It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 128

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. 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.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. On this show, we end up talking a lot about the various ways politicians,

media personalities, and lobbying groups are constantly trying to make life a living hell for trans people, between restricting medical care, access to public spaces, as well as banning and literally burning queer art. Basically, a lot of depressing stuff that's designed to make us trans people go mad. We live in a transphobic society. All it takes is one bad day for an aspiring comedian to fall into a vat of estrogenizing chemicals and emerge a jokerfied harlequin. Filmmaker Vera Drew's new movie, a multimedia queer fever dream titled The People's Joker,

Sarah Drew's new movie, a multimedia queer fever dream titled The People's Joker, takes this premise and depicts what it's like trying to make a living as an irony-poisoned trans person in a Gotham City where comedy has been made illegal. This isn't just an unauthorized transgender parody of DC Comics, though it is that as well. The film is a wholly unique collaboration of dozens of queer artists utilizing fair use to tell a trans coming-of-age story with the gothic queer-coded imagery of Batman. If you know anything about my tastes, you probably know that this is incredibly up my alley. So in a departure from this show's usual doom and gloom, I'm putting together a few episodes on what it means to be a queer artist in today's political climate. More episodes will come out next week, but I wanted to get this one out right now, in time for listeners to catch the theatrical run of The People's Joker,

hopefully in a theater near you, right now or in the near future. Last week, I was lucky enough to chat with the clown princess of crime herself, Vera Drew, about the making of The People's Joker. My name is Vera Drew. I'm the writer, director, and I also star in The People's Joker. I also did some of the visual effects too. You can get tickets online at thepeoplesjoker.com. I would like to just start with the origin of the People's Joker project. Why is there a transgender Joker? And why does that make so much sense? I'm glad you feel like it makes sense. I mean, it kind of really started just because Todd Phillips was in the news talking about woke culture

and how it was too hard to make comedy now which is really funny coming from a director who's made millions and millions of dollars making comedy and also made Joker

the year prior and that is a comedy. It's a dark comedy, but it's totally a comedy. And it made a billion dollars. But yeah, he was complaining about woke culture, as is his right. And my co-writer, the person who ended up becoming my co-writer,

Brie LaRose, actually just kind of jokingly commissioned me on Twitter to re-edit Todd Phillips' Joker and actually Venmo'd me $12. And yeah, I started doing it in earnest. I started actually re-editing the movie. And I had worked at Absolutely Productions for years as an editor and had kind of come up as an alternative comedy editor. So, you know, at that point, it was probably just going to be like a lot of fart sound effects and whoosh noises and slips and slide whistles. But as I was working on it and kind of just making this like big piece of found footage video art, like a narrative kind of just like fell into place.

And I, I, it kind of just came in an instant and I was just like, Oh, okay. I think I actually want to make like a coming of age film, but I want to make like a parody of the Joker, like in,

in that process and kind of just like tell like a really earnest and super personal autobiographical story about my life and growing up in the midwest and coming out as trans and comedy and you know my relationship with my mom and toxic relationship i was in and stuff and but kind of process and uh mythologize all of that through uh through batman characters so that's kind of the the origin of the movie uh i guess um i had also kind of been kicking around an idea for like a body horror like a trans body horror movie before that that was um basically like about uh a drag queen who was physically addicted to irony and like couldn't like survive without it but it was also like destroying her from the inside out

the two ideas kind of like merged together and into this sort of i guess yeah that definitely comes through one of my favorite parts of this movie is that it gets to talk about so many intimate aspects of trans experience like trans misny, the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that gets targeted against trans femmes in particular, as well as trans for trans relationships or T4T and lots of other little things. It's using the visual language of Batman as a shorthand to contextualize parts of queerness that just don't often appear in mass media. I showed my co-host Mia the film last week to get her thoughts on the movie as a piece of queer art, since her and my own tastes often greatly differ. What did you think of the transgender clown? It rips. One of the things that was the most interesting to me about it is like, so I'd read some reviews of it and because it's,

you know, because it's sort of, this is how the media works. Most of the reviews are by says people. And it's really fun to see a movie where you're reading it and you, you, you're looking at this and you're going, Oh,

these people didn't get it. They have no idea what's happening. They, they, they, they do not know about T-boy swag. They do not know about like all of the stuff that's happening in this and yeah i mean i i think that's the thing about it that's really

interesting because you know trans coming of age story is like one of the few kind of stories you're sort of allowed to tell if you're trans less so in film more so like in writing you're sort of allowed to do this specifically yeah yeah and it's really interesting the way that this movie starts with a you know for the first maybe 10 minutes it's okay this is like a pretty standard coming of age story and then it hits the real shit in a way that doesn't ever show up on this stuff like i i first saw this movie a year ago and i was shocked at the depiction of like t4t relationships which you like never you never see yeah never being able to like look at like emotional abuse within a t4t relationship

being depicted this way you're like oh my god it's like actually like showing something that is literally never talked about like openly like this is something that we like people have experiences of but it's it's never really like shown or discussed i found that to be incredibly resonant and very like tastefully done yeah i mean i was just like weeping watching parts of it absolutely there's a line in there that is i have never ever what like one of the sort of most real things that like you as a trans woman experience is someone who's trans misogyny exempt saying they don't feel safe around you yeah that being how they kick you like how you get ran out how you get abused that the fact that that's in that's in film and you can see all of the people like you can see cis people like not

getting it like they just they don't they don't understand what's going on and that's really incredibly powerful in in a lot of ways all well in like jared letter joker makeup it's amazing they're like getting into all of this like extremely intense stuff the gaslighting scene was fucking phenomenal but it all looks like this fucking like copy pasted comic art spliced in with like speed racer and return from oz and it is with all of these like adult swim aesthetics because um vera drew has been an editor on a lot of like starting with like tim and eric stuff to like nathan fielielder to Tim Robinson, very entrenched in this like layered collage like Adult Swim style. So that's present all throughout the movie. It's extremely visually unique. It's kind of like it really is like an internet meme like brought to life and like puppeteered by like an uncanny uh unseen hand uh i think it really embraces the aesthetics of like an ill-fitting halloween harley quinn cosplay costume

it's like taking that and like deeply interrogating what that visually represents and looks like and why someone would wear an ill-fitting harley costume. It deeply understands all of the aesthetic sensibilities behind an image like that. Extremely, extremely fun. I think it's worth talking about, at least in brief, the trajectory of this movie's release, because it is a very comic book, joker-fied story, from the idea of this film to its premiere at a film festival, to all of the uncertainty and legal chaos that came along the way. So an earlier cut

of this movie was originally set to premiere at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, back in 2022. Right before the first showing, Warner Brothers sent a vaguely worded but threatening letter, which resulted in The People's Joker being pulled from the festival, save for one late-night screening that got rave reviews. With its legal status uncertain, the movie kind of went into limbo. Here's Vera Drew on what happened after the first TIFF showing. I really put all I had into this movie. I cashed in every favor I had ever accumulated in Hollywood. Financially, I took out a huge loan to finish it.

And it was just this big, deeply personal thing that I had made that originally really was just for me and my friends. Like it was just kind of a thing that I had just made, you know, maybe I would have shown it to like my Patreon or something, but like it was uh you know after a certain point like it you know once we had that like premiere it was just like i need to like i can't just post this to youtube i can't like just dump it somewhere or like shelve it and what felt right really was like taking the movie out just to festivals and kind of doing a secret screening tour, which is what we did. And that was really exciting and kind of like a joker-fied way of sort of getting this

movie out there. And I was just surrounded by other filmmakers in the genre community and who would see the movie at this festival and be like, you need to just wait. The person who's going to help you is going to come. So for a while, the film was making surprise secret screenings at film festivals across the US and Canada. And now almost two years later, the queer distribution company Altered Innocence picked up the film and it's now in movie theaters nationwide. The thing that I think is really interesting about this

is sort of the timing of it because this originally comes out in 2022 right sure does and then it gets on came out by pushed back into the closet by the corporate ghouls this discovery pushes the people's joker back into the closet yeah but i what i think is really interesting about it is is its position in this sort of arc of queer media, right? I mean, when I was a kid, there was nothing. It was like the first queer thing I ever saw in a show was the Korra-Sami kiss at the end of Legend of Korra. Like, there was nothing.

And then suddenly... It's funny. I just watched last night, night like three of the old law and order svu trans episodes oh god oh boy oh boy do they have some extremely extremely interesting moments i i will leave it up to the viewer's imagination yeah and what's interesting about the rice is you get this moment that i kind of recognize from, you had this sort of Asian American media too, where like there was this, you know,

it was, if you go back and watch something from 2004 that has an Asian person in it, it is, it is like, like there are people right now in the U S who will physically attack you for being Asian and who will say shit and who's, whose level of verbal racism will be less than the racism that's just in this

movie as a gag. Sure. And, you know, and so you, you get, and eventually like throughout the 2010s, we sort of got like,

Oh, there's like Asian Americans and movies now. And that was kind of happening with, in, with, with sort of, you know, in particularly in cartoons,

things like owl house, that was kind of happening in, in media with queer people. And then there was the sort of the 2020s backlash and that's in like you you can you know it's it's in in the same way the hunter s thompson has this line about like you can see exactly where this is standing in vegas you can see the line where the 60s receded like you can see the line where all of the queer stuff just is like gone and this forces everyone you know you have you have two options right you can fucking go back

into the closet and you can fucking work on whatever dog shit show that's just going to be completely cishet now or you can just you can make the people's joker which is to say you can just make you just you can just go and do it and you can make something and i think there's something that's very different than a lot than the the sort of wave that had come before it is that like this is piece of trans media that is made by trans people for trans people and there's some like trapping stuff for cis people to sort of like walk them along a little tiny bit but like it uses the language of dc comics to handhold other audiences to understand what's going on yeah but but at its core you know and like obviously like yeah there's you know mix of plix like i'm butchering his name no no one knows how to say

that's that's the whole bit is that no one knows how to say it yeah i mean like you know so like there's like there's like kind of deep cut like comic stuff in there too because you know this is by people who like unlike everyone who makes these fucking movies these days people who actually genuinely like deeply love the source material that they're pulling from yes and thus are willing to just go off the walls with it and have like jason todd t-boy swag emotional abuser joker who is many such cases like so much more interesting than any iteration of the joker i've seen absolutely well and it also it also pulls on like the very long history of the joker being queer coded yeah i mean like if you go to like grant morrison's joker extremely queer the 60s batman show is all very queer but like the joker has always been seen as

this kind of this like having this queer deviant element um despite really only having like heterosexual pairings um but even still in his relation to batman it's always been a very queer heavy thing and that's something that dc comics have has definitely shied away from intentionally and having something that so blatantly embraces that well not not just like does it for like fun representation like actually interrogates like queer relationships through that through that extremely like troubling power dynamic is really really fascinating there is no fucking cis man like there is no white cis dude who has gone through enough shit to make them turn into the Joker. Like, come on! It's like, oh, damn, I couldn't get on a comedy show until I became the Joker.

It's like, wait, wait, wait, no! No, this is insufficient to Jokerify. Mia, all it takes is one bad day. I... You know, I mean, I guess that is, like... Do you want to know how I got these emotional scars? It's really, like like every cis man is okay enough with violence that they think that they're one bad day for just murdering everyone around them but sometimes they snap and it's like true you know but also come on like you motherfuckers you ain't seen shit we've've had a very, like, incel embrace of the Joker

ever since Heath Ledger, of course, with the Joaquin Phoenix movie. Very incel-coded. Both in conversation with that, because this piece was made as a direct reaction to Todd Phillips' The Joker movie, but it's in conversation with that while highlighting the actual, like,

very, very inherent queerness to this man who dresses up like a clown to play with another man who dresses up like a bat i was lucky enough to catch an earlier cut of the People's Joker at a Canadian film festival last year, dressed in one of my many Harley Quinn costumes. Again, if you know anything about me, you know I love Batman and Gotham City. I do my yearly queer Batman Returns watch parties where I dress up like Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman. But the social groups I'm often in can sometimes be a little bit weird about Batman stuff because he's like a fascist or whatever

but I've always thought that Gotham City is really queer as a concept and I love that someone else appeared to share that opinion and decided to explore Gotham City as an aesthetic zone to operate in as a queer artist here's Vera Drew talking about

the connection between her queerness and Batman. I really am like a lifelong Batman comic fan and I've been working on this movie for four years and I'm somehow still not sick of Batman, which is crazy to me. Yeah, I mean, I think like the lore has just kind of always been there in my life. And it's always just felt very queer to me. I mean, I guess mostly in like a subtext way. But you just think back to like all the iterations. Like, I mean, my entry point into Batman was Joel Schumacher Batman.

Like I saw Batman Forever when I was six. Batman. I saw Batman Forever when I was six. And it was literally one of the first times I realized I was trans was that moment, was just seeing Nicole Kidman. I wanted to look like her. I wanted to be perceived how she was being perceived. I wanted someone to look at me the way Batman looks at her. And that was all very confusing for a six year old, you know, who, uh, up until that point was pretty sure they were a boy.

I grew up in the nineties. So I didn't really have like my representation was the Jerry Springer show. And, uh, Howard Stern, that's where I saw trans people. And, um,

I think like comics were just this, um, space where I could, I don't know know it just feels very queer like and it's it's not just subtext i mean there is there's a lot of subtext obviously in like the schumacher batmans like his his gotham city just is a like gay neon nightmare of beauty um we're definitely like taking that aesthetic kind of in the people's joker like that was always kind of my vision for gotham but even the 60s batman despite how absolutely yeah yeah yeah you know it's it's super conservative but like it's it's so colorful and like it's very gay it's extremely gay it. It's, and it's like, I get it.

Does somebody actually described it to me the other day is like, you have like a character like Riddler and like, he's just surrounded by like hot women. Like it's just, everybody feels like kind of like a weird, Polly annoying person, which is me and my friends. i feel like adam west is definitely playing like a closeted gay man in that show as well totally who's like surrounded by much more

like flamboyant queers and he like doesn't know how to deal with it that's totally fair i i really appreciated like there's so so many Batman Forever jokes in this. Like, you even use the Batman Forever font, like, constantly throughout the film. There's so many, like, little bits. I really appreciated all of the Alexander Knox jokes throughout the film. I feel like that's one of the most underrated characters from the Tim Burton movies. And then all of, like, the Grant Morrison super sanity bits also I found incredibly funny. When I was watching it, I felt like a big strong sense I felt was like, this is what a piece of art would look like if it was made like within the DC universe.

It feels like something that comes like from that point and is like somehow like emanated into our world. Wow. Thank you. It was wonderful. There's definitely some like Speed Racer elements, a little bit of David Lynch's Dune, especially the Mr. Mixoplex scenes felt very much like all of the weird Spice Visions. It was great seeing this progress from the cut last year to this one. It flows a lot. When I was talking with my co-host Mia about the film, we both pointed out how this movie doesn't just feel like a movie with gay people in it. It itself feels like a piece of queer art. The art itself has a sense of inherent queerness.

I think there's a lot of reasons for that. The fact that it's a collaborative project from dozens of queer artists sending in background pieces, characters, voice acting, music, set design. It all creates a very DIY queer zine kind of feel, but in a moving picture. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about this difference between just queer representation and queer art. You kind of touched on something previously where the difference between just queer representation and queer art. You kind of touched on something previously where like the difference between queer representation and like art that is,

that like is queer. These are like two very different things. And the movie actually is in conversation with this as well, being like the difference between hiring a trans person to be on the SNL cast versus a trans person doing their own comedy show. Right. And how those are two very different things with very different politics. And I think this movie is a large statement against

that assimilationist drive that a lot of people kind of fall back on for like self-preservation reasons, self-coping reasons, and like financial reasons, sure. It is extremely critical of that notion and reifies like this like DIY approach towards queer people making our own art yeah and that's something i've been thinking about a lot because like you know like asian americans have like we got there right like cis asian americans we we got our representation like what is a representation it's like well they found a way to make like being east asian the thing you can sell the white people by having it be about food and selling the version of like a slightly different version of the traditional family and i you know and like and you can you

can sort of ask what good has this done for asian american people and mostly what it's done is that asian american cinema there's it's a wasteland right like and you know and you you could you could see like there's there's a version of sort of of where the 2020s go that's different where the assimilationist drive kicks in and we don't and this happens to queer media where it's just this yeah nothing it's just this void of of sort of formless content that gets sold to the cis people i mean and i think you could even look at that from a lot of like 2016 to 2020 styling yeah of queer media that does come off as very assimilationist and now i feel like we are entering this new age of trans cinema where we have a lot of people either working with more independent production houses i'm very excited for i saw the tv glow coming out

uh next month but we have a lot of other independent trans filmmakers starting out quite young, getting into filmmaking also not quite young, like into their 30s, who are working to actually produce films and media that don't just get thrown up on YouTube, that producing art that does not just become another transgender video essay.

That floods the site, right? It's finding other ways to actually engage artistically besides the very comfortable ways that we've gotten used to whether that's like you know what your average trans dj trans like electronic music or a trans video essay which feels like really the only two ways to make art as a trans person reliably are making youtube videos making music both of which can be very good absolutely there's of some fantastic trans musicians there's a lot of great video essays out there but the artistic landscape is so much bigger than that and being able to watch people realize that this youtube thing is so self-limiting and starting to grow

past that is incredibly cool to see i know there's stuff like nebula which is like this streaming service kind of built on youtube but trying to do more of its own things that's been interesting to watch grow uh but also a lot of a lot of people attempting just to actually like take movies to film festivals and actually like engage with this as like art and like having it be recognized as art like it would have been so easy to turn the people's joker into like a youtube fan film right just fucking thousands of fucking batman fan films on youtube that would have been so easy but the insistence are like no i'm actually gonna actually gonna use like fair use law gonna actually do like a legal parody and push this through film festivals get it in actual movie theaters we are seeing a lot more trans films

at film festivals we are seeing this start happening and i'm very excited to watch this grow yeah and i think what's ultimately happening here is that there's a combination of two things one is that we've we're getting spat out by the traditional media machine and two the traditional media machine is rotting from the inside right and it's not good that either of these things are really happening but simultaneously it also means that we're in this position where having been spat out we can go make the giant media monster yeah we can go we can go stab it and force a bunch of these like random cis critics to be like to try to figure out a t4t relationship

but just blow it something like this would have never been made by warner brothers that's just like impossible yeah this this art could have never never been made by warner brothers that's just like impossible yeah this this art could have never never been made under warner brothers right that's just impossible and being able to say no i'm going to use these cultural iconography that we keep being told endlessly that this is this is our culture's version of mythology uh which is fucking people talk about superheroes like that all the fucking time like this is this is our greek gods this is our blah blah blah blah yet it's just owned by like two companies who control everything about it and don't allow the public to actually engage with these as cultural figures and saying no we actually are going to find a way to use these characters in relation to someone's own life as an artist

and using it to talk about queerness and comedy and working in the comedy industry as a queer person to create a very unique piece that, yeah, literally could have, there's no way it would ever be made. So this is a piece of art that could have never happened any other way. And now we have it playing in a local theater near you. And I think that's very cool. Here's Vera Drew again, talking about the theatrical run. We're playing a lot of cities. We keep adding more. If you don't see your city, bother the theater in your town and tell them you want them to play it

and show them one of the many articles about this film and maybe they'll do it or reach out to us and let us know. Thepeoplesjoker.com and you can follow me at VeraDrew22 on Twitter, Instagram, and now TikTok. Don't know how to use it,

but we're going to figure it out together. Thanks for listening. Again, you can check out The People's Joker at thepeoplesjoker.com. Look for tickets and showtimes. Hopefully there'll be one in your area. Next week, there'll be more episodes talking about the making of this movie,

as well as a few other trans comedian art projects that are currently ongoing. See you on the other side. 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, pel 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 Thank you. for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever 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. 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 father in Cuba. Mr. González 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 González story, as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Good Hopin' here. I'm Andrew Siege of the YouTube channel Andrew So. I'm joined by... Mia Wong. Did not miss your cue this time. This will

not make any sense to you unless you've heard the previous episode in which I missed my cue. Hello. Indeed. Indeed. Welcome. Did miss your cue. So recently I read Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. It was his memoir of his childhood in South Africa. And politics aside, he's a decent comedian and had me laughing out loud and thinking a lot as well. And it really reignited my long-passing interest in South African history. Because he's given a lot of context when sharing his stories. So I decided to look into the history of anarchism in South Africa and that's what we will be

exploring today. Much of the information I gathered is thanks to the scholarship of Lucien van der Woldt, a South African anarchist and professor of sociology. Particularly, I'll be looking at the work on anarchism and syndicalism in Southern Africa from the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest and anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and post-colonial world. Without getting into the lengthy and storied history of the region, I do need to provide some context. So we'll start in the mid-19th century, where the region that became South Africa was considered marginal to the world economy. You had the port at the Cape of Good Hope and Port Elizabeth, which handled mainly agricultural exports, and this was during the second period of the British

Cape Colony's existence, after it had briefly fallen into the hands of the Batavian Republic during the Napoleonic Wars. None of that is particularly necessary to know for our sake, but you know, little fun fact. At this point, once again under the British, the land was broadly agrarian, and Britain's farms were worked by colored and African workers. The neighboring Natal colony also under British rule had its plantations worked by indentured Indians. The rest of the interior was under various Africana republics and African kingdoms.

For those not in the know, so Africanrican in this context refers to obviously africans black africans to be specific indians referring to the indentured laborers from the indian subcontinent africanas referring to the africans or dutch speaking white south africans and then we have of course the British which are you know white British people and the colored as a designation as a group as a self-identified ethnic group referred to the people of mixed European and African heritage that had begun to develop their own identity in their own community because the settlement of South Africa had started centuries before. So other than the agricultural export and ports providing a respite for trade between the West and the East, the Southern African colonies weren't particularly high up on anyone's list of priorities.

But then the economic landscape of the region transformed with the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1867 and gold in Witwatersrand in 1886. To make a very long story short, this led to the rapid centralization of mining activities and the growth of towns like Johannesburg, one of the most well-known towns in South Africa. Imperial interests intensified, resulting in the British Wars on Africans and Africanas and the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, an extremely diverse and polyglot society under British rule. By 1913, almost half of the world's gold output came from the Witwatersrand area, and the Witwatersrand mines employed 195,000 Africans and 22,000 white workers. The working class clearly faced many racial and ethnic divisions. It was primarily composed of various Africans, which had their own divisions between them,

and there were also divisions between the largely skilled white immigrants from Europe and the largely unskilled local white Afrikaners. The marginalized African and colored middle classes that began to form from the few free laborers involved in various growing industries would come to lead early nationalist movements while grappling with segregation, discrimination, and linguistic challenges. As Van der Waals said, and I quote, They lived in a situation where cheap African labour formed the bedrock of the mines as well as state industry and the growing commercial farming and manufacturing sectors, and where the cheapness of African labour was primarily a function of the blacks' historic incorporation into the country as a subject people. function of the blacks' historic incorporation into the country as a subject people. In this sense, local capitalist relations of exploitation were constructed upon colonial relations of

domination. Fast forward to the eve of apartheid in 1948 when Afrikaner nationalists took power and extended the segregation policies of the first four decades of the union even further, you get two responses to the national question preceding the development of apartheid from the organized labor crowd at the time. The first response, known as white laborism, was associated with the mainstream white labor movement leading back to the 19th century. The South African Labor Party and South African Industrial Federation were key proponents of white laborism, and both organizations were born from the exclusiveness of early craft unions that later evolved into more pronounced racial exclusiveness.

This white laborism approach combined social democracy with segregation, promoting job reservation and preferential employment for whites, urban segregation, and Asian repatriation. White power for white workers, basically. The other races can figure out their own deal, of course on the reservations that we put them in. So it's no surprise that the apartheid government in part mainstreamed this white laborism movement. But the second response to the national question was linked to the Communist Party of South Africa, the CPSA, from 1928, when it adopted the Native Republic thesis under pressure from the Communist International. This approach advocated for the establishment of an independent South African Native Republic as a precursor to the Workers' and Peasants' Republic, separating national liberation, specifically in the form of nationalism, and then socialism, into distinct stages.

The CPSA initially considered leading both of these stages, but later abandoned this idea and opted for a united front with the African National Congress, aiming for a unitary, democratic, and capitalist state with land reform and partial nationalization. But there's a hidden history that goes unnoticed, prior to the rise of apartheid and the CPSA. All the way back in the 1880s, Henry Glass played a pivotal role in establishing the local anarchist tradition in South Africa. a pivotal role in establishing the local anarchist tradition in South Africa. He was an Englishman born in India with a background in radical London circles. He moved to Port Elizabeth in the 1880s and engaged in various jobs, including working on the Whitwater Strand mines among African people. He contributed to the Cape Labour Press, translated key works by Kropotkin into English, and distributed anarchist

materials through various organizations. Glass seems to have taken a good look at colonialism, saw how Africans were treated, and didn't shy away from calling it out. Now, some of his writing did idealize pre-capitalist cultures, for example pointing out in a letter to Kropotkin that you can still find amongst them the principle of communism, but his main focus was on pointing fingers at an order that treated Africans like second-class citizens and going even further to champion the idea of a working-class movement that bridged racial divides. He understood the foolishness of white workers to try and pursue their liberation alone while sidelining their colored comrades, and though Glass spent his time agitating in

Port Elizabeth, this was also a perspective shared by the Social Democratic Federation, or SDF, based in Cape Town, which despite its name, was all about pushing anarchism and syndicalism. Actually, let me be more precise, there was a dominant wing within the SDF of Cape Town that emphasized anarchism and syndicalism. There were also moderate and status elements in the SDF as well. Cape Town was quite different at that time from Port Elizabeth. Port Elizabeth was mostly African and white, but Cape Town had a significant coloured population, which created a situation where much of Cape Town's working class was free labour, rather than bound to some form of slavery or indenture.

Coloureds were facing growing official segregation and popular discrimination from the late 19th century onwards though, so there was a growing discontent as the working class fractured even further. But there was a key figure in the Cape Town SDF that pushed anarchism and syndicalism, and that was Wilfred Harrison, another friend of Kropotkin, a carpenter, a trade unionist, and an ex-soldier. He was known as a very dynamic speaker and a staunch anarchist communist who pushed for a future where workers owned and controlled everything. With Harrison at the helm, the SDF set up shop in Adderley Street where they were organizing talks, events, and even standing in elections for propaganda purposes.

The SDF's events attracted thousands, creating truly uniquely integrated public spheres that would bring coloureds, whites, and Africans in some of the same spaces. They were holding speeches in Afrikaans, which was the most popular language of the coloreds, and in Isi Nkosa, the language of the Nkosa people. They had bookshops, reading rooms, refreshment bars, beach trips, choirs, and even a few socialist christenings. At the various talks, they welcomed controversial figures, including a young Gandhi. Harrison's wing of the SDF further sought to remove union colour bars, unionise coloured, secure equal pay, and build unions that would unite all workers regardless of race. In the early 1900s, socialists in Witwatersrand launched the Weekly Voice of Labour,

led by Archie Crawford and Mary Fitzgerald. The paper served to connect socialists across cities, from Durban to Kimberley to Cape Town to Johannesburg. Archie Crawford was a staunch anti-segregationist, pushing back against the South African Labour Party for its policies and organising the neglected coloured workers. In 1910, the SDF hosted British syndicalist Tom Mann, whose tours of the region would inspire the founding of the Socialist Labour Party, or SLP, in Johannesburg. They adopted the ideas of Daniel de Leon, the American leader of the

International Workers of the World, and were followed by the Industrial Workers Union, which linked with the IWW in Chicago. The IWW's ideas spread to Durban and Pretoria, but it was Johannesburg where they flexed their muscles with successful strikes and challenges to labor laws. The IWW's position carried the same as its forebears. Fight the class war with the aid of all workers, whether efficient or inefficient, skilled or unskilled, white or black. IWW organizer Jock Campbell would be the first to specifically make propaganda amongst the African workers in Whitewater Strand. But don't get me wrong, these efforts do not mean that they necessarily succeeded.

The IWW and SLP's struggle to recruit to cross racial lines stems not primarily from prejudice, but from their overall weakness as union organizers outside the tram sector where they saw the most successes and of course the practical challenges of organizing the predominantly unfree african workforce under whitwater's run so they talked a good talk about reaching across racial lines but not to massive success because they didn't have a strategy in place to actually establish those connections between Africans, colored, and Indian workers. In this regard, actually, the SDF in Cape Town was a lot more successful. However,

something did happen in Witwatersrand. In May 1913, a significant general strike erupted on Witwatersrand, initiated by white miners and quickly spreading across industries. The strike was marked by riots and gun battles, and escalated on what's called Black Saturday, July 5th, resulting in 25 deaths at the hands of the imperial troops. Subsequent strikes by African miners and Indian passive resistance campaigns further intensified the social unrest. But the failure of a compromise in the aftermath of the 1913 strike led to a second general strike in January 1914. The state responded swiftly, declaring martial law, mobilizing forces, and suppressing the unions, resulting in the arrest and deportation

of key activists, including Archie Crawford. Then World War I further disrupted things, with the country joining the British side. While some organizations suspended activities to support the war efforts, hardline Afrikaner nationalists launched an armed rebellion, leading to splits within the SDF and the South African Labour Party. Although anarchism and syndicalism played a role in these turbulent events, the actual syndicalist movement on the Whitewater Strand was weak and divided by 1913. Despite attempts to forge unity through the United Socialist Party, the USP, it fell apart due to existing divisions and ideological differences among the constituent

groups. While organized syndicalism struggled to lead the strikes, syndicalist ideas and slogans gained considerable traction in labor circles. The strikes and war issues reinvigorated existing anarchists and syndicalists, radicalized new activists, and sparked widespread interest in radical ideas, which would lead to a new development. In September 1915, the Industrial Socialist League, the ISL, emerged as a prominent syndicalist formation. Comprising of the syndicalist veterans and anti-war South African Labour Party activists, the ISL quickly became the largest left political group before the Communist Party of South Africa. The ISL, rooted in the IWW tradition, advocated for the organization of workers on industrial lines, irrespective of race, and envisioned an integrated

revolutionary one big union for national liberation and class struggle. The ISL criticized white craft unions for their divisive practices and advocated for industrial unions to confront the challenges posed by giant corporations and trusts. Racial prejudice, according to the ISL, served the ruling class' interests, ensuring a steady supply of cheap, unorganized African labor. At the same time that the ISL was actively opposing discriminatory laws, the ISL also doubted the efficacy of African nationalist programs in genuinely emancipating the black masses. It contended that national oppression was rooted in capitalism, making national liberation unlikely under the prevailing system. The ISL aimed to reform white unions while leading efforts to organize people of color.

They faced challenges, of course, in the form of opposition from white workers, electoral defeats, and hostility from established unions. They were evicted from Trades Hall in 1917 for resisting discriminatory policies but continued their activities, cultivating links with people of colour, particularly through its passionately anti-Zionist Yiddish-speaking branch. The ISL played a pivotal role in establishing unions among people of colour, launching the Indian Workers' Industrial Union in Durban in 1917 and later through Night Schools for Africans, initiating the Industrial Workers of Africa in the same year, both of which would be led by their own constituents. In July 1918, there would be another general strike, this time primarily by Africans.

Earlier that year, 152 African municipal workers were sentenced to hard labor for striking, leading to protests organized by the Industrial Workers of Africa, the International Socialist League, and the South Africa Native National Congress, the SANNC, which was the precursor to the currently ruling African National Congress, the ANC. The Joint Action Committee proposed a general strike on the Witwatersrand for the release of the sentenced workers and better pay for African workers. Although the strike was cancelled last minute, several thousand African miners participated anyway, resulting in arrests for incitement to public violence. The arrested

individuals included ISL members and a member of both the Industrial Workers of Africa and the SANC. A year later, in March 1919, ISL members played a role in the civil disobedience campaign against past laws, which required non-whites in South Africa to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted white areas. That resistance campaign led to nearly 700 arrests. That same year in Kimberley, the ISL established syndicalist unions among colored workers, such as the Clothing Workers Industrial Union and the Horse Drivers Union. These unions achieved significant successes, including wage increases. In Cape Town, ISL members Sitiwe and Kraai aimed to organise the Industrial Workers of

Africa on the docks. They collaborated with the Industrial Socialist League, a syndicalist breakaway from the SDF, and played a role in the major strike on the docks in December 1919. Now the strike ultimately disintegrated, but it still marked a significant event. All in all, the ISL, heavily influenced by syndicalism, will play a major role in the strikes of the late 1910s. The ISL's influence extended to the formation of the Communist Party of South Africa, CPSC, alongside the SDF and the Indecel, and a few other groups in the 1920s. That party would go underground after

the Anti-Communist Act of the 50s and re-emerge as the South African Communist Party, the SACP. For most of its history, it has been explicitly Marxist-Leninist, heavily influenced by the Bolsheviks. However, when it first started, syndicalist concepts still lingered within the party for many years before it was eventually excised. The internationalist and multiracial vision of the syndicalist movement was later taken over by the two-stage strategy of the CPSC-SACP, which sought to establish an independent, democratic, capitalist republic as a precursor to a socialist order. This, of course, diverges

from the earlier anarchist and syndicalist strategy, which viewed the anti-colonial, independent, and class struggles as interconnected and didn't see national liberation as solely the purview of nationalism. A view which, to me, is more sophisticated and revolutionary than this one-track status view that Marxists tend to adopt, contrary to the organizing efforts of actual working-class people. Interestingly, Van der Waal argues that while CPSA undeniably contributed to the working-class struggle since the 1940s, a critical look reveals that they made consistent caricatures of the pre-CPSA left. They sought to establish themselves as the true vanguard in the fight for

South Africa's liberation. So they portrayed the pre-CPSA left in two main currents, the proto-Bolsheviks, considered true socialists, and everyone else. The pre-CPSA left was deemed a failure, with the proto-Bolsheviks credited for pioneering socialist work among black workers. According to their narrative, it was only in the late 1920s, with the CPSA's adoption of the Native Republic thesis and Marxist-Leninist ideas, that the national question was adequately addressed. Anarchism and syndicalism are portrayed as marginal and bothersome, predominantly white movements that, at best, underestimated the significance of national oppression or, at worst,

endorsed white supremacy and segregation. This interpretation, of course, positions the CPSA slash SACP as the sole bearers of a revolutionary socialist solution to the national question, while ironically erasing the history of early African socialist and syndicalist radicalism. So, wrapping up a bit here, we delved into the intricate history of anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa, uncovering a movement that played a significant role in Southern Africa from the 1880s to the 1920s, and consistently grappled with the complexities of the national question. We've seen a multiracial and internationalist movement, marked by a steadfast opposition to racial discrimination and a commitment to interracial

labour organisation and the unity of the working class. They had a vision of a society rooted in class solidarity, of an industrial republic, distinct from the conventional nation-state, and in lockstep with an international industrial republic. Now, despite the decline of anarchism and syndicalism in the years following the founding of the CPSA-SACP, anarchism is still alive today in South Africa. is still alive today in South Africa. The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, or ZACF, is a specific anarchist political organization based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and founded on May Day in 2003. The organization operates on an individual membership basis by invitation only, emphasizing theoretical and strategic unity among members. The Zabulazas

align with the anarchist-communist, platformist, and especifista traditions within anarchism, subscribing to the idea of an active minority pushing anarchist ideas within larger movements. In fact, unlike the anarcho-syndicalists, the Zabulazas don't aim to build mass anarchist movements, but rather to participate in aim to build mass anarchist movements, but rather to participate in existing social movements spreading anarchist principles within heterogeneous organizations. Zabalaza advocates for direct democracy, mutual aid, horizontalism, class combativeness, direct action, and class independence.

It emerged during a time of political closure within trade unions, which were controlled by the African National Congress government. It oriented itself towards emerging social movements, such as the anti-privatization forum and the landless people's movement, aiming to advance anarchist principles within these movements. Sablaz's work includes popular political education, combating reformist and authoritarian tendencies, and advocating for the independence of social movements from political parties and electoral politics. So that's the story. The history of anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa. Obviously, this is a summary, but it goes to show the influence that these movements have

had in shaping the history of that often forgotten region of the world. Thanks for joining me. Once again, all power to all the people. Peace. 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 Thank you. Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get yourifters, 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 iHeart Radio 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. 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 Piece, 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, a podcast that much to the chagrin of my upstairs neighbors is being recorded at almost 3 in the morning. It's being recorded at 3 in the morning instead of at a normal time because a bunch of protests broke out across college campuses against the genocide in Palestine. We will cover that at some point very soon. However, comma, there is this episode to be done. I'm your host, Neil Wong, and this episode is something a little different. So, there's an element of Trump's Agenda 47 that we didn't

really talk about in our episodes. That's actually a pretty significant amount of the material, and that's Trump's trade policy. And this is sort of surprisingly a very large part of his pitch. The sort of gist of it is that Trump's appeal to like the white working class tm is okay we're going to do a bunch of protectionist terrorists this is going to bring jobs back to the u.s by imposing costs on manufacturing in other countries etc etc this will bring jobs back to america and it will make america greater some shit, the centerpiece of this is what's called the Reciprocal Tariff Bill. And it's not that complicated. Basically, what it says is if a country imposes a tariff on an American good, the U.S. imposes an identical tariff on that tariff.

It's designed to basically automatically start trade wars. to basically automatically start trade wars. Now, the reason we didn't cover this in the original Agenda 47 slate of episodes is that even in the worst case scenario where Trump takes power in like a coup and the sort of power of anyone to oppose him is significantly curtailed, I don't think he can get this one passed.

And the reason I don't think he can get this one passed and the reason i don't think you can get this one passed is because you know as as it turns out this package and we're going to sort of explore this a little bit uh actually seriously messing with tariffs is something that is really really going to piss off a lot of corporations that actually matter now okay so like we could have i could have just done the episode anyways led with that and just given a sort of you know just given the disclaimer that like it's probably not going to happen but i think there's a more interesting story here that hasn't really been talked about about the origin of basically the framework of modern American politics, both on the right and on the left, because they both emerge, I think, from a series of arguments about trade that has been kind of broadly forgotten. I think that's to our detriment.

And the product of this is that there's been a sort of raft of arguments, and I've seen this as much from the left as from the right that trump's support for tariffs and particularly the sort of trade spat he got in with china from 2018 to 2019 marks the end of the sort of like neoliberal free trade regime and the emergence of like new nationalist protections against free trade it's like the new economic system that's replaced neoliberalism and i am very skeptical of this and the reason why i'm very skeptical of this is because i like when when i was coming up as a leftist i spent a bunch of time seriously became involved in like irl left organizing around 2017 i'd done some stuff in like 2013 before then but that meant that you know a lot of the stuff I was reading was accounts of what was

called the global justice movement, or ultra-globalization, anti-globalization. It has a million names. But it was this series of mass protest movements against the sort of raft of free trade agreements coming out of the 90s. And you get a very, very different picture of the 90s. So, and you get a very, very different picture of the history of free trade that is sort of broader and more expansive

in the history of the resistance to it than you get if you just sort of like, you know, assume neoliberalism has been the same always

and Trump is the sort of aberration to it. Now, Trump's status as an aberration is something that I question. I mean, you know, trump's status as an aberration is something that i question

i mean you know the trade war that he got into is something you know it's it's it is different but i think there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of hype around trump's like opposition to free trade like one of the big things you know that trump ran on was pulling out of nafta and he did he did pull out of nafta however comma he then set up a new trade nafta by the way it's a north american free trade agreement it's really shit uh we're going to talk a bit more about what exactly it did later but you know it's it's broadly seen i think rightly as something that smashed both huge portions of what was left of the American manufacturing economy and you know they're the jobs that they got afterwards had shittier wages you know entire communities are ravaged etc etc etc so trump you know famously campaigns on pulling out of this deal but he replaces it with something called usmca now here's the thing about this deal this is basically just nafta

with slightly stronger carve-outs for the auto industry about like what percentage of the parts of vehicles have to be produced in the u.s and some like slightly stronger labor like protections which is like fine but it's it's basically the same deal right so you know you you have to take this whole sort of like ah trump is like the anti-free trade thing with a grain of salt and look at, again, this deal that he negotiated, which is just NAFTA. It is literally after all of the hype of him pulling out of NAFTA, he did NAFTA again. Now, this is something very interesting that I don't think people remember. Obama also opposed NAFTA and they came into office and then nothing ever fucking happened to NAFTA.

So, you know, the sort of, like, the rumors of NAFTA's demise have been greatly exaggerated. But, comma, the story of the building of opposition to NAFTA is very, very interesting. very, very interesting. So something I don't think most people understand is that the modern American left is descended from the Zapatistas, very specifically. We're going to one day cover the Zapatista uprising in some detail, but the sort of cliff-nose version is that on January 1st, 1994, the Zapatistas, who are named after the great Mexican revolutionary hero Emilio Zapata, staged an uprising in Mexico. They seized a bunch of cities very quickly. They were sort of driven out of those cities, but eventually they took control of a decent part of the territory of the Mexican state of Chiapas. The Zapatistas staged this uprising for a number of reasons.

The most famous of them is that January 1st, 1994 is the year that NAFTA took effect. One of the things about this free trade agreement is that in order to ratify it, the Mexican government changed the constitution and the part of the constitution they eliminated was the part that had secured collective ownership of a bunch of land for indigenous people. And this would

allow corporations to seize and control this and seize and control the indigenous lands exploit it for resources kick the people off of it and kill them now this obviously was unacceptable to the zapatistas they go into revolt what i think people don't realize is zapatistas what the zapatistas did next which is holding holding a series of these things called encuentros, like encounters. Sorry, my Spanish is not as good as it once was and it was never great, but in which they invited sort of leftist activists

from all over the world to get together. And this is the thing that rebuilt the left after the absolute catastrophe of the death of the old left around the collapse of the Soviet Union, which sort of annihilated the sort of old left communist political parties and ushered in the pure era of the march on neoliberalism and the activists that came out of these encounters go back to you know go back to their respective countries and they start and you know they're they're organizing against these against you know the these series of free trade deals and they start doing what's become what's become known as summit hopping um i think the the most famous of these in america is what's become known as the battle. I think the most famous of these in America is what's become known as the Battle of Seattle, the 1999

giant protest against the World Trade Organization summit. And this starts from about 1999 to 9-11. There's a huge wave of these. Well, I mean, it goes on after 9-11, but 9-11 really damages it. But there's this massive,

it's really the first sort of real like mass mobilizations and social movements like in in in the u.s since like there's a stuff in the anti-nuclear room in the 80s but this is this is the first really big sort of like resurrection of the left and i think importantly for us like the people who found Occupy, like David Graeber, for example, is someone who starts doing politics during this period, during ultra-globalization, during these sort of protests. And those people, those are the people who build Occupy. And, you know, Occupy, for whatever else you can say about it occupy is the single event that brought that like dragged the american left kicking and screaming out of irrelevance and all of that shit everything you know every like all of the sort of organizational tenants of occupy all of its sort

of ideology that stuff is all stuff from multi-globalization right opposite is and you know the sort of tenants of like of direct democracy of uh the sort of like uh the sort of economic egalitarianism this opposition to free trade this you know this whole thing about the way that the world trade organization and the world bank you know use sort of uh economic restructuring deals to devastate economies and like turn entire nations into sort of debt peons this is all ultra globalization stuff and this movement is very very powerful and very successful even the sort of arch like you know by by the time you hit 2016 right this has reshaped politics in the u.s to the extent that like arch neoliberal hillary cl Clinton says she's openly in fit,

like openly says she's in favor of renegotiating NAFTA and opposes her own giant Pacific partnership, which is the last of the sort of giant free trade deals that would eventually like die and go up in smoke with Trump. Right. I'm going to read a passage from David Graeber's piece, The Shock of Victory, about what actually happened during this movement. This is a section about free trade agreements. All the ambitious free trade treaties planned since 1998 have failed. The MIA was routed, the FTAA, the focus of the actions in Quebec and Miami stopped dead in its tracks. Most of us remember the 2003 FTAA summit mainly for introducing the quote-unquote Miami model of extreme police repression against even obviously non-violent civil resistance.

It was that. But we forget that this was more than anything the enraged flailings of a pack of extremely sore losers. Miami was the meeting where the FTAA was definitively killed. Now, no one is even talking about broad ambitious treaties on that scale. The US is reduced to pushing for minor country-to-country trade pacts with traditional allies like South Korea and Peru, or at best deals like CAFTA, uniting its remaining client states in Central America, and it's not even clear it will manage to pull that off.

And this is what we've seen from, you know, sort of projecting forward from the future from the 2000s when this is written. Free trade was not killed by Trump or Xi Jinping. These free trade agreements, if anyone, was killed by the Zapatistas and the global justice and the global justice movement that the Zapatistas, you know, the sort of like Incantaros and the Zapatistas built. Now, one thing the Zapatistas did not build is the products and services that support this podcast. And we are back from products and services. Products and servicing, that is slightly ominous. Now, the modern left isn't the only thing that sort of descended from the backlash to free trade, right? We've gone over the extent to which the left is built off of this stuff. But much of the modern right is descended from the sort of Ross Per this era is alex jones this is the reason that like alex jones and people like him scream about like scream constantly about globalists

right because you know the global justice movement has two kind of wings there's or you know it was called anti-globalization uh it has two wings one wing is a sort is a leftist wing which is like okay we actually support like the you know we actually support the global movement of ideas and people, but what globalization and free trade actually means is locking people down in their countries with militarized borders while capital moves freely between them, and we think that's fucking bad. There was also another, you know, there was also the right-wing reaction, which is this incredibly right-wing nationalist reaction, which is that, like, ah, like, these, like, rootless cosmopolitan globalists are, like, you know, taking all of our jobs and moving them to, like, Mexico. And, you know, they've,'re like sold out the american people and you know like obviously this stuff is just it starts anti it starts like as anti-semitic dog whistles and just gets you know i mean like like okay these are like the loudest dog whistles of all time right but you know they get increasingly anti-semitic and this is the kind of stuff you know that alex jones is doing and this is the kind of sort of right-wing politics that wins out over sort of

like neoconservatism's more like sort of hoorah, free trade, we're going to use the might of the American empire to spread sort of like this very specific model of capitalism to other countries. And you get the sort of trump style like fuck every other country we're going to kind of do tariffs and stuff now what i think is very interesting so what trump eventually sort of winds up you know producing as a discourse i guess you could say is is this is this image of okay so like the thing that's holding back the american worker is china because all of our jobs are being sent to china and so if we just put more tariffs on is this image of, okay, so the thing that's holding back the American worker is China, because all of our jobs are being sent to China. And so if we just put more tariffs on China and

we defeat China geopolitically, everything will sort of be great in the American nation. You, the white worker, are going to have jobs again. Everything's going to go back to the way they were. And what's fascinating about this is know as the trade war is intensifying in the mid-late 2010s in china there is a parallel discourse which is almost identical where chinese nationalists will do this thing where they talk about like breaking through the great ming as a solution to involution um we talked about involution on the show before is this concept that's very popular in China right now where you know it's becoming increasingly

clear that like working hard is not going to actually get you any more money than you're getting now like you're not going to get ahead in life you're just sort of stuck and so you're stuck in this condition of putting more and more effort into nothing and the Chinese nationalist argument is that if you can if you can geopolitically defeat the

US China will sort of like break out of its wage stagnation and economic stagnation. sort of categorically false assertions that if you if you just follow their sort of nationalist geopolitical agenda then all of the sort of class issues that everyone's dealing with will suddenly magically work themselves out now contra this and contra i think the argument that even that sort of just you know the argument that i was talking about before that like trump and this sort of nationalist like economic policy discourse from china like represents something you know seismic like a seismic change and like trade policy that signals the end of neoliberalism i want to come back to the point of will trump actually be able to implement any of this stuff even if he had sort of near dictatorial power

and i think the answer to that is no and the reason i think the answer to that is no. And the reason I think the answer to that is no is that, you know, one of the old observations about quote unquote free trade from the global justice movement is that, okay, if you look at what quote unquote trade is, right, international trade, huge amount of it is literally the same company moving its own resources from one place to another. Now now the problem is the more expensive it is for corporation to do this the more pissed off they get right and this means that this kind of like tariff war bullshit and this happened through the trump administration that pissed off a lot of people and if if you know and and trump is you know his intention is to start an even larger and more powerful series of trade wars this is going to

piss off a lot of people who actually matter in the sort of in the american political system which is to say a lot of shareholders and a lot of ceos and you know and so i think the fairly obvious conclusion is that what actually happens here is you get exactly the same kind of shit that happened with trump's like quote-unquote pullout of NAFTA, where he makes one or two symbolic gestures, and then everything continues as normal, and he declares victory. Now, the second problem I have with people looking at this as a sort of new regime is the way that they're thinking about this sort of tariff and subsidy regime as something that's not a part of neoliberalism, right?

The sort of theoretical ideal of neoliberalism is countries aren't supposed to do tariffs countries aren't supposed to be able to do like quote-unquote protectionism so we're not supposed to give subsidies to manufacturers and everyone's supposed to like compete on a free and equal trade playing field this has never been true and fact, what free trade has meant in practice, and this has been true since the founding of the World Trade Organization, what it means is that Western countries get to impose tariffs and manufacturing subsidies and non-Western countries don't, right? Even in the WTO, there's a bunch of random carve-outs for like fucking like random workers in Germany and stuff.

This is also a part of like literally a part of what started the zapatista uprising i mean we talked about you know the primary cause like the elimination of collective ownership from mexican constitution but another huge problem is what nafta what nafta was going to do is force a bunch of mexican corn farmers to compete with american corn farmers now okay if it was literally Mexican corn farmers to compete with American corn farmers. Now, okay, if it was literally just corn farmers from these two countries competing like Mexican corn farmers probably eventually could out-compete American corn farmers because Americans are fucking dog shit at farming. But under the terms of NAFTA, and this is, again, a thing that's been true of

free trade this whole time, they have to compete with subsidized american corn this is impossible mexican farmers got fucking annihilated all of their land was seized by corporations and you know it has brought sort of devastation and ruin to the mexican economy ever since this has been absolutely great for the ruling class because all of these farmers who suddenly like you know can't afford to keep their farms anymore were forced into sort of like labor and a bunch of shitty sweatshops that were set up from nafta so this worked great from the perspective of american capital but again if you look at what actually happened here right all of the sort of like

rhetoric of free trade you know like sort of like fades into mist in face of the reality of one of the great industrial policy programs in in the in the history of world economies which is the american subsidization of its own fucking agriculture and you know this isn't considered in the quote-unquote industrial policy or like industrial like government planning or whatever like largely because people have this weird bias when they talk about government planning that it only is supposed to apply to like oh government planning means when someone like plans steel output or some shit but like no like the actual large scale economic plan that goes on in the US is the unfathomable billions and billions and billions

of billions of dollars will be poured into the agricultural industry every year so you know if you look at the stuff that everyone's claiming are these sort of new innovations that are like the end of neoliberalism, right? It's like, oh my god, other countries are putting up like protectionist subsidy things. Like they're having their, you know, people are like trying to make microchips and they're having like state sponsored programs to do microchips. It's like, well, they're just doing with microchips what the U.S. has been doing with cord this entire time, right? What's really changing to some extent is that, you know, the deal had always been that Western countries get to impose tariffs and have manufacturing subsidies and non-Western countries don't. And I think part of what's wearing people out is that, like, you know, China has actually been kind of attempting to break the west monopoly on being able to do with industrial policy and this has caused a bunch of people to really severely overestimate the extent to which like this is an actual break from previous regimes of trade and capital now another point that i want to make that i i've talked about this before on the show but i i want to kind of briefly touch on it again, because I think it's really important and it's really badly understood, is that for all of the sort of discourse about how like, ah, China's like entering into economic competition with the West, it's like increasingly using the party to like pursue nationalist aims instead of like following the market

if you look at what's actually going on in china despite all the hype about like uh china and the u.s are decoupling their economies or like china is trying to make its own domestic silicon industry the actual tendency in chinese economic policy is towards further integration and increasing foreign ownership china has a lot of provisions about foreign companies needing to be in partnership with Chinese companies in order to operate in China. There's always been massive restrictions on how much stock a foreign company can own

in Chinese companies. And these restrictions in sector after sector after sector after sector are being lifted. And so you have to sort of look at this you know the sort of like surface level nationalist narratives about like ah we're entering an era of like warring like like warring mutually exclusive economic trading spheres with the reality of china being like no please foreign capital like you can operate here without us uh it's going to be great just to keep keep keep pumping more capital in.

If we all work together, all of the sort of bourgeoisie will keep making money together. And I think all of this leads to something, the last thing I want to touch on, which is what's actually happening here. And the thing that's actually happening here, and the thing that's actually causing all of these sort of like all like the the sort of focus on trade itself and the sort of trumpian nationalists we can solve all your problems by trade competition what's happening is that after about the 1960s because of sort of structural manufacturing overcapacity and under consumption production you know industrial production is zero sum right you can't increase production rates in a country without that you know without that production coming at the cost of another country and this is this is because and wow stop me if you've heard this one before this is because of fucking capitalism and what trump is trying to do and what you know to a lesser extent sort of xi jinping and what to

you know this these sort of chinese nationalists are trying to do is turn you know they're trying to stand on a beach in order the tide to recede in order to stop the coming class war they are trying to say no we can we can go back to the era where production wasn't zero sum we can do this sort of terrorist we can go back to the golden age of uh both corporations and unions making more corporations and workers like making money together and the sort of like national collaborationist project and they're doing this in large part because they are watching the same thing that you and I are watching. The same thing that's the reason this episode is being recorded at fucking three in the morning instead of a normal time, which is that all across the US and increasingly all across the world, you can fucking see the working class starting to organize again.

You can see it starting to wake up. You can see it starting to mobilize. starting to organize again. You can see it starting to wake up. You can see it starting to mobilize. And this whole fucking thing, all of Trump, right? This entire sort of racist,

xenophobic nationalist project is just utter dread that Ferguson and the Black Revolution put into the fucking hearts of these people. And if we fight hard enough, we fight smart enough, and we fight organized enough, inshallah, we will see the fucking day when these people's nightmare comes true and we never have to hear another word from these fuckers again. Says Ben, it could happen here. Thank you. 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, 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. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. everywhere. 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. Welcome to the podcast. It's me today, and I'm joined by Megan Burdett,

who is the Director of Research at the Kurdish Peace Institute. Hi, Megan. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thanks for joining us. So what we wanted to talk about today was these local elections that have been happening in Turkey in the last week or so. We're in very early april so they happened i think towards the end of march right yeah march 31st yeah so can you explain to listeners first of all like i'd be i've heard about these turkish local elections almost constantly for the past several months because i hear about them from kurdish migrants leaving turkey almost every time I'm at the border. I meet people and they tell me. Can you explain sort of the context of these elections, the concerns going into them?

Yeah, of course. So first off, these are the first elections in Turkey following the presidential and parliamentary vote last year that was seen as a huge disappointment for the opposition and also for a couple of separate reasons and a couple of similar reasons for the pro-Kurdish political movement as well. The opposition underperformed last year. They were not able to defeat Erdogan as the polling and the sentiment in the country had suggested that they would. And the pro-Kurdish political movement also underperformed as well. They did not win as many seats or as many votes as they usually do. And a lot of that was attributed to the very complex alliance decisions they made, choosing not to run their own presidential candidate and instead ask their voters to vote for the CHP, which is

the main opposition party that has a history of being very nationalist and violent and exclusionary towards Kurds, though things have changed in these past 20 years. Voters didn't understand that. A lot of voters weren't happy with that. And then there were some local level issues with selections of candidates as well. And then, of course, the climate of very severe political repression. And had the opposition won, there was a lot of hope that it would have started to change things on the Kurdish issue in Turkey. You know, from what I'd been hearing from people, there were prospects of political prisoners being released, of contacts between the state and Abdullah Ocalan being reestablished, which could have been the

opening of a new peace process. If you follow this, you know the PKK declared a ceasefire prior to the elections. They initially said that it was following the earthquake in order to not allow the conflict to intervene with humanitarian efforts, but they did very explicitly extend it through the elections. And the discussions around that that I heard in Iraqi Kurdistan, in northeast Syria and in Europe made it very clear that that was an opening to hopefully be able to leverage it into a larger peace process were there to be political change. But that change didn't happen. So for Kurds, the situation did not improve. Erdogan continued his crackdown and his military aggression against Kurds in Iraq and Syria. And for democracy in Turkey, for the condition of the opposition, for the condition of all the groups oppressed under

Erdogan's regime, whether that's women, whether that's workers, whether that's the earthquake victims that have been left behind, things didn't get better. So these elections were an opportunity for people to register their disapproval in a way that I think many might have wished that they could have a year ago. And that disapproval was registered. For the first time, Erdogan's party, the Justice and Development Party, or the AKP, was not the first place party in Turkey. The main opposition, CHP, actually overtook them. The pro-Kurdish People's Equality and Democracy Party, or the DEM party, which used to be the HDP, so if I call it the HDP, I'm sorry, went actually, their results were much more in line with what they had done in the past. They performed, you know, right on standard. They actually won more municipalities than they did in 2019. And there was a lot of enthusiasm for change among Kurds, among supporters of the opposition, you know, among people who I think had wanted to see things start to move in a more democratic direction last year. So that was a very

big deal for that reason. And it also shows the fact that Erdogan is not necessarily as invincible in 2028 as people feared he would be. Yeah. So talking of invincibility, I think that's a good kind of key into our next topic, which is that the elections weren't exactly like a smooth kind of, I guess, concession by Erdogan and by his party, right? Can you explain to people who aren't familiar with this what happened? Yeah, so to start before the elections, over 75% of voters who supported successful pro-Kurdish mayoral candidates had their elected representation taken away from them. The government removed and imprisoned elected mayors and replaced

them with regime loyalist trustees who essentially ruled these municipalities on direct orders from Erdogan in Ankara. So this was an unfair playing field for the Kurdish political movement to begin with, very unfair playing field for the main opposition as well. Ekrem Imamoglu is the very popular mayor of Istanbul who just won re-election by a very large margin, has a criminal case against him that could have him banned from politics. So this was very difficult. In the Kurdish regions, there were many, many irregularities on Election Day. One that a lot of people were discussing were these so-called mobile voters, where the government actually sent members of these security forces, predominantly from Western Turkey,

into Kurdish cities to vote in large groups for the ruling AKP. You know, there's a lot of videos taken by local media, local politicians and activists challenging these people, asking them where they're from, and then videos of them all crowding into the airports and back on their buses flying back to Western Turkey the next day. So, you know, they're not even making a pretense of being local voters. That shifted the results in some districts in Çernak, which is a very heavily militarized province where the government bases a lot of its military campaigns, you know, into the occupied regions of Iraq and Syria from. The pro-Kurdish political movement alleges that these voters shifted the outcome. So you had that kind of outright attempts at theft in addition to the

context of repression. And then, most brazenly, just one day after the election, the local provincial election board denied a mandate of victory, you know, essentially the document certifying that a candidate has won the elections and will be allowed to assume office to the pro-Kurdish candidate Abdullah Zeydan in the province of Van, which is a heavily Kurdish province where the Dem party won all 14 district municipalities and the metropolitan municipality as well. So the local election authority essentially said, no, you can't run. There's been a last minute legal finding that you're unfit to run for office as there always is. Right. And then they tried to give the municipality to

the candidate from Erdogan's party, the AKP, who got less than half of the number of votes. Right. Yeah. So kind of, yeah, invalidating the results. We're just going to break briefly for an advert here, and then we'll be back. right we're back so when they tried to invalidate these results right and to install representatives i guess you could call them that who didn't win the popular vote there was a there was like a significant street response to that, right? Can you talk us through that and then the repression of it and the results of it? Absolutely. So there were mass demonstrations in Van, in other Kurdish provinces. And these are people coming out who not 10 years ago saw the military raising their cities

to the ground, killing civilians in the streets. This is a very costly endeavor for Kurdish people in these provinces to go protest. That's why you haven't seen it to such a degree as was seen in the 90s and the early 2000s since the collapse of the peace process and that violent military campaign in the cities. But last night they were out in full force, and very notably they weren't alone. There were protests in Istanbul and solidarity as well, you know, carried out by Kurds living there, but also by leftist parties, by feminists, by Kurdish religious organizations, by all the segments of civil society that have sort of oriented around the pro-Kurdish political movement. And there was also a pretty significant reaction from the main opposition, CHP, which is not known for radicalism. You had the CHP party leader,

Özgür Ozel, saying that it was illegitimate for the government to deny a candidate a mandate. And then you had Imamoglu in Istanbul also criticizing the decision, saying it was illegitimate and calling on the government to respect the popular will. So at the same time, you had this outcry across the Turkish political spectrum. You had tens of thousands of people out protesting, braving police violence. You know, there were armed pro-government vigilantes caught on video shooting into crowds. There was very, very harrowing videos of beatings and torture of civilians. Journalists were attacked and prevented from covering the protests. This was a very

difficult situation to watch. And a lot of people that I was speaking to were worrying about a return to the level of violence that was seen in 2015 and 2016 were things to escalate. But, you know, sometimes there's good news in Turkey and Kurdistan. Not always, but sometimes, you know, in Turkish, you'd say, Dirane Dirane Kazanacaz will win by resisting. And in Kurdish, you'd say, Berhudan Ziyane, resistance is life. And that sort of, those are very famous protest slogans that proved really accurate last night, because today Turkey's Supreme Electoral Council actually reversed the attempts to give the election to the losing pro-government candidate and gave the Dem Party candidate his mandate back. to assume office. And I think they looked at this huge street protest. They looked at this opposition coming from not only the pro-Kurdish political movement, but many different

political forces in Turkey. And the state decided to back down. They decided not to pick this fight now. And, you know, that's not to say that voter suppression in other provinces wasn't an issue. That's not to say that there are still outcomes that are being contested. You know, the government's doing a lot of very unfair things right now to try to take districts from the CHP and from the pro-Kurdish political movement. But what this does show is that when people insist on a democratic outcome and when they are willing to stand up for it in large numbers and face the consequences, the difficulty of doing that, that even regimes like Erdogan's, these very autocratic far right governments, have a point at which they will back down. And I think that that display of resistance and solidarity, getting a government like that to back down is something that can be very hopeful for people around the world right now. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we've seen,

like just to the stuff we've covered, obviously the United States, but also in Myanmar, like increasingly it's becoming harder and harder for states to deny people's right to be represented or to be hurt and like that's a good thing generally for democracy yeah i wanted to ask about you spoke a little bit about the turkish military's incursions into northern syria and into like iraqi kurdistan or the kurdistan autonomous region can you explain that there's a lot of like uh i think turkey is pretty clearly like telegraphed plants for increased military activity in that region so can you explain like what's what's being proposed and what that means so i think because they have gone into this election

and found themselves weakened this is something that could make erdogan very dangerous one thing that the government has always done when it's found itself weak is try to polarize society by attacking the Kurds, both domestically and internationally in Iraqi Kurdistan and in Northeast Syria. Of course, you have the AKP government's loss of its majority in the 2015 elections during the peace process becoming the reason for the government's abandonment its majority in the 2015 elections during the peace process, becoming the reason for the government's abandonment of the peace process itself. Then in 2019, after the local elections where the government lost control of Istanbul and Ankara for the first time, that was very quickly followed with the appointment of state trustees to Kurdish

municipalities and then the invasion of northern East Syria following Erdogan's agreement with Donald Trump about that. And so this does look like the kind of context in which he has lashed out against Kurds in Iraq and Syria before. And given these threats that you mentioned that he has been making, the diplomatic traffic between Turkey and Iraq, Turkey and Iran, Turkey and the US and Europe, they do appear to be preparing for something. Now, I was just on the ground in north and east Syria and in Iraqi Kurdistan, and I heard from many people that they're concerned. The threats that the government has been making appear to suggest that they might try to go for a geographically larger military operation this time.

There's a chance that instead of only conducting their typical spring offensive into Iraqi Kurdistan, which usually gets them nowhere, they might also attempt to invade northern Syria as well. Of course, that's very internationally contingent. They would need a green light from the Americans and from the Russians to be able to violate those ceasefires and go in there. But the threat's very real. It's something that people are very concerned about on the ground. And I think that it's worth paying attention to. And particularly for those of us in countries that are allied with the Turkish government, making noise about, opposing, trying to get onto the agenda so that permission is not given here

they're not incentivized to do this yeah i think that's a very good point because like kurdish issues are ones that don't come up very much in the press in the united states for the most part and and people and their representatives like don't hear about them very much but this is one of those like maybe right to your your rep things like that that doesn't a lot of shit isn't going to get changed with an email to your elected officials but especially like certain officials who are on you know foreign relations committees or something as well as like other forms of political activism could help here right like especially in an election year like that that's a way to stop that no this is something that needs to be made into an issue.

And one thing I hear time and time again, whether I'm speaking to people from the Autonomous Administration, the YPG and the YPJ, or pro-Kurdish politicians in Turkey, is they know, you know, the weapons that are being used against them, the tear gas canisters, you know, the drone parts, the bombs, the equipment, the military training that these personnel get, it all comes from Europe, the United States, NATO countries that are allied with Turkey. There's a lot of leverage and, you know, pushing to end that military support is something that could be done right now that could be very important. And really, you know, this is something where one feels almost when one makes these calls, like one's constantly asking, you know, you should do this for these people because they're being oppressed and your government has a say in it. But we really benefit from this too, right? If you look at what the Kurdish people

and their allies in Turkey have done in standing up for democracy, in getting the government to reverse this attempt to steal an election, you know, that's one small example of the very powerful democratic tradition that they have. That is something that we can learn from, you know, whether you're in the US or in Europe and many different countries around the world right now, the threat of authoritarianism

and the sort of far right politics of which Erdogan is an example, it's an international threat. And, you know, standing with the people who've been able to resist it is something that you know can benefit us all around the world as well yeah and like it presents a vision for a future in which we all stand united against state violence around the world rather than being isolated and gradually destroyed by various states and violent actors talking i guess of violent actors the one more thing I wanted to cover, we were jumping around a little bit, was that, like, I think people will probably have seen, at least maybe their social media timelines are different than mine,

but there was a lot of violence against Kurdish people in Northern Europe recently, right? In Belgium, I think, maybe in Germany as well. Explain a little bit of that. Like, we get into a little bit of little bit of Turkish fascist politics as well, but can you explain what was going on there? So this all began when some far-right Turkish nationalists started threatening a Kurdish family after returning from Nelroz or Kurdish New Year celebrations and escalated into, you know, essentially these far-right vigilantes prowling the streets looking for Kurds and Kurdish businesses to attack.

And this is not something new at all. The Turkish government has invested a great deal in allowing these structures to operate in Europe. You have the Grey Wolves, which are a fascist paramilitary, actually the paramilitary wing of the party with which Erdogan is currently allied and with which he has a majority in parliament, the National Action Party or the MHP. You know, this is a group that's been responsible for murders and assassinations and all kinds of attacks on Kurds, other minorities, dissidents, and has been responsible for violence in Europe as well. You have the government encouraging religious fundamentalism through its network of religious institutions in Europe and trying to make that very extreme and

very politically instrumentalized vision of religion popular amongst the Turkish community. politically instrumentalized vision of religion popular amongst the Turkish community. And then you have, you know, Turkish intelligence assets able to freely operate and conduct all kinds of attacks on Kurdish dissidents, you know, within the very center of Europe, right? We all remember in 2013, the assassination of Sakina Janss in front of the Kurdish community center in Paris. That murder was never solved. The perpetrator who they caught very conveniently died in prison before he was set to go to trial. Turkish responsibility has never been proven in court, I think, because there are a lot of people who don't want a full investigation of a case like that to come out. And then just, I believe, yesterday or maybe the day before, it came out that a Belgian court found alleged Turkish operatives responsible for

planning attacks on two very senior Kurdish diplomats in Belgium who were members of the Kurdistan National Congress, which is sort of like the de facto foreign ministry of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. You know, these individuals had been spying on the Kurdistan National Congress building. They'd been in contact with Turkish officials. They'd been planning assassinations of very senior politicians. This is a real problem. You know, these groups and the state itself are able to freely attack civilians, plot murders and do violence and really cause chaos and that's something that's very dangerous not only for the Kurdish community but for really anybody living in their way yeah yeah and there are a lot of people who would

rightly want that to stop I think so like what's the current the current situation is a number of people were like beaten was somebody kidnapped did I see or was that i didn't see any further reporting on that than one photo it was very serious i mean there were people were attacked i'm not exactly certain of the extent of kidnappings or other instances like that but this was some very serious violence and we know what these groups are capable of um They have killed people and they have essentially gotten away with it. So it may have died down for now, which is certainly good. And obviously, you know, we saw a lot of calls for restraint, you know, from the Kurdish community, a lot of calls for these European governments essentially to do their job and prevent these groups from,

you know, importing their nationalist campaigns against a persecuted minority to a place where, you know, these Kurds have fled to be free from that sort of thing. So it's stopped for now, but it's very much not over. You know, I, when you see the Kurdish community in Europe and spend time with them and look at the security precautions that they have to take just to hold conferences and cultural festivals. Yeah. It's really quite disheartening yeah yeah especially like you say in northern europe like they're not in turkey they left turkey to avoid that stuff yeah we'll take a second abrig here and then we'll be back to finish up so so for the last part uh do you have anything you want to add that we haven't got to yet i think that you know overall looking at the situation in turkey following these elections

looking at the situation in Europe, we're seeing that the Turkish government continues to be an example of the danger of these kinds of far-right nationalist religious fundamentalist regimes that are on the rise everywhere. These are political trends that are growing around the world. And Erdogan and his current Turkish government are a very clear example of the danger that that causes not to just the population of a country, but to neighboring countries, to diaspora communities that have left, that have gone elsewhere, but maintain their culture and maintain their interest in political organizing. their interest in political organizing. So these are threats that people are going to be looking at around the world. And I think it's very important to be following the situation in Turkey for that reason. But at the same time, looking at how the Kurdish people and their allies in Turkey, you know, on the left, in workers movements and feminist movements and all of these sort of groups that have also been victimized by Erdogan's regime, we're seeing that resistance

is possible, that people can stand up for democracy and they can win. And that, look, right, nobody's giving up on their work. You know, the KNK doesn't stop advocating for Kurdish interests in a diplomatic capacity because their members face threats. You know, these people go to work every single day. You know, in Rojava, in North and East Syria, in Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish groups, you know, Kurdish political organizations, Kurdish politicians and activists, they continue building up their project.

You know, I said I was just in Northern Syria. It's extremely difficult right now. People don't have electricity. People don't have water because Turkey bombed all the infrastructure. But still, they're celebrating Nauruz. You know, they're talking about their upcoming local elections that they want to hold and how to hold them in the best way. You know, they're talking about their new social contract and how they can implement it. They're moving forward constantly,

despite the threats that they're facing. And I think that, you know, many of you listening to this are people who are probably looking to improve and change the society that you live in. And so when we look at what's going on in Turkey and in Kurdistan, we can see both very clear examples of what it is that people who want change are up against, but also what they can accomplish even under those conditions. but also what they can accomplish even under those conditions. Yeah. I think like one of the things I took from going to Kurdistan was like how invested, like how genuine the solidarity that those people have with other like oppressed groups. It's like I spent as much time answering questions about Myanmar as I did like asking questions about Kurdistan, which was surprising to to me but obviously happy to do it

but like it would be nice to see some of that solidarity come back from the us right so they're like i mean i guess you can come down to the border and help kurdish people literally any day of the week if you'd like to we do that all the time but if what concrete actions can people take especially with regard to like uh helping the self-administration in north and east syria right like they're facing constant attacks their power stations get bombed like all my friends that are always struggling to have power or internet or even like electricity and they got flooded recently on top of all that yeah so like are there concrete actions people can take to help to be in solidarity oh absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think one thing,

if you have expertise on anything to do with power grids that are resilient to these kinds of attacks on alternative clean energy sources, anything that could possibly help people in a situation like this live, they want expertise. There's a lot of problems that they're facing that they simply, because of the war, don't have the capacity not only to solve, but even to start thinking about how it is that one solves a problem like this because there just aren't that many societies in the world going through it. So any kind of expertise in addressing energy issues, environmental issues, these kinds of problems, the second and third order effects of the attacks on infrastructure, on oil and gas,

on power facilities. That would be very important. They really do need that. And that's something, you know, you can write to us at the Kurdish Peace Institute. We can connect you with people. If you have contacts on the ground there, you can talk to them. That's one thing. Then at the end of the day, you know, they have these elections coming up. That is a big step for them. They've just put out a new social contract. They're really trying to listen to some of the internal criticisms that they get and really build up the civil, social, political side of their system. up the civil, social, political side of their system. You know, there's a belief among many people there that I've talked to that because of the existential nature of these wars that they're fighting, they haven't been able to really pursue the political elements of their revolution to the degree that they want to. And they're trying to do that now. They have this new social contract.

It's an incredible document. You can read it. They're going to hold municipal elections on May 30th, I believe is the date that was announced. So any if you know a lot about electoral systems, if you have done election observation before, if you want to help them do that right and get international attention for what it is that they're doing, that's another way that people have been telling me that you can help. And then finally, you know, if you're here listening in the U.S., Erdogan is coming to

the White House on May 9th, according to reports from Turkish and international media. There is going to be a demonstration. There will probably be a lot of campaigns around that demonstration as well on things like conditioning and ending arms sales and security assistance, on calls for peace, on calls for the U.S. to end its support for and enablement of Turkey's occupation of Iraq and Syria, its repression of its Kurdish people at home. And so anything that you can do to join those actions and those campaigns would be very helpful. You know, this is going to be an opportunity to let both Erdogan and the White House hear what the American people think about U.S. support for what the Turkish government is

doing. So be there, get involved. That's one way that we can, you know, make our voices heard and try to push for a change in policy yeah i think that's great i think people should like if you want an example of i guess the u.s complicity like while i was in kurdistan there was a a bombing that killed 39 sh like internal security forces and that was like a plane that your tax dollars, if you live in the US, develop, right? Like an F-16 with munitions that you probably sold to them. And the US has sold more F-16s since then, right? Yes. Yeah, so that is a thing that we could stop

and that would concretely stop. I spoke to a mother who lost her son. He was a little, I think he was like 14, 15. He was a little football player. They had like 14, 15, a little football player. They had pictures of him all over the house, right? Like it was really heartbreaking stuff. And I know that this happens a lot in other parts of the world.

I'm not saying that's not important too, but yeah, it's always hard to talk to parents who have lost their kids. And you can stop that happening. If we don't sell them the F-16s that do that, then they don't have the ability to do it, at least not as much. And this is one way that we can connect struggles and causes as well, because it's all the same companies that are providing equipment to all of these states that are doing this.

You know, the targets are the same for these kinds of campaigns. And look, you know, all of these governments, all of these corporations, they know that they're on the same side. We don't always know that we're on the same side too. And so I think that getting together and pointing out the patterns and standing against, you know, these arms sales and security assistance in the context of Kurdistan, alongside many other contexts where they're also very destructive is an important way that we can sort of amplify our efforts to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a very good, a very good point. Like I live in San Diego, almost every single bomb that has fallen on Palestine and many of the ones that have fallen on Kurdistan have, you know, the company that sold that has an office here.

Like those are places where you can apply pressure and places where you can hopefully make a change. Megan, where can people, you mentioned like emailing you, where can people find you? How can people keep up to date with what's happening in Kurdistan? our About page. My contact is on there. You can always reach out to me whether you have a question about Kurdistan, you want to read our research and analysis, you know, you're a journalist or an analyst and you want to submit something yourself, we can help you there. We're also on Twitter at KurdishPeaceOrg. And yeah, that's a great way for you to follow in the English language. If you're looking for resources on the ground, you can follow North Press Agency, which publishes in English, the Rojava Information Center, which publishes in English. And then, you know, get involved with your local Kurdish community. In a lot of major cities in the U.S., if you're in New York, if you're in Boston, if you're in the DMV area,

if you're in California, like you know, there are active Kurdish communities. And, you know, there are active Kurdish communities and, you know, go to a cultural event, go to a demonstration. You'll find both great ways to get connected and really get plugged into solidarity efforts, but also, you know, a wonderful community and a wonderful culture that I think, you know, anyone would be, I've certainly been, you know, very happy to have experienced. Yeah, likewise. Yeah. Great. Thank you you know, very happy to have experienced. Yeah, likewise. Great. Thank you so much, Megan. That was great. Thank you.

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. 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

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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, Elian. Elian, Elian.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast coming to you from a week where decades are happening. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. Hi, Mia. Great to be here. And also with us is Talia Jain, an independent journalist covering social movements and protests who is currently covering the Gaza Solidarity encampments at Columbia University. Talia, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Hell yeah.

Yeah, so I'm excited to talk about the Columbia occupation. I also want to briefly mention that there are a lot of, there's been a wave of occupations of campuses across the country. Just right now, this is being recorded on Wednesday night. By the time this goes up on like friday a lot of the stuff we're going to be saying is probably going to be out of date because everything's moving really quickly but i mean there's occupations obviously like columbia there's like csu humboldt university of texas at austin ohio state harvard yale berkeley

some university in italy emerson tufts mit myu city university of new york the new schools university of rochester university of pittsburgh usc university of minnesota university of michigan Emerson, Tufts, MIT, NYU, City University of New York, the new schools, University of Rochester, University of Pittsburgh, USC, University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, UNC Chapel Hill. I mean, there's so many of these by the time that this goes up,

there will be more of them. Yeah, it's been wild. There's been a lot of. I mean, at Humboldt, there was a lot of very intense fighting with the police they the bunch of kids occupied a building they beat the shit well okay that's that's going a bit too far but they barricaded it kept the cops from coming in cops ran off a campus so lots of

incredibly wild stuff happening yeah which i guess brings us to the gaza i guess the original one the first one that got a lot of media attention, the Gaza Solidarity Accompaniment at Columbia. Yeah, so Talia, I wanted to ask you, so how did this sort of start and what's kind of been making it different from the really pretty large number of other

Free Palestine anti-genocide protests that have been on campuses and off campuses for the past like time yeah six seven months yeah well i think the the genesis of this was that columbia university as we've seen in universities across the country suspended a number of pro-palestine advocacy student groups. They were very slow to move their feet about targeted attacks against students who were demonstrating for Palestine, including an incident where someone was allegedly sprayed with a chemical irritant or people were sprayed with a chemical irritant by former IOF ios soldiers who are also students here and just this you know building tension of there is a

actual genocide occurring and universities are being forced to bend towards the people committing the genocide instead of standing on the right side of history or they're actively choosing to do that too, because their whole thing is not about actually educating people and preparing them to be tomorrow's leaders and managers or baristas, but to get people, you know, to give them money to fill their coffers and portray this image of you know exceptionalism and elitism and whatnot so that was the genesis and then um Tuesday night I got a text at like 11 p.m I want to say asking me if I wanted to come cover a late night slash early morning de-occupation demo.

And this was from someone I'd never talked to before. I had no idea who it was, but they said it was at Columbia and they said it was late night, early morning. I thought I'd be out of here at, you know, 10 a.m. the next day. And then, you know,

standing there witnessing it all unfold, it became pretty evident that that was not the case. And I think the reason why this stands out is because this is an elite university where you can't say, oh, well, these are just dumb TikTok kids. These are kids who have like the these are like adults who have, you know, they have incredible resumes, really high academic excellence. They got into an extremely difficult school to get into. And they are joining the ranks of the, you know, frazzled, fringe, stinky anarchists and the silly kids who are being brainwashed by TikTok.

And they said, like, no, those people are right. Like this is bad and you need to disclose and divest and we're not going to stop until you do. And I think that that stance from a position of privilege really shook things up. What followed also set a tone of the university deciding to call the police in, claiming that this encampment posed a clear and present danger to the safety of students on campus. Which, you know, anyone who has spent any length of time in or around the encampment can plainly see that that is nonsensical.

It's absurd. These are kids that are studying on a lawn. But that choice of bringing the NYPD in and having 108 students arrested by the NYPD's strategic response group, which is their, you know, counterterrorism goon squad that violently represses protests pretty consistently, to have them arrest 108 people, including carrying them out from their, by their arms and legs and arresting legal observers, you know, that, that was like, this is the, it was an outsized response for something that was pretty straightforward. They're hanging out on a lawn. They have everything set up to sustain within that space.

They're not going out and roaming around and, you know, breaking things or assaulting people or anything like that. And they're just using this to call attention to their cause, which is divestment from genocide and from, you know, war profiteering and to end the school's gentrification of Harlem and to, you know, institute an academic boycott of Israel and Israeli campuses that are in community with Columbia, like their satellite schools that bring the IOF soldiers to Columbia to commit harm against students here. And, you know, so these are very basic asks, and they were met with state force signed off by the president of the school. And seeing that, I think, is what

provoked a lot of other schools of like, well, if Columbia is doing it, then we definitely gotta, because you have a major elite institution taking this step, making clear that this is not just a cause that, you know, the scrappy little weirdos at the bottom like me care about, you know? And so I think that's what, what set it off. And the fact that they returned, they, they just took over the other lawn while, while their classmates were being processed after being arrested. They just took over the other lawn and they're like, all right, we're going to set it up here.

It was such a hilariously based move that it was like the defiance and the determination was undeniable. and the determination was undeniable and when you see a group like with the students at humble where the the cops with the riot shields are trying to barge in and they're pushing them back and they're screaming get the fuck out and they're bonking them over the head with the empty uh water jug when you see things like that yeah when you see things like that it's that, it's very like, there is an energy to this that has always been there, but that has not been very easily seen by the masses. And we're now seeing it show its head of like, no, we're not fucking around. You need to listen to us. We're tired of the song and dance game that you're doing, dismissing all of our valid concerns because we know concretely and statistically that we are on the right side of history. And we're going to make you listen and trust that if you beat us up,

we're coming back. Like we're not going away. It doesn't scare us, which is what the kids at UT Austin were chanting i think when they brought the horses and the state troopers in it's like we're not scared of you and that that tone has permeated throughout the uh the demonstrations for palestinian liberation since and prior to october but if you don't follow the protests or if you only go by what the the major news outlets are saying about them, you don't see that tone. So this, for me, is not surprising. This is a continuation of an energy that has not ceased for upwards of six months.

I think it's the 201st day of the genocide. So it's not surprising for people who've paid attention it's a relief for kids who are who are here and who have been involved and who have been silenced and ignored and written off this whole time it's a very long answer i know that's a good one though i think it's uh yeah it's great to have your perspective of someone who's been on the ground one thing i wanted to ask is like obviously this is a protest that at its core is about state violence, and it has, predictably enough, been responded to with state violence. And, like, you said that people were generally not swayed by that.

I wonder if you've seen people who kind of had the opposite reaction. Like, I can remember the student protests that I have been involved in, I'm just gonna say that and I can remember like the reaction by students when seeing that fellow students being assaulted by the police was like, okay, fuck this. Like, you don't like George Orwell has this thing about like, when I see a real flesh and blood worker fighting his natural enemy, the policeman, I don't have to ask myself what side I'm on. Did you find the same thing with students where they were like, okay, I wasn't out here. And now I've seen the way the university and the cops have responded to this. And now I'm coming out because it's not okay. The encampment went up Wednesday,

and it was forcibly removed with arrests on Thursday, I think. Or was it Friday? I don't remember. It was a long time ago for me. It's fine. But prior to the encampment being taken down, the possibility of it provoked a significant response from the student body here at Columbia to show up and rally around the encampment all night. They did this march, this daisy chain, where they were chanting, the more you try to silence us, the louder we will be, and disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest, all night around the encampment to keep it safe and to show that they had

larger support beyond the students who chose to stay it safe and to show that they had larger support beyond the students who chose to stay on the lawn at risk of being arrested. After they were arrested, more students came onto the other lawn and have continued to occupy that second lawn. So absolutely, it was a Streisand effect. They tried to shut it down and it made people feel very strongly that they need to show up and put their themselves on the line as well and they also I think they saw what I think it also showed them what the state does and what the university does and seeing it firsthand eliminates a lot of the mystery that you know the fear that that can circulate of like the

uncertainty of it seeing what it looks like they're like oh whatever and now they're seeing you know videos of of protesters being brutalized on other campuses and like i heard someone told me last night they said that they they overheard someone like talking to another student on the lawn and and they were like oh so you had jail support and they're like yes you're there like it's it's this sort of they're gonna they're gonna do what they're gonna do we don't care like because these are the threat of violence physical harm is a threat to cease whatever it is that you're doing of academic harm these are things that are trying to get you to stop doing what you're doing and when you know that they are being deployed as tools and tactics

you're not going to stop because they're not scary to you well what are you going to do you're going to suspend me for joining in a historic protest okay see if i care you know i think that's the energy for a lot of students yeah unfortunately we need to go to ads for a second but I don't know skip them and we'll be back in however long it takes you to press the forward button like six times and we are back so something i wanted to ask about i've been seeing a lot of stuff floating around about the negotiations that are happening between the university and the students i want to know like what have you actually heard about these Because the statements that have been coming out don't seem to really be matching anything else I've seen going on on the ground. Do you know what's happening?

So the university has taken a stance of this is a clear and present danger. It is disruptive. It is harmful, etc. That's because it's impeding with them building stairs and stadium seating for the commencement that's happening in a couple of weeks. So, you know, it's like that's that's the clear and present danger is that it's costly for them to have to wait to complete this this setup. But my understanding is that the students are very much holding their ground very firm and their demands are very reasonable. It's saying like, tell us where your money comes from so we can look into it and see that you're keeping your nose clean. This isn't a difficult ask.

I think if you ask to see my receipts, I could show up to you. Although I'm not an elite university, but I'm also not, you know, profiting off of weapons manufacturing. And so the university stance is very much trying to kind of spook them into quitting. And there was a, you know, a statement released by the president last night at 4 a.m. saying that the students made some concessions, two of which were things that they're already doing, one of which was an easy adjustment that's not a concession, which was just making the camp more ADA accessible and in compliance with FDNY regulations for fire safety, which I think would be crazy if a fire broke out at this camp. Anyway, that was a tangent. But, and then there was a thing saying that they're going to be ending negotiations in 48 hours.

And what the students reported out from those negotiations at the time was that the university at around midnight threatened to call in the National Guard and to call in the NYPD. And that shut down negotiations. And it was only after they put out these widespread calls and thousands of people gathered on the lawn in support of the encampment that that was changed and the university agreed in writing to not call the nypd and to not mobilize the national guard which i don't think they have the authority to do regardless but right it was this written concession from the university and their their perspective of it was that the students provided concessions. And I think it's kind of, it speaks to who each side is speaking to.

The students are speaking to the movement that they have kind of shepherded into existence. And the university is speaking to their donors and their trustees and the right-wingers who are having nuclear meltdowns on Twitter. That's something else I wanted to sort of ask about. Cause I, it's, it's kind of hard for me to get a sense of it. Like,

okay. So speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, who is a utterly deranged Zionist. Yeah. Like you mean the new church Hillman? God, like real weirdo like like anti-evolution guy he's been he said he said that like he's going to go to congress and call for the national guard to play which also doesn't make any sense because congress i don't can't do

it either but i think you're trying to get like the governor but like what what do you think of the actual odds of a national guard deployment because i've heard a lot of talk about it and I I can't gauge it at all so Hochul has said that that's not on the table I believe and there's no interest from what I can tell of the actual elected reps in calling in the National Guard. There is interest from Eric Adams, who is a former cop and basically still a cop, to use the NYPD. And the NYPD has been very allergic to when the National Guard comes out here because they want to be the ones cracking skulls and being in charge of brutalizing New Yorkers. And they take a great offense when someone else comes in and does it for them. So they wouldn't great offense when someone else comes in and does it

for them. So they wouldn't really be on board with the National Guard mobilizing here either. The school doesn't have the authority to do that. It's only the governor. The governor hasn't made any indication. And Mike Johnson is doing conservative stunt work. He was joined by Elise Stefanik, who is a conservative. And, you know know she regularly disseminates disinformation and inflammatory propaganda to demonize unhoused people migrants queer people so it's no surprise that they're you know banging this drum which was also pushed by shai davidi or however you pronounce his name he was an assistant professor here who attempted to hold a rally in the center of the Gaza Solidarity encampment with a slew of Zionists. And his ID card was deactivated.

And he found out in real time in front of a bunch of cameras that he called to come watch him. And it was, it's one of those things things you witness in real time that you feel like uh you're you're living in a movie but it was great and he had a nuclear tantrum and claimed that it was because he wasn't safe on campus when he was told that his protest was not safe for their students so you know i think it's we're seeing a lot of rhetoric and a lot of saber rattling from the far right, from conservatives, from people who have never had any kind of support for Palestinians or for the cause of Palestinian liberation. from APAC you know these are these are not people whose statements should be taken seriously in the context of what is possible what is reasonable and what is you know reality to put it nicely yeah yeah I think a reason it's fascinating like at least to me like I went to a fancy university you know and engaged in plenty of

including pro-palestine actions when i was there but a thing that i see like as a journalist now is that the right wing and wealthy folks generally seem to see that ivy league universities particularly in the us is like their safe space and i think the reason that they're so mad at this is that they feel like it's not just that it's happening it's it's where it's happening and like that that's causing to have these massive tantrums like you've reported on yeah i mean there's the there's there's it's it's all hypocrisy for them because on the one hand these are liberal universities who are ushering in an era of dei and purple hair and queer kids and then on the other side, these are sacred spaces of

learning and higher education that no one should have access to unless their grandparents were in the Aryan Brotherhood. So it's one of those things where it kind of depends on the day about how they feel about really elite campuses of higher learning. But it doesn't matter either way they don't care they don't actually care they just hate the cause and will do anything they can to bring it to a halt but the dna of this cause is to keep going regardless of the efforts to stop it right and it wasn't so long ago that everyone was up in arms when i I say everyone, everyone on the right was up in arms about campus free speech, which is something that seems to have largely been forgotten in the last couple of weeks. Like we've all seen videos in Texas today, right, of the DPS and state troopers and horses and bikes. They love to misuse bikes. But yeah, it's I guess the hypocrisy is kind of the point with those people.

But yeah, I guess the hypocrisy is kind of the point with those people. Yeah, I mean, like Mike Johnson made his speech today on the steps of the low library. He was talking about how, you know, there was a repression of free speech on campus. But then in the same breath, he said that, and that's why I want to call on the National Guard to eliminate this protest. guard to eliminate this protest their argument is that this protest is inherently anti-semitic because it rejects the state of israel and the genocide and apartheid that the state has been doing since its inception and prior to its inception of the palestinian people and in the ihra in the ihra definition of anti-semitism it is any criticism of the state of Israel, which would include people who are living in Israel, criticizing their own government would be labeled as antisemitic. And they're trying to redefine reality in real time by claiming that

these students who just don't want for mass death to be occurring and they don't want their university to be responsible in facilitating that um are somehow anti-semitic meanwhile uh a large number of them are jews themselves who you know they held seder um at the start of passover yeah i think uh maybe do you know bing onean a photojournalist yeah i'm your friend bing bing took this photo which went viral on twitter i saw it in the new york times of a jewish graduate student just like sitting on a folding chair being like no i'm fine i don't feel unsafe here oh yeah i mean that's like that's the thing is that the people who feel quote unquote unsafe are also the people who are known antagonizers of pro-Palestine demonstrations.

These are the kids that bought like fart spray from Amazon to spray on students who were demonstrating peacefully. These are students who show up with giant flags outside of Columbia University to antagonize people. They brought thick wooden poles with flags affixed to them to a demonstration on Wall Street the week prior to this encampment launching. And they were antagonizing people. They were trying to instigate arguments with people. And they were just kind of trying to incite. And then they claim to be victims when people respond to their inciting behavior. And it's very much like an abusive mentality that they have. But in terms of like actual antisemitism, all of that rhetoric ends up being a distraction from actual instances of antisemitism. And the more that you try to fuse the political ideology of Zionism with the prejudice against Jewish people for being Jewish, the more you try to fuse those together as one thing, like, you know, fusing Jewish identity to Zionism, the more you see coming in cheering on Israel and boasting about the murderers of tens of thousands of children, the starvations and the displacements of millions of people, the more that they do that, the more that teaches people like, oh, maybe all Jews are like that. Maybe all Jews are bad. And then I end up

getting DMs from people photoshopping my face into an oven calling for my death when, you know, I don't give a fuck about the state of Israel. I don't give a fuck about any states, you know? So it's just, it's one of those things like this is like, they are planting toxic seeds and then flipping out when they sprout. Talking of toxic seeds, now is the time for some marketing professionals to plant some toxic seeds in your mind as we take our second advertising break. All right, we're back. Hopefully you haven't bought anything since we last spoke. Talia, I wanted to talk a little bit about a thing that we've seen a lot is this idea of the universe.

This happens to every protest movement, right? The state, the university, whatever, will seek to appoint people leaders and allow them to negotiate on behalf of everyone, even if those people have not consented to be negotiated for. And then they'll use that to co-opt the movement, offer concessions that these particular people might want, and in doing so kind of defang the original sort of protest.

Is that something that you've seen happening or the universities tried to do to like divide people or to kind of pull people out and appoint them as leaders? They've suspended the people that they believe to be primary student organizers, but in terms of other divisions, they have not been successful. These are students organizing with their classmates. It's not possible for some outside group to infiltrate that space because they are not students at this university. You know, there's SJP chapters that students are members of in their schools, but they are ultimately making the choices of what their SJP chapter is doing. And, you know, a lot of those SJP chapters have been suspended. So, you know, I think in terms of the seen levels of people on the same page and able to organize the literacy of it is just phenomenal. There's people who are just, they're all very

clearly knowledgeable about what it is that they're organizing for, what the risks are, what the history of the movement is. And they've spent a lot of time learning those things to make sure that when they decide to take a step forward, that they are doing so fully informed and fully empowered. And trying to break that down is something that has not been successful. And we've seen that, you know, time and time again. They have this chant, the more you try to silence us, the louder we will be. And it's true. And these institutions should probably start believing it because it would save them a lot of trouble by, you know, trying to write this off as something that, you know, people don't know what they're doing or, you know, whatever it is, because

they are, they know everything. These are kids that all they do is study you know like you're talking about huge nerds joining into a massive you know decades-long social movement they've done the reading yeah talking people have done the reading um i wanted to talk about like faculty because i know a lot of people who are faculty at universities listen to this podcast and i'm sure they're interested in like how faculty have been in solidarity with students there how they can be in solidarity with their own students have you seen that have you seen faculty showing up oh oh yeah there was a massive faculty walkout the other day between barnard and Columbia faculty members. The schools

are kind of related. They're right across the street from each other and they have a lot of overlap. Barnard's kind of under, slightly under the university, the Columbia umbrella, but still has some precedent and things like that. And there was a huge faculty walkout from both campuses that gathered on the low, the steps of the low library and it was easily hundreds I would say maybe like 500 people and that was it that was at Columbia and then at NYU the students set up an encampment and they were surrounded by faculty who had linked arms as a daisy chain around the encampment to protect the students. So we're seeing a very real, you know, multi-layer of solidarity emerging in these spaces. And I think it's, you know,

even if the, even if professors and faculty don't necessarily wholly agree or wholly understand, they're not fully on the same wavelength as the student organizers necessarily, they're still showing up on the basis of like these students have the right to express their opinions and they should not be getting met with severe academic or state discipline for doing so because we've seen these same campuses open their doors to people like Charlie Kirk and Gavin McInnes and, you know, like white supremacists and white nationalists who are able to go on their campuses and spread hate and, you know, right wing disinformation and try and recruit people through their, you know, young Republican school chapters. Those chapters aren't being disbanded. You there's there isn't an urgent rush to prevent uh the hosting of

white nationalists and white supremacists and you know people who are actually politically and intensely anti-semitic to an extreme they're not doing anything to actually like prevent those people from appearing on campus. So I think that there's, there's a lot of layers to it, but there is a very strong surge of faculty saying like, Hey, this is, this is fucked up. And we're not, we're not going to let you think that this is just kids that you're picking on. Like you're also attacking your own staff who, you know, has a longer relationship to the university, has a, you know know as hard as it is as it is for these kids to get into the school it's harder to get hired to work here and so

you know we're seeing a lot of that there's also security people who were put in charge of evicting students from their rooms at Barnard because Barnard has chosen that students at Barnard who participated in this demo, they weren't only going to be suspended temporarily, but evicted from their housing, banned from campus, unable to access any food or meal plans. Whereas the Columbia students have been suspended, are still able to access housing and meal plans, but they aren't allowed to go to class or any campus events, which is fine because the only one that's happening right now is the encampment. But, you know, there was a security person who sent an email to the school

at Barnard saying, like, I quit. Like, this is inhumane. This is undignified. This is crazy. You're giving these students 15 minutes to uproot themselves from their rooms, they might not have another place to go. These, you know, these might be students who don't have a family's house nearby or, you know, or the funds or the means to live somewhere else and not worry about the cost. You're, you know, destabilizing people's lives in a very severe way. And this, this, you know, security person resigned. They're like, this is nuts. So I think there's, there's the fact that just the, the overall what is of how these universities are responding has provided a type of solidarity. And then there's also the fact that a lot of people just generally understand that genocide is bad and it's gotten to a point where there's a lot of rhetoric trying to obscure that

and obfuscate like what is genocide and you know israel has a right to exist and all this other like bullshit like uh propaganda and and disinformation and and you know fear-mongering and all these things and And people can see very clearly what the game is. And so we're kind of at a pivotal moment for just common reality and critical thinking. And I think that we're seeing a lot of people show that the efforts to alter what our established common reality is is not working and this brings me to the thing i wanted to close on which is where do you see this going oh i'm gonna need a minute on that one i mean you know we're at a very pivotal moment in history there's a lot of comparisons being made

to protest against the vietnam war And in those protests, there was a lot of state violence, a lot of state repression, but there was also a lot of people willing to throw down in a very intense way. And, you know, we're already seeing levels to that that have very very strong parallels you know with like aaron bushnell which is also a story that i i ended up breaking um yeah and you know like so this is this is big and i think that right now in the in the midst of it is hard to guess what's going to happen two weeks from now or six months from now but i guarantee you we all know what's going to happen 50 years from now we're all going to look at this 50 years from now and be like wow the state was on some dumb shit those protesters were right and it's good that they didn't stop totally yeah i think that's a great place to end talia i wonder

if you would like to let people know where they can find you, where they can read your work, how they can support your work. more than five dollars a month those those small donations cover the entirety of my living and survival and and allow for me to to do this work for the past four years so I'm like incredibly grateful you know people can support on Patreon they can also if you just want to do like a one-time heard you on the pod loved. I have like a PayPal and a Venmo and all that other shit on my Twitter account. If people want to send a couple bucks that way. And another way to support is send me tips. If you decide that you're going to do something,

feel free to email and bio. I always want to know. talia all your uh all your tips especially if you're at columbia university anything else you want to plug or me or anything else we need to do before we go i'm sorry that my voice sounds really like this it's i've i i don't think i've i haven't gotten a lot of sleep and i hope that everything i said was coherent even though i was just giving you essay after essay after essay that was fantastic thank you so much sharia thank you so much and thank you guys something i could say from everyone here uh from the river to the sea palestine will Fuck him. Fuck him up. Keep fucking him up.

Fucking get him. Fuck him up. Yeah. Fucking get him. 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.

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