that or like anthropologists. Like they're not. This is the first like actual public American figure that you were allowed. And you are encouraged to be like, yay, this guy fucking rules.

And in a very short amount of time, Kissinger becomes enormously popular as the man who, you know, he's the guy who restored a Chinese American relations. He's the guy who allowed all these people to see their, to see their families and ended the sanction of terror regime. I mean, he doesn't actually end them, but he's helping people work around them and the sanctions eventually sort

of come down but you know all of this comes with a price and this brings us to another kissinger crime which is uh kissinger in the coup against chile's democratically elected president salvador allende so this coup is fully greenlit by the u.s um like kissinger is involved with it pinochet is going to murder 40 000 chilean we talked about this on the show a few times before but what we haven't really talked about much is that after this after the coup chile is like completely diplomatically isolated no one wants anything to do with them because this just meant like made like absolute maniac mass murderer has just deposed like a sovereign government. Like even like even the UK like won't like refuses to like talk to them.

Right. Like like when like the Brits won't talk to you because you've done too many crimes. Yeah. Yeah. You've really fucked it there. Like the guys who whose prime minister's son made a living doing coups yeah but there is one country other than the u.s that will do that will that will like do that will make deals with pinochet and that country is china and china funnel funnels millions of dollars

like two some literally two pinochet directly into the chilean government and this is a time where china is not rich but this is millions of dollars like in in like 1970s money it's a lot of money and this and china is absolutely broke and they're fucking sending it to and they're sending it to fucking uh pinochet and like and and like to get a sense of how weird this stuff is in china right like a lot of people weird this stuff is in China, right? Like a lot of people in China think that Pinochet is a socialist because he's being portrayed positively in the Chinese media. So they assume that he's a socialist.

Like, this is the kind of shit that's like, this is the absolute brain worms that are happening in China at this point, because their, their connection to the outside world is really, really tenuous. And the Chinese media is suddenly gassing up all of these just like like horrific right-wing dictators now as as kissinger star ascends in china the ccp begins pulling its own kissingers i so this is this is a this is a kind of a story we only learned about pretty recently i think in like the last two years beijing was the first like chinese communist leader to visit the u.s and so he got he's in

washington dc and he takes time out of his schedule to have a secret meeting with the cia where he goes to the cia office to set up a like list to set up a cia listening post in China to spy on the USSR. And one of the products of this, that's the sort of low-level stuff that China's getting involved with. The high-level stuff is in 1979, China invades Vietnam. They kill tens of thousands of people. They devastate both the Chinese and

Vietnamese economy. And this is one of the things that this is a decisive thing in the cold war right china has like donna kissinger they've invaded fucking they've invaded vietnam yeah and you know and one of the one of the sort of modern iterations of this right has been you know there's there's a long period of sort of like china's alignment with the u.s and one of the other things that happens is that China becomes increasingly tied to Israel. And this is one of the things that's true of China to this day.

There are a bunch of surveillance cameras in the West Bank that the Israelis use to surveil Palestinians that are built in China. They're the same cameras that are being used in xinjiang um a lot of like chinese uh what's it called it's like chinese police sometimes special forces units like train with israeli like trainers uh there's a lot of like they do like count like quote-unquote counter-terrorism exchanges and the other big aspect of this is that a huge part of the israeli tech industry and a huge part of their sort of defense complex is fueled directly by both Chinese resources and by Chinese raw materials and also by things like transistors that they're importing from China. This is the product of the sort of long arc of Kissinger's work in China and Kissinger's work sort of peeling off Egypt from the Palestinian Soviet camp. And this ultimately is the price of opening relations with the US. It's not a price that's paid by the Chinese ruling class. Instead, what happens is that every dissident in china every fucking child in cambodia every

teenager in east timor and every veteran in vietnam mao sells them the fuck out dian xiaoping sells them out hu jintao sells them out xi jinping sells them out they take american money they take american technology they shake hands with kissinger and they let bangladesh burn and for this kissinger would remain a steadfast ally of the chinese capitalist class his entire life when the ccp butchered the last gas of the Chinese working class at Tiananmen, Kissinger stood by the CCP and basically is one of the few Americans straight up doing PR for them. He does it again when China is trying to enter the World Trade Organization. He – like this is the last thing he was doing before he fucking died was going to China and allying himself with allying himself for the chinese ruling class and you know he meets xi jinping and is greeted as an old friend and this this is how you get to the thing that's been happening today which is like all of these

chinese like the chinese foreign ministry and a bunch of high-ranking chinese government officials like releasing these statements about how dr kissinger is a good friend of the chinese people and this ultimately is what kissinger represents the prospect of the alliance between the american and chinese capitalist class built on the blood of the working class of five continents it is a world in which there is peace and prosperity for the bourgeoisie where there is starvation and death for everyone else this still to this day is the regime that rules the u.s it is the regime that rules china and they are being united for one final time in their love of one henry kissinger and yeah that's basically all i've got i guess the last thing i can say is is one of the things that i think I hope people will understand about this is that the,

the way that the American left thinks about China, like the, the way that it, the way that it's politics function are completely illegible in China. Like there, there are no, like in the U S it is very common to have someone who is like pro Palestine,

who is like socialist, who is like pro LGBTQ,estine, who is like socialist, who is like pro-LGBTQ rights, who considers themselves an anti-imperialist, who is also pro-CCP and also fucking hates Kissinger. And this is not a position that exists in China. There is nobody like this. Nobody fucking – like no one at all believes this because it's just – it's not a coherent political position. It is an American projection of politics onto china because again meanwhile like the actual thing that's happened in china is because of the way the media has covered kissinger the thing they covered is is the normalization of u.s china relations and not all of the fucking genocides that he did

and so they have the same fucking whitewashed view of kissinger that like right-wing americans do and that the American ruling class does and yeah truly truly has been the century of Kissinger from yeah 23 to 23 but but fuck that

the century of Kissinger is over now is the century of the social revolution we're fucking coming for his ass we're gonna tear apart everything he ever built that motherfucker is gonna watch from hell as we destroy everything he ever created in his entire life it's fucking time let's go that's why we're uh we're taking a week off to go to chile and begin the social revolution that kissinger destroyed again as a podcast we we we do now have to uh choose the new most evil person alive uh there's there's been quite a there's been quite a few in the running um we have we have cheney's up there obviously we have uh w bush we have uh we have netanyahu we have um we have he's making a strong

case right now yeah we have maybe he did him off maybe he wanted to take the seat take the throne yeah putin's made a decently strong case yeah sure sure yeah sure there is there is there is a decent list running i think only time will tell um for who will truly have a a lasting impact of similar evil. But yes, there is now a new open position for most evil person alive. So many people are throwing their hat into the ring. We will see how this contest plays out. Yeah, and you will hear it when that fucking person dies.

You will hear it on this show too and we will enjoy it yeah let's make it happen here uh go have a good time enjoy enjoy for this enjoy by the time you're hearing this the second ever sunrise in a hundred years that does not have henry kissinger under it yeah somewhere today somewhere in the world a baby has been born in a post kissinger world and uh we can we can all the most evil baby has been born and we have to kill it yeah yeah yeah somewhere thanks to the cycle of samsara henry kissinger is back that's right if you're squeezing out a baby this month just be careful it's all I'm saying. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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