It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 127

Episode Date: April 20, 2024

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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 Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was,

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CallZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Either snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness can stop the Persian courier service.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about postal services where we ask the question, can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post office? I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me to talk about what is going on with the post office, what's going on with the post office unions, and yeah, how things are going downhill for the noble people who carry your mail is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for giving us the mail carriers a platform to stand on. Yeah, I'm really happy to, and I'm really happy to get to talk to you about this.

So I think the place we should start is with a bunch of very, very weird stuff in how labor law works. So, okay, for most people in the United united states you have a federally protected right to strike if you have a union that is not true for federal employees that is especially not true for members of the post office and that is a real issue because the government has decided that like yeah no all these people who do a vital service are not allowed to go on strike and it absolutely sucks yeah and so i i think this this gets into sort of where i want to start which is with the sort of history of the national association of letters carriers a union that is not allowed to strike and how sort of weird that is. So yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins of the union

and what effect that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work. Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic. I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people on our side of politics to be infighting a lot. It shouldn't come to a surprise. So in 1969, just over 50 years ago, the salary for postal workers was under $2 an hour. People were working months straight with no days off. And those were close to 12-hour days. And so these postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided in 1970

to go on strike, despite it being illegal. This conversation is not new. It was illegal then, illegal. This conversation is not new. It was illegal then. It's illegal now. And I do want to be crystal clear here. I am not advocating for a strike that would also be against the law. And we don't advocate for anything that's against the law. What I do want to advocate for is the right to strike because being quasi-federal there's a lot of limitations in what the NALC and the general postal unions are able to do in total there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the post office some of which are the manager's union. So take that as it is. Yeah. On top of not being able to strike, none of our money that we collect as union dues can be used for lobbying purposes. So they can't support a single candidate or any of the parties involved. We have a separate fund for that with the NALC called the Letter Carriers

Political Fund to try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there. And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back. We are unable to organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued or labeled as a strike. And they're, I think, generally afraid of public opinion. Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively taken away sort of the two major tools that you know i mean unions of basically across all political stripes use right you've taken away the ability to strike you've taken away the ability to uh use your dues money to influence elections so this immediately means you've taken away the tool that sort of militant unions use which is strikes and you've taken away the tools that

more conservative unions use which is buying paul attempting to buy politicians and then also your leadership is like we can't strike us i mean we can't protest because someone might think it's a strike or the public might commend us it's like that that doesn't seem i don't know it really seems like it's like it's not only have you tied both hands behind your back you've like tied them behind your back to your legs you're now rolling around on the ground right and uh so talk about what happens when we push past all of these barriers and just do it anyways you know in march 1970 210 000 postal workers defied law defied the general leadership of the time and it all all started in New York where people clocked in and at nine o'clock, they just walked out. Soon, let's see, it was Cleveland, Chicago,

Los Angeles, the nation joined very shortly after once it broke the news that they were calling for a national strike, Nixon called in the National Guard to try and deliver mail. And the National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards. It's just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail. And an interviewer is asking him, just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail, an interviewer is asking him, do you think that you're doing a good job?

He's just like, no, it's just some kid, you know? And don't get me wrong, I'm just some guy, but you need the training, you need to know what you're doing, and it's not something that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the first time, the mail had stopped. And that won us collective bargaining, binding arbitration, which is a process that I think most people within unions know what they mean. But to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance. And eventually we call in a third party, an arbitrator, to decide for us. And those are generally lawyers. On top of binding arbitration, it gave us a new pay scale and set in motion, I think, over, it's got to be hundreds of raises between the colas and the new pay table.

It used to be 21 years for you to reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous. Yeah. Now I think it's about eight. Yeah. So the post office was forced to reorganize, and so was the union. This is where the American Postal Workers Union was born. And from this strike, we were able to settle on the national agreement. So there's the national agreement, which is our binding contract.

There's the JCAM, which is the joint contract administration manual which is what the post office and the union use as the interpretation of the contract that way we are not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean we can just focus on whether or not someone broke our agreement so after this one would imagine that a quasi-federal institution would honor the contract that was created, bargain in good faith, and treat their employees fairly. Isn't that right? Yeah, I know.

Spoken like someone who has never watched a federal government in action. Yeah, absolutely not. Spoken like someone who has never watched a federal government in action. Yeah, absolutely not. Before we get into issues that we face today, I do want to say that one of the main goals of our contract negotiations or of this episode really is to create public knowledge of how our contract is not being adhered to if there was one main goal that i'd have in mind is just to have the post office honor what they signed and agreed to do um yeah i mean it's something that that it's it's a part of being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the union enforces it. Because the moment the contract happens, the bosses will attempt to not abide by it. And this is what a lot of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of militancy was.

I mean, if you look at how the UAW worked in the 60s, They'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line. And if someone did a contract violation, he would blow the whistle and everyone would just sit down. And you'd immediately have a strike, right? You know, in like that level of militancy, you don't need to be at that level to enforce a contract. But you have to actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management over it. And if you're not willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless. And that's a real issue with a lot of unions. Which just kind of circles back to one of the big issues that we face is that if we were to do that, that would be a willingful delay of mail.

And we could be charged for it just for trying to enforce the contract yep yeah which i the thing i think is really interesting just to circle back to the 1970s strike is that so the strike was illegal right nixon brings in the army and the national guard to break it and the strike still wins and not only does it if it you know i mean you could argue whether it achieved total victory but not a single person who walked off the line got arrested even though all of them technically committed a crime and that's something that like you know i i think let me okay the the enforcement of laws depends on sort of the the depends on a set of relative balance of forces and whether people care about enforcing the law which is how like for example

like if you pirate like seven movies and you get you get three copyright strikes you go to prison but you know like the sam altman or whatever like ai company can literally steal everything on the entire internet and get money for it and no one will ever prosecute him right and so so you know whether or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal and you going to prison for it largely has to do with the balance of forces involved and that's something that you should keep in mind when and this is this is this is the thing that that cuts the other way a lot too right like a lot like employers just do illegal actions literally all the time and it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care. Yeah, by and large, labor laws in America are set up in favor of the businesses, of the employers.

If you're familiar with workers' comp or any of the systems involved in the Federal Employees Compensation Act, it's not enforced. We have cases that are pending arbitration where someone's been run over by a worker, has been run over by a postal vehicle. While they were working, the post office effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the damage done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes, we will pay this individual and the post office is liable to pay them. But now they are off the rolls, which means there's a greater period of time before this individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that within the post office, the managers need to fill out, I believe it's an 8130 or, you know, all these forms have

some numbers associated with them that they just refuse to fill out. And there's no recourse, there's no path for us to take to make them hurry or make them get this individual the money that they're owed and some people um this doesn't ruin their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever but i imagine for many many working americans that's that's their livelihood uh immediately down the drain yeah unfortunately we need to go to ads for a little bit because unfortunately

my boss's boss's boss's livelihood depends on these ads mine technically does too but like lord knows I don't see that money so ads ads and we are back and yeah I guess that leads into the next place you want to go to which is talking about what

what are the specific grievances today that y'all are dealing with and the union is not dealing with? Right. So in terms of grievances within the union and our negotiation, a lot of it does have to do with the aforementioned workers' compensation. Employees are simply not getting paid. I think the biggest problem with the union and the grievance procedure today is that management has figured out this really effective strategy. If they don't settle on the lower levels and it gets pushed up to arbitration, then we have a massive backlog of cases pending arbitration,

which could be scheduled years out. Yeah. I think if you do the math for our current rate of handling these cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around 15 years to get through them all. Jesus Christ. And that's assuming there's no new ones. Yeah, yeah. it'll take around 15 years to get through the law christ and that's assuming there's no new ones uh yeah yeah that's like where you know when you go to a restaurant and there's that little stanchion out there that says it's a five hour wait from this point that's the point that we're

at um anything beyond today will be further along jesus christ um and so I think that is just a major problem for us, clearly. Yeah. Management just not complying with any of this, and it makes it so that our employees have to wait. Something I do want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure, if we can, is just what's going on with the post office and the postmaster general. Yeah. All right, so I want to go at this from the customer perspective first, because I think that's the best way to relate to people. I think by and large, people are losing faith in the post office. Either you have no idea what's going on, you don't care and that's fine. I'd say before I joined I didn't think of them at all.

You know they're just the guy that shows up at my house every morning. A lot of people seem to think that the post office is going out of business and our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service that is getting worse. People are paying more for worse service. rightfully upset at them, I do feel like we're doing a disservice to our customers. And I'm really not trying to attack them when I say that they're uninformed or clueless to the inner workings of the post office. I do directly want to attack Congress and say that when they had pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in 2006, which required the post office to pre-fund 100% of its retiree health benefits and liabilities 75 years into the future. What? So overnight, the post office was handed a $5.5 billion burden. And that's where the whole, I don't know if you remember, I certainly wasn't conscious of it at the time, the Save Our Post Office stickers that were being

sold and trying to fund the post office. And really, that's where the rhetoric of the post office is going under comes from. The other thing I want to point out is that we are quasi-federal. We actually accept nothing from taxpayer monies. It says it's a service, but really the post office is ran as a business. We don't even get subsidized because they don't need to. My local union president loves to remind us that the post office is a business that has a revenue of $78.2 billion. to remind us that the post office is a business that has a revenue of $78.2 billion. And he'll want me to stress that the 0.2 is extremely important because 0.2 of a billion is 20 million. They are not in jeopardy.

We are not going out of business. And the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, he's the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath the president of the United States. He's played warden Clarence Thomas. Wow. Yeah, I think it was like $380,000 a year or something like that. DeJoy was appointed by Donald Trump. was appointed by Donald Trump. I'm assuming this is kind of a baseless assumption, so forgive me on not doing my research here, but I'm assuming that they're buddies because DeJoy has no idea.

Yeah. Wasn't she the guy that Trump brought in specifically to destroy the post office as part of the campaign to steal the election? Yeah. So there's been a lot about DeJ joy defrauding the election process i i wasn't part of the post office to see the inner workings of it so it's kind of hard for me to say if it was hearsay or not but i'd believe it because de joy has no idea how to run a post office he's never been involved with this kind of business he is in the same way that Trump is a businessman, a horrible businessman. And his Delivering for America plan could really be redefined as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing is they're consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing post offices in order to save money and shoving three installations into one building.

That's why the lines are getting longer. It also means that from dispatch, the employees have to drive an extra mile or two into their working zone, which of course means that we're going to go into overtime. And this just throws a wrench in the mail handling process. He has single-handedly made the service a lot more reliable. And I do think that you're right. Unreliable. Yeah, sorry, more unreliable. And I do think that you're right. He wants to destroy the post office, not only for the election, but to the point where it makes more sense to go

private now is the time to point out that the joy is a major shareholder in fedex oh jesus christ which is a subcontractor for the usps and he has millions of dollars in equity involved. He's got skin in the game. I love open corruption. So great. And so on the local level, on what's going on in my office, I actually have one of the better offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been sent to other offices and I have experienced firsthand the bullying and harassment from management pushing us to go faster. But even at one of the better offices, I work 60-hour weeks. I don't have set days off. It's not even a rotation. When I get home, I'm spent.

And my commute isn't that bad. I think I'm about 15 minutes each way. I really can't imagine driving two hours after an 11-hour shift just to eat and come back and do it again. I mean, that's just unsafe. Yeah, it would be illegal, but since it's in the contract, it's not illegal. Oh my God. So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the post office,

well, I guess I should explain. When you join as a letter carrier, the first 90 days, they can fire you for any reason. And you're something called either a CCA or a PTF. And that means part-time flexible or city carrier assistant. You are only guaranteed four hours for showing up for work. You're not guaranteed to be scheduled. So if they don't like you,

they just will schedule you once a week for an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if you're in a busy place, then that just means that they're going to work you to death. So when you join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family, you lose time with your loved ones and your friends. And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk about it, I get asked the same thing. Why don't you quit? Yeah.

And the truth is, this job is awesome. I love it. I want to work it. I just want it to make sense and be livable. And I'm not going to give up just because we haven't reached the point where it is. If you walk away now, it doesn't get better. I'm sure someone would take my place, but it helps to have people stick around.

That's actually a pretty common, I mean, this is one of amazon's strategy right for their warehouses they intentionally want to cycle through people because the more the more new people you have continuously cycling through the less organized and the less sort of like less knowledge they have less you have to pay them etc etc etc and so if you can just cause high turnover rates on purpose that's that's a thing that a lot of these sort of business ghoul like nightmare factory people like love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell but you know they're getting they're still getting paid right and so

i try and hold that in mind when i've been overworked and I'm at the end of one of my major shifts because I had to carry part of another route because someone else called out. I really have to stop and think to myself that this other person who called out is just as exhausted as I am. Yeah. is just as exhausted as I am, is probably going to get a letter of warning for calling out. That's another issue. They don't want you to use your leave. Jesus Christ. I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've been doing that a lot at my office as well.

It reminds me a lot, our issues of your recent episode. I think it was you about the nurses union, the shift change episode. Their members are dealing with a lot of the same things where the unions are so big that they become detached from the membership. And we are finding out afterwards what our bargaining agreements are, what our strategy was. Everything's after the contract has been signed. And that's just not how unions were meant to be. They're meant to be from the bottom up by the workers for the workers. But it really does feel like it's like national as its own entity. And so I guess that would bring us to talking about the union and the future of the union. Yeah, let's get into that.

So I got to be careful here because Brian Renfro, he's our national leader of the union. He's been struggling with problems in his personal life. And I don't feel like I'm ousting him as it's public knowledge, at least within the post office, it's public knowledge. He's dealing with substance abuse, with alcoholism. And that's something that hits very close to home within my family.

And I really don't want to demonize that he's struggling. But what I do want to say is when you're going through something like that, and you've accepted a position on the national level like this, you really need to either step down or appoint someone to handle things in your place. As negotiations started over a year ago, he kind of went missing. And it was later revealed that he was an inpatient, which is fine. Get your help.

But there was nothing left, no notes left for us to strategize with. And our membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the leadership has gone missing. It's very dark times for the nalc well and that that's also just sort of like an organizational problem right like if if you're if your organization is set up in such a way that a small number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no one has any idea what's going on that's just a bad way to run something and especially it's a terrible way to run a union because the union's you know power is supposed to be from from its organization and from the collective power of a

large of a large organized group of people who can make decisions for themselves and if it's if that's not happening and you get to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people who can just sort of vanish like that's that for whatever and you know like literally whatever reason that is right it could just be you get sick it could just be like whatever happens that's just a terrible way to organize things and i guess it's also like i want to make take like a little tiny tangent to be like if you're doing any organizing project your goal is to organize yourself out of a job like you're like ideally if you were in an organization it should be able to function without you there should not having an indispensable person is a fiasco don't do that this is true of both like your tiny local

mutual aid group as much as is true of your giant national union so this this has been this has been mia talking about the indispensable person don't have well yeah that's kind of the funny thing about joining a union from an anarchist perspective it gets a little funky how hierarchical they typically are and the problems that we know we are going to face when you have a system that's built like a pyramid. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so I was saying, we're in dark times,

but there's such a bright future that I can see for us. Branch 9 of the NALC, and namely this individual, Tyler Vassar, who, when I had originally posted on Reddit asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would be great for this interview. His branch, Branch 9, has passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for contract negotiations. And I hope this sweeps the nation. We're not allowed to strike, as I've mentioned, and our leadership is so shy when it comes to activism or mobilization of the workforce. They don't want to touch the topic. The closest thing we have to it is a rally

that is Enough is Enough that's being held in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to postal workers. We're being robbed and we're being harassed. But even then, we're missing a large chunk of the danger that is posed to postal workers. Because yes, we're being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied and harassed inside of our workplaces by management, by the people who are supposed to empower us to do the job effectively. And so they don't want to touch the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation.

NALC's identity, the postal strike of 1970, that it seems silly to ignore it today and pretend like it didn't happen. So for the future, I think that activism is our key to success. I think that the old heads that lead our union come from a time where unions were frowned upon, where activism was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion will be largely in our favor and that public opinion can really put pressure on the legislative branch, on Congress. And if we are transparent about our union, what we're asking for, the issues that we're facing, I think that the public would be on our side. If the people in America knew that management was falsifying time records or training records and interfering with workers' comps claim and back pay, or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay,

that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions, big or small, that they would care and that they would join us in the streets. One major thing that happened, I think it was last year in the summer, we had a letter carrier. His name is Eugene Gates, who died in the texas heat jesus yeah because management told him not to take as many breaks or he would face discipline these pressures that we face when when you're threatened that you will lose your job if you don't listen to us, you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion and further.

Yeah. I think that the post office killed Mr. Gates. And there wasn't as much outcry or anger behind the movement. much outcry or or anger behind the movement I often find myself thinking that while I don't have the answers I do know that we need to care more yeah and it's hard to care when when you're exhausted I acknowledge that yeah well I think there's two things about that one I mean I don't and this is something I've gotten to with a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done on this show, is that I think a lot of very, very basic jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably appalling that people just don't know about. And I think people are very sympathetic to once they actually understand what's happening in the kind of just horror show stuff that's happening in these workplaces and the second

thing i think that's sort of important in terms of getting people to you know like trying to actually do like mass mobilizations even just to get people to understand what's going on is that i think a lot of people who are facing these kind of conditions think that they're alone and think that it's just something that happens to them or they've been in them for so long they think that it's sort of normal and having a bunch of people go no like a this happens and b it shouldn't happen is extraordinarily powerful because you know like because that feeling of isolation is the thing that your bosses depend on to make sure that you just keep going along with these conditions, even though they are just objectively horrific. And I think any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to

go anywhere. Right. And one of the strategies that I really want to push forward as I grow within the union, and don't get me wrong, I want to stay a steward. I think that educating our members and being part of the workforce is my place in the union. But what I want to push is for union solidarity. I want the NALC to hire organizers, specifically organizers, to try and get the public mobilized and as well as the workforce so that we can put pressure on Congress, so that we can show our bargaining teams that we support them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms. And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and reaching out to the other movements in a time where union support is higher than ever is such a clear path that we

are just ignoring for whatever reason, because people are afraid to speak out against the post office. And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen with our current contract, but I do know that the fight never ends and that while we stand on the shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively new employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the footsteps of some warriors. The branch president I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard work over the years that I don't have to reinvent the wheel. None of us do. We just have to continue the struggle.

Yeah. And I think that's a great place to end, unless you have anything else that you want to make sure we get to? No, nothing on this topic. Yeah. So how can people support you and postal workers just in general if there's a specific place you want them to go? where you put in your address and it'll give you the email addresses, the phone numbers for your representatives so that you can make some noise. Again, we're amazingly limited in what we can do. So there's not really anything that you can donate to help us, including the Letter Carrier Political Fund.

But yeah, just pay attention to us. Maybe leave a bottle of water out in your front door. It says, for the postal worker. There's nothing better that you can do than talking about it. Word of mouth is the best advertisement. Well, yeah, we will put that in the show notes. I hope you all win. And I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in my life, but thank you for your service.

I appreciate that. Yeah, I never imagined myself to become a federal employee. And it is just as bad as I imagined. Yeah. So I do want to shout out, actually, it's a little meta, I imagined. Yeah. So I do want to shout out, actually, it's a little meta, I guess, but I do want to shout out some important episodes

of It Could Happen Here that hit me very closely, if I can. Yeah, yeah, go for it. Because a lot of the people listening will be postal workers that have been pointed in this direction.

Please, look at the Myanmar episodes, Free Burma, the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that, Mia, I believe you've done the same work as James with Border Kindness. Those are two topics that I think y'all hit really well. And that really touched me as a person. Sometimes I'll relisten to those episodes when I'm having a hard day, just to remind myself that it's all the same. It's all the same fight. Yeah, it absolutely is.

And I mean, I think that's, that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's, it's both the beauty and the horror of, of this world is that on the one hand, all of us are being crushed by the same sets of forces. But on the other hand, it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also a part of the larger fight for get all of us free. Yeah, exactly.

So just fight the burnout and stay in the fight. Yeah. Yeah, this has been Nick Adapto here go make trouble for people who suck 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. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities,

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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 Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

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the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. It's James. We just wanted to let you know that some new shit has come to light since we recorded this. Specifically, a former staffer of World Central Kitchen who resigned, who was of Palestinian descent, wrote an op-ed, I guess, in Monde Weiss, which is a publication that covers Israel and Palestine and the United States' role there. And it's given us some more information about World Central Kitchen that we didn't know know when we first recorded this and so we are going to address that at the end so after the second ad break charles will go shireen and i will come back and we're going to address some stuff that we found in that op-ed we will also link it in the description to this

podcast yes it's a really good article i recommend you guys give it a full read but yeah we will be talking all about it at the end. So please listen to the whole episode. Hello, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today, I am joined by my illustrious colleague, James. Hi, James. Hi, Shireen. And my now friend, Charles McBride. Hi, Charles. Welcome back to the show. Hi, now friend, Shireen. It's wonderful to be here. And to know that you're a real person and not a federal psyop.

Yeah, fun fact, I have met Charles in person, but I have not met James in person. And I think that's pretty funny. That's why I got colleague and Charles got friend. No, don't think we're not taking notes over here, Shireen. Don't read into that. Okay. We already have. We're talking about World Central Kitchen

and the tragedy that happened last week in which seven aid workers were killed. Both of these gentlemen have personal experience with the organization, so I thought it would be good to talk about. But James, take it away. Okay. So yeah, I think we should maybe start off,

Charles, you and I have both seen World Central Kitchen in different places. Like my longest experience with them was starting in 2018 in Tijuana, right? When we were trying to feed people who were part of a caravan of migrants who had arrived right before the midterms. And what was a relatively normal thing became a really big political sort of football, really big political sort of football which resulted in the people remember like people being tear gassed in mexico from inside the united states people being held first in a baseball stadium and then in an old strip club which was really gross and there being essentially no ngo presence at first and then mutual aid presence and then World Central Kitchen, one of the first people to show up and cook for people.

And like at this point, there was a really dire need for food. Like I have this vivid memory of three of my friends and I riding in the bed of a pickup truck into this refugee camp and people just mobbing for food and water. And like people were good about like not stamping on children once once we stopped but like i was really worried there was going to be a crash people were very hungry and very thirsty and i had just had massive respect for people showing up and just being like we are people who cook food and what we're here to do is cook food and these people are hungry so we're going to give it to them and so i've i've uh i've always been admiring of their work since then. And I wonder, Charles, what your initial experience was with them

and if you could describe what sort of work you've seen them doing. Yeah, so first experience that I had with World Central Kitchen was actually hands-off. It was when my friends and I, we created this thing four years ago called the FarmLink Project, which is a food rescue organization. It basically finds food that's going to waste on farms and pays the wages of the truckers and the drivers to transport the food to food banks that are overworked. We sort of tagged in with World Central Kitchen in the beginning of COVID and talked with them a little bit, but there was never any official partnership.

Some of their comms people gave us advice. Some of their fundraising people gave us advice. First time I ever saw them in operation was coming into the Zhemesh train station week two of the Ukraine war. And they were the organization feeding all the refugees coming in. There's a bunch of people in world central kitchen. And, and the thing I noticed was none of them were speaking English. They were all speaking Polish and Ukrainian or Russian. And I started to realize this is an organization that knows how to mobilize a local population and a local response as a part of the thing. And that's something I really noticed when almost a year later, I flew from Ukraine to Turkey when a 7.5 magnitude earthquake went through southeastern Turkey, Kurdistan. went through southeastern Turkey, Kurdistan. And I flew into Adana and then basically linked up with the World Central Kitchen people in the city of Osmaniye. And one of the things I noticed was how quickly they were able to get into Syria when nobody else was getting into Syria.

Syria when nobody else was getting into Syria. And the reason is because it's just chefs. It's just using chefs in restaurants in places where they already exist. Every place in the world has chefs and restaurants. And Jose Andres has this amazing quote that I really like. He says, everyone already works for World Central Kitchen. They just don't know it yet. works for world central kitchen they just don't know it yet and i saw that in action i saw all these kitchens transformed into you know shelters and food distribution sites and i got to work alongside their team so my project i was trying to fundraise for uh heaters and blankets to heat the afad tents in the affected regions in kurdistan in the Kurdish villages on the border with Syria, because it was still very cold at that time. And there was not adequate attention paid to that. Obviously, Afad and its cronies is part of the whole reason that that incident was as bad as it

was. But World Central Kitchen stepped up in a big way in Turkey. And I was really impressed with kind of their outfit. We were working out of the same distribution center. I got to accompany Jose Andres on a couple of his deliveries and we went to Hatay and walked around and saw the extent of the devastation and visited all the World Central Kitchen feeding sites. And it was just, it was all Turkish people and Gorgias people who were there working for World Central Kitchen. They had been mobilized by this entity. So there's this decentralized element to World Central Kitchen that I found really impressive. It didn't feel like the top-down bureaucratic thing I kept running into in my humanitarian work with these big NGOs. It was much more grassroots, much more bottom-up.

So it gained a lot of respect for me in that sense. Yeah, I think that's a really good point to make that they do have a different model, it allows them to be flexible. It's allowed them to be places where other people aren't like, I think a lot of people perhaps like I'm not as familiar with the NGO world as you and I might be like NGOs often present themselves in places where people need help. It's like, you know, they have large office buildings and white land cruises, and they have one way of doing things, and it's their way. And sometimes that doesn't work. I can recount countless examples of this, right?

NGOs that exist to do things in a certain way and don't adapt to a local situation or culture. And that's something that World central kitchen have done really well in my experience all over the world yeah they they graft themselves on to a local response and every everywhere that they go it takes on a local flavor and i think it's that's why this happened is because they inserted themselves into a highly volatile situation and because they are so decentralized and because they are so on the ground, they also expose themselves to the realities of what Palestinians have been facing in Gaza, and lost members of their team, you know, as a result. And I think that is part of that is

there's a lot of people who won't even go into Gaza, you know, if they had the opportunity, like you said, these big NGOs. I think last time I was on the podcast, Shireen, I talked about, you know, seeing these big UN advertisements in the Copenhagen airport saying, save Ukrainian children when I first, when I was going over there. And then as soon as I got there, I mean, the minute you go east of Lviv, you're not going to see a UN truck anywhere. And it was that way for nine months.

You know, and yeah, it was just a bunch of people with like brand new white Land Cruiser Prados sipping cocktails in Lviv while subcontracting with actual humanitarians working closer to the front line. World Central Kitchen was not that way. They were all the way out, all the way on the east. Everywhere I went, there was World Central Kitchen cars, even deep into Donetsk. And that was really impressive.

It felt antithetical to the whole non-profit industrial complex model that I'd become familiar with. And I was impressed by that. Yeah. So perhaps we should speak about exactly what they were doing in gaza because i think people are perhaps a little confused there's been a lot of like misinformation from from all

kinds of angles about what they were doing in gaza so do you have a good handle on that i mean world central kitchen positioned itself they engage in slightly more activist humanitarianism than most organizations, which is why, I mean, Jose Andres went big on Ukraine. He was there, he brought the whole team, I mean, they dedicated so many resources to Ukraine. And for him, it was unequivocal. Ukrainians are the good guys, Russians are the bad guys, we're helping the victims of this conflict. are the good guys russians are the bad guys we're helping the victims of this conflict and you know we're on the side of of the angels in this and that was the positioning and i think it was a bit of a wake-up call when after october 7th he did the same thing in israel and went and you know gave food to the to the to the different kibbutzim that were affected by the October 7th attacks. And at first, very much positioned himself as like,

we're here to help relieve the affected Israelis, which again, for like polite liberals in the humanitarian world, you know, Israel, Ukraine, both aligned with Western interests, Western values, theoretically. And I think, and then, you know, suddenly the war focus goes from what happened at the Kibbutzim to what's happening in Gaza. And so they went to Egypt

and they started helping the refugees and then they tried to get into Gaza. Then they did get into Gaza. And they set up, you know, an effective system of food aid. And I started to notice while that was happening that the perspectives of a lot of the people that I was working with in the aid community were starting to shift on this whole thing.

People who didn't have a political interest in supporting the Palestinians and were just kind of supporting Israel because of the default. When they actually went to Gaza, they started to really change their tune. And you see this a little bit with Jose Andres as well. I think Jose Andres was, yeah, I mean, in terms of his personal views on Israel, they seem to have very clearly evolved. You can see very soon after October 7th, he is calling out the Spanish prime minister on calling what's happening in Palestine a genocide. He's

saying that Israel has a right to defend itself. And then he spends a bunch of time in Gaza and now he's greeting everyone in Arabic. And then this thing happens and he immediately points the finger at Israel he says you guys targeted my team you killed them deliberately and you made sure the job was finished and that is that is just so reproachable and in doing so he became one of the only like really big celebrity voices to make what appeared to be something of a 180 turn on that conflict. And pretty much everyone that I've worked with in the humanitarian or journalism space has also done the same thing in regard to Gaza. I'd say most people thought my views on this were too extreme after October 7th,

when I began immediately criticizing Israel. And now the ones who have actually been there pretty much unequivocally say they're the bad actor in this region. And I think you saw that shift happen in real time with sort of the attitude that World Central Kitchen took to Gaza. All of that stuff is available from public statements. I don't want to share private sentiments that have been shared with me by members of World Central Kitchen staff. Those are their own and they don't represent the organization. But I think even just watching the yo-yo of jose andres's perspective on this change has been enlightening

yeah and i think like it's easy to be critical of someone for having opinions which like have not aged well right like and sometimes that's okay sometimes sometimes we need to do that sometimes people say shit which is unforgivable but like uh i think in this instance like we can be critical at a point but i don't think now is the time for that like i i think now is the time for like everyone who wants the starving and killing of innocent people in gaza to stop is on our side right now and we need to welcome that and like there are a lot of people in this country right who we need to do that same 180 and giving examples of people doing that is good like they and there are a lot of people who don't see themselves when they see dead people in gaza and that's a problem right and that's some shit that they need to examine and because there's a

lot of bigotry there but if they see themselves in those aid workers or they see themselves in jose andres and look fucking when i saw the bodies of those aid workers right you have a tall skinny british guy with with long hair and a plate carrier with a badge on like that that's what i look like to 99 of the world and it's hard not to feel like oh shit like that could be me um and and i i have well i feel like i have a lot of empathy for people in gaza i have friends in gaza we we speak to them on the podcast shireen and i spoke to him last week but whatever it takes for those people to change their opinions right now is what we need like and then we can we can dissect the

how we got here later but like every minute that this continues, more innocent people die. And if we can stop this one minute sooner, then there's important lives that we can save. And I think it's really important to focus on where we are, not how we got here right now, if that makes sense. As far as global conflicts go, I believe it's like 224 aid workers have died in gaza which is not a normal number in any kind of war so i that's according to the un yeah a hundred journalists right like every there is one person i can think of who has worked with in gaza who is still alive everyone i know has lost family members uh yeah and that's just my tiny slice you know i'm by no means as affected by this as most people but yeah the three times as many children have

died since october in gaza as are normally killed in conflicts in a year worldwide like it's fucking horrific and uh yeah we would do well to like put aside our differences and make it stop, I think. Yeah, I agree. Opposition to genocide and wanting to end it should be a very big tent. And the fact that some people on the internet are trying to make it a smaller one doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. It promotes infighting, which is not helpful right now. Yeah, it is helpful to not call it a war and continue calling it a genocide because

that's what it is. So yeah, just continuing to change all the rhetoric around this genocide, I think is important. This is also not the first time that Israel has directly targeted aid workers that are clearly labeled as aid workers. In 2006 in Lebanon, Israel struck a Red Cross ambulance right in the center of the logo, right on top of the truck. The van was a Red Cross, a clear Red Cross, and it struck right in the center. I think that image is now going around again. It's from 2006 again. It's not first time that israel has directly targeted aid workers and i think it's really appalling seeing uh leadership in israel just kind of apologize half-heartedly being like this was a mistake and then they just move on it's if this was the red line for people i one i find that frustrating but if it's finally the red line for people i just hope it continues

and people don't let it go there's that story that was absolutely fucking heartbreaking right of that young girl who was trapped in her car and she called the ambulance and the ambulance came and they bombed the ambulance right and they killed her and they killed the ambulance drivers like those two ambulance drivers were palestinian they were working for the palestinian red crescent they deserve every bit as much outrage as the world central kitchen people do and what they did with every bit as admirable um but like if this is what it takes for people to change then like i hope that they will also acknowledge that everything else that happened before was an atrocity too talking of like atrocities we we have an advertising break now. That was good, James.

Good job. And we're back. Charles, you recently got some online attention for a video that you posted that was highlighting the vast imbalance of attention that the targeted assassination of the aid workers got in comparison to the murder and genocide of Palestinians. Specifically, people were talking about how there was also a Palestinian driver who was murdered along with the aid workers and his name was not getting mentioned. His name is Saif Issam Abu Taha. And just a reminder of how frustrating it is that this had to be the red line

for people, there are over 33,000 people in Gaza who have been murdered, nearly half of which are children. There are probably thousands more who are trapped under the rubble, and other thousands that are just unaccounted for because of the bombing of hospitals and the lack of records. So to have the killing of six aid workers be a red line for people, that's what I mean by saying it's frustrating because it is a tragedy. But tragedy has been taking place for the past six months and also the past 76 years. So, yes, the video that Charles made got some well-deserved attention. And I'd love for you to talk about it a little bit.

Yeah, so this was like a strange convergence of things for me because I had been keeping up with the WCK team as they went into Gaza. I'd actually even been in conversations with some of them about potentially going there, but I hadn't, I mean, like these were just buddies from a humanitarian trip. I mean, you know, like James probably knows you make friends really fast when you're connected, when you're in these sorts of scenarios. And, you know, I had, I made friendships while I was in Turkey that I've maintained. But then my Palestinian advocacy was separate. I'm over here educating and everything. And then suddenly there's this convergence of former co-workers on this team dying, and then it being the fault of this regime that I've spent the last six months trying to educate people on why it's bad. And I posted a video, which was my tribute to the fallen WCK employees who were very close friends of people that I got really close to on that project.

It was a tribute to them and also a way of pointing out how their martyrdom has been, has overshadowed the martyrdom of so many Palestinians who will never get the kind of press and attention that they did. And I think it achieved that effect. The video went very, very viral. It's exceeded a million views on TikTok. It's at around a quarter of a million on Instagram. And more than that on the accounts that have reposted and shared it, sometimes without the context that I am not a World Central Kitchen employee, nor do I represent the opinions of the organization. And one of the things that I think made that story go viral is that I did shift the attention to, I said, this is a genocide. And I said, as grieved as I am at the loss of these people that I have this connection with, I do want to point out that it is overshadowing the horrendous with a lot of people. It also resonated with my former, you know, my friends at WCK who reached out to say, we appreciate you using your platform to talk about this, especially considering the fact that WCK employees do not typically are not really supposed to be making statements online about this. So they have a little more leeway with that concerning the fact that the head of the organization has explicitly now condemned Israel for this strike. But I've had

some very interesting conversations with friends of mine that either still work or are connected to the organization. And that's a slightly complicated thing because World Central Kitchen subcontracts with so many different people. So at any given point, there are people who are connected to World Central Kitchen who are not representatives of the organization or technically employees. So, you know, you can't say definitively, this is what the majority of people in WCK feel about Gaza or Israel or anything. You know, different people have different opinions about that whole situation. I think what you tried to do was obviously not to represent them

and it would be disingenuous so i don't want to suggest you did but the internet does that i want to talk about one more talking of disingenuous things on the internet i guess there was this thing that went around immediately in the aftermath of the photos coming out of the different people's corpses that like it seemed to be mostly like tankies or perhaps people who still believe that they can generate revenue from views on twitter saying that like because these people had a security team the security team was somehow spies and this is evidence they were working for israel right like and you can speak to your experience charles like i've worked with security teams and seen people working with security teams

all over the fucking world because war is dangerous and you have the thing that everyone needs. If you have the misfortune of being a veteran of the global war on terror, you have very few outlets for your skill set. One of those is providing security for humanitarian actors and journalists. And that is one of the most pro-social applications of your skill set. Yeah, there are a lot of worse things to do with those skills, believe me. Right.

Very good point. So I have encountered a lot of people in my time in Ukraine and elsewhere who have decided to turn their sort of military intelligence background experience into, you know, well, okay, I'm good at this, I'm familiar with these types of scenarios. And if there's one thing I'm decent at, it's, well, at least trying to, to keep people safe and give them intelligence. And that is a, that's never a guarantee. But in all the people I've met who actually are legit, you know, security consultants, or just veterans who have applied their skills towards a pro social humanitarian purpose are pretty good guys. And while I'm sure,

you know, there are some of them who are connected to various, still connected to sort of the intelligence services of their various countries. I think that's definitely a possibility. A lot of them are not. They're just veterans who are trying to help. And this is a way that they can make a living while doing something that has a low moral hazard. So, yeah, I dismiss that stuff.

There's a lot of conspiracies the problem is i mean in the vacuum of the sort of post-manufacturing consent world where none of us trust the western liberal media a lot of people trust stuff that's even dumber including just like takes on the internet that somebody pulled out of their ass. And a lot of it is if you if you have set yourself up against everything that comes out of the West, then every everything that looks like a fingerprint of an intelligence agency, or anything is going to ring your alarm bells. Obviously, you know, James, I feel like Ukraine is a great example of this. The fact that the United States supports Ukraine means that Ukraine must be the villain and that the entire thing must be a CIA psyop and there's spies everywhere. And I'm a spy for

going to Ukraine and helping grandmothers get their insulin. All of those things have been said about Ukraine, about me, about, you know, that sort of thing. And we know it's not true. It's just that people, I mean, these, as far as I know were these were guys who were security consultants very similar to I work with a lot of British veterans of the global war on terror basically on various different projects some of it having to do with PTSD others having to do with environmental conservation some of whom have worked in Palestine and been in the West Bank and i think brits by and large have a more sane perspective on palestine than than people in the u.s do i've just noticed that there are like fewer ultra zionist brits than americans i think our politics is less dominated by that perspective there are

ultra zionist british people but yeah it's also just i think a little bit harder to live a life in Britain where you don't know, if not Palestinian people, Arab people and Muslim people. And that complete demonization and dehumanization of Muslim people that the Western media did for 20 years to manifest your consent for war that wasn't about weapons of mass destruction or women in Afghanistan. for war that wasn't about weapons of mass destruction or women in afghanistan it doesn't stick the landing quite so well when like you have friends and you can you can kind of see through the nonsense yeah yeah well also i think the percentage of like evangelical christians was probably much less uh yeah no one's breeding a fucking red cow in england to take it to this third temple that i know of that was one of the things I was going to point out is I don't think you even have to know, like to be a Zionist, you don't even have to know Jewish people in the US. I was raised an ultra Zionist without knowing a single Jewish family because I came from an

evangelical community in South Carolina that was very Christo-nationalist, very kind of culturally dispensationalist, even though my family wasn't dispensationalist. It was all about in times you support Israel because that's where, you know, that's where Jesus is going to come back. So, yeah, I remember,

I mean, I, I, we even had like fake Passover ceremonies in our church. God, this is, this is bringing up some, some interesting.

Yeah. Into the trauma box. But truly, I mean, one of my, one of my early sort of i i would say i was i was completely anti-zionist before i was even a leftist and part of that reason was because i got to know a palestinian friend in washington dc while sharing a desk with an israeli conservative and a liberal

zionist wow that is and yeah it's and yeah joke like these people walking to a bar yeah trio of people so i like i think i had kind of i got pilled on palestine part of it was because like i was a history major in college so i learned historiography i just never applied historiography to the israel palestine conflict and then having these two voices in my ear while like living and working in DC, I was like, oh, I need to actually look into this. And so, yeah, I mean, I would say even before I was like a leftist, I was down on Israel. I figured they were not the good guys. And then I think reading The Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky really solidified that. And obviously, Ilan Pape kind of was the nail in the coffin for me.

And speaking of what happens in D.C. and Americans' opinions on the Middle East, most of them are dogshit opinions because most people do not have some sort of strong point of reference to this zone.

But it goes back to what we were saying about how being against genocides should be a very big tent and we should resist efforts to make it smaller. Because I'm reading through the Hundred Years War on Palestine right now, Rashid Khali. And one of the things that he said is how the war is fought in the United States in Congress because we hold the keys. So as much as it's as painful as it is to try and change the minds of dumb Americans with no geopolitical understanding, it's absolutely essential to holding Israel to account. It is actually one of the best things that you can do. And when someone who has the international appeal of Chef Jose Andres points the finger at Israel and said, you killed my employees deliberately and you're starving Gazans, that goes a long way towards shifting the opinions of the people who actually hold the keys to everything

israel does yeah i think that's a very good point and like um that's what we need to do right like stop stop them getting bombs to kill people not argue on twitter or you know instagram or what have you like we need to make the make the killing stop i wonder like you spoke a chance about knowing people i know world central kitchen are no longer working in gaza for the time being from what is that still correct they they've publicly announced that they're scaling back their efforts yes i i'm not sure if they're going to totally close down their operation. I think right now they're probably trying to reconsider their security protocols before making another step.

Yeah. I mean, I don't really know what has, there are things of course, but like they did attempt to de-conflict, I guess. And they were using a road, which is designated for the use that they were using it for.

Israel knew where they were. They have to report where they are. I mean, it would be fucking crazy if Israel attacked aid workers again right now. But also, it's Israel. I mean, yeah, also they've done crazier things, yeah. But can we dwell on that for a second? Like, Israel constantly boasts about its ISR capabilities. ISR is Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance.

So Israel is constantly reassuring people that it is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties. It talks about its chain of command for approval. And in light of that, none of the things that they've said about this make any sense whatsoever because if if their protocols because they're either it's like they can't decide what they're trying to gaslight the world into believing every claim that they're making is muddling what they're trying to get the world to believe about them and it just gives everyone the distinct impression that they're recklessly incompetent lying evil or potentially all three right like even if you look i was because i don't know why this is the thing that i do

i was looking at like trying to work out what munition israel had used right to to destroy those vehicles and um israel has they have a number of different sort of munitions that they could have used but one of the things that they do in the u.s does it too but it's it's a it's a bigger thing with israel is if they have inert or low yield hellfire munitions so like guided munitions that are fired from a helicopter or a drone and they use them to do a thing that they call roof knocking right which sounds maybe like you're like knocking on someone's roof what you're doing is sending a missile through somebody's roof and that is the means by which you alert them to evacuate the building because you're planning a larger strike that in itself yeah we have this great isr capability and what do we what do we do with it

we we we launch missiles into the homes of civilians and then hopefully they will run away in fear for their lives so that more of them don't die when we blow up that block 10 minutes later like it's just you know you have to look at what's happening not what's being said i guess but no they're absolutely allergic to accountability and i think you can see just how far they've been they're scrambling now because they've been able to get away with so much for so long and their excuses are falling apart because they're alternatively depicting themselves as a highly disciplined and professional you know army or that they're just making mistakes because it's war and that people should get off their back

because no one holds anyone else to the same standard they hold israel so it's like which is it like what are you trying to get the world to believe? Are you either this crack disciplined unit with a very sophisticated chain of command and an AI software that you're really proud of for targeting? Or is this the fog of war and you're just making mistakes and everyone makes mistakes and we should get off your back for it? Because you can't have it both ways.

The civilian casualties are too high for you to have it both ways. So either you are making mistakes and too many people are getting killed and you're violating the lawless rule or you're doing it deliberately which is worse yeah people can make up their own minds i guess charles thank you so much for joining us today i really respect all the work you do and i am grateful that you have shared your voice with our audience once again. Where can people find you on the internet if you want to be found? Thank you, Shrein.

Yeah, just you can find me pretty much everywhere except Twitter with Charles McBride. And that's McBride with a Y rather than an I. It's on Substack, Instagram, TikTok. And my website, charlesmcbride.com, will be live at this point. Nice. When this episode drops. If you want to support the humanitarian work I've been involved in in Ukraine, you can support Mission Harkiv. On Instagram, it's mission.harkiv.

And their website is missionharkiv.com. and their website is missionharkiv.com. And if you're looking for an org that is already working in Gaza to provide life-saving aid in the wake of UNRWA being gone, World Central Kitchen now pulling out, ANERA pulling out, Global Empowerment Mission is still there

and still fulfilling a lot of the same functions that those organizations were doing. Thank you so much, Charles. Shireen and James from the future here giving you an update about the article that we mentioned at the top of the episode. So the title itself is I resigned from World Central Kitchen because they refused to tell the truth about the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The ex-staffer is Ramzi Talhami. The article itself has some really damning information about WCK. So we're going to get into it. He says for months, World Central Kitchen leadership censored material coming out of its Gaza operation

and refused to honor staff concerns about their work there. And even though they're finally taking a stand after its personnel have been murdered, it is much too late. So he resigned in early March of this year. And at the time, he was the only staff member of Palestinian descent at WCK. And there is an amendment there. He says that while WCK hired many Palestinian contractors in Gaza and Egypt, he was the only Palestinian with staff status following the departure of one other longtime employee. And he resigned in protest of the extensive, unexplained censorship regarding Gaza at the organization. They talk about how in December 7th of last year, they sent a letter to WCK's executive team.

And that letter called for WCK to join other regionally active NGOs in calling for a ceasefire and condemning Israel's blockade, as well as conforming its language and coverage of Gaza to the standard that was set by the coverage of Ukraine, as well as stopping meal service in Israel. as stopping meal service in Israel. It got 43 signatures and the WCK executive team declined to meet up with the people that signed the letter and they failed to respond to any inquiries. And they also actively still served the meals in Israel while the second day of the ICJ genocide hearing was happening in January. There's one paragraph that I want to dial out as as well just because i think it's very crucial

when we're discussing the fact that these people died working for central kitchen and that's uh this paragraph that i'll just pick up halfway through in another instance a video of a wck kitchen caught in an idf bombing was put on hold entirely it appears this incident as well as the fact that wck personnel were aboard a un convoy that was bombed have not been mentioned anywhere externally like i think that's a really crucial getting off point you can have shit politics but if you're not saying stuff when your people are getting bombed like until they're getting killed a i don't know what's wrong with you and b if you didn't change things i don't know if they didn't change things right that's not

detailed here but like you have to change things if your people are being bombed like if i'm working somewhere where that's a likelihood you know like if if we get bombed once and we're lucky enough to be okay we do not continue doing the same shit and i'm not entirely sure that they did i don't want to for a moment suggest that like this the people who died were in like complicit right that's not what i'm saying it's not what shireen's saying i very much understand the desire to to go to places where dangerous things are happening and help the people who did nothing to deserve this and i think the people who did that deserve our unending gratitude and respect um i'm not for a minute saying that that's not true i'm saying that this organization needs to really think about how it does shit if it wants to continue operating and yeah the blame is on the executives of this organization. The article also talks about how the character of WCK's relief response to Gaza, it was revealed very early on after October 7th.

The chief communications officer, Linda Roth, she had put out a statement without the communications team's input, which is apparently breaking precedent. And it was about how Hamas attacked Israel with no mention of the Palestinian lives that were lost. And then three days later, Jose Andres posted a video to WCK's Instagram where he only makes reference to the October 7th attack with no mention of the climbing Palestinian death toll at the time or the blockades. And then on social media, Charles mentioned this at the episode. On October 16th, he tweeted at the Spanish prime minister to be removed for her protest of the Israeli tactics. And at the same time, WCK continued to work closely with the IDF over the course of the relief response. Andre's video were decisions that were made by leadership against the concerns of the WCK personnel. There's this paragraph that I want to read just verbatim. Much of the work in a genocide is not pulling the trigger, but instead minimizing and denying that a genocide is going on.

Genocide is a phenomenon of gradual boundary pushing. Each increment must be accepted by the parties with agency for the next to be reached. Under the direction of CEO Aaron Gore, Linda Roth, and quote, Chief Feeding Officer Jose Andres, World Central Kitchen recklessly endangered its personnel, shelflessly exploited the situation for its own benefit, and actively participated in the normalization of an ongoing genocide. I think what I want to say more broadly here it's my stance i guess maybe other people share it maybe they don't this situation is not going to be solved by ngos and it's certainly

not going to be solved by ngos which have this very explicitly neoliberal political agenda right like at best they can plug a hole in a leaky bucket and it's good when they do that right if one less person starves, that's good. It doesn't mean they don't have to be perfect to help, but they don't get to be exempted from criticism because they're helping, right? Like World Central Kitchen didn't want to help us at the border in Hukumba.

My friends reached out. They didn't want to do that. Yeah, I don't think you should expect NGOs to share your radical politics. It doesn't mean that they can't do harm reduction. And it doesn't mean that when they are doing harm reduction, Yeah, I don't think you should expect NGOs to share your radical politics. It doesn't mean that they can't do harm reduction. It doesn't mean that when they are doing harm reduction, they sometimes need your money.

And in the situations where this is happening, you should give it to them if you can't help more directly, right? But if we look at their communications, we do see them calling for a ceasefire, which is about what you can expect from an NGO. It appears that we see Jose Andres calling for a ceasefire which is about what you can expect from an NGO you know we'd actually it appears that we see Jose Andres calling for a ceasefire and we see world central kitchen saying Jose Andres called for a ceasefire which I don't quite know why they don't just say we are calling for a ceasefire they didn't sign that document with the other NGOs like that I don't know if they're trying to play like have it both ways I don't know I don't I'm not privy to

those conversations right they didn't sort of wholeheartedly say this is a genocide but they have to get permission for israel to do stuff i mean now they're saying it but uh after the atrocity that happened the whole world is watching right not that the whole world shouldn't have been watching from the start but like i don't think ngos are ever going to be you know it's radical there's people on the internet want them for they're also they're doing stuff and people on the internet aren't so you know we have to respect that and i don't want any of this to take away from the fact that some people from all over the world right from europe From Europe, from Australia, from the United States have died

feeding people who needed to be fed because like that's the most any of us can give is our lives, right? And so I don't for a minute want any of this to detract from the sacrifice they made, nor should their sacrifice be held in any higher regard than the sacrifice made by hundreds if not thousands of palestinian aid workers right people working for the palestinian red crescent um a palestinian even the palestinian people working for international ngos right or the the united nations people who have been killed right um none of those sacrifices should be ignored or undermined because those people have certainly given a lot more than i have i don't have any right to to say that i think

yeah this org it changes communications right i think they've obviously realized that like there is no nicely nicely about this like you have to call a spade a spade when it comes to what's happening in gaza which is a deliberate and targeted attempt to kill civilians, thousands and tens of thousands of children even. And I think until we move the conversation on to one where that is being called by its name, that is to say genocide, then I don't think we'll see the reactions that we need.

And I think they appear to have reflected on that. I wish they'd got there sooner, but they're there now. And I'm sorry that it took these people's lives to get there. But what I see from them is what I see from other NGOs. It's not, they're not certainly not uniquely bad. In fact, there are better than very many NGOs. And they were there when other people weren't and they're delivering food when other people weren't.

So I don't want, I don't want to distract from that, but yeah, this messaging, this internal conduct like there's some of these internal messages they are troubling and like it did again it's just what i expect from any other ngo whereas i've seen these guys do things in many ways that are better than other NGOs but none of that messaging takes away from these people giving their lives and i don't want to suggest that. I think the most telling thing is that they're making the biases of their the top people that work for this company very evident. In the article it goes into Linda Roth's background and her pro-Israeli stances in the past and the fact that in all the outwardly facing materials about Gaza it was very typical to

change the word siege to conflict or to question the blockades. It talks about how the people at the very top, their biases just seeped through and the people that were actually working for the organization were in disagreement with this. I think the last thing I want to read from this article just really highlights that WCK did not protect the people that worked for them. It says, save the possibility of genuine incompetence, the WCK leadership's decisions were not made to maintain neutrality, did not increase effectiveness, and as April 1st demonstrated, did not protect personnel. The leadership's failure to honestly portray the dire reality in Gaza and lack of an attempt to influence the genocide in Gaza via its status and close ties to the Biden administration means that they bear responsibility for its outcomes. Let no one say they did everything they could. And this is obviously talking about the leadership versus the personnel.

And then he goes on to close the article saying that his experience is one experience. And when he resigned, there was a palpable widespread atmosphere of disappointment among the staff and employees and he ends with just calling on current and former WCK employees contractors and volunteers to publicly share their stories as well in order to force accountability and change yeah look if you work for central kitchen you can message us i'm here to hear your stories that yeah yeah we just wanted to make sure that this perspective was shared and again the article will be in the description so please give it a good read but yeah that is the episode thanks for listening free palestine We'll see you next time. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite 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. Radio 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. at betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And when things fall apart, one of the things that happens is you get a bunch of, a lot of opportunities for a lot of weird little guys, a lot of Nazis and other kinds of scum start,

you know, sliding up to the surface in the hopes that they can get some of the sweet, sweet oxygen of collapse. And that's why we brought on to the program and are bringing into the network our good friend, Molly Conger, for a little recurrent series I like to call Look Who's Stalking. That was the stalking joke I wanted to open the episode with Molly. For me, attorneys, I am not stalking anyone. I would never do that. That is a crime. This is reporting. It is reporting. And the line between reporting and stalking, always clear. You know, I think it's on the publication. You know, I think it's on the publication.

Yeah, yeah. So, Robert, today's topic is such a perfect mashup of so many of my favorite things. It couldn't be more my speed unless this whole story took place on a wiener dog ranch, right? Yeah. This story has city council meetings that got rowdy. It has Unite the Right attendee getting doxxed. It has the internal comms of a hate group getting leaked. It has regular ass people putting their foot down about hate in their town.

It is a years-long arc of one man's journey from fucking around to finding out. His evolution from chanting, you will not replace us, to getting replaced at the ballot box. This is the story of Enid, Oklahoma, Ward 1 City Commissioner Judson Gannon Blevins. Oh my God. Oh, we're going back to my old home. That's right. You spent some time in Oklahoma as a kid. So Judd Blevins was raised in the town of Enid, Oklahoma. And the listener, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is the story of a small town. And I'll be honest, I did. I'd never heard of Enid. But you grew up in the area. Do you have any sort of pre-existing notions of Garfield County?

Yeah, I mean, Enid was like a bigger place. I grew up in Idabel, which was really out in the sticks. So kind of everywhere was more civilization than Idabel. But Enid certainly was. Although not much. No one would accuse it of much civilization. It is apparently the ninth largest city in Oklahoma, which is surprising to me. It's an hour and a half outside of Oklahoma City, 76% white, 60% Republican.

And according to a 2021 article on Yahoo News that reads like it was written by an intoxicated chatbot, it is ranked one of the most conservative cities in the country. Yeah, that all scans for Enid. Now that scans for a lot of cities in Oklahoma, mind you. Right, they could have named any of them. Yeah. But it has a population of about 50,000, which is actually the same size as Charlottesville, my hometown, and a city that Judson Blevins happened to visit in the summer of 2017. In 2018, the former U.S. Marine moved back to his hometown

to work at his father's roofing business. In 2019, he was publicly identified as a regional leader in a white supremacist organization. And in 2022, he announced he was running for office. And in 2022, he announced he was running for office. I mean, that all that's a very Oklahoma politician route. It's also like a not a lot like from from roofing to white supremacy, not a wildly uncommon route for people to take in Oklahoma. Don't worry, he's still doing both. Oh, good. I mean, you never want to give up on your passion for roofing. That would have made me sad. Although some of his supporters have pointed out that he hires lots of non-white people to do

manual labor. So how could he be racist? Yeah, I mean, you don't want to get up on those roofs yourself. That's dangerous. It's hard job. It's hot out. Yeah, this is all pretty Oklahoma so far. On February 14th, 2023, Judd Blevins narrowly won a seat on the Eden City Council, defeating the incumbent by just 36 votes. His past ties to the now defunct white supremacist group Identity Europa were no secret. Of course, by 2023, Identity Europa didn't exist anymore. So I don't blame you if you don't have a clear memory of exactly what kind of Nazi group they were. And I want to make it very clear. I don't want time, distance, and white polo shirts to soften this. Identity Europa was a neo-Nazi organization. Oh, yeah. They were also just like the most infiltrated group of the Trump era. Like of all the Nazi orgs in the Trump era,

I feel like they were the one where every week someone else got inside their comms. Well, I guess Blevins may be part to blame for that as the regional coordinator. Oh, good. So he was doing a great job. But Identity Europa was modeled after the far-right French identitarian movement and sought the creation of a white ethnostate. The You Will Not Replace Us chants you remember from Unite the Right were actually popularized by Identity Europa at their rallies earlier that year. earlier that year. And according to testimony from a former girlfriend, one-time Identity Europa leader

Elliot Klein considered himself, quote, an unironic exterminationist. He had violent fantasies about killing Jewish people himself. So it's not just guys hanging out, right? No.

Identity Europa was founded in 2016 by Nathan D'Amico, a former Marine who went to prison after drunkenly pulling a gun on a cab driver for, quote, looking Iraqi. Well, I guess at least he's honest.

But while he was doing his time, he read David Duke's autobiography. Oh. And he had an awakening, right? He read My Awakening and he had an awakening in prison yeah yeah yeah you know you go to prison for a hate crime you read a little david duke you get some ideas man it it's not a good book like that's my thing about having david duke's autobiography be like your life-changing event is it's not a a good book, right? Which I guess neither was Mein Kampf,

but I feel like everyone's lying about that one. So according to some, this is so off the beaten path here, but I have to say it. According to some payments that came out in a divorce proceeding, David Duke made payments to Kevin Strom for ghostwriting it. Kevin Strom is the pedophile who actually said that thing that people think voltaire said about the jews oh cool yeah great so just something to think about when you're reading david duke's autobiography in prison i guess i mean i guess i i had wondered what happens to pedophiles like when they're back out in the world. How do you get work as a pedophile? Oh, he has a much younger wife now.

No, that was before. Yeah, no, he's got a kid now. Oh, what? No, he shouldn't do that. Yeah. How is that? Okay, great. Not allowed to live near a school, but I guess they can't stop you from procreating.

We should evaluate some of that. I don't know. Anyway, back to our friend Nate, right? So Nathan D'Amico gets out of prison, makes his own hate group. You may also remember him as the guy who bravely beat the shit out of a 95-pound woman at the rally in Berkeley in April of 2017. Oh, yeah. And they memed the hell out of that. They squeezed it for all it was worth.

They used that image of him beating that woman in the street for promotion and recruitment. They used that image of him beating that woman in the street for promotion and recruitment. D'Amico himself touted a spike in membership applications, which he attributed to the popularity of the video. Identity Europa was heavily involved in the Summer of Hate, that rash of violent white supremacist rallies across the country in 2017. They were instrumental in planning his Unite the Right rally. But when the group's Discord server was leaked in March of 2019 and published in full by Unicorn Riot, their leader at the time, Patrick Casey, quickly announced a rebrand. Identity Europa is no more. They were the American Identity Movement now, much to the displeasure of the American Indian Movement, whose acronym they stole. But the rebrand was not successful, and the group died out

completely in 2020. And Casey tried to pretend the rebrand wasn't just an attempt to escape the fallout of the leak, but it really was the leak that killed Identity Europa. At least seven active duty military members were identified in the leak. A school resource officer at a high school in Virginia was suspended. A Minnesota National Guardsman was recalled from basic training. So Judd Blevins was just one of dozens of members of the group to be identified in those chat logs. The work of anti-fascist researchers who identified Blevins was just one of dozens of members of the group to be identified in those chat logs. The work of anti-fascist researchers who identified Blevins in the leaked chats was corroborated and published in an article on Right-Wing Watch by Jared Holt within weeks. And it's about as solid as an ID as you could hope for from a chat log,

or depending on your position, the kind of ID you really don't want. A user called Conway was Identity Europa's regional coordinator for Oklahoma. He recruited and vetted new members, organized outings for banner drops and social events, and frequently posted pictures of the white supremacist propaganda he'd been putting up, encouraging others to do the same and offering tips on how to create more effective visuals for the group's online accounts. In over 1,100 posts over a nearly two-year period, he left a lot of clues. He posted a link to an article in his hometown paper, the Enid News and Eagle. He posted a photo of a relative's baby, details about his parents' lineage, his plans to move home to work for his father's

business. And in the lead-up to the Unite the Right rally, he excitedly shared in the Discord that he would be carrying the original flag of the state of Oklahoma, a red rectangle with the number 46 inside of a white star. And photos from the rally show just one man carrying that distinctive flag that was designed by a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, Judd Blevins. As he grew into his role as regional coordinator for Identity Europa, he coordinated member meetups, getting several guys from Oklahoma to drive down to Texas for a get-together. Conway posted about the meetup, and photos posted by other attendees show Blevins standing shoulder to shoulder with other members holding a large Identity Europa banner. Conway even posted about his appearance on a 2018 episode of Identity Europa's podcast, where he emphasized the importance of staying in the you-will-not-replace-us mindset. So by the time he announced his run for office in 2022, it had been over three years since he'd been out at his Conway,

the hate group member who attended the Unite the Right rally. And you could see why he would think it would work, right? Because that you replace us thing it's become like the mainstream republican politics right like this this um ideology has at least one in the republican party but it's also one divorced from these guys because even they are like they're they're too toxic for even the modern republicans like it's it, it's remarkable, but I also get why he thought this would work. And I think, I mean, I don't, I don't know what his connection remained to other members of IE after it dissolved, but towards the end of it, as it was dying, right? So under Elliot Klein, you know, Klein wanted to make a militia for Richard Spencer. He wanted to,

you know, build IE into a fighting force, But under Patrick Casey, they sort of moved back towards we should be trying to influence inside of politics. We should be going to colleges and getting, you know, conservative students to become more based. Right. So this this is a rational course of conduct, I think, for where he was in 2019 when Identity Europa died. But in any case, by 2022, anybody in Enid, you could read his posts praising Hitler and celebrating Identity Europa for striking fear into the heart of the Jew, his words. You could see pictures of him at Unite the Right, both on the morning of the 12th in the park and the evening of the 11th with a torch. You could see pictures of him going to Texas for IE meetups. You could see the dozens and dozens of photos

he posted in the discord of Nazi posters and stickers he had put up on telephone poles and college bulletin boards across Oklahoma and the posts where he reveled in the media coverage of the recruitment materials he left inside library books. His hometown newspaper, the Enid News and Eagle, ran an article about the allegations, which he never denied, a month before the election. And without ever having to give a straight answer on the issue, he won. And that could have been the end of the story, right? You know, we've seen this trend in the last few years of these radical right-wing elements trying to melt into the mainstream Republican Party. You know, got these horrible little groipers working in congressional staff positions and, you know, Nazis going to CPAC and not getting ejected. They're getting out of the streets

and into the meeting rooms. Yeah. An account tied to Blevins that he recently, for the first time, denied this was him. It's him. This has been widely reported uh it was a twitter account called at abolish journalism posted in 2019 quote i agree with the argument gop cannot be changed from the bottom up however i do not believe in discouraging our guys from getting elected into smaller offices such as city council county commissioner or, or even state legislators. Basically, positions where one can fly under the radar, yet still be effective. And that's what this is, right? This isn't a guy who got out of white nationalist organizing and in an unrelated fashion became a local politician. No, he said years before he did this, that this was a good idea

that he had. You know, he never said, I renounce my previous actions and beliefs. I regret being an active recruiter for a hate group. He just changed the way he was doing it. And he said countless opportunities to be clear about what he believes today and whether that's different from the beliefs he espoused between 2017 and 2019. And he won't. He won't say, I no longer identify with the posts I made when I was enthusiastically posting the 14 words. And that's probably because he just found a better way to do it.

But there were people in Enid, Oklahoma, who saw right through that. Yeah, this is where the story takes a turn that like, I don't know, it made me hopeful, because the first time I ever met a Klansman was, you know, in Oklahoma. It was the dad of a friend of mine. Like, this kid bragged about it, and I didn't know what a Klansman was, and I had to go to my parents and be like, hey, so-and-so said this about his dad. What does that mean?

And my mom was just like, well, you're not allowed to go to his house anymore. That's what that means. Jesus. Jesus Christ. If this guy had like, if shit had gone well for him, I guess that would have been my assumption. But that was my assumption based on me not giving a fair shake to Enid, Oklahoma. Right. I think that's, you know, what's so remarkable about this story is people didn't think Oklahoma could do it. But you know who can accomplish everything they set out to do? Uh-huh. That's right. These sponsors, all of whom are available in Enid, Oklahoma.

And we're back. Okay. Alrighty, so... I'm happy to hear the next part of this. Blevins took office in May of 2023. Local election law requires a six-month wait between being sworn in and when a recall attempt can be initiated. But the residents who opposed Blevins didn't wait quietly. A group called the Enid Social Justice Committee protested his swearing in, with some protesters holding posters bearing a photo of Blevins holding a torch at the August 11, 2017 Nazi march at the University of Virginia. And now this, I didn't even think about it until I was

writing this, that what an incredible coincidence of timing, right? So May, 2023, he's being sworn into office. It was just, I think maybe two weeks before he was sworn in that the first indictment was unsealed against the guys who are now facing felony charges for participating in that torch march, right? So he was, we did an episode on this a little bit ago but if you're not familiar that the guys who marched in that torch march at uva in 2017 some of them are now being charged with a felony under virginia law for burning an object with intent to intimidate it's obviously a sort of a law aimed at the clan right sort of a cross-burning type law but they were burning they had these burning objects and they were menacing people it was racially motivated so they're being

charged with this felony for burning an object fair it does it does feel like that's yeah a pretty good fit but so right as he's being sworn in you know these people are protesting his swearing in with this photo of him with the torch and And a couple of guys just showed up in jail here in Charlottesville on that charge. So it's just a remarkable cognitive dissonance, right? To see these people, some of his supporters and Enid downplaying the seriousness or even outright denying that Blevins attended this rally. But the guys he was standing next to that day are pleading guilty to felonies you know he's up there voting on resolutions and passing ordinances about you know stormwater management or whatever i think

one of his accomplishments in office was getting a texas roadhouse in enid first off you shouldn't be proud of having a texas roadhouse anywhere as a i my job used to it might have been a sizzler i can't remember something like that i would be much more excited for a sizzler than a Texas fucking roadhouse. I'll say that much. But, you know, he's up there getting a, you know, affordable chain steak restaurant in Enid, but there's a non-zero chance that he could be arrested at any time and extradited on a felony charge. I mean, look, if there's one thing that's appropriate for the sizzler, it's knowing that the guy who put that sizzler there could be arrested on a felony charge at any moment. You know, we don't know what the strategy is. The prosecutor's office,

obviously, they're not going to charge everybody who is there, but it's on the table, right? Like, he's on video at that march with the torch in his hand. He fits the criteria for the 10 other guys that have already gone to jail for this. But in November of 2023, those six months had passed. Recall's on the table now. And before the group made the final push to actually file for the recall, they made an offer of reconciliation. All Blevins has to do is acknowledge the truth, denounce his past actions, just own up to it, start making amends, just say, yes, I did that. No, I don't do it anymore. And he can't do it throughout this

entire ordeal. He's never owned up to it. There are pictures and video and his own words across multiple online accounts. There's no plausible deniability here. There's no saying, well, maybe that's not him. It's him. So just admit it and say you're not that guy anymore. But he has consistently refused to even acknowledge it. On several occasions, when really pressed, he dismisses that 2019 article by Jared Holt as, quote, a hit piece posted four years ago by a George Soros-funded leftist outlet, a hit piece posted four years ago by a George Soros-funded leftist outlet, calling it smears and slander. Nothing smears somebody like their own words and actions.

I'm being defamed by this photograph of me. I'm being judged simply for the things I chose to do. I thought this was America. But he won't actually deny specific facts. He won't say, that say that isn't me in the photo or I did not participate in that or I did not post those nice things about Hitler. He just attacks the people saying it. of those council meetings in November of last year, a woman speaking in support of Blevins said the allegations weren't credible as they came from organizations like the SPLC that, quote, only exist to smear conservative Christians. There we go. First of all, the SPLC didn't publish it. It was Right Wing Watch and Huffington Post, but whatever, Susan. And it was at that same meeting that the council declined to even vote on a resolution to censure Blevins.

The council was putting forth a resolution to say, we don't agree with what that guy did. You know, it wasn't like punishing him. It didn't actually strip him of any powers. It didn't do anything except say, the rest of us, we don't like that. And they couldn't, they wouldn't even vote on it. It got tabled. the rest of us we don't like that and they couldn't they wouldn't even vote on it it got tabled and at that meeting commissioner derwin norwood the only black member of enid city council offered blevins his forgiveness and gave him a big hug and told him he loved him

never apologized right you can't forgive someone who hasn't apologized he He had never, and still has never, apologized. And he was pretty clear on where he stands on apologies, saying, I am not going to apologize for the lies that others tell. Yeah, it was a great meeting. I watched it from home. I had, you know, I love a meeting. Oh, yeah. No, that's, I mean, I don't understand it but uh i respect it so with their peace offering roundly rejected by an unapologetic blevins they moved forward to recall the enid social justice committee gathered enough signatures to put it to a vote and in january cheryl patterson threw her hat into the ring to replace blevins and to be clear this is still enid oklahoma where 60 of voters are registered republicans yeah this wasn't some liberal coup patterson is also a lifelong republican a candidate formed the

week before the election patterson was quick to say like right off the bat the second she opened her mouth she said contrary to the rumor i was not recruited by the enid social justice committee and she said you know she'd been thinking about running for a while. She loves Enid, but she was pushed to action by her opponent's inability to clearly denounce his past involvement with a white supremacist group. And it is remarkable, right,

to see conservative Republicans in the South saying like, that Nazi stuff is too much for me. Yeah. I mean, and that's like, that's actually an important part of turning this shit back is getting these people who are otherwise conservative to draw a line and actually hold to it because it, it at least arrests that rightward momentum to an extent.

And, and we're just not going to get out of this unless we have some of that. Right. I'm not, I'm not living in a fantasy land where the city of Enid, Oklahoma is represented by a council of six socialists. That's not on the table. I accept that. But at least their Republicans can say, ah, the 14 words is not my vibe. Yeah, literally participating in a white supremacist terrorist action is a line for us. And I'm glad there's a line. So, you know, she said she was inspired to run for office because he not because of what he did, but because he couldn't even denounce it, right? That, you know, people can grow and change. I pray that his heart moves, but he's unable to even denounce it. And he really

does seem incapable. The very first question at that forum the week before the election was about this. Obviously, a lot of the questions were. And he gave another non-denial, right? He said, this election is about the next three years of this city, not about organizations that disbanded five years ago. But he went on to say that he would, quote, gladly plead guilty to speaking out against what is being done to this country and the anti-white hatred in the media. So he tries to talk around the issue, saying, you know, he was just advocating for the same policies that got Donald Trump elected. But it's not like he was on the local Republican committee, right? He wasn't working on a GOP campaign. He was an organizer for a group that supported those policies of the

Trump administration explicitly because they believe those policies were a stepping stone towards the full Nazification of American politics. You know, the relationship between those two things, troubling, concerning, but you can't pretend there's no difference between voting republican and holding a torch at the nazi parade and that's what he's trying to do here he's trying to blur that line so you know i'm i'm just being punished for being a proud conservative and it's like which which part right people who's you know people who want free speech and it's like which word do you want to say and at no point during this recall campaign, from when they announced it in November to the election two weeks ago now, at no point during this recall campaign did he publicly denounce any of the white supremacists who supported him. white nationalist publication run by an English-born anti-immigration race scientist who lives in a castle in West Virginia, wrote fawning editorials which were promoted by prominent white nationalists,

including Identity Europa founder Nathan D'Amigo. Fascist Telegram channels provided guidance to subscribers about Oklahoma's campaign finance laws, which would allow them to donate to Blevins' campaign anonymously as long as they kept it under $50. According to reporting by Chris Mathias in Huffington Post, a man in Texas who runs a business with a known Patriot Front member donated nearly $2,000 to the campaign, which made up the bulk of the donated cash. And you might give him the benefit of the doubt and say, well, maybe he didn't know he was being endorsed by some of the largest elements in organized white supremacy in America. Sure. But he did. He did know. As a member of the city council, he definitely saw the letters that were addressed to the city council in support of Blevins from

the American Freedom Party, an explicitly white supremacist political party that occasionally runs a Nazi for president. But he said nothing. And when a constituent, Father James Neal, asked him directly why his campaign was funded by members of Patriot Front, he told the priest to, quote, shut up. Again, he chose the company of neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, white nationalists, and ethnostate enthusiasts. How can you expect people to believe you're not that guy anymore when you have their public praise, their endorsement, and their money in your pocket? But you know who does not have $2,000 in cash from Patriot Front in their pockets? No, no, they keep that shit in the I mean, they don't have it. Here's our sponsors.

And we're back. So on April 2nd, that's two weeks ago now as we're recording, the people of Enid returned to the polls. And Judd Blevins was voted out of office as Ward one city commissioner by a vote of 829 to 561. And I don't know if you're a math guy. I'm not a math guy. I'm going to get a calculator out for this bad boy. But this turnout was significantly larger than the vote that put him into office. A 72% increase in total votes. That's a lot. That's a lot more people who showed up to an off-cycle special election. Yeah. Yeah, that's specifically weird. And unlike the slim margin of just 36 votes that won him the 2023 election,

he lost the recall by nearly 20 points. That's a spanking. It's hard to chalk a loss like that up to a lunatic fringe, right? That's that's the electorate speaking. But Matthew Giebert, a former State Department employee who lost his job for failing to disclose his active involvement in white supremacist organizing, noted in his Telegram channel that while the loss is disappointing, an open white nationalist winning 40 percent of the vote is, quote, nothing nothing to despair over and you never got to hand it to the guy who hosts a podcast about the joys of nazi fatherhood or whatever yeah but the numbers are what they are you know he did win 40 of the vote yeah and this was after months of very public debate in the national spotlight that made it impossible not to know what the allegations were. And it's

not like these were just diehard conservatives who would walk into the voting booth and put their checkmark next to wherever the letter R was, right? In this election, the other name on the ticket was a Republican too. Like these were people who walked in there and knowingly and intentionally cast their vote for a guy who used to vet new members for a Nazi club. This isn't a fairy tale. It's reality, right? This wasn't an offensive win by progress or the left or what have you. This was an effective defense. And I hope conservatives can see a little lesson here, right? Like the story is too often one of ever ratcheting extremism. You can only win if you go further, if you go wilder, if you're appealing to the people who are on the absolute extreme end of what's acceptable to say

in the party. But this was a case where a fellow conservative said, hey, I want to take some books out of the library too. I'm not a liberal, but we just can't be out here saying the 14 words, right? And I think some of the buzz around this story comes from people in bigger cities or bluer states, I mean, honestly, I'm guilty of this as well, who were shocked that, you know, purple-haired liberals and progressive clergy even exist in a place like Enid, Oklahoma. But this red state, blue state dichotomy is a myth. Most places are purple. Most places are 60-40. Even in places that reliably, 100% of the time, vote Republican, there's still a large minority of people who are not represented by that. So even in a place like Enid, which is Republican at the polls, you have a pretty big

chunk of the population who isn't represented on that two-colored map. That doesn't mean they don't care. And when I watched those Enid City Council meetings, I saw Charlottesville, right? I've gone to every city council meeting in Charlottesville for the last seven years. Like I know what it looks like for people in a town that size to show up and say, what the fuck? What the fuck are you doing to us? Right? You know, it looked like one of our meetings. You know, I saw regular people, moms and students and grandmas and teachers and ladies who bring muffins to the church bake sale. People who know that their town can do better than to be represented by a guy who won't apologize for attending the largest Nazi rally on U.S. soil in our lifetimes. Yeah, and I feel a lot for the folks who are kind of not represented by either of the two big lines on the political map, and maybe most of the time feel like, I don't know what the fuck I can actually do or should do, but I know this Nazi shouldn't be in office.

were just regular people. These weren't party apparatchiks or, you know, this wasn't the Democrat Party doing this. This wasn't the Republican Party doing this. These were just people who didn't think that a Nazi should be their city commissioner. And that's, I think, another myth at play here, right, is that activist is some sort of separate class of person, that there is some portion of the population whose only goal in life is this nebulous, nefarious thing called activism. You know, it's sort of this boogey portion of the population whose only goal in life is this nebulous, nefarious thing called activism. You know, it's sort of this boogeyman of the professional troublemaker. And throughout this process, Blevins and his supporters have smeared the group organizing the recall, the Enid Social Justice Committee, as some kind of fringe radical group. They're antifa.

They're freaks. They're not like us. Yeah. You know, they're coming for our children. His recall campaign website called the petitioners an unhinged group of left-wing fringe activists and the campaign website didn't say what he could do for you it attacked the petitioners and said this is what they will do to you and i've i've seen this in my own city council meetings right this sort of bizarre tendency of

those in power to write off the people they don't want to hear from as activists well those those aren't people we need to listen to those are activists that's a different kind of person anyone who's asking for something they don't want to do something that's uncomfortable something that requires them to look inward or look at the structures they're upholding they undergo this instant metamorphosis from constituent to activist. This is no longer a voter or a constituent. This is a crazy person. This person isn't your neighbor anymore. They're an activist.

Yeah. I think, you know, there are people who wear that mantle proudly and why shouldn't they? It's a usually positive thing. of the word as some sort of delegitimizing cudgel is so consistent that i think it's worth thinking about when it gets used against the recipient's will yeah and there's no ending to this story right because this is never really over it is happening here it is happening there and i don't know what's next for Blevins. Maybe he just melts quietly back into society and puts roofs on houses. A week after the recall, he filed paperwork to change the name of his dad's contracting business from Invincible Contracting to Great Plains

Roofing. And the paperwork filed shows that the company is now registered. The company is now registered at his address, a house in Enid that he bought last summer with a VA loan. But now that he's free of the self-imposed restraint of running for office, maybe he leans into it and becomes this guy, right? Maybe he's just the guy that this happens to and he goes on the cancel culture grievance circuit. Maybe he goes full throttle and tries to get back into movement organizing. Maybe he goes full throttle and tries to get back into movement organizing. I think his failure to come out and really celebrate the movement and really own it and say, yes, I said that stuff and it's good. I think that failure, as they would perceive it, would hurt him a little bit if he tries to reenter the movement, but not so badly that he couldn't do it.

You know, they're so desperate for new material that they would probably embrace him if he wanted to be the figurehead of the month. Yeah. Hopefully he just does the roofing thing, though. Yeah. Yeah, hopefully he does the roofing thing and then the falling off the roof thing and then... You know he's not doing the work himself. He doesn't even have a contracting license. I checked. I hope he hires someone who is like a very large person and they fall off and are okay

because they land on him that's that's i think where i'm going here and to be clear that's robert speaking yeah yeah that is but that is also the official opinion of iheart media again i don't know that he's he's made any great pronouncements. He hasn't showed up on any Nazi podcasts yet. I will put $10 on a bet that says he will. He'll be on somebody's podcast by the end of the month. I don't doubt it. But hopefully he just does roofing. Yeah. Stick to roofing. you know they they want a battle that they shouldn't have had to fight it should be kind of a no-brainer that we don't elect guys like this that's becoming less certain every day like the fact that there was any question about how the recall might go is concerning we shouldn't be in a position of wondering will people vote for the guy who won't deny he loves hitler but i think we can applaud the tenacity of the folks in enid who did what was necessary in a place where

it wasn't easy. Yeah. You know, and there's lessons to be learned here. Go to the meetings, get a seat in city council chambers, go to the library board meeting, go to the school board meeting. You don't have to be an activist, whatever that means, but be in the room because nobody's going to change the world on their own. And maybe changing the world isn't even a meaningful objective. I don't know what that means. Yeah. But today, maybe there's something you can do with your neighbors to stop the rising tide in your town. You can't change the weather, but you can put down some sandbags. And there are Judd Blevins' everywhere, hiding behind mealy-mouthed rhetoric of conservatism and quietly chipping away at your local institutions. Yeah, so it's doable fighting the Judd's Blevins of, I chose a different way to pluralize his name, of wherever you live, your state, your city, like is doable.

of your, wherever you live, your state, your city, like, is doable. And it's doable if you stick to this very simple platform of like, but not a Nazi, right? We can agree, not a Nazi, you know? And if conservatives have any, if conservatives had any sense, they could retake a lot of ground by saying like, you know, we love all the stuff you love, fellow conservatives, but we're not that guy. Right. Like if they had any if they had any pride, they would stop pandering to the lunatic fringe. Yeah, and it is just kind of looking at how the congressional race is shaping up, where it seemed like it should have been pretty easy for them to retake the House. like it should have been pretty easy for them to retake the House.

But, you know, now they're kind of like flailing a little bit, in part because they keep backing these maniacs who just aren't good. I don't really believe that those ideas are popular. They just

have fallen into this trap of thinking this is the only way to win, so I guess I have to do it. But you don't. Anyway, house anyway whatever we'll cut that who cares about those guys yeah but you don't have to do it right you be be the cheryl patterson you want to see in the world yeah and just be a milquetoast republican and beat the nazi yeah at least i don't know. I'm mixed because like, I do, uh, I do like it when the Republicans fail over much, but I also feel like it's bad to take the bet of like,

well, if we hope for more Nazis that push people away from the Republicans, maybe it'll work for us in the long run. Statistically that, that kind of game gamble is a real dangerous. That's not a crime. I want to keep turning. Yeah. What? Yeah. That's not a crime. I want to keep turning. Yeah.

Yeah. That's Enid. That's Enid baby. Good work Enid. Congratulations to the Enid social justice committee. Honestly, I'm very impressed. You get our,

our coveted Oklahoma city of the month award, which is confusing because you are very near Oklahoma City, but they shouldn't have named it that. But that's all I got. That's all I got. Yeah, I was just trying to put a button on that bad boy. But, uh... That's Oklahoma, baby.

Yeah. Good for you. Good for Oklahoma. With some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite 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

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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. else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. El will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis.

On this show, we try to apply political and cultural analysis towards speculative futurity. What can we learn about the future by looking at how our present relates to our past? And now as we approach a whole decade of a resurgent far-right gaining cultural prominence, we're entering a moment in time where pop culture and media is starting to catch up to the current political zeitgeist. Our media landscape is inundated with depictions of unreality, political extremism, collapse, and rising civil tensions. Some of these succeed more than others, but most are still deeply neoliberal in their depictions. The Obama-produced Netflix movie from last year, Leave the World Behind, was a speculative look at a collapse orchestrated

to jumpstart a second American civil war. Alex Garland's voyeuristic civil war movie just released, which sort of gestures at politics with offhand mentions of Portland Maoists and the Antifa massacre, but as a movie, it completely fails to understand the moment we currently occupy, and I believe is even more out of touch than the Obama collapse movie. But we're not talking about that today. For my thoughts on that, you can look up my review on Letterboxd and refer to the reviews I liked for a more robust critique of Garland's deeply troubling depiction of quote-unquote neutral war journalism as uncritically virtuous. Instead, this episode will be turning to a depiction of modern-day extremism that I'm not sure is better. It's

still deeply neoliberal and honestly more overtly propaganda, but one that I still find more interesting and I believe does understand our political moment much better than Alex Garland does, who comes off as less and less intelligent in every single interview he does. Last month, the television show Law and Order did an episode focusing on Robert Rundo's far-right fitness groups, the white supremacist active clubs. To discuss, I am joined by longtime far-right researcher Molly Conger. Hello, Molly. Hey, thanks for having me on. And you probably didn't know this about me. I am a secret enjoyer of police procedurals, so I've actually watched a lot of Law & Order. I have never seen a single episode of Law & Order until this week.

So I was really inundated. I don't know. I watch a lot of kind of troubling media, though, and media that tries to comment on like current political extremism. And often when I talk with my friends about my interest in viewing things like this episode, I get confused or even adversarial reactions. And I do truly understand their hesitations. Pop culture media like this is often very sensational, turning very real pain, trauma, and death caused by the far right

into this form of kind of mindless entertainment, and often reifying the role of good government and good cops to maintain order against racist insurgents, even though more and more of their ilk begin to occupy public office and become cops themselves. But politics and culture are hand in hand. Lots of what became the alt-right grew out of Gamergate, and I think there is a real use in understanding how the political activities of fascists and anti-fascists are depicted in mass media. I believe there is some value in knowing what NBC and the writers of Law & Order think an active club is, as like a sort of cultural litmus test, and also to see how well people like us are doing in trying to educate about these types of groups. us are doing in trying to educate about these types of groups. But I totally understand that not everyone wants to suffer through a 40-minute Law & Order episode about cops beating the Nazis,

so instead I will watch it for you and talk about exactly how they depicted this with Molly here today. So I think the most efficient way for me to do this is to kind of give a recap of the episode, and as I start going through it, we will discuss certain points. I can't just summarize all of it in like a short paragraph. I mean, I could. I just think that would miss out on a lot of stuff. So instead, we're going to go through the episode and comment as things happen. And this episode ends up being about a lot more than just an active club.

It's actually pulling from a few other influences that we will talk about probably towards the end. Anyway. That felt sloppy to me. I feel like they tried to tackle several specific, like, I don't know how familiar you are with the Law & Order franchise, but they call these episodes

the ripped from the headlines episodes, right? Where they take a real life high profile case and write an episode about it but they tried to combine several elements that i felt didn't blend well and it gave them more material to work with than they were able to address and so it just felt i just it felt unresolved to me i mean yeah i assume lots of these police procedurals are kind of undercooked as like pieces of art i mean mean, the Dick Wolf extended universe is churning out so much content that like, I don't know how they're still doing it. I mean,

Olivia Benson has been on television since I was a child. So let's get into the actual episode. The cold open begins. It's night in New York City. A nervous looking white woman enters a subway station, and she's startled by a sleeping homeless man. As the subway approaches, eerie music starts playing. The anxious woman walks onto the subway, and a black man catcalls her, as a group of other men kind of join in. The woman quickly switches to a more empty subway car, where she then bumps into another black man whose eyes look kind of vacant and is making weird grunting noises. And then the man appears to lunge towards the woman. We cut to crime scene tape stretched across the subway station. Two police detectives enter the

subway car where a dead body lies on the ground. But it's not the scared white woman. It's the oddly grunting black man who appears to have been strangled to death with no apparent witnesses. He's identified as 24-year-old Ellis Joyner, a stand-up comedian who a detective says, quote, came from down south, loved to talk about how much he loved New York. The other detective remarks, great place to live, not such a great place to die. to live, not such a great place to die. Cut to title screen. With music that I assume has not been updated in like 30 years. Absolutely not. It's iconic. It sounds so, so 90s.

They can't change it now. There are thousands of episodes of this show, Garrison. It's history. Already with the cold open, we have the dangerous subway, scary homeless people, this poor white woman, a lot of stuff's being thrown at us. Right, and obviously playing on the idea that like, oh, the white woman is going to be under that sheet, like that's going to be her body. Totally, totally.

So as we return to the episode, a forensic pathologist says the man died after being put in a quote-unquote sleeper hold, which cut off oxygen to his brain. His medical records reveal he also had severe asthma, and his hyperinflated lungs indicate he was currently suffering an asthma attack when he was killed by the lethal chokehold. In the 50-minute window for time of death, the train passed through six subway stations, four of which all had broken cameras. Which is supposed to remind the viewer that we really need to fund the subway cops correct a lot of this episode is about how subway surveillance is under equipped to deal with crime and we would could probably fix a lot of problems if there was more security cameras in the subway or just a hundred cops what if they put a hundred cops on there sure or or more cops and like to my surprise, the subway in New York City

historically has not had security cameras inside the actual train cars, though they are expected to by 2026. But the light rail in Portland, the kind of like, not subway, but like the public transit train in Atlanta, they all have cameras inside the actual train cars. I was surprised that the subway in New York did not. I just never knew that. Anyway, back to Law & Order.

Ellis Joyner's credit card identified the station that he got on at, which also had broken cameras, but police pulled street cam footage from a few blocks away, which shows Joyner getting into a fight with another comedian, where Joyner got punched. The other man is recognized as Malcolm Page, a stand-up who used to open for Chappelle back in the day. So already setting up something fantastic. The detectives interview Page and show him social media footage of Joyner's set from last night, making fun of Page for being old and irrelevant. Paige says that Joyner verbally attacked him because Joyner, quote, got his panties in a twist, unquote, over some of Paige's jokes, quote, hit too close to home for fancy boy, unquote. And when Paige says fancy boy, he does this little shaky hand thing, which the detective asks

if that's supposed to imply that joiner is gay which the older comedian says yes i mean i've seen this sort of like limp wrist hand but this isn't this isn't a limp wrist did that was what he did it was just like a weird like shaking like hand like fancy boy you sort of shake your hand side to side when you mean like kind of or maybe. Yeah, exactly. It was the wrong hand movement. Get your homophobic gestures right. It was really weird.

I found this whole interaction kind of bizarre. And unnecessary. Like you write in this kind of red herring when you're trying to fill time. But they had plenty of script. They didn't need this. This episode's so focused on different forms of racism so much. Adding in this like weird gay subplot, it doesn't't end up going anywhere and it's just kind of bizarre so anyway this basically this older comedian was telling homophobic jokes joiner then made fun of him on

stage and this older comedian page assaulted him outside page then left in an uber and joiner ran off with his boyfriend who according to page weren't getting along either so there's some kind of like like a new suspect arises exactly exactly so police look through joiner's emails and texts in the cloud quote unquote and can't find any record of a boyfriend making detectives surmise that he must have been in the closet, which is a baffling thing to surmise. Cops then contact, quote, the Traveler app. That's Traveler spelled T-R-A-V-L-R. You have to cut out a vowel or it's not an app. So Legally Not Grindr gives NYPD complete access to Joyner's account. And it's, I'm sorry, like, are gay male sex apps usually like pink and purple?

The color scheme is pink and purple. Yeah, not my experience. But yeah, I think this is also a reference to like travelers, like fellow travelers, right? Right, but it was obviously supposed to be Grindr. It's just Grindr. It doesn't matter. But legally not Grindr gives NYPD full access to Joyner's account, which shows he's dating a guy named Michael Zane. And this whole thing is so wild, because if you're dating someone,

you should not be primarily communicating through Grindr. And he said later they've been dating for six months, and they've never texted they're just using grinder to chat whenever you go on grinder the goal is to get off of grinder as soon as possible why why would privately texting each other instead out you as gay any more than having an identifiable grinder profile i feel like having grinder up on your phone and it has a very distinctive like text tone like that's way more and it has a very distinctive text tone, that's way more likely to out you, dog.

Just text regular. Exactly. It makes no sense. Anyway, the traveler messages between Joyner and Michael Zane indicate a sort of ongoing fight or argument. Now, Zane has a prior conviction for aggravated assault last year. They didn't actually, so I went back and double

checked this because I have some beef. He doesn't doesn't have a conviction they said he was arrested for assault last year he was just charged he wasn't convicted my mistake yes but also the episode does not make that very clear well no because i have a reason i went back and checked because it makes no sense so yeah his boyfriend was charged last year for aggravated assault so the detectives pay him a visit because they think he's like a suspect, right? Zayn says that he didn't kill Joyner, he loved him, and that their fight on the night of the murder was about Joyner's own self-hatred and Zayn believing that things would be better if they could just live openly as a couple, but Joyner was concerned that it would threaten his comedy career. Zayn maintained nothing ever got physical between each other

and explained that his assault charge was from trying to break up a bar fight. But when the cops arrived, they targeted Zane because he was black, to which the two NYPD detectives nod solemnly. They're like, yeah, that does sound like something we would do. Yeah, other cops are racist, but not us. They're like, OK. Zane claims that Joyner wanted time alone, so he got off the train a few stops before and went home.

But mentions that there was a white guy with short brown hair, bright yellow sneakers, and a hoodie with some kind of symbol on the back who was looking weirdly at him and Joyner. Security camera footage shows someone matching that description exiting the train car one stop before Joyner's body was found, and one of the detectives recognizes the symbol.

We will learn more about this mysterious hoodie, sneaker, and symbol after this ad break. so i i first i just want to describe what this symbol is it's it is it's this octagon with spiky corners and like two k's facing like like like one facing backwards yeah one facing forward one facing backwards but smushed together and the shared middle pillar is like an arrow pointing upwards it looked like nothing to me they tried to design something that looked vaguely racist but it's just not it just it just looks dumb it looks like i don't like a tech company logo or something like yeah it doesn't even evoke anything for me. No, it's not good.

They're trying to make it scary with lots of different angles, but it's not. It's not scary. Anyway, the detectives arrive at an MMA gym in Chelsea called the Kovac Academy. It opened about a year ago, and they've been peppering the neighborhood with flyers. Well, that sounds familiar. Extremely accurate. The cops are greeted by a jacked staff member with a shaved head and they asked to speak with the owner and this skinhead employee says

that they just missed him but there's a picture on the wall of the owner holding a trophy and he's wearing the exact outfit in the subway security footage the detectives are told that he was getting a cab to the airport now i thought i thought this was going to be like a classic rundo move right do some crimes flee the country you know um but allegedly he was actually flying to toronto which actually will kind of get explained later on cops run outside to see if they can spot him before he leaves and they see a man in yellow sneakers and a logo emblazoned hoodie walking towards a cab they sprint tap him on the shoulder the mma guy throws detectives against the car starts fighting not realizing they're nypd because he has like earbuds on cops pull their guns then he surrenders the owner of the gym is named domino

domino it's it's a weird it's weird name i think dom domino it's like i and i think it's an irish name domino yeah domino kovac he has four previous convictions for assault all against black victims with two charged as hate crimes a detective notes that kovac has a tattoo on his right arm of laced up combat boots with the number 88 which the detective calls a white nationalist symbol. Okay. Okay. I looked. I looked hard. I looked hard through a lot of photographs of Nazi tattoos,

and the boot tattoo is not common, and you only see it in skinhead culture. And this guy's not a skinhead. The actual owner of the gym does not appear to be a skinhead. He has a big beard. He has longish brown, not long but like medium shaggy brown hair but but yeah he has this combat boot 88 tattoo like that's there are a lot of nazi tattoos and that's not the one i would have picked for this character no it's obviously it's like some law and order writer googled like nazi tattoo and just picked that like but that's the thing is if that's what they had done i don't think they would have picked that because like i said i was looking through all

of these sort of like lists of different kinds of tattoos yeah yeah by different non-profits there is one one picture in all of these databases of a tattoo that's even similar to this where it's a pair of boots with the number eight on each boot i found one yeah i mean i think that that is the one they used i think they did want to like bring in some level of like the idea of dog whistling kind of with 88 which will come up later in the episode but it's it's not well done anyway kovac says that he's never seen ellis joiner before and that the night of the murder, he was running a late night intensive training program called the Combat Academy based on the Navy SEALs training course. So many red flags are going off here. It ended around midnight. Afterwards, Kovac said he walked to his girlfriend's nearby apartment.

He was never on the subway. But he explains that the gray hoodie and yellow sneakers are part of the Combat Academy uniform that all members wear. It's so important to wear matching outfits with your boys. And in one of the more accurate moments of the episode, as soon as he's in even a little trouble, he gives out all the names of the members in his group. Did not even wait for a subpoena. He's like, would you like their credit card number? Did not hesitate. He's like, you like their credit card number did not hesitate he's like no absolutely i'll i'll give a dna swab i'll tell i'll tell you the names of all the guys

it wasn't me i swear so the detectives locate the recently divorced brandon arnaud outside of the i like that they added the detail he was recently divorced but this never actually come up it does not matter but the second the second they walk up to him on the street he was recently divorced but this never actually does not come up it does not matter but the second the second they walk up to him on the street he was like oh my wife left me my wife left me last year so i got really into grappling with the boys because my wife left me yes exactly so they find him outside the elementary school he teaches at and which also never comes up again nope and after after very very little questioning, very tame questioning, he immediately admits to killing Joyner,

saying it was an accident and that Joyner was attacking a woman on the subway and Brandon here was trying to protect her. At the police station, the police say that they can't find any footage of the woman Brandon is talking about, but the defense attorney asks if the cameras were even working at every station to which the cops roll their eyes like really sarcastically

don't answer they're like oh my god this fucking guy asking if the cameras are broken the cops tell brandon that they found ellis joiner's missing cell phone in his gym locker they searched his house they didn't find anything but anything, but they got a warrant for his gym locker and found the cell phone. And they alleged that he stole it after he realized that Joyner recorded a video of the fight that ended up with Joyner being strangled to death. And that's something we call consciousness of guilt. The defense attorney ends the interview immediately as soon as they bring this up. Like, why wouldn't you tell your lawyer that? Tell him that before you go in.

The search history on Brandon's laptop shows him trying to figure out how to unlock the phone to delete the video. Now, this part's a little bit odd. The cops debate, even though, quote, he admits to killing Joyner, I'm not sure we have enough evidence to charge, unquote, which is not true. You have so much evidence. You have a confession. You have so much evidence to charge unquote which is not true you have so much evidence you have a confession you have so much evidence to charge this is so bizarre like how often do you have an

a recording of a murder happening and then the guy admitting that he admits yeah it's ridiculous they charge on far far less they have that conversation in the in the room where they're like well we can charge him or we can let him go. He's like, I mean, I understand a conversation about like, is this murder too? Is this manslaughter? Yeah. But it's not a question of whether or not you charge him with something. You're charging him with something.

Come on. I mean, I think there's a reason actually why they had this conversation, which I will get to at the end of the episode, if you remind me. I think there's a reason why they discussed this option of letting him go versus charging him. But at this point, we now switch to the law half of the episode after we finished the order half. I don't know why these are reversed because they do the police part first, then the court part, but whatever. It should be called order and law, which I guess just doesn't sound good. So a front page story in the Legally Not New York Post is being passed around the DA's office.

It reads, self-defense or racist killing? Hero or zero? A recurring story in New York City. The prosecutor, who's played by Hugh Dancy, who I'm just going to call Hugh Dancy because I don't know his character's name, states that half the city believes Brandon's self-defense story and the other half just sees a white man killing an unarmed black man. That is what happened. A litmus test for what people want to believe, says the main DA. I think at this point, the writers in that room are just tired. Oh, yeah.

So like you can only do so much cocaine before it just like stops working. The DA's office says that brandon held joiner in a chokehold for so long after he was unconscious that even if it started as self-defense it escalated to homicide they debate between manslaughter and murder saying the former would be easier to win with a clear use of excessive force regardless of brandon's story of trying to help the girl but based on the cell video, the DA decides to pursue a murder case due to a quote, depraved indifference to human life, unquote, displayed by choking someone for full three minutes after falling unconscious. I'm not sure if you mentioned, so when they found

the phone, so the victim had been recording the altercation and then it got knocked out of his hand. And so it was, it was recording audio of the murder but not video i'm i'm gonna get to that once we get to the court scene hugh dancy is nervous about brandon's literal white knight story and that he has no history of violence but the da insists on second degree murder saying quote this is george floyd all over again in what way and i'm sure as hell not gonna end up on the wrong side of it unquote which does not make the DA sound like a good guy. It just makes him sound like he doesn't want to have like a bad press. It comes off as very slimy.

I said I watch a lot of Law and Order. And so I have seen probably a thousand hours of it, but I haven't watched it in several years. So I don't know if maybe the tone has evolved a little bit, but I got the impression that like, I don't know, maybe this is a guy who's consistently worried about getting reelected, right? Because his job is an elected position. Yeah, yeah. He just doesn't want the press. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So finally, we cut to court. The prosecution plays the cell phone video. Seconds after Joyner starts recording on his phone, Brandon knocks it out of his hand, landing camera side down, continuing to record only audio of the struggle. We hear Brandon

putting Joyner into a chokehold, Joyner repeatedly saying he can't breathe before appearing to pass out, followed by three minutes of silence up until Brandon releases his arm from around Joyner's neck. He picks up the phone, sees it's recording, and turns it off. As the video is playing, the prosecutor and the jury are all shaking their heads so that we know that they don't agree with it.

Hugh Dancy questions the medical examiner who explains that after Joyner lost consciousness, he could no longer pose any lethal threat to the defendant, who continued to choke Joyner for three more minutes. The defense suggests that a surge of adrenaline distorted time and awareness of his surroundings, which in the panic of the moment made Brandon not realize Joyner lost consciousness for that long. Ellis Joyner's secret boyfriend testifies next. He says the defendant was weirdly staring at Joyner and himself and that Brandon moved aggressively to step in Zane's way when he was trying to exit the train and said,

quote unquote, watch yourself in a quote unquote racist tone. The defense brings up Zane's past aggravated assault charge to cast doubt on his testimony. Okay, they can't do that. They cannot do that. You cannot do that. There is a very limited set of circumstances in which you can bring up a witness's criminal history. And this isn't it. There is a lot of funky law decisions going on in this episode.

You can't do that. Speaking of funky law decisions. Well, actually, speaking of speaking of this ad break we are back. Speaking of troubling law decisions, the defense calls a surprise female witness, Rebecca Lasky, something you cannot do. I looked it up. The average time to take a felony to trial in New York is a year. So from time of death to this going to trial, best case scenario, probably like a fucking year. They had a year to find this woman and she shows up on the last day of the trial it's definitely not the last day because like if this was you know this is obviously sort of mimicking the the what is his name daniel

penny yes that that's what we got to towards it's obviously mimicking the daniel penny case like this would have been on the new york post like every day leading up to the trial this woman so would have been located the murder happened in january the trial starts i believe in early march and lasts about two weeks um according to the timeline of the tv show so but that's not how it works anyway um rebecca lasky the female the surprise female witness she she testifies that she accidentally bumped into joiner who quote unquote appeared mentally disturbed and was making aggressive grunting noises, aggressive grunting noises, before lunging at her. She then claims Joyner reached into his pocket,

she was scared he had a knife or something, so she screamed, she screamed for help, and Brandon Arnault saved her. She testified that Mr. Arnault grabbed Joyner away from her, and the two men started fighting. Lasky calls Brandon a hero, and the jury looks on inquisitively. After the female witness's quote-unquote compelling testimony, the prosecutor talks with the DA about offering a manslaughter plea, but the DA is steadfast, since the video clip of a man begging for his life and being choked to death for three minutes after falling unconscious has not actually changed. Hugh Dancy remarks that new context for the video isn't really in their favor, to which the DA just replies, just because a white woman saw Joyner as a threat doesn't make it true. Like, okay, based New York DA, I guess. Back in court, the prosecution asks Rebecca Lasky if she

was actually present when, quote, the defendant choked the life out of Joyner, unquote. She clarifies that the train stopped as the men were still fighting. Joyner was reaching into his pocket. She was scared that he maybe had a knife again. He's probably reaching for his inhaler. Inhaler or his cell phone to record this fight. She curiously mentions, though, that after Brandon grabbed Joyner's arm and the fight started, Brandon kept yelling at Joyner. He was yelling to, quote, surrender and that he was bleeding and that he was dirty or fighting dirty. I don't really remember the exact words, unquote. This destroyed me. I almost turned it off.

Everyone in the courtroom gets a really funny look when she mentions the word dirty. So we will get to this in a sec. Under questioning, Lasky admits that she never saw any weapon of any kind, let alone a knife. And Hugh Dancy suggests that after being attacked by a fellow comedian and having an argument with his boyfriend, Joyner was probably suffering from an asthma attack triggered by high stress. He wasn't mentally ill. He wasn't acting aggressive or grunting in a threatening manner. He was stuck in a subway car having an asthma attack. And he addresses Lasky

saying, quote, you saw a scary black man making a noise. Objection! Sustained. So, yeah. But they didn't, but that's the,

so they objected there. But then when he says, like, and isn't it true that his behavior was consistent with an asthma attack? Nobody objected to that? She can't offer a med she can't offer a medical opinion rebecca lasky a ballet dancer not a medical professional cannot offer an opinion on what what his medical symptoms can be consistent with when she starts getting upset saying like oh my

god this is all my fault like this happened because of me like at that point no prosecutor would have allowed her to continue speaking he would have said just answer the questions just answer the questions he would not have let her get emotional up there and blame like that's that's poison yeah but it makes not very good television thrilling television so after court for the day the prosecution wonders if brandon allegedly saying something about blood and dirt could have really been, quote, the Nazi slogan, blood and soil. No, no, no, Gare. No, no. The new battle cry of white nationalist groups, unquote.

See, here's the thing. So this is where the episode goes fully, fully off the rails. Here's the thing. So this is where the episode goes fully, fully off the rails. So like when I was watching her testimony, she was like, he said something about like, you know, he was bleeding and like he was dirty at no point. Did my mind connect that to and and I quite literally just yesterday was watching videos of guys yelling blood and soil. This is something that's on my mind.

It is a ridiculous joke. It's not there because, because yeah he's yelling something about being about like bleeding because his lip was bleeding and sure a remark about being dirty could be could be construed as as like a racist uh remark but the jump from bleeding and dirty to blood and dirt to blood and soil is fucking baffling. It's just not even the same words. Not to nitpick here, not to nitpick. I just don't know that blood and soil would have been the chant he chose as he was doing the choking.

It's bizarre. He would have said a slur. Hugh Dancy is also skeptical. None of the interviews with Brandon's family or coworkers indicated anything about racial extremism. But the other prosecutor suggests that they look into his fitness gym, the Kovac Academy, as the owner, quote, has ties to a few white nationalist organizations. Uh-oh. The DA's office decides to investigate further. They arrive at the gym as the buff skinhead staff member from the start of the episode is closing up for the day.

the buff skinhead staff member from the start of the episode is closing up for the day. He claims to not know Brandon very well. And when he's asked if he's ever heard Brandon say something that could be interpreted as racist, he responds by saying, I'm sorry, but I can't help you. The prosecutor makes a snide remark and starts to leave. And the man quietly says, look, I can't get into details, but let's just say you're heading down the right path, but I can't help you because it would blow my cover, unquote. Whoa.

Oh, my God. He's a cop infiltrating the Nazi fight club. I mean, there are some cops in there, right? I don't know if I would say they're infiltrating. The next scene is the funniest in the whole episode. The next scene is the funniest in the whole episode. After stumbling on to the undercover operation, the head DA arrives at the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau,

as they have info pertaining to the prosecution's murder case. But the Counterterrorism Bureau explains their scope is much larger than this one case, and they have, quote, had their eye on Kovac for a while now. They explain to the DA that his MMA gym is actually a, quote, had their eye on Kovac for a while now. They explained to the DA that his MMA gym is actually a, quote, active club, part of an international network of white supremacist sleeper cells that all front as MMA-style gyms, unquote. So, okay. Okay. Okay. White nationalists have been using MMA gyms to front for activities for decades.

I just found a new one the other day. This does happen. This does not mean they are active clubs, nor do active clubs have to be MMA gyms. These things are Venn diagrams that can sometimes overlap, but not always. The version of active clubs we see in this episode now starts getting pretty fictitious it immediately at first i was like oh that's like a fairly reasonable like yeah like we do have active clubs at mma gyms that's a real thing and they were like and they're stockpiling weapons to do a january 6th yeah so what what so they say they've identified over 30 active clubs across nine states and several provinces of Canada. So nine states, far too low. There's active clubs in way more states than that. There's also not necessarily like, if you have 30 active clubs across nine states,

that's a bizarre ratio. That means there's a lot of active clubs in like a few states, which generally isn't how it kind of ends up being there's maybe like one or two maybe three like per state we don't fully know but i will give them points for adding in the canadian chapters which most people kind of overlook but also like why is the nypd investigating something happening in nine states that's the feds territory to be fair that is fully accurate the nypd counterterrorism bureau investigates things all over the world but it's like just let if it's interstate let the feds handle it their jurisdiction is fucking bonkers they're like the third biggest like counterterrorism like law enforcement group in the entire world it's like one of the world's largest standing armies yeah no it is it is absurd they say quote the clubs operate as recruitment centers they lure

in young white men under the guise of getting fit while indoctrinating them in racist ideology and training them in military combat, unquote. Now, the training that people receive in active clubs very often does not equal military combat training. In fact, they often have very poor fitness regiments and really bad advice on how to get fit. I mean, if getting hooked on gear and rolling around on the floor shirtless with the boys is military combat training, then absolutely. If you look at the there's a pretty extensive docs of some of the active club members of the state of Georgia last year, and they were their fitness information was not up to snuff they were they were mostly 17 year olds who were arguing about different ways to like lift better anyway law and order says that these active clubs are quote trying to build an army it's the new face of hate unquote a very a very kind of retro slogan we don't really use that anymore, but if you look like

10 years ago or like, yeah, around 10 years ago, you would see a lot of like liberal articles talking about the new face of hate. Quote, no more white sheets or burning crosses. They've adapted and created a facade to mask their racist beliefs, unquote. So the DA wants their undercover guy to testify to secure the conviction against one of the active club members, but the counterterrorism bureau doesn't want to blow their nine-month undercover operation, even for a murder conviction, as they've, quote, recently received credible intel that Kovac is now stockpiling firearms and explosive materials, unquote. So they should probably go ahead and arrest him for that, huh?

Yeah, yeah, right? It's time to move. I guess now they're combining, like, active club stuff with some, like, Atomwaffen and militia stuff. Just, like, smushing together all these different groups into one, like, mega boogeyman, I guess. Quote, these men are terrorists. They're capable of significant violence, unquote. Quote, these men are terrorists. They're capable of significant violence.

Unquote. So the counterterrorism bureau suggests that the DA takes a, quote, big picture view of the situation. Unquote. So the DA breaks the news to the prosecution team that the undercover will be unable to testify because the active club is, quote, planning a coordinated attack along the lines of the January 6th insurrection. Unquote. So you should probably like the undercover operation is over like if you have credible intel that there that there's an imminent attack like the operation is over so also like this is just not what active clubs do this is like they don't care about j6 that's like a proud boy thing and some militia dudes like most active club members would be like no all of the j6 people are

like fucking like conservative like trump trump brain brain dead losers they're like it's really that thing a couple years ago where those members of the base were arrested right before they were going to try to kick off the civil war by inciting um they were going to shoot into the crowd at the gun rally in richmond at the virginia gun rally and then the plan was that everyone would start shooting each other you know it's like so they had a pretty large stockpile of weapons that one of the guys was canadian so like maybe they got mixed up with that i mean yeah base yeah like they're combining elements of the base adam often active clubs proud boys into like this like mega boogeyman right it's just a villain the da says that this new attack will, quote,

only be more violent and without advance warning this time, unquote. What do you mean without advance warning? You just said no about it. No. Are you going to let it happen? Right, right. Are you going to let this happen? The greater good is for us to allow this to occur.

The undercover investigation cannot be jeopardized in any way, but as this looks more and more like a racially targeted murder, according to the DA, the DA's office has to find a different way to show that Brandon is racist. Quote, it's for the greater good.

A phrase that Hugh Dancy says helps justify a lot of otherwise unjustifiable positions. And they start getting into this kind of debate around like the ethics of like doing a long-term infiltration operation versus seeing like a like like an active like like seeing an active threat or like seeing a way to like currently clamp down on a like arm of an

organization even if they can't get the whole thing yet and they have this debate of like is it is it better to like do like a long-term strategy or to like just like chop off as many limbs as we can as we go on and again it doesn't make sense because if they have all this credible intel why not just like get them right now but like whatever wrap it up so back in court mr kovac is on the stand hugh dancy asks if he and the defendant have ever discussed, quote, racial ideology. To which Kovac says, I don't know what that means. Believable.

Incredible. I mean, yeah, that is the correct answer for this situation. The prosecutor elaborates, racial purity, interracial marriage, what role black people should or shouldn't have in society. And Kovac once again feigns ignorance.

Hugh Dancy asks about Kovac's 88 tattoo being a Nazi symbol. And Kovac once again feigns ignorance. Hugh Dancy asks about Kovac's 88 tattoo being a Nazi symbol. And Kovac just says, I don't know. I just like the number 88. And then he doesn't, the prosecutor doesn't explain to the jury that it means Heil Hitler.

He just moves on. Never once in the episode is it explained that the 88 uh symbol meat is a reference to heil hitler never actually say it never say it yeah dancy does bring up uh mr kovacs for prior convictions for assaulting black men two of which were charged as hate crimes and kovac just says that was a long time ago and now see i i do want to say because i made such a big deal about it earlier about how you can't ask about prior convictions. I think in this case, it is an allowable exception because it goes to direct impeachment. Like if he said like, yeah, you know, he made a statement himself about how he's not racist.

And you say, well, you have a hate crime conviction. And later in the courtroom, he says that he, of course, obviously doesn't have any problems with black people when being questioned by the defense attorney. But Hugh Dancy pulls up Kovacs' social media accounts, all of which contain the phrase blood and soil in his bio. Objection! Relevance! The prosecution then argues that Rebecca Lasky's testimony of hearing something about blood and dirt may have been a vague recollection of hearing blood and soil. No.

Dancy describes blood and soil as a nazi reference to a racially uniform society the jury would not have been allowed to hear this this would have happened outside the presence of the jury kovac just says the phrase means that you're proud of who you are and where you come from kovac taught the defendant how to fight how to do a chokehold so to end the questioning h Hugh Dancy asks if he also taught the defendant to hate black people. Objection! Objection! Alright, so the defense's closing argument frames the subway as a dangerous, lawless zone. And Brandon as a peaceful elementary school teacher who has never gotten as much as a speeding ticket.

Probably because he doesn't drive. Yeah, because you live in New York. Who saw someone in danger and bravely decided to step up and do something. The prosecution's closing argument frames Brandon Arnault as a closeted racist who saw an opportunity to put his white supremacist ideology into practice in a situation where he thought he could get away with it. Quote, people like Mr. Arnault keep their bigotry buttoned up. They only discuss it with people who share their hateful worldview. They rely on plausible deniability, because if the racism

isn't overt, many good people are all too happy to assume it isn't there. But every once in a while, in moments of panic or anger, the mask will slip. Unquote. Hugh Dancy closes by saying that Ellis Joyner was an innocent, unarmed black man suffering a medical emergency, and the two white people on the train assumed he was a violent threat, and they attacked him. And even if there was no intention to kill at the start, quote, at some point, the defendant's focus shifted, and his racial hate began to manifest, unquote, yelling blood and soil at joiner quote a declaration of hatred for all people of color unquote as brandon choked him to death okay here's the thing here's

the thing this whole situation with the undercover the counterterrorism i have to believe that they're trying to set up a longer plot arc that that's going to come back in a later episode. Or so they have a new spinoff called Law and Order Organized Crime with Christopher Maloney, Elliot Stabler from SVU. I wonder if they're going to cross it over to organized crime because it makes no sense. That's what I assume. I think this white nationalist group is going to come back and be even a bigger plot point in a future episode. Otherwise, it didn't need to be in here otherwise the inclusion in this in this piece is is really bizarre so but no so they but what i was gonna say is they did not need that undercover's testimony

because the only testimony they wanted to elicit from him was like as a character witness to say like oh yeah i've met him and he's racist yeah that wouldn't really even be admissible in most like like even if the judge even if the judge allowed the jury to hear that like this isn't a hate crime case it doesn't matter what matters is whether or not he used excessive like more force than what's necessary for a self-defense argument right the entire legal strategy they shift to halfway through the court proceedings is so obviously a dead end that doesn't actually relate to...

And wouldn't have been allowed. Yeah, it's so bizarre. And if they wanted to get information about his views that maybe his family didn't know about, that people at work didn't know about, why did they not get warrants for his phone and computer?

I mean, I think they did because they mentioned searching through his phone and computer multiple times through the episode found that he had searched for like how to delete from cloud or whatever from the guy's phone but like again i think that's mostly just like undercooked you didn't open like his telegram account to see what exactly exactly you didn't see the active club chat season you didn't see like you didn't talk to any other members of the the combat academy no other members of the gym really anyway so the jury finds the defendant not guilty because yeah okay outside the courtroom the head da says quote we did the best that we could here's another problem there's another problem so not all states allow this but in new york the court can submit to the jury what are called lesser included charges so if you're charged with murder too i think was what they charged him with

in this case you know the jury can deliberate on the actual charge murder too but they can also consider what are called lesser included charges so So something like manslaughter. So the jury can say, well, we're not going to convict on murder two, but we do think it was manslaughter. So we're going to convict on that, even though that wasn't the charge in the indictment. So I can't imagine that this DA would not have pushed for lesser included charges. Well, Hugh Dancy may agree. He says, quote, no no we could have done better we just chose not to for the greater good no but they they could have done i think i i think he says that kind of sarcastically um the the da affirms that one day soon they will take down the whole racist organization but behind the the two the two da's here brandon walks out of the courtroom and celebrates with the other members of the active club. End of episode. Okay. So, but when they put Kovac on the stand and they

were saying like, oh, like, did you teach him about racism? The better line of questioning at that moment would have been, okay, you're his grappling coach. Did you teach him how dangerous chokeholds are? Right? Because because like i don't know anything about a chokehold so if i accidentally killed someone with one maybe i didn't know that would happen if you are taking five hours a week of private hand-to-hand combat lessons you probably do know and that would go to you know foreknowledge and like why didn't why didn't they ask that again i i started this episode because i thought it would be about active clubs. And it turns out by the end, it's really not.

It's really about Daniel Penny. It's really about the killing of Jordan Neely. So this is the actual rip from the headlines piece that they're doing, which I did not really realize until the episode was over. So this is kind of riffing on the incident that happened on May 1st, 2023. Jordan Neely was a 30-year-old black man. He was a Michael Jackson impersonator. At the time, he was homeless. He was riding the subway in Manhattan and appeared emotionally distressed. He was yelling about needing food and water. No one was helping him. He was yelling that he didn't care about going to jail. He was ready to die. And this was reportedly frightening other writers. Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old former Marine, approached Neely and placed him in a lethal chokehold that lasted anywhere from five to seven minutes, depending on if you ask the prosecution or the defense. Penny was repeatedly told by other writers that Neely appeared to be dying.

By the time first aid was being administered, he was already dead. Daniel Penny was let go after being questioned by police and only arrested 11 days later. I think this is the part where they're like, do we want to let him go or charge him now? I think that's kind of what they're doing here. On June 14th, 2023, he was indicted on the charge of second degree manslaughter. The trial is scheduled to start on October 8, 2024. So this episode also, I think it fails in a lot of ways in its depiction of active clubs. It uses certain terms, like the term active clubs, which I was surprised they just, I was surprised they used, because that's kind of more of like a niche term, but they just made it to be this like MMA elite Nazi squad. And I think them trying to include this bit does an incredible disservice

to trying to depict the killing of Jordan Neely, which first of all, like there's already problematic aspects, right? Of turning this like really fucked up thing into a piece of entertainment. That's kind of why I started this episode with that monologue. But I think by cramming so many other elements in here,

like this homophobia angle, this active club angle, it does a real disservice to the actual incident that they're trying to comment on, where there was a man in a very crowded subway who very publicly was basically lynched because a few riders were not super comfortable when riding the subway because this man was

yelling for food and water so it's not it's not great um i but after watching leave the world behind civil war and this i think this is the best depiction of our current political moment out of all of those three things which is a a pretty fucked up bar. I guess, Molly, do you have any other thoughts on how they depict Nazi stuff in this? I mean, not well. Not well, bitch. No, I was just going to say, I was looking on Reddit and seeing people's takes on it on the Law & Order Reddit, and I found this fantastic comment. They did take the Daniel Penny case, but changed the whole story to make penny look guilty probably to make the real penny look like a bad guy in real life um um um uh objection objection objection your honor

mods mods not yeah not great because also yeah it also like for people who are like looking at this as a parallel to jordan either like oh why did they change so many details to make him look even more guilty i'm like no that's not what's happening at all like i think they did a disservice to that story by changing so many elements i mean like you said there's there's a conversation to be had about the ethics of depicting the story as entertainment period yeah but if they're going to do it and they've been doing it for 30 years right that's just what law and order does if they're going to do it i think they have a responsibility to not do this to not do this yeah well again they have bigger fish to fry since there's that upcoming worse than january 6th attack had led by these

fma guys who were stockpiling explosives. So watch out for that, I guess. Yeah, I guess I'll have to watch the rest of the season to see if the MMA gym blows up New York. Yeah, I will not be until they release a direct follow-up.

So I think that does it for us today. This is already way too... This episode's already long. It's already longer than the Law & Order episode. So that does it for us today. Thank you for listening. If you want to check out my review of Civil War, way too... This episode's already longer than the Law & Order episode. So, that does it for us today. Thank you for listening. If you want to check out my review of Civil War,

it's very short, but it's kind of to the point. I'm on Letterboxd at Hungry Bowtie. And then the reviews that I liked, which are underneath my own review, go into more depth about the problems with that film, in my opinion, and other people's opinion. Anyway uh where can people

find you online molly oh i am on twitter at socialist dog mom and my newsletter the devil's advocates on ghost and i guess that's it for me oh i'm podcasting sometimes now no objections for me yeah i guess by the time you're listening to this, you can listen to my latest episode of this show yesterday. Alright. See you on the other side. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite Thank you. 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today, and I'm joined by Dr. Maung Zani who's an activist and scholar with 35 years of experience advocating against genocide and for freedom in Burma and one of the founding members of the anarchist activist platform Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia. Welcome to the show Dr. Zani. Yeah thank you so much yeah. Yeah it's a pleasure to have you here so and also I should mention Nobel Peace Prize nominee as of as yesterday or the day before so congratulations on that also. Yeah thanks so much it happened in January before the deadline and so but I just

released the announcement you know for the Burmese New Year, you know, occasion, because, yes, you know, the country has been torn apart by, you know, armed revolutions, genocide, the racism, anti-Muslim violence. And so I thought, like, this may be a tiny uh sliver or positive thing and so if if activists want to have you know some sustenance for their grassroots revolution here's somebody who's who has been grassroots for 35 years so that's why i released it but that's you know secondary anyway yeah i know it's it's uh if it can get the world to look at what's happening and pay attention then i think it's a good thing so one thing i wanted to ask you about today to start off with is something that when i talk to

people in the u.s in the uk about the revolution and the coup in Myanmar, the context of like ultra nationalist Buddhism is one that is very hard, I think, for people who don't have a great understanding of how that works to understand. So I was wondering if we could start off with you explaining like this, this long and painful history of like ultra nationalist Buddhism in Myanmar and how it's empowered the genocide of Muslim people and also the the hunter today. Well when we talk about you know ultra nationalism or various strands of nationalism, I think we need to periodize or put in different historical periods.

Because the term nationalism was a progressive, emancipatory, ideological umbrella when the local society, all primarily Buddhist and also other people but the majority political systems were built on the foundation of Buddhism in Burma, you know, like different kingdoms. But when

we were under the British for 124 years the internally warring Buddhist kingdoms, you know, nationalist Buddhists that would confront the alien colonial British rule. So in that sense, you know, nationalism was not a bad thing at all because it was, you know, primarily for emancipatory struggle. Yeah. primarily for emancipatory struggle.

But then fast forward, post-colonial independence period, 1948 onward, when the British rule was removed at the end of the Second World War, three years after, the oppositional Buddhist nationalist umbrella identity collapsed. So Rakhines want to foreground their ethnic city, given that the main oppositional commonality, colonialism, was no more. colonial colonialism was no more and so that's when the um you know ethnicity was re-injected you know into the uh ideological formation and uh and interestingly as you would know as well the end of the second world war was followed by the cold war, right? And on the one hand, like you've got, you know,

godless, communist, atheistic Russia, Soviet Union, and then China. And then on the other hand, you know, essentially Christian West, you know, or at least allegedly Christian West. And in that context, the ultra-ationalism was essentially encouraged by the United States and allies. This is nothing new. If you look at the rights of socialist governments across the Middle East,

you know, primarily Muslim Middle East, you would find like the rights of Muslim brotherhood and, you know, what we call today fundamentalist Islamists, right? But the, you know,

the Buddhist with ethnocentric orientation were encouraged by the United States through grants and aid. Yeah. The same way like the rise of fundamentalist Islam was encouraged or midwifed with the U.S. money. with the U.S. money. Because, see, this is important because through the eyes of the Cold War strategists, the only way that egalitarian leftist ideologies could be confronted was through this faith-based ideology. So I don't want,

I'm not saying that the Burmese nationalists and ultra-nationalists were not responsible for their own growth, but I also, what I'm saying is there was a larger global context in which this monster was hatched yes and then and and and so but even you know like the going back to the 1930s after the wall street collapse you know then like you know the the deep recession pervaded across the world and colonial economies like Burma with massive agricultural export economy,

the British found it expedient to basically turn to a religious divide and rule. And like, you know, the Burmese Buddhist laboring classes were pitted against the Indian laboring classes of different religions. But that was more like the Buddhist nationalist, ethno-nationalist versus, you know, like what we would call today migrant laborers from India. Because we were part of British Empire. After the British left, the Muslims began to be scapegoated.

And then finally, I think we cannot understand, as you know very well, the nationalism or ultra-nationalism without some kind of political organization. And that organization is what we call Burmese political state, whether it's controlled by the civilian elected politicians or the military as an organization. Political states always there, whether it's, you know, fascism in Nazi Germany or Italy or Japan, or like the genocidal Myanmar about 15 years ago. State was the engine, actually. It's not the people that were generating this toxic ideology. It was the state that was was manipulating inventing manipulating and

mobilizing towards their sinister ends right yeah and it's the divide and rule strategy and the fall i guess that falling back to this these kind of colonial methods of rule is something that i guess i want people to understand is still happening in in burma or myanmar right we see the the military that the hunter doing it right now right like attempting to ferment inter-ethnic conflicts to prevent the formation of a popular front or a coalition against against their rule right yes i think the here, one observation I want to make is independence from Britain, restoration of, say,

modern form of sovereignty to Burmese people was not a clean break from the colonial past because the state in Burma as it exists or it has existed over the last 70 plus years remains a colonial state. It was an instrument of economic exploitation or racialized or ethnicized administration and all the security laws and you know or ordinances and whatnot uh they were formulated with the interest of the ruling colonial interests or power like like at the time British.

And what independence did was really transfer of this internally racialized entity, we call state, from the white man's hand to the brown man's hand, you know, the Burmese. to the Brahmins' hand, you know, the Burmese. So the state wasn't actually finding it difficult to foment racial or inter, we don't use the term race here, but inter-ethnic conflict or inter-religious conflict.

The state itself embodied this divide and rule outlook because it remains internally colonial. You see what I mean? Yes. And so I think that it isn't simply the policies of the XYZ regimes that have ruled Burma since independence. But the state itself is conducive to or supportive of this kind of inter-religious and inter-ethnic contest, because there are no principles of equality as ethnic or religious communities. There was no sense of, you know, horizontal or vertical fairness among the political class and the majoritarian agrarian communities. And so the state itself is problematic. agrarian communities and so the state itself is problematic yeah that's why like you know the the when Aung San Suu Kyi came to um you know semi-power because the military still controlled or backseat drove her regime she found it really difficult to maneuver because she was straightjacketed in this, you know, internally colonial shell.

Yeah. Yeah. And then so I think, of course, like, you know, you are correct. What the military is doing now, say, in Rakhine State, where they committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims, Rohingya Muslims. They drove out close to 800,000 Rohingyas genocidally across the border to Bangladesh in 2017 and also 2016. They are now arming and training

and forcibly conscripting able-bodied young Rohingya men into their ranks and to fight the progressively militarily stronger Rakhine Buddhist Arakan army. That's just one area. But, you know, if you look at other regions, like Shan State, for instance, there's extremely complex ethnic contestations happening, right? So what political scientists call horizontal violence is taking place.

And so there are multiple conflicts at work. Of course, the military is number one, you know, problem maker, but there are also lesser evil forms of like political and ethnic conflicts taking place. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's very much a chance to, I think, particularly complicated and interesting. As we look at the situation now, both in the liberated areas or the areas without control of the Napidor state, they may still be controlled in a in a sense by other kind of like pseudo states i guess are you familiar with this there's this argument i think it's probably like articulated i'm sure you are uh articulated like most notably by james c scott of like um and he looks at the example of myanmar has been rightly criticized in some areas of like the the mountains as an area where people can i guess

choose to opt out of the state or or to be like where the state is not completely consolidated i guess and never has been yeah i know i know jim's work you know like the uh the he divides people into valleys and uh you know, mountains, you know, what's interesting is like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot more complex than this, you know, the dualistic understanding of like hill people versus plain people, because, you know, like even in the, in the hills, there are, you know, highlands and, and, and there are plateaus and, uh, the,

you know, and so, but also I think like that, I've, I find it more useful to look at this, uh, not through geographic lens, but through the colonial lens, because you've got the colonial state because like, you know, Jim is essentially an anti-statist but as a matter of value yeah i i i am with him you know because i'm i'm bent on uh um the anarchism as my value you know but analytically i think the the the given the fact that the the colonial state continues to live on and continue to haunt the Burmese society, I think the way I look at it is like center and periphery, right? Irrespective of the altitude. I mean, at this point, altitude is no longer really strategically important because we live in the age of drones and like, you know, MIG-29s and F-16s.

Mountains are no longer a cover. You see what I mean, right? Yeah, yeah. The construct of the mountains as like non-state space or a place where you can go to choose to be non-state i think like uh it's interesting to hear young bamar pdfs fighters now be like oh i chose to go to the mountains even though it sits very much alongside that cannoli analysis that you had of like the uh the wild people or like quote unquote savagery right which or when i speak to bamar people who are like 21 now

who joined the pdfs at 18 17 after the coup they had all been very much indoctrinated with the idea of non-bamar people as quote savages or wild people who lived in the quote mountains or jungles and like choosing to go there to escape the state. I think it's really interesting to hear that analysis reproduced in their storytelling of their own lives. Yeah, I mean, I think it has been in the Burmese political psyche. You move away from the center and you are more autonomous and you are you know freer from the right you know the reach of the center right the the because it we we still have this um center periphery mentality yeah i mean you know culturally yes you're absolutely right

uh the the way people in the center like the the group that I belong to, Burmese Buddhist majority, we look down on people that are on the periphery, right? The way people dress. I mean, it's also like, you know, the like those who grew up in the non-majoritarian regions, you know, what I call the peripheries of the Burmese colonial state, when they settle in Rangoon or Mandalay or, you know, major urban areas, they begin to address, they begin to, I mean, they necessarily adapt to the Burmese way of life, the majority dominant, you know, customs and whatnot. So I still stick with the, you know, this whole colonial relations, you know, organizationally and psychologically. organizationally and psychologically. Yeah, I mean, also we have the vocabulary. If you want to oppose a central state or the central regime, we say we take refuge in the forest, right?

Yeah. And we take refuge in the forest or under the tree against the scorching sun or like pouring monsoon rain, right? Or the evil center, right? And so it's all built in. It's in the language. Even, you know, like organizing an armed revolt or going underground is described as taking refuge in the forest, the jungle, you know. And what's interesting, though, is like, you know, from the state's perspective,

if you're taking refuge in the jungle, of course, like that's treasonous. And, you know, that is an act of criminality. is an act of criminality. But if you use that language, or if you do exactly the same thing, literally, physically, if you're a Buddhist monk, you are considered holier than monks that continue to live in the city.

You see what I mean? Yeah. So you go, the forest monks versus like a city town or village monk. Right. So this is quite a fascinating linguistic, you know, twist here on one hand, like, you know, but from the revolutionaries perspective, if you are in the jungle you grow certain aura around you you are in

the jungle right and you don't you don't wear jeans or you don't look like city people but you're wearing you know like the um fatigue army fatigue and you know jungle um the the paraphernalia. And as a revolutionary, that's like Che Guevara type. You see what I mean? Yeah. Revolutions start or organize around jungles. You know what I mean? So it has nothing to do with altitude.

You see what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, I like that periphery colonial model. So I wonder, I think people who listen to this will both be very much amenable to anarchism and see the problems that state societies create and also to the

revolution in myanmar and and to the young people and then not so young people who are fighting it i wonder like how do we build a future for myanmar that doesn't replicate this colonial core periphery model that doesn't the sine qua non of the state that's centered in nepador is like the it's just this use of violence to control and this colonial relationship, right? So how do we not replicate that in the post-revolution future? Well, I think there's a danger in, what should I say, romanticizing the mini states or sub states, right? Mm hmm. If establishing autonomous states does not confront the colonial nature of the state from which these meaning states, you know, emerge as oppositional entities. In other words, whatever administrative structures that the current armed revolutionary organizations set up, they need to first make sure they don't replicate the internally colonial nature of the state that they have been fighting and to some degree of like success at this point in history right um that because the the coloniality is very much connected with the idea of pure ethnic identity you see what i mean yeah yeah and in this

day and age i mean whether you i mean you've been to korean state and other places in burma and and you know in the middle east at curtis and so but they're they're they're always like you know the idea of a pure ethnic identity right even? Even if you're a revolutionary. But the truth is, you know, even small places, you will find Muslims and Hindus and Christians or people with different migratory histories and class background. You flatten them into a single ethnic identity. into a single ethnic identity.

That in and of itself, I mean, self-perception, we are a new Karen state or Karen state or Kachin state, right? Even Kachin, the term label, the label Kachin in the north, they have about three or four major groups there and some resent being referred to as Kachin. But they go along because they are against the more evil central Burmese Buddhist state, right?

So that's why when I explain to you at the outset of this conversation, at the outset of this conversation, this like a Buddhist identities merged as an oppositional umbrella, anti-colonial identity against the British when that common oppressors has gone home and then we start fighting each other.

You see what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So number one, it's like, you know, it's very, very important. These new entities do not define their political organizations along any idea of like you know blood and soil yeah yeah and that's very very important otherwise we we we replicate what we fought against, right? And secondly, I think no military organization should control administrations. But at the moment, with the exception of the Korean National Union, most other ethnically organized armed resistance organizations in Burma,

when they set up administrations, you know, administrators are guys who are, you know, like carrying AK-47 or some other weapons. You see what I mean? Because what they need to do is, as soon as they have

secure any ancestral region, what they need to do is they need to do is as soon as like that they have secure uh any like uh ancestral region what they need to do is they need to separate law and order maintenance from the defense yeah and and the the the reason we have gotten into this bloody mess is because the military did not separate law and order administration as a civilian function from the national defense. So the current progressively militarily successful ethnic resistance organizations have to demilitarize self-consciously and as a matter of policy their new administrations so these two things you know move away from blood and soil idea of identity and demilitarized and civilianized the administration yeah do you have hope like i find when i talk to

especially younger people in the pdf who are most people my like maybe it's easier for them to see the the obvious the colonial relationship and the way that that these constructs have harmed them and and prevented them from finding solidarity with people of other ethnic groups. That's something that like, sometimes they will articulate to me, right? That like, you know, we were told these people were bad and evil and savage, and they're not, and they're our allies in this fight against dictatorship. Do you think that that's replicated in the leadership of EROs? Like that idea that this blood and soil nationalism has been or this blood and soil identity i should say is something that's like a bit problematic and divisive and will always be so or like do you not see that replicated so much well there's still you know, the old conservative orientations in these EROs

with respect to two things. The acceptance of, you know, younger generations into policymaking circles, right? Yeah. And then the other one is the half of the population of these ethnic communities have remained marginalized and that is woman if you you know i mean on one hand it does make sense that you know men with guns and men with like you know the 50 years of revolutionary experience are going to play a leading role.

But these guys have to make a conscious effort in changing their own value system, which is like, you know, bring in new generations with more progressive ideas into policymaking circle, leadership circle, and bring in women. And, you know, I wish I know more about the Kurdish revolutionary organizations. My own very limited understanding is that, you know, gender equality, I mean, for the Islamophobic crowd, it might be quite shocking, but the Kurdish revolutionary organizations are much more gender equal than white democratic societies. Yeah, that's right.

And I think their analysis, if I can sort of summarize Apo's thought, is that colonialism begins in the patriarchal family and that the first colonized subject is the woman. And therefore, if we can't decolonize our familial and community relations, then we have little hope of decolonizing ourselves as a group or as a society. So their analysis rests in the same place as yours does. And I think that there's, I think, increased solidarity and communication between the Kurdish freedom movement and the resistance movements in Myanmar, which I hope can only do good for that, especially with regard to gender relations. It was interesting to see the Kareni, KNDF Battalion 5, issued a statement which said that they had a long way to go in terms of

gender relations and they looked to the Kurdish model of example of where they can get to which at least it gives me hope that these things can it can get better yeah I mean KNDF is a remarkable you know organization current national defense, Karenny. I mean, they are led by very progressive, sort of like, you know, semi-anarchist type young people. Yeah. You know, the ethnicity and gender discrimination are self-consciously avoided and discouraged. Yeah.

are self-consciously avoided and discouraged. So basically, I think we cannot have a successful revolutionary movement just by trying to take power from the center. There has to be, you know, our rebellion is different from a revolutionary movement. Revolutionary movement involves a shifting fundamentally the non-progressive values and outlooks, right? That is something that needs to happen. And that, in my view, is a deeply, you know,

intellectual, psychological process. But I think that is happening. And so that ideological progressive shift is going to hit the ceiling at some point because you've got old men in decision-making positions who haven't bought in entirely the need to shift their value system. And then partially it's not simply ideological. It's also self-interest.

When you're the boss for 25 years, you're a little like autocratic tyrant. You know what I mean? Right, yeah. A little organization. So shifting the, you know, giving women and younger generation spaces mean, you know,

you shutting up 50% of the time and letting the other, you know, people speak 50%, you know, like there, there are no, no more like monologue for one hour. You see what I mean?

Yes. So even like, you know, the air time, you have less air time. That's like, you're less, that's your self interest, your air time, you know the air time you have less air time that's like you're less that's your self-interest

your air time you know let alone economic and other interests this is just like talking in the in in in a meeting you see what i mean i've been through like some of some of the meetings and stuff and so you know like guys think that only they have important things to say and you know especially military matters or big items okay like women talk about welfare of children and uh you know widows kind of shit yeah yeah this this very sort of still like like separate spheres gender model that i know yeah i have hope for the young generation but um i remember one of the guys i met he told me that like um he said he said like three years ago i had some gender problems and i i didn't understand what he meant he was like i thought that women couldn't do things that men could do and now i realized i was wrong and they were

telling me that the police wouldn't there was a there was a taboo to walk underneath a woman's uh longevity yes yeah so they hung them around their protest camps when they were in yangon fighting the police and then the police wouldn't come in so they were like oh this is when i realized that sexism hurts everyone so i think it's yeah we i have hope for that generation i think it's uh it's been one of the things that has given me so much hope for the world in general, as I've been covering the revolution in Myanmar, is to see people reconstruct and change their identities in a progressive and inclusive way. And people in this country and the UK as well are so stuck in their sort of regressive identities and to see

young people there acknowledge that sexism homophobia these these racist and inter-ethnic uh like hierarchies are damaging everyone has it's given me a great deal of hope for the future yeah i i share your optimism and then part of it is, you know, the progressives or people or younger people or like older people with progressive outlooks. I mean, everything is constructed. You know, like if you change the material situation in terms of, you know, who's making decisions or the, you know, under what conditions decisions are made. I think that people are able to shift their thinking. You see what I mean? And so I think definitely political leadership is very important.

You know what I mean? I don't believe in this vanguardist ideaist idea of like a group of men, you know, guiding the herd, right? But at the same time, I think like these older men should meet the younger generations halfway. Yeah. And I'm not saying like, okay, all right, you know, like, you know, like, don't trust anyone above 40 because I'm 60, so I still want to be trusted. But yeah, I mean, I'm 60 and I can take shit from 18-year-old junior friend or colleague who tell me you're full of shit. And here's the reason. I listen, right?

and here's the reason. I'll listen, right? So I assume like other people my age, my generation would be able to do the adjustment, right? And especially for the better. But I think that there are really articulate young people and women whose voices need to come to the fore. Like, you know, like people, I mean, like we don't live in isolation anymore.

Like in the 1960s and 70s and 80s, Burma was very isolated. And so, you know, and so the ideological currents did not reach within the Burmese society. So the type of religion or religions, I mean, Christianity, the type of Christian practices, outlook, whatnot, remain extremely conservative compared with even a conservative Christian country like USA.

Yeah. Yeah. like christian country like uh usa right yeah yeah and then uh but now like you know with we live in the social media internet age and so you know young people you know use the the term like intersectionality you see what i mean yeah they start to see like race class gender and other issues you know like inter intersecting and and producing or reproducing or ending like different forms of, you know, repression and, you know, exploitation and whatnot. We still have a very, very long way to go. We can shift, but that's not to say that, you know, we should feel like discouraged,

you know, but we won't see instant changes. But that's not to say that we should feel discouraged. But we won't see instant changes. No, yeah, but I think over time, yeah, I have a great deal of optimism for the future of Myanmar. Dr. Sani, it's been really great talking. Where can people, especially people who are interested in your work and in the future of Myanmar, how can they follow along with your work and with these struggles to create a more equal and just and democratic in the non-state sense, Burma? I mean, I use social media, especially Facebook a lot.

And I began consciously writing in Burmese language because I don't need to inform the world because the world knows the shit that's going on in Burma. So I think my Facebook's okay. But if people read English English or even like you know other languages you know our own mother tongue the forces of

renewal Southeast Asia 4c.co it's a good platform we encourage and actually we seek out you know very radical ideas in multiple languages, Burmese or Chin or Karani or whatever language they want to use. We don't censor anyone. They can say anything

as long as they're not advocating fascism or violence or like, you know, things like that. And so, yeah, I encourage to take a glance at our, you know, Southeast Asia network of anarchistic activists and scholars. Yeah, yeah, it's a great website. I'll include a link to it in the description. Thank you so much for your time this evening. We really appreciate it. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production

of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jamee Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions.

So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.