It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 123

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

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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, 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, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High 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 Tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Call zone media. 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. Get ready for anarchy in Atlanta. This is an illegal protest. You guys need to disperse or you will be arrested. Anarchists start work. They struck again this week. Cops are approaching now. Obviously got a flashbang. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. For the past three years, a wide range of people in Atlanta,

Georgia have been working to prevent the construction of a now $110 million militarized police training facility in the South River Forest in southeast Atlanta. I've continuously covered the evolving struggle on It Could Happen Here for the past few years now. In this episode, I will attempt to summarize some of the actions from the past six months and the wave of recent repression targeted against the movement. I will also offer some analysis and critique on behalf of anonymous force defenders who spoke with me in dedicated conversations. After the last week of action in summer of 2023, it was clear the movement needed a new way for

people to engage in the struggle against Cop City, beyond the referendum and the occasional nighttime sabotage. Force encampments were essentially impossible, and the weeks of action seemed to expunge their usefulness. A small group of people began organizing what would become known as Block Cop City. The idea was that on Monday, November 13th, a mass mobilization would descend upon the Cop City construction site in an act of non-violent protest, and perhaps plant tree saplings where the forest once stood.

This marks the first time that the framing of quote-unquote strategic non-violence and non-violent direct action were embraced for a mass action like this, hoping that it may attract NGOs and activist groups to co-sign onto the action. Historically, throughout this struggle, such quote-unquote non-violent framing was at least avoided, if not explicitly rejected, as a limiting restriction toward achieving measurable victories against the Atlanta Police Foundation and Cop City contractors. Throughout the end of summer and the start of fall, a speaking tour for Block Cup City traveled to over 80 cities around the country to promote

the action and recruit people to travel to Atlanta come November. Block Cup City started as a very vertical, top-down plan. The central conceit was decided upon by a small number of individuals, many of whom were not from Atlanta, and the finer details would be worked out in a series of public meetings in the days before the action. Whether or not local force defenders liked or disliked the proposal, Blockup City acted as a gravity well, sucking nearly all of the energy, time, and attention into its orbit for the entirety of a fall in Atlanta. Throughout the nationwide Block Cop City speaking tour, a small subset of attendees voiced objections and disagreements with the proposed strategy and its use of time and resources. Those opposed to Block Cop City

thought the idea of a large public march to the worksite was going to put people in unnecessary harm without doing much to achieve a measurable blow against Cop City. I was going to put people in unnecessary harm without doing much to achieve a measurable blow against Cop City. I'm going to quote from a report back that was published online shortly after the action. Quote, something that tends to happen in autonomous action is that there ends up being an inner circle at the core, which can limit the scope of who is able to meaningfully contribute to the direction of an action because it creates a hierarchy. At Spokes Council, it felt like this at times, because it was primarily a small group of speakers who were directing the entire Block Cop City movement. This led to dismissal of certain concerns, which were brought up by affinity groups, unquote. In the planning stages,

organizers pushed back on the notion that getting arrested was a part of the plan. organizers pushed back on the notion that getting arrested was a part of the plan. But on the day before the November 13th action, a Black Cup City organizer told press and media in a private meeting to have your cameras ready because there will be arrests at noon, demonstrating some form of intent to use people's safety and freedom as a way to generate online buzz with the hope of inspiring people to once again take action in the forest. The possibility of arrest was obviously mentioned at the Spokes Council meetings, but was framed as far from a certainty, with rallying cries insisting that the march will be able to all leave together.

During the two days of Spokes Council meetings, the route and formation of the march to the construction site was decided upon, and quote-unquote direct action trainings took place to prepare people for the march on Monday morning. The march was to be split into three distinct clusters, a front line, middle, and rear. Before the march, there was limited communication between clusters, making it difficult to have informed expectations of how a confrontation with police will happen. Part of the quote-unquote strategic non-violence stipulation meant that thrown objects and projectiles were explicitly disallowed. March, word started to spread around that what was left of the frontline cluster decided that only bullets will make the frontline fall back and that they would withstand all other forms of police violence, mostly less lethal rounds, tear gas, batons, etc. Now, this whole thing about live rounds was not widely communicated to people who just showed up for the action on Monday morning.

During the spokes councils, it was learned that a vast majority of attendees had never before been to Atlanta or the forest, and a great many of whom had never attended a protest or engaged in a clash with police before. Some local force defenders took issue with the perceived strategy of primarily recruiting young people from across the country with little to no experience going up against police. Come Monday morning, the number of people gathered to march on Cop City was far fewer than what was initially hoped. It's impossible to say for sure whether the limiting of acceptable tactics and the nonviolent framing hurt or helped the final number of attendees. Regardless, the 400 or so brave people that departed Gresham Park was not the mass action initially envisioned by organizers.

We've got about three dozen riot cops and SWAT teams stationed here, blocking off the road, heading to the west. We've got police shields, we have AR-15s, we have tactical response vehicles, ATV. A lot of cops behind us, a lot of cops in front of us. We are completely sandwiched in by the police right now. The frontliners approached the police riot line at the big intersection near the entrance to Entrenchment Creek Park. Two large banners formed a V-shaped wedge, and the crowd advanced into the police line. People are pushing through. Cops are putting up a fight. People are continuing to move forward.

The march is pushing the cops back. Under the pressure from a few hundred people, the police line was pushed back by one or two dozen feet. Frontliners withstood police batons and less lethal munitions. Steady progress was being made. That was until tear gas got deployed. Cops are continuing to move back. Flashbang!

We got gas. CS gas was first launched into the middle of the crowd. Police paused to put on their own gas masks. But instead of using this moment to advance further, the bulk of the crowd held their position, with large sections of the middle cluster subsequently entering into the treeline of Entrenchment Creek Park, as continuing volleys of tear gas were fired by police. This caused the front line to retreat back, effectively ending the offensive portion of the action, as the group that entered into

the forest was later escorted out by police, rejoined the march, and eventually returned to Gresham Park. Everyone knew that it was a near certainty that police would confront a mobile crowd, and outmaneuvering police all the way to the construction site would be highly unlikely. The only way a mass of people would be able to get to the worksite is if police allowed it. Still, there's much to learn from Block Cop City, and even just the brief skirmish with police, so forgive me for engaging in some tactical analysis based on the good portion of my life spent in riot jousts and input from others with more on-the-ground experience.

We first have to think about what will cause a mass of people to break up, scatter, and retreat, both on the protester side and on the police side. The front lines are meant to act semi-fluid. Typically, projectile launchers are behind the front line and are designed to scatter the opposing front line and middle sections of the enemy side, to disrupt an offensive formation so that it loses its capacity for forward momentum, or to stagger a defensive line enough to force retreat. As was the case on November 13th, when a layered defensive police line is backed up with vehicles like a Bearcat, the on-foot line will most likely not retreat back behind their vehicles. Frustratingly, these massive police vehicles occupy a sort of paradoxical role, as a 10-ton roadblock that would force a center advancing line to break apart in order to pass,

putting the advancing line in a less strategic position, even though if the vehicle was threatened by being overrun, police would probably attempt to pull the vehicle back, signifying retreat. So how has this paradox been solved before? Well, with ranged attacks like bottles, fireworks, and what the state of Ukraine was teaching its civilians to make in the early days of the Russian invasion. This is why projectiles are of such a strategic importance. One cannot break through a police line without employing violence. Utilizing projectiles

is necessary to force rear police vehicles to retreat, along with the cops' own projectile launchers placed behind their riot line, which are used to break up the opposing front line. And police have no such tactical non-violence scruples against using projectiles. Some Atlanta anarchists have also noted that the resources put towards acquiring a great number of plants that ended up just being abandoned could also have been used to acquire gas masks for the middle cluster, reinforced shields, and ancillary materials put towards prioritizing the crowd's efficacy and safety against the use of crowd control munitions. Thankfully, there were no

arrests made in direct connection to the march, but I don't believe this can be accredited to any comprehensive organizing when the day prior, media was told that arrests would be taking place by lunchtime. For whatever reason, the police let a kettled crowd of people go free. We can only speculate on why between the logistical hassles, the stretching let a kettled crowd of people go free. We can only speculate on why between the logistical hassles, the stretching of prosecutor resources, and the bomb squad that was actively sweeping the area of Entrenchment Creek Park and checking all of the bags and backpacks that were dropped in the area where the splinter of the march was escorted out by police. When talking with force defenders in Atlanta who've spent years now engaging in

militant struggle against police, they offered a more fundamental critique of this action. If the choice to employ a strategy of non-violence is in response to grossly inflated charges and repression the movement is facing, as some Blockup City organizers have stated, that means that you're allowing the state to determine your rules of engagement. The entire idea of announcing your plan to walk onto one of the most policed areas in the country did in fact prevent people with more on-the-ground experience from participating on the day of the action. Risk requires reward. A small core of organizers were so steadfast in one particular version of how this event would take shape, branding people with disagreements as all overly online disaffected nihilists no longer involved in the struggle in Atlanta. Not only were online critiques

discarded, but opportunities for in-person conversations and input from people with more on-the-ground experience in Atlanta were also turned down. And I think it is important to state, hats off to the many young people that traveled from around the country to participate in this action. One can hope that Block Cop City broadly and going up against this line of armed riot police was a useful learning experience for whatever happens next in these people's lives as we approach the 2024 election and who knows what is to come. The night after Block Cop City, six vehicles owned by the company Ernst Concrete were set on fire in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Earlier that fall, Ernst Concrete trucks were seen working on the Cop City construction site.

After the arson, Ernst Concrete released a statement saying that they were not going to work on the Cop City project. saying that they were not going to work on the Cop City project. In an Atlanta Police Department press conference from December 2023, Chief Darren Shearbaum discussed a wave of recent arsons. The most recent one happened in Gwinnett County this past November. This was Ernst Concrete when a number of construction equipment was set on fire. Then we go to three arsons that happened right here in Atlanta, McDonough Boulevard, where a contractor, Brent Scarborough, was targeted three different times in the month of October of this year, July of this year, as well as April this year. We see that the same group takes credit

each and every time on their source of giving information out. And so it's likely to be that same group, very small in number, moving from state to state, is likely the profile of these individuals. It's very, very small. It is a handful of individuals that are having a much larger impact on the safety of the city than they should have. Atlanta Fire Chief Roderick Smith and John King, the Georgia Insurance and Fire Safety Commissioner, both talked about how these arsons negatively affect the contractors working to build Cop City. how these arsons negatively affect the contractors working to build Cop City. As we talk about impacts caused by arson, it affects our businesses,

those that are participating in helping out building the Atlanta Public Safety Trainer Center. We suffer from additional costs due to arson that these companies face and individuals face. This affects every one of our citizens in the area because all these losses, yes, there's an insurance company that will probably cover some of the costs, but those losses will be passed on to the customers. So we all will take the losses. On January 17th, APD put out another press conference to discuss, even though the police are already doing such a great job out stopping crime when it's 14 degrees and homicides continue to decline, even still, a new state-of-the-art police training facility is vital to maintain safety in the city of Atlanta.

We've asked you to come together again today because there is an effort underway by a very small group of individuals, anarchists, that want to impact the safety of Atlanta, Georgia. Just yesterday, a piece of equipment aligned with one of the construction companies that was building the public safety training center for every Atlantan was set on fire. Next door in a neighboring state of South Carolina, we had a construction company that had a loose connection to the project here in Atlanta that was targeted by an individual that used one of the tools of violence, fear, and intimidation that has been used mainly by this group, which is arson, set equipment on fire, going after concrete trucks. And so soon, the individuals that have been in the dark of night impacting every one of our neighborhoods will be held responsible as we bring these individuals to justice. every one of our neighborhoods will be held responsible as we bring these individuals to justice. Police in South Carolina were able to identify a suspect and ended up arresting and charging them with arson. The fire chief elaborated on the theoretical risks of arson, such as injury to human life and the ugly sight of burnt rubble left over in neighborhoods,

as well as reiterating how it affects the Cop City project. What are the effects of arson? Financial, as we've heard earlier, the impact that the equipment being burned plays a role with the companies working, delays in the project due to this. Less than a week later, the city had another press conference in front of burnt husks of equipment outside a construction site run by a Cop City contractor. If you look over my shoulder, you will see the equipment that was burned. It belongs to a private contractor. There were a total of four pieces of heavy construction equipment that were damaged this

morning. Chief Schierbaum quickly linked the attack to StopCop City due to a post online about the attack accompanied by the hashtag StopCopCity. The hashtag is present. Schierbaum also gave an updated account on the number of arson attacks which have targeted construction equipment. I believe now we're right at 34 that have occurred here in the state of Georgia and elsewhere. The vast majority of them are concentrated in North Georgia, but there are others that have occurred elsewhere. We're very fortunate of an arrest in South Carolina. There's

clearly at least one other person. This individual or individuals don't care about life and safety. They firebombed police precincts. Their goal is to erode proper public safety infrastructure and erode the government. Very cool stuff indeed. I do believe that 34 number is a gross undercount, but hey, if they've forgotten a few attacks, really no real harm in that. We have, however, gotten a few recent numbers on the monetary damages caused by stop-cop-city activity. numbers on the monetary damages caused by Stop Cop City activity. In a Georgia State Senate committee meeting near the end of January, State Senator Deborah Silcox said that APD Chief Administrative Officer Peter Ammon told her earlier that day that the estimated cost of nationwide property damage made in protest of Cop City exceeds $100 million. That beats the ELF numbers.

Now, four days later, the Atlanta Police Department tried to backtrack that number to New York Times reporter Sean Keenan now saying that it was $10 million in property damage, a 1000% difference, which either way is a massive amount of money, and we do know for sure that the city has spent at least $1.3 million just in the legal fees related to Cop City. We know at least some of that $1.3 million was used to combat the Cop City referendum campaign, an initiative started last summer to collect petition signatures to put Cop City on an upcoming ballot. I talked with Sam Barnes of the Atlantic Community Press Collective to get an update on the current state of the referendum. The referendum has more or less been stalled out since last fall in response to a lawsuit from DeKalb County residents who claimed that their First Amendment rights were being infringed upon

because they were not allowed to canvas for signatures. A court issued down an injunction basically allowing the referendum campaign to have additional time to collect and then turn in signatures. The city then appealed that injunction. That whole situation is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals, who heard arguments from the city's lawyers and the vote campaign's lawyers in January and who have not yet issued a ruling on that appeal. The referendum campaign has turned in what they say are 116,000 signatures,

which, if verified, should be more than enough to get the referendum onto the ballot. But the city of Atlanta has said that they cannot start counting these signatures until the court of appeals issues their ruling. It's not really clear where in case law or in Georgia code or wherever they are getting that legal precedent from, but it is the line they are sticking to. Long story short, even if the city was to start counting votes today, and even if there were enough to get this referendum on the ballot, the next election it could appear on the ballot in is the general election in November 2024. Cop City, per APD and the APF's repeated claims, is going to open in fall of 2024. Now, I don't personally have a lot of faith in that. At one point, it was going to open in August 2023. Just the simple fact of every construction project runs into delays. But I think it is pretty clear,

especially given the clear cutting and the concrete pouring that has already happened on the site, that it will make significant progress by November. It's pretty obvious that the city's strategy here is to just delay and delay and delay the referendum until the thing gets built. Effectively, just making the referendum dead in the water. built, effectively just making the referendum dead in the water. On February 8th, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a series of house raids on three homes in South Atlanta that they suspected of being linked to Stop Cop City activists. Phones and computers were seized, along with Stop Cop City-related zines and posters. Occupants of the house were dragged outside, sometimes literally. A few were detained for hours on end, with one being driven to a police headquarters for interrogation, but was released later that evening. This morning at 6 a.m., investigators of the Atlanta Fire

Rescue, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Atlanta Police Department, joined by uniformed elements of this department, the Georgia State Patrol, executed search warrants signed by judges who'd reviewed the probable cause, allowing us to enter three locations to seek evidence connected to acts of vandalism and arson that have occurred over the last few months. As investigators went to those locations, they were armed with an arrest warrant. It's worth noting that the search warrants cited federal statutes on the destruction of vehicles and RICO. While executing one of these raids, police located an individual whom an arrest warrant was issued for days prior and brought them into custody. This arrest, along with the one in South Carolina, also marked the very first arrests linked to clandestine nighttime attacks in the three-year history of the movement.

We're processing all the locations now. The evidence to make that arrest had already been in possession of law enforcement even before we executed the search warrants this morning. So the arrest warrant was signed before today, and the arrest warrant was not connected with the search warrant. So those were independent of the arrest warrant was not connected with the search warrant. So those were independent of the arrest we'd be making once we located this gentleman. In a city press conference, the mayor opened by saying this arrest was, quote, linked to multiple acts of vandalism and arson, unquote. Yet they were only charged with one account of first-degree arson, which police linked to the burning of eight police motorcycles last July near the end of that summer's week of action. This particular arson is unique from the many

other cop city-related arsons in a few ways. This was not targeting construction equipment. Instead, it was directly targeting police infrastructure. An unexploded plastic incendiary device was left at the scene, and the police training building that was singed, the city now claims was occupied by a police officer. What was often overlooked is inside of that precinct was a protector of the city, and a line of police officers inside. As police have said, they only had enough information to make this one arrest linked to this one specific instance of arson. Thus, these raids can be seen both as an intimidation attempt and a last-ditch effort to collect additional information necessary to make future arrests. More arrests will come. They will come soon and will continue to hold people accountable to

everyone that has been involved in these acts or in jail and before a judge. The investigation is very active, ma'am. There's a reason we serve three search warrants today. We are looking at a wide range of areas where we believe evidence is held that will identify who is responsible for the others and who else was responsible besides this gentleman. The investigation will play that out, but there are others that I anticipate will be resting in the weeks to come. This messaging from Chief Schierbaum is obviously meant to spread panic and paranoia amongst activists, organizers, and the anarchists of Atlanta. Those in Atlanta were quick to prove that repression would not stifle attacks against Cop City. On the night of February 9th, a police car was torched outside of the home of an APD officer in the Lakewood neighborhood of Atlanta.

The next day, police claimed that they tracked the movements of two alleged arsonists via ring doorbell and street cameras to a house in Lakewood and conducted a raid that afternoon. Nothing was found and no arrests were made. The FBI and the ATF viewed the vehicle arson outside of the home of an Atlanta police officer as a significant escalation, and made their first on-camera speaking appearance on Channel 2 to discuss the possibility of introducing federal charges. The house raids, threats, doing all these press conferences, it's all part of this media frenzy to elicit fear. Earlier this year, Chief Schierbaum unveiled plans to put 450 billboards all across the country offering reward money for information specifically placed in

cities they believe anarchists are traveling from to set fires in Atlanta. Every single press conference the police do, they are desperately begging for members of the public to snitch, saying the only way this case will be solved is if anonymous tipsters come forward with information, offering increasingly comical amounts of money if information leads to a conviction. Fear is one of the greatest tools this state has to bear. But through this sequence of events, police and investigators are also kind of showing their hand here, demonstrating the current limit of their actionable evidence. It has now been well over a month since these raids, and as of now, no subsequent arrests have been made. The timing of these house raids also seemed intended to disrupt an event planned for later that month called the Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City, a convergence located in Tucson, Arizona

that was planned for February 23rd to the 26th. I was not able to attend, but I spoke with Sam from the Atlantic Community Press Collective who covered the summit in person. It was a four-day convergence in Tucson, Arizona called for by the pretty well-entrenched radical organizing scene there in Tucson that was just intended to be the kind of summits we've seen here in Atlanta

that are often called weeks of action that can no longer take place here in Atlanta. So it was intended to be just a gathering of like-minded people to share ideas, build community, have fun, frankly. And there also were some direct actions that occurred during the week. The hub for the summit was a park kind of on what I'd call the north end of Tucson called Mansfield Park. And there was a small camp space set up and organized by locals. The structure of the summit and of the camp space in general was, again, very familiar to anyone who has attended any of the Weeks of Action in Atlanta. There were camp meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

There were camp meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There were camp announcements, a lot of spontaneous activities within the camp. A couple movie nights were held. Tucson, Arizona is about 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Sam told me about a panel they attended on the intersections between the border, Gaza, and Atlanta. If you've been paying attention to the cop city struggle, you're probably already familiar with these themes. The Atlanta Police Department participates in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, the GILI program, where they train with members of the IDF.

The talk featured Jewish Americans, Palestinian Americans, a correspondent from Indian Collective, who was there to cover the summit as well, also spoke during that event. And that intersection was, I think, even before Aaron Bushnell self-immolated that Sunday, was probably the most profound theme running through the weekend. Again, especially with Tucson's proximity to the border and to native lands that are on the border and which are often surveilled using, wait for it, Israeli military technology.

The sort of official name of the summit was the Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City, was the Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City, which was a sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge at Nationwide Insurance, which is the main underwriter of the insurance policies that ensure what would be Cop City. Nationwide has a major corporate office in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is in between Tucson and Phoenix. On the first night of the summit, a small group of anonymous vandals attacked three

subsidiaries of Nationwide Insurance in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. Breaking windows and vandalizing their buildings. Later on in the week, there were two more public direct actions that happened during the summit. The first was a black block march on the night of February 25th in downtown Tucson, Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. As a crowd of a little under 100 people moved through downtown, Stop Cop City graffiti filled the plaza, and a PNC bank, as well as a recently closed Wells Fargo branch had their windows smashed. Wells Fargo is affiliated with the Atlanta Police Foundation, and PNC is a financial backer of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the Appalachians.

Police were able to arrest at least three people suspected of participating in the march. Oddly, they were charged with arson of an occupied building, I believe due to fireworks being thrown in or near one of the banks. Given the name of the nationwide summit, it was expected that there would be a public action targeting nationwide insurance. Arizona. Again, just outside of Phoenix. Phoenix is about two hours away, where we stopped by a sort of sidewalk rally type situation that was happening outside of the nationwide regional offices, which was honestly quite locked down, quite hard to get access to it as we were leaving the sidewalk rally and being followed by Scottsdale's finest bicycle riders. I thought it was interesting that one of the bicycle cops had a life behind bars personalized painted bicycle bell. It was teal and said life behind bars.

And when we asked him about it, he just said, I just thought it was funny because, you know, I'm a cop and I'm behind bicycle bars. It was delightful and look forward to further coverage of this exciting story in a soon to be released ACPC video feature. So after the rally outside of Nationwide's offices, we got a tip that a this sort of enclave of gated of disrupting the evening of this nationwide executive and their neighbors. There were six activists in total that locked down three at each entrance. that locked down three at each entrance. They used a device that has been described to me as being called a cupcake, meaning it was a bag of concrete placed on the inside of a car tire set with some rebar

and a kind of pipe sticking out of it where I assume there was some sort of like handcuff locking on the inside of the pipe. The gates were also locked shut with like bicycle locks. on the inside of the pipe. The gates were also locked shut with like bicycle locks. People were locked to the entrance of the gated community for almost four hours before being arrested. All six were ultimately given misdemeanor charges and released within 24 to 48 hours. Sam also talks to me about how these big public gatherings like the summit in

Tucson, Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, seem like they just can't really happen in Atlanta anymore. So in November here in Atlanta, we had the Black Cop City Convergence, which was organized to a pretty significant extent by folks not from Atlanta. I know one reason I heard for that was, it's pretty well known that organizers in Atlanta are tired. And there was a group of people from outside of Atlanta that felt like they could carry that lift to organize an action here in Atlanta. The Summit in Tucson, to my knowledge, is the first major convergence that has been organized outside of Atlanta with a call for folks to come from the nation over. It was a very keen or a very sharp feeling of grief that this

was not happening in Atlanta, that it could not happen in Atlanta, both because the forest has had a huge chunk of it bulldozed, but also due to the police occupation of the forest, that this could not happen in Atlanta right now in the Willani Forest. And I think especially given recent events in Atlanta, in anywhere in Atlanta, in Georgia, frankly. Even if due to extenuating circumstances, events like this may not be able to happen in Georgia, frankly. Even if due to extenuating circumstances, events like this may not be able to happen in Georgia, Sam told me that once the summit kicked off and things got going,

it became clear that, of course, convergences can and probably will continue to happen anywhere and everywhere. For a long time, a slogan of this struggle has been Cop City is Everywhere. Even if there weren't similar cop city like facilities planned or already being built all over the country. I believe the latest count was a 69 or 70.

I can't quite remember who did that research but even if it wasn't for that again to go back to like the sharp through line of gaza the border indigenous lands ghillie israel genocide this this this struggle is the same everywhere the the police are the same everywhere as recently discussed on this podcast. As this episode draws to a close, I'd like to air out some thoughts I've had ruminating around my head for a while about inter-conflict as desperation. These comments are not about any specific city or situation. This simply reflects a pattern I've observed in various struggles caught in a down spiral, particularly during the fallout of the 2020 protests nationwide. Historically, I think Atlanta has actually proven

to be pretty resilient against this sort of thing, but as the stakes are quite high, I would hate to see something similar happen as the cop city struggle here in Atlanta seems to be entering its latter stages. First, I'd like to say it's always a worrying ticking clock once people start getting treated as disposable or as political props to be sacrificed in the service of spectacle. But primarily, I've been thinking about, at a certain point, far enough within a struggle, it becomes easier to fight each other than it is to fight police. Which is not to say all conflict is bad. Conflict can often be good. Tension can result in new, innovative action that otherwise might not materialize. But when said actionable conflict starts to materialize more frequently against each other rather than against the state,

that signals impending doom. Being able to consistently put your beliefs into practice with a like-minded group of people, to directly engage against systems of oppression like the police or the state, especially in your own city, is a life-affirming process, almost intoxicating. It's very easy to become addicted to high-intensity conflict. Unfortunately, the state is a resilient bastard, even if you can land a few sizable blows. Over time, this state can gather a lot of resources to push back. It may take a few days, weeks, months, or even years. Only in our minds may the glorious first spark of uprising last forever, the burning of the third precinct, or the first year or so of Defend the Atlanta Forest.

But nostalgia is a trap, and eventually the empire does in fact strike back. But as it becomes harder, more dangerous, more frightening to engage against the state, the desire for that rush of conflict stays, it lingers. So what is one to do? The walls are closing in, but you have this need to fight. So you take out your anxiety, PTSD, and frustration on those around you. It is much more scary to fight the police. This, by comparison, is easy while still feeding that conflictual drive. We must keep on fighting, and since it's harder and more scary to continually fight the cops or the state, we instead are looking for ways to fight

each other, to find scapegoats to purge, often in service of some unrelated personal grievance or in-group self-preservation. Constant attack, constant strength, constant purity. These conflicts can take form as blame as to why a desired outcome is not being achieved. Intensified stratification of in-group out-group dynamics, as in these are the bad people in the movement, whereas we are the enlightened affinity group with the only successful strategy, or conspiratorial co-intel pro-like actions, such as cop jacketing, snitch jacketing, and more general bad jacketing against people who you have simple organizational disagreements with. This can also manifest as

a deep unwillingness to hear preemptive critical commentary and the assumption that all criticism comes from a place of bad faith. A recent article in a popular anarchist publication roped in genuine critique and disagreement as somehow being in alignment with the state's motivations against the movement. And is this not just a form of cop jacketing? Saying that if you disagree with a particular strategy, that means you are in alignment with police because they also dislike a particular strategy. But the police dislike the strategy for a completely different reason because they dislike any form of resistance. Claiming that critique from anarchists and criticism from the state come from the same fundamental place is simply laughable it is in moments such as this when repression is increasing

that justified frustration and fear leading to paranoia can be turned into a weapon by the state at these moments people must be the most vigilant against their own fear resulting in retreat from battle against the state and turning to intra-conflict as a desperate form of alternative struggle. Solidarity, love, and care are paramount, including harsh love, including well-meaning critical commentary, debate, and constructive conversation. Well, that's enough of that. Finally, I'd like to give an update on the Cop City construction timeline. The past few months, city officials and the Atlanta Police Foundation have made a series of statements claiming construction is very much on schedule and We'll be moving in in December. It will be operational this time next year. The new facility is almost 70% complete with construction. Many have pointed out that this is a ridiculously high number, considering that a video published by the police just a few days ago showed an unfinished foundation and a single paved road. Now, Sam from the Atlantic Community Press Collective

helped explain what this number might be referring to. There are no walls built, to say the least. I personally believe that to be a very charitable reading of a document with a construction timeline we've seen as a result of our open records requests that sort of break the what a lay person such as myself would call the construction process up into things like permitting, pre-construction, development, construction. On that timeline, they were

about 70% done with the development, and they were also about 70% done with the whole process, ranging from permitting to cutting the red ribbon. What, again, as a layperson, I would also call the construction process, meaning the whole, you know, roof, walls, doors thing on that particular document was 0% complete, or like, I shouldn't say 0% because they have poured like concrete pads and stuff i don't remember exactly what the date on this document was but it was zero to a very small percentage of complete so yes on the grand construction timeline of filing the first document to again literal walls um yeah sure they're 70 complete by any measure of construction to the average citizen no they, they are not 70% complete. Before I close this episode out, I do want to let listeners know about ways to support Jack,

the person arrested in the house raid last month. In the show notes, I'll link to a fundraiser that goes towards his legal fees, jail commissary, and phone calls. You can also go to the website freejack.co, that's freejack.co, for information on how to mail letters and books to Jack while he is currently being held in jail without bond. Trials and court cases related to the Georgia cop city reconditement have all been delayed till at least this summer. Follow the Atlantic Community Press Collective for updates on that as they happen. See you on the other side. Do you think he's fled the state? You know, obviously he's not here and we're seeking him and so we would ask him to come in and answer our 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, 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,

their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know follow and admire join me every week for post run high it's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted pretty crazy and very

fun listen to post run high on the i, 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, 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. Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.

Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Kid Appin' Here. I'm Andrew Sage from the YouTube channel Andrewism and today we'll be shedding light on a recently popular discussion on the problems with modern cities and more specifically the growing absence of third places. Now love them or hate them, cities are here to stay and if you spend any time on urban planning youtube or really just looked around you know they have some issues.

Traffic congestion is a big one, a notorious nemesis of modern cities stemming from increased population, poor urban planning and excessive vehicle usage, creating a big waste of time and straining our well-being. There are also issues of physical and mental health among city inhabitants. The environmental impact of urban areas can be quite terrible. Housing issues seem to be globally hellish, but still people flock to cities because that's where the opportunities are, hence the growth of slums and the overall strain on infrastructure like utilities and transportation and the functionality of cities, many of which are currently well above their capacity. Of course, many of these issues just don't touch the wealthy in the same way.

Within the city's gleaming skyscrapers lie stark disparities in income, access to resources, and opportunities. And for another issue more relevant to our discussion here, in the midst of a crowd, urban dwellers often grapple with feelings of loneliness and disconnection. The paradox of being surrounded by people, yet feeling totally alone. people yet feeling totally alone. In his seminal work The Great Good Place published in 1989, American sociologist Ray Olinberg presents a captivating notion for a balanced and fulfilling life, a harmony among the three spheres, the home, the workplace and the realm of third places. These third places encompass inclusive social settings, crucial for community bonding, and foster meaningful interactions. As for what qualifies a third place, common examples come to mind. Cafes, pubs, stoops, parks. However, not every cafe, pub, stoop, or park captures the essence of a true third place, as Olinburg described it.

Historically, third places have been a powerful force in shaping the course of revolutions and cultural movements. During the American Revolution, the tavern was a vital hub for political discourse. In the French Revolution, the café was a crucial meeting place for the revolutionary intelligentsia and common people. During the Enlightenment, coffeehouses in London assumed a central role in fostering the intellectual and cultural transformation of society. And during the Harlem Renaissance, third places could be found in theatres, churches, jazz cafes, and more, serving as vital havens for African-American musicians, writers, and intellectuals that sought to develop and

celebrate their cultural identity. Olinberg outlines eight key characteristics that define the allure of these communal spaces. He takes a rather strict approach, and this is key, emphasising that his description excludes the majority of venues, even if they exhibit some of these defining traits. And I suppose you can argue with that, but I think that's a quibble i've had with

the discussions about third places because people seem to be more infatuated with the vague idea of them and not so much interested in what the term has actually been coined to describe so you end up with people labeling all sorts of spaces clubs and organizations and organizations, third places, even if they don't fit the criteria. At this point, the internet has seemingly lost the plot on third places and taken a life on its own independent of what Oldenburg intended. But he's dead, his book is still around, but I don't think a lot of people have read it. But I did preparation for this and so we'll delve into some of those characteristics now. For one a third place lies on neutral ground. No one is expected to play host for the others, no one is obligated to be there and people are comfortable and free to come and go as they please. Third places are spaces where people can just be, where opportunities

can exist for fraternization in a safe public setting that can't be found in the privacy of the home or the professional boundary of the workplace. A space where a variety of relationships can blossom, including the ones that don't go any deeper than friendly public encounters. Secondly, the third place is a level in place. Secondly, the third place is a level in place. It requires no formal criteria for membership, it places no emphasis on one's social status, and provides the possibility for people of a variety of backgrounds and experiences to associate on the merit of their personality alone. Within third places, people can find friendships with those whom under ordinary circumstances, they might never cross paths.

The third characteristic of a third place is that it is a place in which conversation is meant to be the main activity. It doesn't have to be the only activity. For example, card games or pool or dominoes make for an excellent social lubricant. But the space should be comfortable enough to facilitate pleasurable, light-hearted and entertaining conversation.

Now, it's not difficult to create a space that can facilitate good conversation, but it's also easy to ruin the flow of good conversation. Music, personal screens, egotistical people, they can all be quite ruinous to the social energy that a good third place tries to foster. Fourthly, third places need to be open and readily accessible. That means being accessible in the sense of being in a convenient location and open whenever the demons of loneliness or boredom strike or when the depressions and frustrations of the day call for relaxation amid good company. In other words, third places are available when people need them to be. Now, the form of accessibility that Oldenburg describes

is not the form of accessibility that disability justice advocates fight for. And that is one of the quibbles that I have with Oldenburg's conception of third places that I'll get into later. Next, third places are given their appeal by their regulars, who help set the mood of the space and provide a welcoming environment for newcomers. Every regular was once a newcomer, and the acceptance of newcomers is essential to the sustained vitality of the third place. Sixth, third places keep a low profile. They're not exclusive, extravagant, pretentious, or overly fancy. They're not usually openly advertised, and they tend to be older places

with a modest or even seedy atmosphere. They're certainly not tourist traps. Seventh, and we're almost done, third places have a playful mood. People go to third places for the banter and the laughter, not tension and hostility. So that's what the space is set up to encourage. And lastly, number eight, third places are meant to be a home away from home,

offering a sense of intimacy, regeneration, and community that puts people at ease in a warm and friendly atmosphere. So to summarize, third places exist on neutral ground, function as equalizers of social status, provide an environment where conversations are at the center, keep a low profile, are open and accommodating, have an essence shaped by their regulars, characterised by playfulness and a sense of home away from home. Third places, with their unique characteristics, present an array of advantages. They not only enhance an individual's social and conversational skills, but also foster a sense of genuine connection and belonging within the community. Third places are a respite from the monotony of daily life under the weight of modern capitalism. They inject much-needed novelty into our routines, offering a diverse and free-flowing atmosphere that stands apart from the rigidity of our daily grind.

They're a balm for our emotional well-being, a spiritual tonic, and they allow us to tap into our creative and expressive selves. Crucially, Third Pl places offer what Oldenburg coined as friends by the set. They provide convenient spaces for social gatherings, offering routine and reliable interactions with a diverse array of individuals, both casually and intimately, without the hassle of scheduling meetups. Unfortunately, third places kind of fell off in many areas. Obviously not everywhere, but especially in places where American-style urban sprawl and suburbia has proliferated.

I've been describing the characteristics and benefits and historical potency of these spaces, but I've only gotten small taste of some of these myself. And for a lot of people, I think particularly of my generation, besides perhaps the approximate experience of a college common room, third places are a distant cultural memory, not a lived experience. So Oldenburg basically asks, what's up with that? And according to him, the blame for this vanishing out falls squarely on the suburbs. The blame for this vanishing out falls squarely on the suburbs. These sprawling enclaves prioritized private abodes over public spaces, perpetuating an isolating narrative that confines the good life within individual homes and yards.

Suburban designs, often imposed by distant developers, stifle community connections. Few opportunities exist within them for organic social interaction beyond your immediate neighbours. The car-centric layout further thwarts the revival of third places as reliance on cars diminishes chance encounters and informal gathering spots along daily routes, fostering a culture of detachment among neighbours. But it's not just the suburbs that are suffering this issue.

Urban environments too have succumbed to efficiency and profit, sacrificing space for genuine human connection. Standardised franchise chains dominate, erasing the character and charm that encourage communal interaction, replacing it with sterile environments. And technology hasn't exactly aided third places either, as the allure of the internet has been a substitute for real-life interaction that tends to keep people indoors.

Sure, you can see the internet as the frontier for new third places, and in some ways they are, but not quite in the same way. And of course, I mean, let's call it out even though Oldenburg doesn't, capitalism plays a significant role in the decline of third places. Work-life imbalances leave scant time for social engagements. The relentless commercialization, privatization of public spaces, gentrification, closing traditional hubs, and profit-driven urban designs all contribute to this decline. The disappearance of three places isn't an accident of history,

but a consequence of our modern societal choices and systemic pressures. So, Willemburg's ideas have been catching on a lot lately, especially with younger generations. Like I said, it's this distant yet alluring cultural memory. For obvious reasons though, things kinda suck right now and a lot of people are taking a half understood grasp of the concept and running wild with it. Like for example, I also see some people like just blanket applying the internet as the new third place and while there are corners of the internet that do approximate that experience and I recognize the potential of virtual spaces such as Discord to embody the characteristics of third places, I firmly believe that virtual third places lack the tangible elements inherent in traditional spaces that are essential for fostering deep emotional connections and

empathy that are vital for healthy community life. These social media platforms, particularly sites like Twitter, often lack the authenticity and nuanced communication present in face-to-face interactions. That's by design, of course. Twitter thrives on conflict. That's why I'm not there anymore. But it's all too easy on sites like those to misinterpret intentions or to use anonymity for negative interactions like cyberbullying, trolling, or online harassment. In real life, trolls get kicked out, bullies in some cases are dealt with, people who are harassing people also tend to get kicked out, but online all those things often run rampant. Moreover, the permanence of

online interactions can hinder the relaxed vulnerability often experienced in traditional spaces as everything is recorded, which makes trust easier to breach. But despite my critique of how some people have been running with the term third places, I think the actual book and its concepts do deserve further scrutiny and, in my view, radicalization. Wollenberg's idea of the home, the workplace, and the third place is a sort of a Peckin order. It also really sidelines domestic labor as not really work, as if it's separate from the workplace.

And I also don't like the idea of work being prioritized over essential social interaction. I think there's also the interesting aspect now that for a lot of people, like myself included, work and home are now the same spot. Indeed. Ever since the pandemic, there's been a

large surge in people working from home, which kind of complicates this dynamic. Yeah. Pre-industrialization, I think especially, that idea also coincided. You know, the first and the second place, the home and the workplace were also a bit blurred. And now I think we're witnessing a similar blurring today, you know, post-industrialization and as a consequence

of the pandemic, with remote work really catching on and blurring those lines, for sure. with remote work really catching on and blurring those lines, for sure. I think another major oversight in Oldenburg's work is the gender bias within historical and contemporary third places. You know, these spaces have been predominantly male-dominated or gender-segregated. I think his nostalgia for third places, which you kind of pick up on in the book, neglects the historical limitations that women face in accessing these spaces. So I think if third places were to make a resurgence, we would definitely need to address these systemic barriers, like the double shift that

many women juggle, to ensure their inclusion in future third places. I think another critique i would have is on ownership control you know third spaces are touted as neutral but when they're operating under the whims of private owners or state authorities they very easily succumb to those profit-driven motives i don't think a community space a space that is to a space that is central to a community, should be so concentrated in the hands of private developers or private owners. I think those spaces are the types that should be collectively stewarded. There's also the cost barrier of three places, you know, due to financial constraints. barrier of food places, you know, due to financial constraints and everybody's able to, you know, spend the time there and spend the kind of money there that those spaces kind of require for you to stay there for extended periods of time.

You kind of have to buy something in all those places. A lot of food places are alcohol-oriented, which is not exactly inclusive for people who are not interested in alcohol consumption or recovering from addiction. But of course, speaking of inclusivity, Olinburg's idea of accessibility, like I said before, doesn't really come from a place of disability justice. But that has to change, you know. We need a broader grasp of accessibility.

Which is why, despite my critiques, I do acknowledge the merits of what are often termed as virtual third places. They serve as more accessible alternatives for the immunocompromised or disabled individuals. These spaces break down geographical barriers, uniting people from diverse backgrounds and locations, fostering connections based on shared interests, passions, and identities without the constraints of physical distance. And unlike physical third places, virtual third places are offered around the clock,

catering to users' diverse lifestyles and rhythms, offering a flexibility that is really rarely found in real-life settings. At the same time, though, in Uhlenberg's defense defense he does point out that third places will not resonate with everyone there is this popular notion that third places have to be for everybody and then i see people criticize him saying oh well i prefer to just stay at home i don't really like third places i don't like social interaction or whatever or i don't like that form of social interaction and that's cool you know third places shouldn't be the sole remedy or the main remedy for social ills

preferences will of course vary and not everyone finds cafes or bars appealing which is fine but i still think we can radicalize third places a bit further not just in the sense of diversifying it but also in the sense of bringing it under popular power you see radical third places in my vision aren't content to merely exist in a neutral ground dictated by capital or state initiatives no they're envisioned as collective grounds common grounds where individuals not only frequent but co-own these spaces invest in time energy and resources to ensure their survival. Emerging spaces that transcend the typical lightheartedness associated with third places. They wield the power to spark social revolutions,

serving as zones for decompression, rallying spots for union activities, and nurturing grounds for mutual aid, a nucleus of community-driven change. But what sets these radical spaces apart is not just the accessibility and location operating hours, but also a culture of inclusivity that goes beyond nostalgia for traditionally male-dominated third places. You know, it's about welcoming a broader spectrum of perspectives, identities, and abilities. Imagine this, not just a space away from home, but integrated within neighborhoods and mixed-use buildings, fostering community integration. As for how we bring these radical free places to life,

the Rote Flora in Hamburg, Germany, I think provides some great inspiration. Formerly a theater, it was transformed into a political and cultural hub by activists in 1989. Today it stands as a symbol of resistance against social injustice and a space pulsating with artistic expression and vibrant dialogue. They achieved that place through squatting, and squatting is risky and revolutionary, but it isn't the only path for securing such spaces. I think we can mobilize communities, empowering them to actively participate in shaping public spaces instead of waiting for decisions from above. I can't remember where the term comes from, but it's guerrilla urban planning. You know, painting lines on the pavement for bike paths. You know, reclaiming the sidewalk.

Claiming spaces in your neighborhood. Taking control, not asking for permission to shape the park or the spaces that you share as you see fit. It's really about, you know, co-creating our environment. It's not merely accepting what's imposed upon us. Reformist strategies in instances like these can have their merits. They don't exactly advance revolution, but, you know, advocating for walkable neighbourhood

to improve public transportation doesn't, improved public transportation doesn't hurt. But the crux remains. These actions, this effort to push for reform, it can slowly accomplish potentially some change. But the crux remains. Empowering people to manage their own lives and spaces, not relinquishing that power to uncaring autocrats. The decline of third places might not be catastrophic, but until we recognise and harness our power to shape physical environments, our urban social life will continue to lack vibrancy.

I think we have to acknowledge our profound influence on our surroundings and seize our agency to actively craft our spaces. All power to all the people. This is Andrew. This is a good happening. Peace. 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, the conversations keep going.

That's what my podcast, Post High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing

their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that's happening here in your ear. And one of the things that we love talking about here is a critical ingredient towards creeping authoritarianism, towards growing corporate control and surveillance over all of our lives, which is, of course, technology that makes it even easier to monitor you than it already is.

And we're not talking primarily about, like, the government monitoring you, because they can, you know, do stuff like just pull your phone data from a, you know, which cell towers. It's pinged. We're talking about the kind of stuff that allows basically whoever can get an app on your phone to track and stalk you. And yeah, I'm going to first introduce Mia Wong. Mia, welcome to the show that you also host. Yes, I'm here. So what are we talking about today and who are we talking with? Yeah, so we are talking about Stalkerware, which is the sort of broad name for the category of software that Robert's been talking about. And we are talking about someone who hacked one, well, a Stalkerware stalker. Yeah, the person who hacked one of the Stalkerware companies.

Maya Arsene-Kraimu, the famed hacker of the no-fly list. Yeah, returning guest. Always happy to have you on. Yeah, always happy to be on. Yeah, so I think I don't know, I think there's

a real tendency among, and I see this among leftists a lot for kind of good reasons and kind of not good reasons, to really only focus on state and like large corporate actors in terms of surveillance and that's a mistake yeah totally yeah and so i i guess i guess the place where i want to start before we get into the specific company that you do is it still called owned i can't i it's fine to call it

owned or pawned or whatever i i still do that sometimes people get confused um but yeah yeah but before we get into that i want to um i want to ask you a bit because you've done a lot of sort of i guess you call it research both actual-wise and then in terms of poking around their servers. Research and trendalism and whatever you want to call it. Haxing. Yeah. So I wanted to just start off by asking if you can give sort of like a brief summary of what Stalkerware is.

Yeah, so Stalkerware as a category encompasses like a number of different types of apps most of them like on the service advertise themselves as like parental control software which is already bad enough just to be clear uh that is like advertised for like spying on your children's phone like seeing their location in real time seeing their messages that they receive any photo they take ostensibly this is to like prevent bullying and help with them when they get depressed because they don't trust you and talk to you for whatever reason but um obviously a lot of these are then furthermore uh because that's like that sure that's a like target audience that's a demographic you can advertise to

but then there's this even bigger uh target demographic of people who are insecure in their relationship mostly men not only men but who are then salt this idea that they can use software like this for stalking their partner for finding out if they are cheating on you things like that which is obviously an even bigger problem which once again not to discount the problems for that spying on your children is already like bad enough. But yeah, this leads to this whole like big industry of these apps being used by partners against each other, like also just by people like against anyone in their surroundings that they suspect might be doing something shady, might be like talking behind their backs. It often kind of turns into like, it obviously turns into this obsessive thing, especially

if you're salt, this idea that this, this app can magically solve like interpersonal issues, like with anything that sells you this magic idea of being able to solve any problem that these people start kind of spying on everyone in their circles. Some of them, not everyone. A lot of people only spy on their partner or their child or whatever. But it often spirals out of control into this controlling everyone and their surroundings, knowing what everyone is up to, where they are, and spending hundreds of dollars a month on doing so. And yeah, that's pretty fucked up, if you ask me.

Yeah. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting, too, also in a lot of cases illegal this is going to vary you know from country to country and state to state but in the u.s there are states like california which gets pointed out in the very good tech crunch investigation on truth spy where there are really strict laws that journalists like you have to abide by as to when you can record someone that these apps absolutely break. Yes, it's specifically a thing that also most of these apps will have like a disclaimer at the bottom that is

like, this might be illegal in your jurisdiction and please ask for consent before doing this. And then they have lots of tutorials on how to install this on someone's device without their consent. It's like always like a, we do not take any like we we it's not our fault if you break the law basically which obviously like it's so far not a lot of this

has been challenged in court but i don't think this would hold up too long like i'm not a lawyer but uh i don't think just saying we make a product to do crimes with if you do crimes with it it's not i mean it works for the gun industry so yeah the difference is that like the with the gun industry it's a product where there is a legal and an illegal like clear way to do it the thing with stalkerware as well is that like a lot of them will also explicitly say the only real use of this we allow you to do to use it for is to surveil your child which unfortunately is legal in most jurisdictions because children are property of their parents. Yeah.

Because I do not agree with that. But yeah, it's one of those things where people using it like someone installing an app on their exes or their partner's phone or whatever without consent could very easily would lose any court case. Whether or not the company would get in trouble, I think is going to rely a lot on the stuff, the videos they're posting about like how to put, how to get these apps on people's phones without them knowing.

But like, they do have that out with like, no, it's just for surveilling children, which is great. And for anyone else, you need consent or whatever, but I think it is important.

Yeah. To point this out very early for anyone who's listening to this because they think they might have stalkerware on their phones or because they know they have stalkerware on their phones. You can use this in a domestic abuse case. This will immediately, this is explicit proof that abuse is happening, no matter anything else.

Because that's the thing generally with domestic abuse cases. It's really hard to prove abuse is happening. Stalkerware and any other type of spying device, like also physical GPS trackers and stuff, that is immediate proof that there's controlling behavior going on, that you are being spied on. This cannot only be used and is explicit admissible evidence. This also usually makes cases worse.

Not for you. It can potentially add charges and make it more serious. It can help making cops give a shit about abuse, which I hate that I need to say that. It makes it more serious because there's spyware and whatever. It's easy evidence. First off, like you can prove they're spying on you. And second, if you are in one of the states where that violates the law, then you can immediately say this person is breaking the law.

Like we don't have to debate whether or not they've crossed a line. And even if it doesn't directly break the law to spy on someone on a partner like it depending on the on the region it can be kind of a hazy like thing especially if it's a device you might co-own if it's like a state where you work with like co-possession or whatever in the u.s i do not know u.s law very much around this but yeah there's like laws like that but usually still the fact that you're being spied on can be used as proof for other abuse things you might be alleging because it's like hard proof that something is happening and also usually these companies will somewhat have to respond to sapuena so they will have to give out like who the account

owner is behind like the spying on your phone for some of them we can also there's also tools that help you find out who is spying on you or there's like someone with forensic background can help yeah and i i think people uh one thing we should note is that if you're kind of curious has my device been infected by some of these tools the one the one that we've been talking about most truth spy if you go to that tech crunch article or to my article it also has a link yeah or to yeah to, yeah, to your article on your website. There's a tool you can use where you, it'll tell you how to get your IMSI, I think. IMI, yeah.

IMI, yeah. Which you just dial a thing on your phone and it gives you that number. It's basically how you identify specific phones. And you plug that in. It will let you know if your device has been compromised. Now, like December last year, up until there is the data. And if you, yeah, it can pretty much tell you if you've been spying on using this specific tool until then.

For other stuff, there's also guides, usually on TechCrunch and otherwise on StopStockerware.org, which is the US coalition against stalkerware. And also just generally, I think a lot of more local anti-stalking, anti-abuse orcs are not as informed yet as they should be, but there's still a good point also to reach out to. Yeah, one of my questions about TruthSpy that I'm hoping you can answer

is I know that you can text messages get transferred via it, your call records, all that kind of stuff get and who you were calling does that include messages for like encrypted apps like signal or is that not accessible through this it depends like for some for some of these it will like get signal

messages whatsapp messages and everything generally by reading the notification content because like from notifications you know like what messages have been received. Sometimes it will only then have the received messages and not the sent messages. Often these also include a keylogger component that maps messages then sent back as well.

It depends a lot what these apps collect, but for most of them, also the collection for other texting apps is usually kind of broken none of these apps are really well maintained they're mostly just quick cash grabs uh yeah harder to maintain features usually don't really work and it it seems like based on that one thing people can do outside of checking to see if their device has been compromised is do stuff like um turn off uh notifications for apps like Signal, right?

And that's actually just generally good advice. Notifications are a compromise of the security that Signal offers. Don't have them enabled, you know? Yeah, or at the very least, disable them on the lock screen on Android. Yeah, yes. I don't know if that... I think that's also possible on iOS, but I think iOS doesn't show message content on the lock screen anyways.

I'm not sure anymore. But yeah, it's just also small things like that. And also one of the key tells that someone probably tampered with your phone, especially for Android, is if Google Play Protect is disabled and you do not remember disabling it for something else, it was almost definitely disabled because someone installed something on your phone just try re-enabling it and it will probably tell you something the thing also to keep in mind if you find stalkerware on your phone please get professional help do not just delete it do not like necessarily confront whoever you think might

be your abuser about it unless you're very sure that that's the situation you can handle because like yeah that that is one of those things that like bringing it up or just deleting it can very quickly lead to like yeah yeah complicating the situation a lot you know what else complicates situation these ads and we are back so when it comes to the actual fight against this stuff obviously what you're doing is a big part of it getting inside these companies and um finding out like what they're doing and their capabilities is huge. For in terms of like what regular people or people who are interested in becoming activists about this can do, what is the what is the struggle to actually fight this stuff look

like? Like, how do we how do we put a bullet in this industry's head? I think one of the biggest things and also like why I do the work I do with like hacking it with encouraging others to like send me data, be that insiders from these companies, sending it either to me or TechCrunch specifically currently, because me and TechCrunch are the only people really doing journalism on this regularly. And the important thing with journalism and all of this is awareness. It's very important to create awareness about this.

That's also why I do the media work with like being on this podcast and things like that i think the most important thing is to make people aware like talk about this in your feminist circles or whatever uh things like that especially bring it up just also in like general info things about abuse or how to detect abuse i think the most important thing to do against stalker whereas demystify it. Because most people don't even know that this is a thing. That there's just commercially available spyware that anyone can install on your phone. It's just important to not give in to some sort of paranoia as with any of these things.

It's just important to generate awareness, talk about it, spread these articles, let friends know that this is a potential thing and then yeah i i the hard thing with this is that like obviously it should will probably help if there was some sort of legislation against some of this it's gonna be very hard to get any proper legislation that ends this industry because in most western countries which are the only countries which unfortunately would have enough power to like actually get these apps shut down because that's the world we live in but the problem there is usually that like this notion that children are owned by their parents is too strong to really make a full case against these

apps and at the very best what i can like the very best i'm kind of hoping for from um from like legislators it's just a ban on advertising these apps on use against other adults which would be big already but that's yeah doesn't really solve the issue because there's still going to be enough people who know of their use for use against adults and there's going to be enough people on like reddit threads talking about hey well yeah you oh you're not sure if your government is cheating on you you can just use this app you know that's also how most of this marketing for this works it's just yeah at the end of the day this is like a patriarchal issue so yeah i i think that's

also why like i am so focused on like the hacking and the like blowing these companies up and showing like who's behind them it's because at the end of the day the most effective thing we have against these companies is like the grassroots movement of making them too scared to run in this business making it not profitable enough because as i said most of this is like quick cash grabs from like web design studios uh and outsourcing companies yeah that are just making a quick buck from this because otherwise they don't get paid enough like that's the sad thing really is how much of this industry is in uh all of these countries uh western companies outsource their it to uh because there's lots of it companies there and they are

entirely reliant on like western companies giving them very underpaid tasks and you have this problem that you now have a bunch of employees and not enough money to always pay them and what do you do you like find some weird niche of like a tech product you can quickly build yeah and this is like one of those easy niches it's like always the scummy stuff and and like yeah it's that's also why like so many of these companies are like based out of vietnam out of iran and whatever it's just companies that already have it hard enough to do business globally where the it industry is like falling apart because there's not enough like local customers and anything that's international you're just the

cheap workforce right so yeah it's it's once again also like a class problem i don't like most people working in this industry know that they're working in a like scummy industry yeah of course but like yeah you gotta get paid and that's yeah and that's like why i think making it more scary to operate in this industry is like yes a way to go because like with with Because with just these four hacks that have happened against these companies over the last half a year or so, two of them, three of them? Three of them have shut down completely.

Others seem to be slowly moving towards just building other software primarily. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, it's like with any other shady industry that the best we can do is just to not make it profitable to run the software because at the very best, anything else we look at is just pushing them more into the shadows, which is not going to solve the issue at all. Yeah, I think a lot about strategic thinking,

which I do believe is kind of often in part because of how rightfully negative most people on the left think about the military. There's a tendency to ignore some of the theory around how to actually win a conflict. All strategy, really, when you're talking about defeating an opponent, revolves around denying and taking operational area from them, right? Yeah. And that's what you're talking about when you talk about, well, we need to stop this. One of the first things we can do as part of fighting this is to stop them from being able to advertise certain places, right? It's making sure that they're not able to operate without being seen. It's basically cutting down their area, their space to maneuver, their ability to profit, which cuts down their money, their access to people, their ability to actually like operate, right? Like that's what we're looking at in terms of how do you kill this stuff?

It's not one single really. I use the comparison of like a bullet, but it's never going to be one bullet. These things are too durable. There's too many countries at play to do that yeah yeah i that's also why i like put so much emphasis on doing media work about this i'm getting more people to talk about this and getting more awareness of it this out there to the point where i'm willing to work with more conservative newspapers on this because everyone needs to know about this at the end of the day this is how we like stop people from falling victims to this most people who are a victim of stalker where apps have never heard of stalker

where apps before uh and i think that's like one of the biggest ways to tackle this and on the other hand we also have i think another big leverage point with how many of these are getting hacked because none of these apps are very secure that's another thing is this can also be leveraged against like the abusers in this scenario. I think just pointing out to them that all of these apps get hacked all the time and that this is how they get found out that this is how their data of them as abusers ends up landing on the internet. I think that's also like a very important angle at the end of the day is just to make it clear like, yeah, yeah no not even you are like

secure from this having consequences for your life like beyond like direct interpersonal or legal consequences this can and in the past has result in like your email address being on a list of people who have do abuse to people online you don't want to be on such a list i think that's also important just to point out there isn't one stock of our app that's not eventually going to get hacked. There is a big war against these apps. There's so many different hacking groups that keep sending me data from these. I'm already working on another article that already once again affects the data of 80,000 more abusers and it's just the

abuser data this time but i'm still gonna report on it like it's it's it's this is not gonna stop uh it's even also not gonna stop when i stop uh reporting on this myself like i've there's been work before me down on this i i also the first time I got involved in finding stalkerware was back in 2020. People have been hacking these apps forever and will keep hacking them. Like, just look at the Wikipedia page for stalkerware. There's an ever-growing list of these apps that have been hacked and I think at this point the official count being kept by one of the people at TechCrunch is that like 13 apps, a few of which have been hacked two or three times. Yeah. These are not

secure apps for anyone. No, no, no. Of course not. I mean, it makes sense that an app dedicated to violating people's privacy for money would also basically violate the privacy of the people using it. Yeah yeah and also they don't

care like like i said it's not it's a it's a cash grab it's nothing else uh there's a few apps that are like a little more than a cash grab but it's usually just because they're made like they're still a cash grab but they're like more well made but it's because they're a cash grab from a company that has better developers or more money to do the initial investment the thing is also like most of these companies don't have a lot of initial investment and i think the important thing to consider as well here is um one big area of this that i have not yet started tackling but i do want to like look into more sometime is um a big reason this industry is so big and most of these apps have a lot of users despite there

being so many of them is uh the affiliate marketing industry once again our very beloved friend yeah all of these apps are parts of various affiliate marketing networks some of them started by stock aware company and some of them just other like things that advertise all the shady things like all those phone number locator apps or whatever that's also part of those same affiliate marketing networks. And there's lots of money flowing here and there's lots of money flowing to very big tech YouTube channels. And I might soon have some proof for some of that, but that's how these are advertised.

It's everyone who advertises StalkAware to you who has a big platform is doing that because they're getting money, not for any other reason. We need to do more ads. We will be back shortly. And we are back well that's all i had mia what do you got yeah i guess there's there's another thing i wanted to ask a little bit about which zach whittaker who's been one of the journalists at tech crunch doing a lot of the research yeah he's great um one of the things that he brings up that i think is another i don't know it's kind of a playing with fire angle on them but one of the issues that these companies seem to have is payment platforms because a lot of payment platforms look at this

and go wait hold on yeah so yeah i was going to talk about that a little bit that's an angle we've also been fighting on a lot, like me and Sang. We work on most of these stories together. It's kind of funny, we both got each other into the stalkerware thing back in 2020, as I mentioned. That was the first time I stumbled into a stalkerware app

with a security issue. I reached out to some random journalist at TechCrunch about it, and now he is the only one talking about this forever because I reached out to some random journalist at TechCrunch about it. And now he is the only one talking about this forever because I reached out to him that one time and he got sucked into this horrible, horrible world of spying. But yeah, like one of the things we focus on a lot is reporting these companies to their payment providers,

to their server hosters, to the point where sometimes like for weeks, Zach will just wait for them to switch to a new provider after we got them taken down from like PayPal and then from their other PayPal account where they're just using like the checkout experience from one of their completely unrelated software projects which they will later claim is not related at all

and they are different companies and whatever but then like eventually they get taken down from that as well and usually we can get them taken down from most like Western hosters, like especially US hosters will immediately take them down. You do not want to risk being the company hosting is by and by on US grounds. Yeah. Yeah.

You just like same with EU hosters, like the few companies that we've seen that were on Hetzner, they immediately react because it's like, yeah, no, like under EU law, you don't want to risk that no like under eol you don't want to like risk that and also just because you don't want to host that like there's no reason for you to host shit like that uh it will have like image consequences and that's an important thing that is maybe also something you can do as more like a grassroots thing it's also like if you find one of these apps and if you see oh they're using like paypal or whatever uh just reach out i think people is even harder to reach as like just an average lay person i don't expect them to reply they might still take action you will have to

manually check people doesn't really reply to things ever but yeah same as with like hosting company if you see they're hosted on a European or American hosting company, just reach out, be like, hey, there's someone running spyware on your thing. Also use the word spyware, not stalker, where they will not know what that is. It is spyware. So, yeah.

And that can usually get them taken down, and often they don't have proper backups and will have a few months of data missing, and it's like yeah that's how you slowly grind them to a halt yeah and also once again like if you have tips about any of these companies be it having found a vulnerability just or insider info especially i'm always very happy about insider info you can reach out to either me or zach whittaker we're both very happy to talk about this. Yeah.

Yeah, that's something that's been used really effectively by right-wingers to target sex workers. This has been a huge thing. There's been a bunch of campaigns to get platform companies. And yeah, so it's... It's interesting that for once we can use the very restrictive and conservative rules of payment providers for our good. Yeah. But yeah, basically any of the big payment providers will not respect something like this.

Some of the small regional odd ones probably won't really give a shit. They have no reason to. It's like revenue for them. But yeah, it's generally worth trying. And I'm always glad if someone just reaches out to these companies and we don't have to do that ourselves uh i think me and second a few other people like actively working on this are doing more than enough work currently but yeah like just if you find one of these things don't go digging too deep it's a depressing world but if you stumble upon one of these somewhere or whatever uh just just report them it's it's it's going to disrupt

their operations and if it happens often enough they might just give up yeah and i mean like in cases like like the truth spy they are willing to do extreme amounts of fraud to um to to get to money easily because they like started with like mostly just in like with the market they could get with their vietnamese payment providers, right? Eventually they realized, well, the US is like this really big market, right? But for really easy like US stuff, we need like a PayPal thing, right? So they made like over 12 fake American identities with fake passports and fake addresses and signed up to PayPal a whole bunch of times and had various employees

at the company move money around yeah that's um obviously uh not a thing the u.s government will like if you do that uh generally speaking uh they moved like millions like that so yeah which is pretty crazy like that the money the amount of money that's moving in this industry is crazy. Like, actually, like, most of these apps will be half broken, which no one ever complains about because, like, it's shady. Like, you don't expect, like, if you go online and you search for something shady, like anything, like, be it piracy or whatever, you don't expect it to be the best experience ever.

Like, you know you're getting some weird service and it's probably going to be half broken. But, yeah, like, most of these talk- apps start at like $40 a month and more. And then sometimes for more features you pay up to $60 or $70 or so. And then all of these have tens of thousands of users, sometimes hundreds of thousands of users. Yeah, you can do the math yourself. It's crazy there this is a really big industry which makes it so crazy to me that it's like not a thing that's talked about more especially in like feminist spaces and things like that because this is such a like big angle of like modern tech enabled abuse that i yeah really think should should be more of a topic

yeah especially on the left like this is this is bad yeah no this is like critically bad i agree entirely and also like that the whole thing with like all of this data being so easily accepted your data can end up getting sold on some dark web forum you're both as the abuser and as the target right and the government can find these like i have no like this this is not me making a statement of that's a thing that's happening. But there's nothing preventing the government from hacking these companies and getting shit. Yeah. I sometimes, whenever I get these datasets, and it's always hard to work with datasets

that include non-consensually collected data of people, right? Yes. But I do always do some due diligence checks like mostly trying to find if the government is using a specific app sometimes yes there is always like the odd correction facility officer who has signed up for one or two of these apps or or like education people and whatever but then i also sometimes search through the text messages for just some code words and the amount of people moving drugs uh who have stalkerware on their phones it's you know yeah and it's it's one of those things where there are laws like

technically if i if my understanding of of the laws around this are correct it is illegal for an organization like the fbi to utilize these apps but yes but we have an organizing called the NSA who and it is it is on paper illegal for them to do this with a third-party app but one thing that often gets done particularly by the FBI but but you know not just by them is it's not illegal for law enforcement agencies to contract with private agencies and if those agencies you don't you just don't check in on what they're doing you know what they're using but like yeah or like if an informant or like if an informant like sends you this data like you're not gonna say no exactly exactly and also you don't really need to disclose that because it's information coming up from an

informant you do not need to disclose that informant in court ever so yeah it's like it's it's very there are there are ways around you know the laws that we put up not that we shouldn't continue to extend those laws but you shouldn't like just because well you're they're not allowed to use this doesn't mean they can't get access to the info yeah yeah and also there's all this important thing like there's like also globally like there's like also globally like there's other governments that can't just be using this like for one of the apps i got the indian government the russian government doesn't give a shit like that was also like another thing where i like for one of the apps i got data for there was some indication that at some point the

colombian national police did a bigger evaluation of using commercials, spyware for their use. Because you're in a country with not that big of a police budget in comparison. You cannot afford all the cool Israeli tools everyone else has. So what do you do? You just look for random apps you can find, you know? Yeah, you find the Walmart, the Kirkland version. The Wish.com version, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alibaba spyware, right? Yeah. And like, I don't think most of them moved forward with this because these apps fucking suck. Like, they're bad. Like, that's the other thing. Like, they don't even really do their job well. They're bad. And you don't know who's behind them. You cannot even go up to someone and be like

yo, don't do this. You also cannot go to the cops and be like this company is scamming me because yeah, I assume some people have probably done that before but uh it does involve admitting to a crime so yeah it's like yeah these companies just get away with not giving a shit about their product because like yeah yeah well i think that's that's all we had thank you maya for both the work you're doing and for talking to us yeah is there anything you wanted to plug before we uh we roll out here just my just my blog i think where like i do this journalistic work and also more there's about to be another cool investigative piece out soon which tangentially involves more tracking and

whatever uh and also involves like hollywood and more it's it's it's it's a crazy big story uh i i promise uh that will be out like hopefully in a month or so uh but yeah my blog at maya.crimeu.gay crime u as in crime w yeah and gay as in gay yeah yeah just check out my blog at the bottom of the blog there's all my links to my social media for anyone who's like listening to this and has been wondering where i am i am back on twitter as well yeah for now for now that's for for all of us these days that's always like uh for now yeah at this point but yeah i am back on twitter i'm posting there sometimes yeah all right well uh thank you and uh thank you all for listening we will be back tomorrow unless this comes out on a

friday in which case we'll be back at some other point but soon 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, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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.

Welcome to A Cadapted Year, the podcast where getting medication takes like four fucking hours because of a bunch of unbelievable bureaucratic bullshit. I am your host, Neil Wong, who was asked by my pharmacist today, and I quote, Have you been pregnant? Or have there been pregnancies? I like, have there been pregnancies so i like have there been pregnancies yeah that was that was what i was like what it's like the officer involved shooting of human life she like she walks up to the thing right and she she she puts the like she puts the meds like like she's about to ring them up right and then she stops and then turns and walks with another person starts talking to her boss and then comes back and then asks me if they've been pregnant since i was like what it's like i am not passing i'm just wearing i'm

just wearing like jeans like a mask and just like a random coat i is so it's been a it's been a time yeah achievement in the world of healthcare where they can simultaneously uh like ask you for being pregnant and then make you fucking labor unpaid for half a day to obtain your like basic hormone therapy or whatever it is that you need like i've my favorite is when the health insurance makes me uh this is this is a podcast about health insurance and how we hate it i hope you're enjoying it when they're like hey we need a doctor to confirm you still need the insulin what the fuck do you think has happened if i cured this shit you would have heard about it i didn't at home pancreas transplant didn't bill you guys for it you're welcome yeah with with me

is james who is from a country that is more normal about health care but is now here yeah normal is not the right word but it's less shit is the correct word unless you're trans in which case it's about a toss i was gonna say yeah yeah yeah um yeah a country which has a different approach at least at least like has accepted the fact that if we're going to have the state pay for sending bombs to kill little children in Palestine, it should also pay for my insulin, which I think is a good place to start, I guess. Yeah, there's an ideal combination there.

No one has yet reached, this is this is this is the task of international socialism etc etc yeah yeah i will accept the necessity of the state only when it funds insulin not bombs yeah but so we we are here to talk about another incredibly violent state bureaucracy and the people who run it we're going gonna be talking about a series of very bizarre and incredibly authoritarian crackdowns that uh democratic well governors city councils many many such cases yeah have have been have been invoking to nominally crack down on crime, a thing that is down everywhere and has been down everywhere for a long time. Yeah, there are many such cases.

It's great that Democrat local politicians are now doing everything that we were warned that Republican president would do four years ago. Yeah, it's really fun. I mean, this is one of these things. So the place we're going to start is New York Governor Holtzschild. Holtzschild? I think that's how you pronounce your things. So, so the place we're going to start is a New York governor. Holtz.

Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz.

Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz.

Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz.

Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Holtz.

Holtz. Holtz. Holtz. Yeah, I don't know. New York keeps going through politicians faster when I can learn how to pronounce their names. So with what they're going to have like Andrew Cuomo, the fourth in power by the time this episode goes out,

there'll be like two, there'll have been two new Kings of England. The secret sibling. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're not making a podcast about the royal family nonsense we don't care nope nope this is this is this is this is the best that you're getting out of that but yeah so hootroll has deployed 750 national guardsmen to stand outside of some subway stations that's a tongue twister try saying that one five times as fast in the mirror to like do bag checks and generally just sort of stand around and be intimidating yeah it's great uh i'm sure it's what those people signed up to do i'm sure they feel fulfilled and i'm sure

everyone in new york feels safer and happier as a result of random people in camouflage being standing around a subway yeah and we're going to get into the sort of emotional, affective aspect of this, because that is ultimately what this is about. But I think, okay, there's a lot of sort of interesting aspects of this. So, okay, there's been a lot of talk about what the sort of precursors to this are, and I'm going to ask you about,

because there's a lot of very weird, absolutely dog shit national guard deployments that have happened yes yeah yes there are i have uh yeah yeah we can get on to that yeah but i think i think that the most immediate predecessor to this that that leaps to mind is something i talk about on the show all the time because everyone else seems to have completely forgotten it i refuse to let this be memory hold which is the time that my previous shitty mayor ordered a bunch of in 2020 ordered a button this is in february 2020 so this is this is pre-uprising put just started putting SWAT teams on subways okay and they immediately did the thing the SWAT team does which is they started putting SWAT teams on the fucking red line they immediately shot a guy for no reason.

Like, I think, if I'm remembering correctly, the thing that originally they said it was fair evasion and it wasn't fair evasion, it was the guy walked from one train car to another train car, a thing that, like, millions of people do every day. Yeah, yeah, and capital punishment for fair evasion is also

wrong and bad. Yeah, well, luckily this guy somehow survived um they shot him in the back but yeah they also tased him a bunch of times and then shot him so right good yeah bad however thankfully this guy survived but yeah but this is something that that happens you you this is something that you know with with the the current crop of right-wing mayors have been doing and you know the 2021 ended with such a fiasco that even like Chicago's machine, well, it wasn't really quite the machine,

but like even Chicago's right-wing Democrats were like, okay, we probably shouldn't do this, lest the SWAT teams have their like start the killing moment. But, you know, so that's like one sort of predecessor to this. And the second one is i wanted to actually ask you specifically about the the federal national guard deployments on the border because i think yeah that's the part of this has just been like disappeared yes exactly again those have been like completely overlooked and kind of memory hold by uh most apparently like

since since biden came to power like there's there's the texas state deployment right which we're all very familiar with they get cheated out of their their benefits they tend to die from suicide from bringing their own firearms on deployment or uh getting drunk and driving around they've had like higher casualties than they've had in deployments to iraq in in their uh the texas deployment right the federal one is different i see these dudes often it's nearly always dudes i did of course women could be deployed in that capacity but i haven't seen them and they are for the most part like scared kids with firearms guarding prison camps full of children uh like i had one of these guys go to draw his pistol on me the other day because i was trying to alert him yeah i

mean like i guess like it's better in that situation that like it's not my first time having someone draw a pistol on me and i can tell him to sit down and stop being a dick but this uh in this case right someone had had was was experiencing cardiac distress and when i'd gone to the nearest person who i can do right like i can't call an ambulance and have them come in there i have to go to either get bp to radio or in this case national guard so but what they're doing is in addition to like guarding these uh open air detention sites on and off is they are conducting kind of surveillance along the border so often i'll see them with like surveillance arrays cameras uh i assume also like listening to radios and stuff like that and they're not actually like interdicting or arresting

migrants they're not supposed to be anyway but what it's supposed to be doing is that that kind of having that surveillance capacity and i guess protection when it comes to the to the oads um but yeah they are everywhere like i see these people all the time down here in uh you know certainly in the eastern san diego county border and i don't and they're all in rented vehicles as well which is weird that they haven't got their uh humvees or whatever it it must be a significant expense and obviously border crossings are not decreasing thanks to them being there right they you know they mostly like cruise around i was out doing a water drop on sunday and you'll see them cruising around the

dirt roads and then obviously people therefore just avoid the roads it doesn't make it doesn't reduce migration like everything else it just makes it more dangerous and but yeah they've been here for a while it's one of these things where they're doing... Okay, so the guys in New York just basically seem to be standing around doing bag checks, whereas those guys are doing a lot more. But I think there's one of the things that's been happening here, and this is not just... The focus has been on the Republican Texas deployments, right? But this is something that both the Republicans and the Democrats democrats this is from what we're seeing yes and the federal

government have decided that you know the thing that we are going to be doing is what are what are and i mean active militia deployments like that's insane like that that is a level of that is a level of authoritarianism that is no that that has become effectively normal right like there was there wasn't i mean there was kind of an outcry against the the subway stuff but like it hasn't stopped like as best i could tell like they're still out like yeah like it enough nothing none of it stopped it that we've been you know what the thing that we've been forced to accept is not even not just you know because we've already been forced to accept the sort of the militarization of the police right but now it's just straight up the

total militarization of society to the extent that like yeah we just have a bunch of soldiers wandering around doing like random security checks and doing surveillance and like holding people in these open-air prisons. Yeah, exactly. And deployed way outside their state often, right? I think some of the people here are from Missouri or Illinois. Some of the less kind of insane, the people who mistake me, I guess, for a member of the cartel,

judging by that guy's actions or some ridiculous, somehow a threat to him, we can talk to them and you know it's it's a very bullshit mission i think most of them would agree like further east they're just like standing around by the border wall in the baking sun in the desert just just yeah doing security theater but with as you've said real consequences yeah and it's like the thing that is happening is these people have realized that the national guard if you are a senior enough state official is just your private army you can do whatever the fuck you want with it and this is the thing that they're doing with it and i i think we should you know it's worth looking at what the sort of justification for this

is which is probably also i i neglected to mention um that there are a dozen republican governments governors who have deployed their national guard to the border right like uh with not as part of the federal deployment like to your private army thing and i believe the north dakota it's funded by a private individual like a private individual is covering the state's cost to deploy them to the border like this is nuts yeah fully insane like they're serving as a fucking pmc yeah but i mean we're seeing you know very explicitly we're seeing this fusion of like personal state and corporate power and that's being used to just deploy a bunch of guys with guns to a bunch of random places and you know like it's worth mentioning that like crime rates are down they're down year

on year they're down like the broad trend is down they're down like like outrageous like i think almost like 50 or something from the 90s right yeah and likewise the ratio of people crossing the border to agents to process them is is much lower than it was in the 90s you know we we have more border patrol agents we have a more militarized border patrol they have all these assets that were previously seen only as like see a black hawk all the fucking time yeah we call it the scrap hawk it's like uh it's like several several black hawks it's not any particular sub model of black hawk it's like the surviving pieces of several black hawks but yeah they have a lot of kit that you would think would be military kit yeah and you know so i i was i i so when i was

reading about this i was like okay so i'm trying to figure out how many crimes are actually happening on new york subway system but i'm gonna read this paragraph from Reuters because it is outrageous. There were 38 robberies and 70 thefts, including pickpocketing, on the subway system in February, compared to 40 robberies and 98 thefts in the same month last year, according to police data. There were 35 assaults, the same number as for february 2023 about 90 million trips were taken on the subway over the month now that is nuts the subway including pickpocketing right you're at about a hundred yeah yeah like a trivial a trivial number

of incidents 90 million trips right this means that like per trip your odds of being pickpocketed are almost literally one in a million this is this is about the same odds you have of being struck by lightning you are 17 times more likely to get killed by a bee or a wasp sting than you are like pickpock like pickpock not even robbed pickpocketed on the subway right so there's i i from what i could i think there was three killings on the new york subway in february yeah there was a shooting i think today or yesterday wasn't there yeah yeah but this is the thing so these things get a lot of of attention right but again 30 million trips we're talking like maybe three

maybe four people getting killed a month so that's like one in 30 million rides yeah someone gets shot that is outrageously safe like that is bafflingly startlingly safe but this this sort of brings us to well okay the thing the thing that this immediately brings us to is an ad break but it will bring us to a second thing after the ad break oh great i hope it's a good one all right we're back for the ads we're bringing you actually amazingly advertisements part of what part of the whole thing that's happening here because you know one of the one of the big drivers of what's been happening in new york and the reason everyone thinks the subway is unsafe

is new york's media market and very this is a bit like you know so like the media market in the u.s is not good right but very specifically the new york media market is absolutely batshit they are nuts and this is one of these things where you know you may have like a 1 in 30 million chance of getting killed on a subway but every single one of those 30 million like incidents like why all those 130 million is every single one of those is like front page news right because this is you know this this is both part of the part of the actual sort of conservative politics of these media organizations they are you know new york media market is dominated by a bunch of right-wing tabloids and a bunch of newspapers that are normally not right-wing but are. Yeah.

And so, you know, there's this sort of breathless coverage of every single time one of these attacks happen. And this is one of the things that Kutcher very much like literally says about this. You know, like we're at a point in this sort of crime cycle where enough journalists have been screamed at by people who are like the crime rates are all down. That the journalists have to include in the article a thing that's like the crime rates are down right this took like four years of just screaming at them eventually it worked but you know like who's like asked about this and she goes yeah well it's it's about people feeling it's about like the feeling that people have because they don't they don't seem to buy this like policy yeah yeah and you know this is one of these things where like this is like the how insane the new New York media market is over this stuff has had, like, an actual substantive political impact. And this is something that, you know, the Democrats embrace of this sort of, like, especially in New York, this, like, tough on crime thing has gotten to the point where literally Eric Adams has to be the guy who's like, no, no, no, actually, hold on. Like, New York is safe. Please stop panicking. I got my police funding already.

Please stop, like, fleeing the city in terror. Yeah. It's amusing that that's similar to what's happening in San Diego, another city, Democrat council and mayor. So we have this Todd Gloria, terrible mayor, serial bullshitter. And Gloria, in his State of the City speech, was saying we should be locking up criminals not laundry detergent this was his big line he was very proud of i have successfully

purchased laundry detergent that was not incarcerated uh since then but um he i think he was talking about target i guess apparently he's legislating for the interest of target but you have then his his opponent in the mayoral race, who's a former Marine cop, Republican guy, being like, yo, I think we fucked up on our homelessness policy. We're just like, criminalizing this is not just the answer. And then we've got Gloria just being like, no, lock him up!

You know, like, they're trying to push this continued, like this California bill that will force incarcerated people with mental illness, right? Against their will just yeah it's yeah it's it's up it's fucking i mean it's not bizarre because like i think so many democrats and and like certainly publications here have really leaned into like suburban grievance politics yeah and uh you know like fix the potholes and make it so I don't have to see poor people. It's their entire ideology. But it's still, I don't know, it's just kind of,

I'm struggling for the words here. It makes me really fucking pissed off. The people who showed up to one or two BLM marches are now out there like barking for a second border wall and machine gunning the unhoused. Yeah, and this has had a, especially in New York, a second border wall and machine gunning the unhoused. Yeah. And, you know, and this has had a,

especially in New York, this has had an actual, this has, this has been having a substantive like electoral impact. One of the stories that kind of got buried in 2022 is that you can actually, if you look at the electoral map in 20, in 2022, you can actually literally see where the new york

media market ends because all of the districts in the new york media market became significantly more conservative and this is this is and i this is not a joke this is literally this whole tough on crime shit is literally the thing like and in this new york media market this this is what cost the democrats the house because basically everywhere else in the country there was okay so like like red district shifted red yeah every single district that was contested like all of the sort of like purple like districts they all went they all shifted to the left because of abortion stuff but then specifically a bunch of the likes what are supposed to be like very safe blue districts went red because they were all because all of them were doing this insane tough on crime stuff.

And those seats, like the seats they lost in New York are the reason the Republicans have control of the house. So like, you know, this isn't working for them electorally, but they're still doing it because it's their ideology. And we're going to get into a bit more about why about that that part in a second

but before we do that i want to talk about i think another one of these things that has gotten kind of lost in the shuffle which is do you do you heard about the the giant like dc crime omnibus bill i've heard about this yeah yeah like i will say i'm not familiar with it other than like hearing that it's bad yeah so okay so so in in dc the city council passed this enormous sort of like giant set of like omnibus set of like policies are supposed to be there like keep dc safe crime omnibus thing i okay there's a couple things to note about this one is that it's actually not as bad as it was originally going to be because there was so much like uproar because i mean the original one like had provisions that was like banning masks at protests and shit and it was like it was really

bad and it got like nuked um but it's still really bad and there's a lot of it's a lot of really weird kind of grievance stuff like there's this provision specifically that's supposed to be about like like targeting quote quote uh organized retail theft which is one of the insane this is yeah this is one of those like storm in a teacups that has been going for a while now yeah but i mean there's also kind of like there's just their standard police stuff which is it they're trying to expand pretrial detention, which they did. One of the absolutely insane ones that have been declared unconstitutional, but apparently it's just back now, is allowing police chiefs to designate certain areas, quote, drug free zones where. Yeah, sorry, people can't see. I'm so confused.

yeah sorry people can't see i'm uh i'm so i'm confused basically what it lets it basically what it lets you do is it it lets the cops just harass a bunch of people even more than they already do um like mostly mostly what it does is just when you declare one of these areas it's where all the black people are and then the cops just have cops have like an incredible like incredibly increased ability to just randomly stop people and search them right yeah stop and frisk law yeah so there is a thing that like part of the mask

provision stayed in force which is that they're making it basically it's like like wearing a mask with the intent to commit a crime is a crime right that lets the cops like determine right your intent so like yeah it's one of those laws like they do this a lot with gun laws right they pass gun laws that don't make anything that wasn't already illegal illegal they

just make it so that if they if you if you're if you're caught you're going to prison for longer now yeah this this actually there are there are provisions like that in this too there's also a bunch of random like gun provisions there's some other like more nuts ones like there's there's one where uh cops can arrest you so if if they're trying to cite you for not paying a toll if they they claim that you didn't pay a uh you didn't like pay a transit fare um you have to give them your full name and address and if they don't and if you don't they can arrest you which is nuts this is so like don't disrespect me on the train in front of everyone or isn't it that's what that is there's another one there's another one which is like i i

don't i don't have another way to describe it other than this is the uh this is the how to get away with murder bill which is this is so one of the things that they're doing is letting cops review their own uh helmet footage before uh police inquiries

it's great ah this is this is the get the narrative straight yeah bill do you also get to edit it uh i don't well okay so here's here's the thing about that quote unquote no however comma uh these things mysteriously vanish uh time mysteriously disappears yeah there's also like a whole thing about like there are certain groups of people who the cops can just like force dna collections from oh wow which is it's a lot less broad than it used to be but yeah it's still a provision in there but yeah this is a nightmarish bill that they've been able to pass and you know i think it's worth thinking about

why this is actually happening which is that all of this stuff all of these are sort of long range reactions to 2020 right this is this this was the sort of strategy after 2020 for rebuilding legitimacy of the police and you know and also now rebuilding sort of rebuilding the i don't know psychological capacity i guess yeah to you know i mean just deploy a bunch of troops on u.s soil right yeah sort of building up that tolerance yeah and and you know like this all of this stuff is sort of born on you know on on on protest crackdowns on one of the things that's also sort of worth noting about this is all of this stuff. I mean, the DC crime bill has been in the works for a long time,

but the subway stuff is all stuff that happened pretty quickly after the Aaron Bush and Elsa assimilation. So a big part of this has been the Democratic ruling class kind of losing their minds after watching how widespread 2020 was watching the extent to which they were forced to like you know like like there are democratic politicians in 2020 like talking about like i mean there there are like elected people talking about defunding the police there are like they're all do you remember the weird like that whole like kneeling

thing in congress they all did oh yeah yeah the picture the morning can take with yeah yeah yeah that's a powerful instance of cringe yeah but there's a lot of like you know there's there's the sort of memory of that has been has been sort of drilled deep into the Democratic Party. And so what has been happening, like, you know, and what's been happening, and this has been happening in blue states very explicitly, is this strategy of hyper-militarization with the explicit, like, not explicit, sorry,

with the implicit but not very well-concealed goal of putting everyone back in their place after 2020. And that is extremely grim. I mean, I think, I don't know, I'm glad the DC stuff isn't as bad as it was originally. Because the original one were just like straight up a bunch of fascist shit. This is also fascist shit, but like not as unhinged as the original bills were so right you know it's like like the the tide of this stuff isn't inevitable right but also very very powerful factions of of the democratic party have decided that this is the thing that they want to do and it absolutely sucks and you know and and this is you know and

this is in in a similar way to sort of the stuff on the border being bipartisan i mean at some point i'm going to do an episode about the absolute shit show that's been happening in chicago where yeah like a kid a kid got fucking measles in in one of these in one of the migrant shelters in pilsen in chicago um and now the mayor's like evicting a bunch of a bunch of people from the migrant shelters jesus you know so like there's a i mean this is a thing like in chicago i mean there's just outside of like you know we're like outside of just like basically every like walgreens or just on street corners there's a bunch of refugee families like

just sitting out there in the cold trying to get some money because there's fucking nothing for them here and this is a bipartisan you know this is a bipartisan political project yeah you know just sort of sheer terror inflicted

on the most vulnerable people in society yeah it's it's really depressing to hear that just because I know that like sort of sheer terror inflicted on the most vulnerable people in society. Yeah. It's, it's really depressing to hear that just because I know that like, you know, I, I see people here and then they get out and my friends see them and we take them to the airport and my friends feed them and look after them there

and they get on their planes and we hope for the best for them, you know? And then, then, then yeah, they just go to some other city where some other dog shit Democrat who lied four years ago is gonna do everything they can to make life as hard for them as possible yeah the good thing is you have to vote for them while you're voting for fascism hooray how sad yeah that that that's

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music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. It's me, James, just introducing this podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. the episode so i'm going to do that now firstly i think i said igla a couple of times when i meant strela it's a strela portable surface-to-air missiles have been refitted with new batteries in the syrian civil war specifically and i've included a link to a document about that

in the show notes um so apologies for getting those two things confused they're both i guess former soviet surface-to-air missile systems uh the other things i wanted to mention are that a few like throughout this episode we've used man pads right uh that's kind of the colloquial term or the the official term really uh for person portable anti-aircraft systems like it obviously doesn't mean that you have to be a man to use one certainly like the fact that the hpg are using them and that the kurdish freedom movement are using them obviously women can use them non-binary folks can use them too everyone can use them and finally i just wanted to mention that there have been some suggestions that the uh the thing that was used to shoot down

the bayraktars was like loitering munition, which is something that is often called a suicide drone. In this case, it's not a loitering munition that impacts something on the ground, but impacts something on the air. There's an Iranian system that does that, but apparently it's possible to replicate that with a large number of off the shelf or sort of commercially available pieces. So maybe that's what's going on. And this episode was a little bit speculative and we still don't have lots of hard answers but we hope you'll enjoy it because it it represents a change in the relationship between the state and people who are not the state and that's why it's important okay hope you enjoy hello podcast fans welcome back to the podcast i'm joined today by my friend mia hi mia hello And we are talking about, of course, surface-to-air missiles,

a topic that I'm sure is at the top of mind for all of you as you drive to work this morning. Why are we talking about surface-to-air missiles today? Well, today is Wednesday, the 20th of March. And today, I'm sure maybe some of you would have seen some of you, most of you probably will not as you go about your daily lives, that the KCK, the KCK is the group, the Kurdistan Communities Union, the joint group between the various groups in the different parts of Kurdistan, right? So you have the PKK, you have the YPG, YPJ in Syria, PKK in Turkey, right? The PJ in iran uh and the case okay like brings all these groups together do they is there a name do they is there like an iraqi branch that's the one that i don't know you have the yebishe the um the azidi group right yeah but it's really kurdish one i i think everyone i will reconsider my statement the people who I have become aware of who are in Iraq, who I know about journalistically, are KCK people.

Okay. A little bit of smoke and mirrors for you there. But yeah, the people who I know who are in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region are KCK. So I think most of the sort of people within the greater Kurdish freedom movement, the Apochi people, are KCK within Iraq. It is in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region, so like Iraq in a technical sense, but only really in a technical sense like when you go to the kurdistan autonomous region you don't even do iraqi immigration you do kurdistan

immigration which is nice because it's a lot easier i was there in october of 2023 and since february of 2023 the kck have announced they have shut down 13 Turkish unmanned aerial vehicles, which you and I would call drones. And we're not talking about drones like your friend has a drone and they use it to film you at the beach drones. We're talking about like Bayraktar drones, which are, it's an aircraft, right? Like if you saw one, you would be like, oh, there goes a plane. Yeah, it's like the Turkish version of the Predator drones that the US uses.

Yeah, yeah. It's a very similar thing. It's a very popular drone system, actually, right? They've sold Bayraktars to, I think, dozens of countries. Yeah. I mean, most. See them all over. Yeah, 31 countries that they've exported the bayraktar to so they're

very widely used they're kind of the the sort of drone of choice for people who are just like buying on the open market right uh carter uses them ukraine uses them a lot but even countries like i'm looking here burkina faso has uh has uh bayraktars so what's notable about this is they've also shut down akinch Akinchis are like the newer Bayraktar variant. They make a slightly different noise. I've spent some time in places that are being attacked by drones over the last year, and it's a highly unpleasant experience. But people who are used to this, which I am, I guess, thankfully not, will tell you that they can tell the difference by the noise that these drones make.

But there was the Akinchi, for instance, I believe it was an Akinchi that did some of the attacks. I was unfortunate enough to be nearby when I was in Rojava in October. So what's notable about this is like the KCK, obviously like they're a non-state actor, right? Because there is not a Kurdish state. There is a Kurdish nation, one might argue,

but it's split between four states, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. And so them being able to shoot down drones is quite remarkable. Yeah, none of the non-state actors really in the last 20 years have been able to do this. Everyone talks about how advanced ISIS's capabilities were for a non-state actor, and they were, but they couldn't do it.

It's wild. No, like, Houthis have shut down some Reaper drones. Yeah, but they're a state. That's the thing. They have huge swaths of the regular yemeni military are just like yeah and then they're supplied by other state actors right like very clearly uh so it's a little different what yeah it's this is relatively remarkable right that they've been able to shoot down like and not just it's not just like oh we got lucky uh we got we got lucky and dropped a single drone isis had if i remember correctly

isis had some igla uh man pads like the old russian man pads the thing with those and we're going to talk about this a little bit later they they have like a battery and that battery will run out over a certain, or they're sold, some of them are just being sold on the black market without batteries from what I've seen. Some folks that we've seen in the civil war in Syria have worked out how to somehow make that battery work or make another battery or make another electronic system for them.

They don't have like a lockout, right? They don't have a like, we've detected, your iphone will sometimes get mad if you're using a third-party charger yeah yeah yeah right so tim apple has was not involved in the design of the nk38 igla uh most most of pity uh and so he wasn't able to engineer a third-party lockout um but those have been repurposed but yeah we did not see the islamic state of iraq and al-sham dropping u.s drones in fact the reason like the thing that allowed there were two things that allowed the defeat of uh like the so-called islamic state right one the heroism of the people who fought against them uh be they like iraqi kurdish you know a lot of people fought

against the 15 000 kurds died fighting isis but also the fact that the u.s had complete air dominance and could just fucking obliterate things from the sky whenever it wanted to it did it did a lot it did a lot of obliterating things from the sky right and so the ability to shoot down drones is something that like it has been very hard for for non-state actors and it's not like like it's not like the kck has a state sponsor right yeah yeah also so like like for example like hezbollah has shot down to although these weren't actually they shot down to hermes like israeli hermes drones so those are just those are surveillance uh things but the thing is, like, Hezbollah did this by getting surface-to-air

missiles, like getting surface-to-air rockets from Iran. Yeah, that's the standard. The way that you can do this is if either, like, Iran, the US, I guess technically China and or Russia, like, can do them. But if none of

those four countries are willing to play ball or I mean I guess technically the UK I guess or like France could send you one but but like it's it's it's really really like I I don't I don't think any non-state actor who wasn't being just directly armed by one of those states has pulled it off no um the other non-state actor who I've seen with ManPads very recently are the Karen, the Karen National Liberal, KNLA. The KNLA have been putting out these pictures. This is in Myanmar.

Yes, this is in Myanmar. So for folks who haven't listened to our previous Myanmar episodes, go and listen to them. But yeah, they're some of the work I'm proudest of um these knla guys have these photos have come out that they're not not posed photos right they it's very clearly they wanted these photos to come out and it shows them with these manpad system i'm actually not sure if it's a strela or a chinese i think it's called the hn5 the chinese it's essentially the same thing.

But they have the grips docked for them, but they don't have the coolant ball and the battery at the front. So what they have is a fancy-looking, doesn't appear to my eyes to be fully functional in terms of tracking and shooting down an airplane. Although I have seen footage uh from friends of hunter aircraft deploying like flares over current state and then like turning around and leaving so uh perhaps there's something i'm missing here like like it's entirely possible that like when

they decided for these photos to come out they they're in a certain fashion and like those guys have engineered an entire arms industry of their own using reddit and aliexpress like i if anybody can make something work they can make something work i uh i have great faith in their ingenuity and as i said like it's people in syria have previously made systems like this work they're not they don't have that lockout so it's quite possible that they did but i've not seen a video of anyone in myanmar shooting down uh and any kind of aircraft yet right the uh the russian aircraft the they have shot down aircraft um allegedly someone shot one down with uh with with a, uh, like a grenade launcher, a single shot grenade launcher. I saw that video. Yeah.

It's one of the most Chadley things anyone's ever done. Uh, it's, uh, it's some like modern warfare or whatever, whatever the computer game is called, uh, battlefield. That's what it's called. Uh, yeah. Talking of, uh, talking of, uh, Chadley and exciting stuff, then this might be an advert for like being a prison guard or something exciting that we have to introduce now.

Okay, don't be a prison guard. All right, and we're back. I hope you found gainful employment elsewhere outside of the carceral system and uh we're talking about surface-to-air missiles particularly these 13 surface-to-air missiles or 13 drones that the uh the kck have shut down right one thing i thought that was noticeable is that they did say missiles they are people were able to provide the missile system necessary that so like there's a theory that i've seen that um that they were able to to crash a drone of their own into into

a bayraktor like a um kind of i guess like a suicide i don't like the word suicide drone because it's not the drone that's dying like normally when people talk about suicide drones they're killing people yeah but like a uh a ramming drone yeah yeah yeah like a like a it's like robot wars um but they they said missile in their press release so you know if we take that on the uh if we take that on the face of it um that that suggests that they shut them down and certainly there are this like there is good video evidence of these mir and i just reviewed the video uh incredible soundtrack we'll link to it in the um we'll link to it in the show notes in the videos you very clearly see oh it's a drone oh it's a huge explosion that uh that gravity is now having its effect on this drone like it is plummeting to earth yeah like it's it's definitely not a like we fired a machine gun in the air and

it hit it somehow or something like it's right it got hit by an explosive yeah that's remarkable yeah one of the uh there was a shooting down of an aircraft in my it wasn't one of their makes i forgot what it might have been. It was a two-seater training plane. I can't remember quite what it was, but that was shot down supposedly by small arms fire or maybe like a... Generally, the air defense of most non-state armed groups

has been dushkas, right? It's the thing that you've seen in the back of a pickup truck going like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang with a big sort of spade grip it's a classic uh like technical gun but this isn't that like this is something very different something they're they're exploding when these drones get hit they're exploding and they've all been in i think oh yeah all of them are in areas of the what we call the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq, right? So some of them are in Zap, which is near Duhok,

but towards north of there. Some of them in the Kandil Mountains, which is part of the Zagros mountain range. Again, it's in the north of that Kurdistan Autonomous Region. And I think some of them are in it I think it's Gare it's pronounced but they're not in like I think obviously when a lot of people think about the Kurdistan freedom movement and think about Rojava this isn't there the US did shoot down a Bayraktar or an Akinchi over Rojava while I was there but they only shut it down because it flew over their base. They continued to let

the Bayraktars bomb civilian infrastructure all over the ANES. These are not there. So perhaps whatever they're using... It's very interesting, right? Maybe it's not something they can take there, or maybe

they're not able to get it out of the mountains. It's too much of a risk. No, it's not you know like it's not they're not able to get it out of the mountains it's too much of a risk no it's it's interesting i mean for a number of reasons well yeah partially that they're not using it in syria partially they're also they don't seem to be using them in turkey either no it's interesting when they take off it's not that like subtle right it's a big a big aircraft so they'll get some warning when they take off and that will allow them i guess to prepare their munitions but yeah they don't seem to be using it um they seem to be using it in like in this this area whether they're very strong right whether these mountains are extremely fortified uh they've been fighting

turkey there a lot in recent days and weeks um you can always i mean obviously you're going to see some somewhat traumatic combat footage but guerrilla tv always has like updates on these things so that's the sort of thing that you uh you know like to keep up to date with but yeah they're not using them there they're not using them they're very close to turkey right but yeah not not quite in and turkish soldiers do occupy some areas inside uh the iraqi uh kurdistan autonomous region so like a it's kind of all uh and turkey seems to be kind of trying to ramp up its operations against the kurdistan freedom movement in inside the kurdistan autonomous region but this is a significant impediment to that, right?

It's also very interesting that, like, we have not heard shit about this from Turkey. No, yeah. Well, and I think part of this is, you know, like, I think in some sense that's an indication of how serious this is, because, I mean, this has been, you know, the law of the 21st century is that if you are a state actor,

you have unlimited air superiority over any non-state group you're bombing, and you can, you know, law of the 21st century is that if you are a state actor you have unlimited air superiority over any non-state group you're bombing and you can you know especially like especially if you're like the u.s you can send bombers or drones into like any country you want and you can bomb them yeah and that has been true that and this this has been the basis of u.s military power it's also been the basis of a lot of like you know the turkey obviously doesn't have the same air doctrine as the u.s does but like that's been the basis of a lot of turkish operations that they like they're the people who have air power and because they have air power because they have drones and because you can't shoot back at them they can do whatever the fuck they want yeah like i've been in the situation where you are completely powerless

and very afraid because at some point something could fall out of the night sky and kill you. And there's fuck all you can do about it. And yeah, that has been the way of the world, like you say, for this entire century. Right. It's what we've seen in Myanmar. The pro-democracy forces are gaining ground every day. They're doing an incredible job but like i've also talked to people whose whole unit has been wiped out and they've hidden under the dead bodies of their friends because there's a plane or a helicopter

circling around um and it's the one area where they've really struggled to to defend themselves right it's yeah i'm writing a book about anarchists at war uh eventually i will publish that book but this is the thing that defines like the benefit like the state even when the state like loses its monopoly on legitimate violence it still has a monopoly on airborne violence and uh the questioning that monopoly like is is is incredibly dangerous for the state's ability to for the state i guess in general like for for its continued ability to to crush movements be they liberatory or be they otherwise right and like we can yeah i mean this is something i i think is really interesting is this is something that's been a fear of,

I mean, everyone from like Western intelligence people through like, I mean, you can see people in like Hollywood freaking out about this. Like, like rebel group gets access to a man pad is like one of the most common, like spy show plots. Yeah.

And yeah, it's like, it's something that, you know, you can, you can, you can listen to like the U S military talking about this is, this is something that they're really concerned about.

Yeah, it's where they draw the line with the groups who are quote-unquote allies. The US will tell you that the SDF are their allies in the fight against ISIS, but they're willing to let their allies die rather than give them manpads. Like, I've seen this i have i've seen the funerals you know because the and the u.s i've also driven right past the fucking u.s base and i know that there are plenty of plenty of plenty of anti-aircraft systems there because they shot down a turkish drone while i was there but they're not willing to give them to the even the people who they'll fight side by side with because their fear of having manpads get into what they would uh maybe turn the wrong hands is uh is is it yeah it's like the

the one area where they have i guess complete domination right they've given them to ukraine of course um and but despite like repeated allegations there is no evidence that ukraine has sold surface to air-air systems anywhere. And they obviously won't give them to Myanmar, right? So if this is what it appears to be, then it's a really massive change. Talking of a massive change, you could make a massive change to your financial situation by purchasing gold we're back yeah i i think something that's really interesting about the way that the sort of man pad getting to non-state actors has talked about is that usually the way that it's like usually the u.s line on it is like we like we can't let anyone get these because they're going to use it

to shoot down civilian airliners yes yeah and now to be fair people do accidentally shoot down like militaries accidentally shoot down civilian airliners all the time yeah that's a very common thing but i i think i think that's that's a smokescreen right because like even like the actual thing that if you're if you're a militant group usually the thing that you want to be doing if you have one of these weapons is is shooting down the things the people who are bombing you yeah and i think there's a really interesting sort of like psychological thing going on here where this is this is the sort of propaganda thing that that you know to get to get like you random person to be terrified of like you know the kurds having

surface-to-air missiles is they use like they use people's like fear of getting blown up in an airplane it's like no no like look at like you know evidence suggests that what is actually what actually happens that these is that they shoot down drones yeah yes exactly right and not like the other thing which is somewhat remarkable it's it would be one thing to have got your hands on one or two but to have been to have shot down in in a one year well just over one year from february the 13th 2023 until march the 1st 2024 uh they have shot down uh 15 uavs like that that's a that's a decent number of man pads or maybe not man pads that's the other thing we kind of didn't mention right like uh bay ractors can fly very high we were just sort of checking this out before the show and i think

they can fly around 7 000 meters which would in theory put the outside outside the... 20,000, 25,000 feet. 25,000 feet, yeah, which is about twice the height previous generation manpads, things like Stingers and Iglers, can operate at. I'm not sure if the... For an Igler, reach targets of maximum altitude of 2,500 meters. So, yeah, that's a little under... As high as these attack drones can fly maybe they have to come lower to like launch their munitions or maybe they come lower to uh

to search for people um because they're presumably looking for uh the kurdistan freedom movement has gorillas all over these mountains right here extremely well camouflaged and extremely adept at avoiding drone attacks because that is what they have been doing for for a long time so maybe that's how but also maybe maybe there's something that that we're not aware of or some kind of maybe it's not a man portable system at all maybe it's something that yeah it's like fixed in place well and that and that comes to i think one of the one of the really interesting here, which is how on earth did they get these? Yeah. Like, whatever system they're using, you know, normally, like, the only way, like, you know, like Hezbollah or the Houthis get them from Iran, right?

But the Iranians are absolutely, like, under no circumstances are they going to. I mean, maybe if Turkey declared war on Iran, there's, like, a 5% chance, maybe, in, like, their darkest hour, they might try this. But, like, there's like a five percent chance maybe in like their darkest hour they might try this like there's no way yeah like iraq and iran have repeatedly attempted to mobilize the kurds against each other right um but yeah i think that they would draw the line at handing over man pads and yeah and they're definitely not getting them from the u.s no and they're not using them in areas where they're with the US, and the US has been very clear on that. It's definitely not...

I don't think it's any other Western country either. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, maybe based Sweden smuggling manpads in or something, but I really doubt it, which leaves it really up in the air. I mean, maybe Russiaussia maybe somehow i don't know it's it's it's all very weird yeah and i mean like in recent months the asad regime which is backed by russia has been an open conflict with the uh the sdf so i think it's it's very unlikely

uh like the asad regime has been fighting with and killing and dying with YPG and YPJ in Syria. So it seems very unlikely. Yeah, that's what's very strange. There seem to be a couple of different groups of people, right? The Karen have popped up with these previous generation, these Igla kind of manpads. The Kachin have shot down a lot of planes recently, and it's not entirely clear how. So the Kachin are another ethnic group in Myanmar, somewhat closer ties to the PRC. The United Wai State Army have manpads. They are the sort of closest tied to the PRC of the EROs in Myanmar.

I'm using a lot of acron of acronyms here aren't i um yeah this is this the problem we're talking about kurdish groups and also talking about yeah it's really the two great acronym like wars don't be overlooking the spanish civil war the alphabet soup of conflicts uh yeah this is this is a life i've chosen for myself so yeah the ethnic revolutionary organizations in myanmar uh the the closest to to china it's the united wire state army who have been at the fringes of the conflict but certainly not fully committed to fighting against the hunter in the same way that the karen the kachin the arakan army the pdf for the other groups that form up the the resistance in burma or myanmar um but there have definitely been more planes shot down in myanmar this year than in the in the

the last few years so there's it perhaps there's some kind of source in the world for these uh surface-to-air missiles like there will come a point in the human future when one of these is either reverse-engineered or someone just really... If someone had said to you 10 years ago that several people online, some of whom I've spoken to, some of whom our friend Jake Hammer

had spoken to, would be able to construct a gun that you could print from your computer, you'd have said you're barking. At some point in the human future, someone will work out how to use things they already have to make something that can shoot down aircraft.

But, yeah, it's baffling. There seems to be no obvious answer as to where what the source of these... The last thing I would say is that there was a yakuza boss yeah yeah this guy legend he's just like yeah he it like this man's my man's done nothing wrong uh he was convicted of uh selling trying to sell man pads to the karen and i think to the kachin

um i can't remember it was definitely one of them with the karen uh and uh he was trying to do so very funny he was calling them cake and ice cream incredibly uh incredibly good cipher it's a hell of a it's a banger of an indictment everyone should read it uh takeshi i forget what his last name was but he um he was trying to sell them man pads and what he was actually doing was being monitored by the dea but the man pads that he thought that he had access to were fictional like it was it was the it was the feds who had conned him into thinking they had man pads um they they did have some 84s he met them in the netherlands took an incredible selfie with a light anti-tank weapon um you can look it up leather jacket like i think he's got blue aviators on uh like my man's been

arrested for having incredible drip um and it's very sad but uh yeah the manpads he thought he was selling were fictional but the fact that people were like yeah this seems reasonable uh like that people were like okay we're prepared to enter to deal with you they weren't like what are you on about suggests that maybe these things are entering the market people will always say that they came from afghanistan like after the u.s left um but i don't think the taliban would have any reason to sell them they're getting bombed by pakistan right now like what yeah yeah it doesn't seem it doesn't make sense to me that that that they would sell them yeah and i one thing i should also

mention is like every single time there is a war anywhere in the world there are a trillion rumors that come out that like oh there's like this guy is selling like x weapons or whatever and it's like 99 of them are false yeah yeah yeah you hear this all the time and it's never true yeah so that makes it really hard to sort out like where these things are coming from yeah exactly friend of the podcast uh victor boot is uh he's free again he's back just maybe maybe maybe he's gotten back on yeah maybe the god of war is uh is back baby that would be incredible there would be an incredible narrative arc for victor boot uh but like as we said in that episode right like uh it's very easy to point like to victor boot

as being this evil guy but in fact like we've sold a shit ton of weapons to people who turn out to be pretty pretty uncivil as the united states uh a lot more people working at all the other places that have offices in San Diego made a lot more money than he did selling weapons to people. So we ought to be calling the kettle back a bit there. But clearly, something is up with surface-to-air missiles. I hope this makes your spring break flights more exciting. It just gives it a little edge as you take off. Don't fly in Turkey.

Yeah. Yeah. But see, our tip is to not fly from, not land, I guess in, I mean, like we said, the KCK ain't going to shoot down your civilian plane. They're nice people. I'll just say the KCK in my experience have been very nice, very forthcoming, extremely communicative and responsive to press requests, which, uh, like much more so than, uh,

a lot, a lot of other state actors. Um, and I don't think you have any worries about them shooting down your aircraft, but it is, it's an interesting development that like, yeah,

we'll fundamentally challenge the way that states are able to squash non-state armed groups going forward yeah and if if we if if we figure out where they got them from and that becomes public i will you'll you'll see the next episode called we found out where the bad pads are from yeah yeah i think in all likelihood it's in no one's interest to announce where these are from. And I don't think, you know, the ones in Myanmar, it's not inconceivable that they came either directly or indirectly from China. And certainly that would be the most feasible. But seeing them elsewhere, it's fascinating. you know if somebody has like either reverse engineered these or there's a large number of them available on the black market like that would be a sea change in the way conflict happens right like um it you know israel right now is able to bomb palestine with complete impunity if non-state

armed groups had access to man pads there that maybe wouldn't be the case but yeah it's a change it's a change in the way the world goes to war. I think it's always interesting. It's always interesting. Like for a podcast that was built on speculative fiction about future collapses, like this certainly is something that challenges the monopoly of the state. So yeah, it's something to keep an eye on. I will attach in the notes, the guerrilla TV video of the Bayraktars being shot down. Please enjoy the soundtrack. Yeah, it's banger.

And we'll also include some links to those videos of the Karen National Liberation Army with their manpads. If you're a manpads understander, you know where to find me. It's all over the Internet. Yeah, with that, I will leave you. Have a great weekend. Don't fly your Cessnas hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week

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