It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 139

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

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I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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 Could Happen Here,

but, you know, very few things actually happen. I'm Andrew Siege of the YouTube channel Andrewism. Now, indigeneity is a contentious topic, now more than ever. Not when it comes to flora and fauna, of course. As far as I know, it's a pretty simple matter of being considered indigenous to an ecosystem when they haven't been introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation. As over millions of years, these living things have become well-suited to their habitats, carefully adapted to the region's soil, climate and food web.

When it comes to people, we're talking politics. There can be some confusion about what it means to be indigenous, especially when questions of land rights, autonomy and reparations enter the equation. Most people understand that Native American nations and Aboriginal Australians are indigenous. questions of land rights, autonomy, and reparations enter the equation. Most people understand that Native American, Nations, and Aboriginal Australians are Indigenous, but they don't really know what that means. Some might then ask, well, if Indigenous just means originating from a place, then aren't all Homo sapiens Indigenous to Africa?

Why should one group's claim of Indigeneity take precedence over any other? Others may ask the question, if a group occupies a region for several generations, does that then make them indigenous? Are white Americans indigenous if their family has been there since the founding of the US? Are French people indigenous to France? And if so, does that somehow justify their xenophobia toward refugees? But when generations of marginalized groups have been struggling to retain their social, cultural, economic, and political sovereignty and achieve justice, reparations, and liberation after centuries of oppression and attempted annihilation, we need to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for us to understand what it means

to be indigenous. From what I gather through my research, which was focused on the work of just a few North American indigenous scholars, Tayaki Alfred, Jeff Quanticell, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, indigeneity can be interpreted as a matter of colonial relationship and or as a matter of a land relationship, a relationship to place. These two definitions are of course highly overlapping, you really can't get away from how colonization informed land and vice versa. But let's start with the first interpretation of indigeneity. According to Taiyaki Alfred and Jeff Cortesell, indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized

context of contemporary colonialism. It is an existence oppositional to colonial societies and states and a consciousness of struggle against such forces of colonization. No two indigenous groups are exactly alike, of course. There is significant diversity in their cultures, contexts, and relationships with colonial forces, but they do share that struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence. Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples may not always be as overt as they once were, with some noticeably overt exceptions, but the historic and ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples, the erasure of indigenous histories, geographies, and languages, and the current situation of deprivation persist nonetheless.

Even so-called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality that indigenous peoples remain as in earlier colonial eras, fundamentally occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own homelands and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival. By this understanding of indigeneity, it can be said that without a colonizer, without systems in place and actions being taken to marginalize, disempower, and destroy their societies in favor of a colonial replacement, there is no need for the concept of indigenous.

Without colonialism, there would be no status of indigenous to be imposed upon groups of people whose very existence and claim to the land is an obstacle to that colonial endeavour. The UN Working Group of Indigenous Issues drew partially from this understanding when attempting to define indigenous peoples in 1986. Quote, indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed in their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories or parts of them. They form, at present present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined

to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity as the basis of their continued existence as peoples in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems. By this definition, Amerindians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasis in India, Native North and South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, Kurds, Syrians, Yazidi, Palestinians, Amazigh, Sami, Basque, Sapmi, Basques, Hawaiians, Maori, San, Mguti, Papuans, Chams, and many more are all indigenous peoples. There are layers of nuance yet to be highlighted.

The colonial situation is not a simple binary of indigenous and colonist. For example, in much of the Americas, Africans who were indigenous to their own homelands were displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime. They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they weren't driving settler colonial society either. In fact, some were enslaved by indigenous people as well. At the same time, some members of the African diaspora would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own, such as the Garifuna of St. Vincent, Honduras, and Belize. Meanwhile, in modern-day Africa,

though all African ethnic groups can technically be considered indigenous to the continent, the concept of specific indigenous peoples within Africa refers to those groups whose traditional practices and land claims have been placed outside of the dominant state systems and exist in conflict with the objectives and policies implemented by post-colonial governments, companies, and the surrounding dominant societies. dominant state systems and exist in conflict with the objectives and policies implemented by post-colonial governments, companies, and the surrounding dominant societies. Such a definition can similarly be applied to modern-day Asia, where governments like Indonesia,

India, China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh have infamously refused to recognize the existence of indigenous peoples within their territories. These countries, like most countries in the world, did not ratify the International Labour Organization Convention 169 in 1989, known as the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, concerning the rights of indigenous peoples. The UN's Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, passed in 2007, would, however, be voted on approvingly by most of the world, including the same countries that haven't recognized the Indigenous Peoples

within their borders. All four of the countries that rejected that particular resolution, Canada, America, Australia, and New Zealand, would later change their vote in favor of the Declaration, of course with their own tacked-on interpretations and emphasis on the Declaration's legally non-binding nature, as is to be expected from settler colonial societies. There are approximately 250 to 600 million indigenous peoples around the world today, each facing the reality of having their lands, cultures, and forms of organization attacked, co-opted, commodified, and reconstructed by various states. Regardless of their legal recognition, indigenous peoples themselves have long understood that their endurance as a people will continue to depend on their connection to land, culture, and community. Which brings us to

the second interpretation of indigeneity, closely related to the first, as an identity rooted in a relationship to place, whether that be physical as with land, social as with community, or cultural as with culture. An indigenous relationship to land must be reciprocal, with give and take, based on a view of the land and water as a gift that must be cared for over generations. According to Haudenosaunee mythology, as recounted by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, the mother goddess Sky Woman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land, learning from other species to understand how to live on it, giving as she received,

and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake of those who would inherit it when she passed on. In their view, the land is identity, it is ancestral connection, it is pharmacy, it is library, and it is home, the source of all that sustains, and the sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to the world. By this understanding, it can be said that indigeneity is born out of land connection established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by choice or by force, but regardless of where they might find themselves, homeland or not, even if there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments,

as long as they observed the processes and ceremonies of generational relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love for the land in common, they remained indigenous. So then, the question might arise. Why aren't settlers and dishes to place if their family has lived on land for generations? The answer lies in relationship. Settler society, as a whole, is based on an extractivist, capitalist relationship with the land, focused on exploiting the land and its resources. Without a relationship with the land that extends reverence to a deeper understanding of its complex interdependence, settler society can never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes without saying that not every indigenous group or indigenous practice is perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather destructive and even speciocidal. But if we are to work with this definition, to conceive of being indigenous as something based on cultivating a long-term relationship to place, that indigeneity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity

of that relationship. Without community, there cannot be indigeneity. Much like the trees in a forest are interconnected by subterranean networks of mycorrhizae, which enable them to share resources and survive as a whole, in order to be indigenous to place, community must exist to sustain that web of reciprocity with the land so that it all may flourish. Indigeneity to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply tied to the land it develops on. Cultural ceremonies, according to Kimra, focus attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies

transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. Such practices should be reciprocal, as ceremonies create communities and communities create ceremonies, as well as organic, not appropriating existing cultural celebrations or tending toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and fragmented by the pace of modern life, leaving little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rites of personal transition such as birthdays, weddings, and funerals. But ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community. When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride,

relief, nostalgia, and excitement builds in the social atmosphere, hopefully fueling the confidence and strength of those who are going on to pursue their passions. But Kimmerer wants us to imagine standing by a river, flooded with those same feelings as the salmon marsh into the auditorium of their estuary. Being indigenous to place means cultivating cultural ceremonies that honour the land and all the cycles and seasons of life within it. Now that we have a clearer understanding of these two distinct yet related understandings of indigeneity, as both an identity formed as part of a colonial relationship and an identity rooted in a relationship to place, I believe that we should explore how this understanding can be applied to decolonization and social revolution.

Decolonization is the process of unsettling colonial power structures, whether that be through overturning acts of enclosure by building new commons, overturning acts of possession by reclaiming our spaces and identities, or overturning acts of administration through social revolution. Social revolution is a complete transformation of our society, economy, culture, philosophy, technology, relationships, and politics. An ongoing and heterogeneous change in people's powers, drives, and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and transformation of existing systems and institutions, punctuated by major ruptures and advances, all with the aim of self-liberation.

It takes confrontation with the powers that be, non-cooperation with the established order of things, and prefiguration of new social relations, institutions and infrastructure and practices in the here and now. If we maintain the interpretation of indigeneity as based on one's position in a colonial relationship, then the decolonization process will entail the abolition of that relationship as the premise of identity, and therefore the abolition of indigeneity as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally, socially, and spiritually weakened within the narrow parameters of the

state, where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power and develop the process of decolonization toward mimicking the practices of the dominant non-indigenous legal political institutions through, for example, land claims and self-government processes. What the decolonization movement needs, according to Maya Yucateco poet Feliciano Sanchez-Chan, are zones of refuge, places where indigenous knowledge can be guarded, exercised, and sustained. In Mesoamerica, these zones of refuge represent safe spaces where the diverse cultural expressions of the region can persist in spite of state efforts to create a homogenized Mexican national identity. The concept of zones of refuge is consistent with the traditional objectives of cultural

preservation and autonomy and with the social revolutionary aims of prefiguration, which seeks to sow the seeds of future relationships, institutions, and practices in the here and now. Through the expansion of zones of refuge and other institutions of resistance and autonomy, we can realize decolonization in reality. But again, this idea of indigeneity via colonization is just one understanding of the two. We need to explore another approach to decolonization, one that recognizes the power and potential of indigenous relationships with the land. Globally, the UN recognizes that indigenous peoples protect 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity, biodiversity, and scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil,

Canada, and Australia provide the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly clear that the colonial approach of conservation via dispossession removes the very people who take care of our most important ecosystems. Over the course of Bread and Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer highlights the reciprocal relationship with the earth that many indigenous groups, including her Potawatomi culture, have cultivated over generations. The principles of the gift economy is an essential aspect of this relationship, which forms the basis of indigeneity to place. The gift economy is a system of exchange where resources and services are shared without expectation of remuneration or quid pro quo. The gift economy

extends not just to people, but also our non-human kin, caring and being cared for in turn. If we want to restore that relationship, we can start by planting a garden. A garden can be a haven for native flora, a resting place for various fauna, a feast for endangered pollinators, a sustainer of local water table, and a hub of thriving soil. Not only does it benefit both our health and the health of the planet, but it is also a nursery for nurturing a connection that extends beyond that small patch of dirt. I don't believe that merely building a connection with the beyond that small patch of dirt. I don't believe that merely building a connection with the land can make someone indigenous, but not being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiding the renewal of the world.

Kimmerer uses the example of the broadleaf planting, also known as the white man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honored member of the plant community because it thrives as a good neighbor instead of as a destructive invader. While other invasive species poison the soil or overrun the land, the white man's footprint took on a strategy of helpful coexistence, even sharing some of its healing properties with those who ask of it. It is not indigenous, but it has become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters. To take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do. Decolonization requires to uproot invasive, irreverent, and destructive individualist capitalist settler societies

in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that we share and are responsible for. It requires to receive and honor the knowledge in the land to care for its keepers and pass on that knowledge to the next generation. And it is crucial that we elevate indigenous voices, knowledges, and pedagogical approaches in pursuit of this aim. All power to all the people. This has been Ekrapane. Peace. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move

out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our

culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 ch man 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. Hello, welcome. This is It Could Happen Here, and I am Shereen. And today is another silly little episode. Well, it's not silly.

Well, it is silly, but I think it's actually also interesting. So maybe you will too. If not, oops. But the point of this is I do not like being on my phone. I hate being on my phone. I've always hated being on my phone. I waited until the last possible moment I could until I even got a smartphone. But I just hate it. I hate

texting. I hate it all. And so, especially the last several years, I've been trying to read more and it's been great. But sometimes my brain just needs a task for me to do, like with my hands, so I can trick myself to thinking I'm being productive just because I'm physically doing something. And recently, that something are puzzles. And look, I like all puzzles. You can't show me a puzzle that I won't at least try. Physical jigsaw puzzles that can take hours or days to complete, like sign me up. But ever since getting a cat, it feels a little too precarious to commit to one of these jigsaw puzzles for the fear of her prancing around on the pieces, or

knocking them over under furniture to never be found again, or chewing on them, or eating them. And so, the puzzles I have been increasingly turning to recently, which I have always loved, are word and number puzzles. Sudoku, KenKen, classics, incredible, crosswords, cryptograms, code breakers. I can do those for hours. I will say though, I do find word searches pretty tedious and boring, but if I was completely out of options, I would probably do those too. There's just something really satisfying about physically putting pen to paper and solving something. And yes, I always use pen because I live on the edge. And as I said, I do not like being on my phone. So I've been buying puzzle books so I can have a physical thing to write on.

I've had puzzle books for years, but recently it's become a bit of a problem. I bought four different puzzle books in the span of like two weeks and not because I completed all the puzzles in them per se but because I just completed the ones I wanted to do usually skipping the word searches or long riddles or whatever. And honestly a much better use of my freaking time could go to something like learning literally anything else like picking up a new

skill, learning a new language. But no, my smooth brain wants to do a fucking puzzle. So I do a puzzle. Multiple puzzles, usually. Maybe you have noticed a trend, dear listener, in my episodes that are not about Palestine or the so-called Middle East. Most likely you haven't noticed only because I think about myself far more than anybody else does. But in order to not want to jump off a cliff every day, I've realized I need to write and learn about things that I like. Wow, incredible discovery. But for real, I think we all need a balance of making sure we're informed about the world and connecting with our humanity, as well as doing things as human beings that allow us to continue to want to be informed about the world and connect with our humanity. So, one day I won't need this big preamble before every episode that's on about Palestine, but today is not the day.

Anyways. Because I love puzzles, I wanted to learn about puzzles. How long have humans been putting together word and number games for the sole purpose of exercising our minds, or dare I say, have fun? I needed to know. It's truly one of the most wholesome things this species has ever done. So, I did some research. This episode is going to be about the crossword. That's where I wanted to start. I think most of us would agree that the crossword is the most popular or well-known word game or word puzzle. I will admit that every time I see a random newspaper in a cafe or hotel lobby or something, I always steal the crossword. And I ignore everything else,

because now is simply not the time. But how did the crossword come to be as this ubiquitous normal thing? The crossword is a fairly recent invention, born out of desperation. Arthur Wynne is regarded as the inventor of the modern crossword puzzle. He was born in 1871 in Liverpool, England, and his father was the editor of the local newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury. When Arthur was 19, he immigrated to the United States, settling for a time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. While in Pittsburgh, Wynne worked on the Pittsburgh Press newspaper, and he played the violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony

Orchestra. We love a well-rounded chap. He later moved to New York City, where he worked as an editor for the New York World newspaper. And then, in 1913, he invented the crossword puzzle. While working at the New York World, he needed something to fill up the space in the Christmas edition of the paper's FUN supplement. FUN in all caps. So he took advantage of the new technology at the time that could print blank grids cheaply, and he created a diamond-shaped set of boxes with clues to fill in the blanks smack in the center of the FUN supplement. fill in the blanks, smack in the center of the fun supplement. So, for the December 21st, 1913 edition of the New York World, he introduced this puzzle with a diamond shape and a hollow center, with the letters F-U-N already being filled in. He called it a word cross puzzle.

And nearly overnight, the word cross puzzle went from a space-filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page. A few weeks after the first word cross appeared, the name of the puzzle was actually changed to crossword, but this was only a result of a typesetting error. However, these puzzles have been known as crosswords ever since. Arthur Wynn didn't necessarily invent word puzzles, though. Ever since we've had language, we've played games with words. Crosswords are basically where two long-standing strands of word puzzles interconnect. The first being word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren't necessarily using deliberate deception, and the second being riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don't necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through. Maybe you're wondering, what's a word

square? Maybe you're not wondering that, but I'm going to tell you anyway. The word square is the direct precursor of the crossword grid. It's a special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words can be read across and down. The number of letters in the square is called its order. While two squares and three squares are easy to create in English, by the time you reach order six, you're very likely to get stuck. An order ten square is a holy grail for those who are regarded as logologists, that is, wordplay experts. So a word square is a puzzle requiring the discovery of a set of words of equal length written one under another to read the same

down as across. Apparently, the ancient Romans loved word puzzles. The first known word square, the so-called Sater square, was found on a slab in the ruins of Pompeii. The Sater square, which I don't know if I'm saying that right, but it's spelled S-A-T-O-R, it's also known as the Rotus square, depending on which way you read it, because Rotis is satyr backwards. And I say this because word order apparently doesn't matter in Latin. But this square that was found is a five by five, five word Latin palindrome. I'm going to say it in Latin, but I'll tell you what it means.

So apologies on this pronunciation, but Sator Arepo Tenant Opera Rotis. The farmer Arepo works a plow, a palindrome, just a reminder that it's something spelled the same way forwards and back. So that's not necessarily the English translation, but in Latin, that's what it is. Author Adrian Raffel described the Satter Square as the, quote, Kilroy was here of the Roman Empire. For those who don't know or need a refresher, not going to pretend I knew this either, but Kilroy was here was the Roman Empire. For those who don't know or need a refresher, I'm not going to pretend I knew this either, but Kill Roy was here was a popular American graffiti that was seen overseas throughout World War II. The words Kill Roy was here were accompanied by a cartoon drawing

of a man looking over a wall, and this became a popular piece of graffiti that was drawn by American troops in the Atlantic Theater and then later in the Pacific Theater. It eventually came to be a universal sign that American soldiers had come through an area and left their mark. And then, during the Second World War, Kilroy became so popular that this graffiti could be found everywhere. It was on ship holds, bathrooms, bridges, and it was painted on the shells of Air Force missiles. Its origins most likely come from a British cartoon and the name of an American shipyard inspector. The myths surrounding it are numerous, and they often center on a German belief that Kilroy was some kind of super spy who could go anywhere he pleased. Apparently, there are two Kilroy

inscriptions hidden in the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., and these were found tucked in the corners of both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the memorial. And so, the Satter Square was essentially the Kilroy was here of the Roman Empire. The square was found scrawled from Rome to Carinium, which is in modern England, to Dura Europos, which is modern Syria. It's unclear why this ancient meme was such a thing. Maybe it was the first meme ever. I guess it depends on what your definition of a meme is. To repeat what the square says, the words in the square are Sator Arepo Tenant Opera Rotas, the farmer Arepo works on a plow. Arepo is what's known as a hapex legomenon, which means it is a term of which only one instance of its use is recorded or can be found.

This means that the Sator Square is the only place where the word Arepo shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature. The best working theory as to why this is, is that it's a proper name invented only to make the square work. But the Sater Square has more tricks up its sleeve. If you reshuffle the letters around the central N, which was in the word tenant, you can make a Greek cross that reads paternoster in both directions. And this means our father. I mean, come on.

So clever. And then the four leftover letters, the two A's and two O's, those stand for alpha and omega. Early Christians might have used the square as a discreet way to signal their presence to one another. And the Seder square stuck around for a very, very long time. In the Middle Ages, it was regarded as a magical object, gaining a reputation as a talisman against fire, theft, and illness. The devil, apparently, gets confused by palindromes. So, with the devil not knowing which way to read, a 5x5 two-dimensional palindrome is an extra-powerful devil repellent. The satyr square also appears etched into tablets as a prevention against mad dogs, a snake bite cure, and a charm to protect cattle from witchcraft.

While word squares have maintained their quasi-magical reputation for hundreds of years to come, other visual word games also became popular during the 19th century. In the Victorian era, visual word games became extremely popular. These visual word games include double acrostics, which paved the way pretty directly for the crossword. Queen Victoria, I guess, was regarded as a cruciverbalist, which apparently means a person skillful in creating or solving crossword puzzles. In researching all of this, I have learned many English words I had no idea were even words to begin with. So, cruciverbalist Queen Victoria constructed what's known as the Windsor Enigma to teach her subject how to bring coals to Newcastle. In her 1861 book, Victorian Enigmas, author Charlotte

Eliza Capple attributes the Windsor Enigma puzzle to Queen Victoria. The queen was known to be fond of riddles and enigmas. One hoax apparently kept her occupied for half a week. From a passage from The Private Life of the Queen by, quote, one of her majesty's servants, written in 1897, quote, Her Majesty Queen Victoria takes delight in a clever riddle or rebus, but on one occasion she was very angry at having been hoaxed over a riddle which was sent to her with a letter to the effect that it had been made by the Bishop of Salisbury. For four days the Queen and Prince Albert sought for the reply when Charles Murray, controller of the household, was directed to write to the bishop and ask for the solution. The answer received was that the bishop had not made the riddle, nor could he

solve it. End quote. Okay, queen. We love feminism. Anyway, the Windsor Enigma was basically like a riddle, and this is what it said. The Windsor Enigma. The initials of the following places form the name of a town in England, and the finals read upwards what that town is famous for. And these are the nine clues in this enigma. A city in Italy. A river in Germany. A town in the United States, a town in North America, a town in Holland, the Turkish name for Constantinople, a town in Bosnia. I wasn't saying that with a lisp. It's not Bosnia. It's spelled Bothnia, just FYI. A city in Greece, a circle on the globe. So when you solve these nine clues, the nine letters which are on the left-hand side of these answers, it spells out Newcastle. And then on the right side, it says coal mines when

you read it from the bottom to the top as the riddle says to do. So Newcastle is famous for its coal mines. You know what else is famous for its coal mines? I can't actually answer that question. I have no idea. But here's some ads. Okay, we're back. So another old word game, which was a precursor to the crossword, is a game called Doublets.

It was invented by Oxford mathematician Charles Dawson, who was better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll. In this game, you transform one word into another of equal length, changing a single letter at a time, using as few moves as possible. All the linking steps also have to be legitimate words. A lot of modern puzzle books have doublets in them, including a bunch of the ones that I have, and they're pretty fun. As in a crossword, the process of moving stepwise letter to letter forces you to think about all the possible word combinations, and each doublet has a theme, a kind of mini alchemy that keeps the words all somehow related to each other. In Charles Dawkins or Lewis Carroll's 1880 book, Doublets, a Word

Puzzle, there are examples of this, where he says to, quote, drive pig into stye, raise four to five, make wheat into bread. So the idea is that those words become the other one with a couple of changes. A classic, classic word puzzle. And we're inching closer and closer to how the crossword came to be. And the crossword came about when riddles entered the grid. Crossword clues trace their origins to riddles. Crossword clues trace their origins to riddles. Riddles have been around since the dawn of time and can be found in basically every religious book and are seen in mythology and literature for centuries and centuries.

The Exeter Book is an 11th century Old English manuscript, and it's the largest and perhaps oldest known manuscript of Old English literature, containing about a sixth of all the old English poetry that has survived until today. That's a lot! And it has about a hundred riddles of all types. They say there are quote-unquote about a hundred, because these riddles still to this day drive people crazy. In the 10 centuries since their composition, scholars haven't conclusively solved every riddle. There are four basic ways that quote riddle logic operates. One, true riddles. Two, wordplay. Three, neck riddles. And four, anti-riddles. The enigma, which is a metaphorical

statement that's designed to feel like it has one solution but actually contains unresolvable multitudes, is different than this. The word enigma comes from a Greek word that means, quote, to speak in riddles. It applies to things, as well as people, that puzzle one's mind. Examples of enigmas can be Egypt's ancient pyramids and how the hell they were built, Amelia Earhart going poof, or the Bermuda Triangle being weird. Plenty of enigmas occur in modern times too. One example that people point to of this is the 2014 disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. On March 8th, 2014, the airplane departed Kuala Lumpur. It was bound for Beijing, China, but 39 minutes after

takeoff, the plane disappeared. It quite literally vanished without a trace, becoming one of aviation's greatest mysteries. And over a decade later, investigators still do not know exactly what happened to the plane and its 239 passengers. But just a few months ago, in March of 2024, Malaysia's government said it may renew the hunt for MH370 after an American marine robotics company that tried to find the plane in 2018 proposed a fresh search. A massive multinational search at the time in the southern Indian Ocean, where the jet is believed to have crashed, found nothing. Apart from some small fragments that later washed ashore, no bodies or wreckage have ever been found. Spooky! So that's an enigma. Examples of enigmas with word puzzles could be something like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? These are logic knots that want to

stay knotted or not solved. Haha, there's another little pun for you. Or riddle. Anyway, riddles, on the other hand, do want to be solved. A true riddle, one of these four basic ways that riddle logic operates, transforms thing A into solution B. True riddles rely on a logical connection that's not obvious on the surface, so you need to think more deeply about it in maybe a non-conventional or non-literal way in order to reach the solution. When riddles become baked into culture, they can turn into like inside jokes. Riddles have been around for millennia, and the best riddles have been repeated for just as long. One quote-unquote famous riddle, if you will, is the Sphinx's riddle in Greek mythology. Just some background on the Greek

Sphinx because I personally found it fascinating and very interesting. But the Greek Sphinx was clearly inspired by the Egyptian Sphinx, but the Greeks modified the Sphinx and made it their own. The Greek Sphinx had a woman's face and breasts and a lion's body with bird's wings, while the Egyptian Sphinx had a male head, which could be either human or animal. The word Sphinx is Greek and it means, quote, strangler, perhaps stemming from the fact that lionesses usually kill their prey by strangling it. Since sphinxes were seen as very intimidating, the Greeks frequently put them on gravestones to frighten away would-be grave robbers. This use is called apotropaic, meaning causing someone to turn away. called apotropaic, meaning causing someone to turn away. Most of the examples of ancient Greek sphinxes that we have today are from ancient gravestones. So in Greek mythology, there was

one famous sphinx who turned up in Thebes shortly after its king, Laius, had been killed while on his way to consult the Delphic Oracle. This sphinx flew on top of the city walls and asked all the Theban youths a riddle. When they could not answer it, she ate them! Feminism! Strikes again! At the time, Creon was the regent in Thebes

since Laius had died and he was so desperate to get rid of the sphinx that he promised the kingship and the hand of the widowed queen Jocasta, who also happened to be his sister, in marriage to anyone who could solve the Sphinx's riddle. This was the Sphinx's riddle, which you may have heard before, which is why I said it was quote-unquote famous. What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet in midday, and three feet in the evening. In the myth, around this time, Oedipus came into Thebes and he solved the riddle. Oedipus said, the answer is man.

Because a man crawls on all fours in the morning of his life, he walks on two feet in the midday of his life, and then he uses a cane for extra support when he is old. The sphinx was so upset that Oedipus had answered the riddle correctly that she threw herself down from the walls of Thebes and she died. You know what else died? My soul, when I realized we need ads to make money. So, here you go!

Okay, we're back, and we were talking about types of riddles. Again, there are four basic ways that riddle logic operates. True riddles, wordplay, neck riddles, and anti-riddles. And we talked about the true riddles before the break. And so now, let's talk about wordplay, neck riddles, and anti-riddles. And we talked about the true riddles before the break, and so now let's talk about wordplay riddles. A wordplay riddle does the same thing as a true riddle, but it adds an extra layer of trickiness to it. So it's thing A turning into solution B, but there is a slight catch in between that has to interrupt the pathway between those things first. Wordplay riddles include puns and other bits of linguistic gymnastics to take the anticipated answer to the next step.

A rebus is an example of a wordplay riddle, which uses letters as part of the clue. A rebus is a puzzle device in which words are represented by combinations of letters and pictures. A neck riddle gives a solution that would be impossible for the solver to arrive at without context. So, question mark equals B. The term neck riddle comes from stories in which the hero of the story uses an unsolvable riddle to outwit a judge or a monster and save himself from being hanged. So, a neck riddle saves your neck. Wow. This is one typical folktale example.

As I walked out and in again, from the dead the living came. Six there is and seven there'll be. So tell me this riddle or set me free. You're probably never going to get this answer unless you've heard it before, but the answer is a horse's skull that contains a bird hatching eggs. Six have hatched, but one is still to come. What? So a neck riddle has an answer that's so specific it's deeply unsatisfying because that's precisely the point. After all, it's not meant to actually be solvable. It has to stump the other person, or in this case a judge or a monster, to ensure that you

or the hero gets off scot-free. Often that's achieved through over-precision, but sometimes a change in perspective will do the trick. In The Hobbit, our hero Bilbo Baggins bests Gollum in a riddle contest by asking him the unknowable, what's in my pocket? And then there's the anti-riddle. An anti-riddle is one that tricks the reader because it looks like a riddle, but it's actually not a riddle at all. Basically, A equals A. For example, why did the chicken cross the road seems like a riddle, but the answer to get to the other side is just the literal answer. So, in conclusion, a word grid and a bunch of riddles. Those two things are what evolved over time and over the centuries to bring us what we know today as the crossword puzzle. Author Adrian Raffel, who wrote the book

Thinking Inside the Box, Adventures with Crosswords of the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them, wrote in the Paris Review in 2020, quote, If you're a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a hard time solving a crossword. You'd have to separate the puzzle into two separate strands of problems to tackle the issue. How to figure out what a clue is saying, or rather, what it's precisely not saying, and how to fill the letters in the grid in the way that makes the most sense. Crosswords force the brain to cross wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the visual-spatial part of the brain

with the logic-run part of the brain. This is part of the reason why even the best crossword-solving AI in the world isn't yet better than the best human. The AI can fill in the grid pretty quickly, but in terms of resolving that grid through riddle logic, humans are still a step ahead. The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do, it created an itch we didn't know we had, and yet we've always been primed to solve them. End quote. And that is just a beautiful way to end this episode. So, that's it. That's the crossword.

I'm going to go do a crossword right now, because why not? I told you I needed things to do in the beginning of this episode, and this is my thing to do. That does not include scrolling on my phone and wanting to die. So, with that, bye! I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts

dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. It being the slow crumbling of the old world and the painful birth of the new and here to talk about the painful birth of the new world is someone who was compared

to me very recently born garrison davis how are you doing gare good good as as a new member of the k-hive nation i have a new life under me now. Yeah, you've embraced the Kamala of it all and are now just vibing. Yeah, it's a beautiful place to be. Yeah, unfortunately, it might be just as delusional as Biden's own insistence that he should be the one to run. And that's kind of what we're talking about here today. Oh, good. I love delusion and its impact on American political life. So our initial post-debate comments were a little bit frenzied, a little bit chaotic, as was the debate, I suppose. And post-debate polls were also just kind of a mess initially with wildly differing

results from source to source. of a mess initially with wildly differing results from source to source. But over time, they have since stabilized and kind of synced up. To like succinctly put it, essentially, the debate undid most of the pro-Biden shifts that had happened in the wake of Trump's felony conviction. Yeah. And I've seen some polls have shown it tightening up a little bit again, but it's very, I mean, I always wonder how much, you've got kind of two camps, broadly speaking, in terms of the people who seem like they're not completely insane. One of them is kind of the Nate Silver side of things, which shows Biden as having fallen fairly far behind and having, you know, he's got Biden at about a 30% chance, which is where Trump was in 2016. So that doesn't mean zero. Whereas the

new 538 polling average, and I kind of have been following their new head of statistics for a while, has it still close to a dead heat? And then obviously, there's arguments that people will make that Biden is actually very far behind, which have more to it than the arguments that Biden is going to win in a landslide, the kind of democratic, like the polls are wrong entirely. I don't think that's likely, but I think we're looking at somewhere between Biden as a definite like underdog or more or less tied. I guess that's where it seems to me like the evidence still is. Yep. A USA Today Suffolk University poll conducted immediately after the debate gave Trump a four point boost. The week after the debate, a New York Times Siena poll

found Trump's lead had increased by 3%, now leading by six points with likely voters. Other questions were polled in the wake of the debate. A CNN poll found that 75% of Democrats believe the party would have a better chance of defeating Trump with a candidate other than Biden. And overall, yes, his number dropped or kind of coasted with what it had been in like, you know, April, March, February. And according to Politico, other than Trump in 2020, no incumbent has trailed this far behind in horse race polling since Jimmy Carter's reelection bid 44 years ago, which does not make me feel super optimistic. It's not great. And man, it would be, I suspect the polls are still

overemphasizing it to a degree because if Biden losing by 6% would be like the worst performance of a Democrat in like a generation, like in a long, long time. And I just don't believe it's going to be that far off, but like it is definitely, things are a lot uglier than they were when we recorded our last horse race episode, right? Like the debate was somewhere between pretty bad and catastrophe in terms of its impact on the polls. Absolutely. And but Trump, what Trump actually gained himself as a candidate is not very much. It's mostly it's mostly it's mostly decreases on biden and uh five pollsters did pre and post debate polls and trump is gaining on the margin but in none of the polls did he gain anything more than a four point swing so they're all pretty consistent and it's it's not it's not

all the end of the world here either a poll released last saturday by bloomberg and morning consult showed biden narrowing trump's post-debate lead, specifically in swing states, with only a 2% difference between all seven swing states, with Biden being ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin. Yeah. 2% is within that margin of error. So things are also starting to level up over time. Yeah. And I think some of this may have to do, we're going to talk a bit about Project 2025, which I tend to think, and we've been chatting about this online all week in our work chat, people are overemphasizing as opposed to what Trump is, because Project 2025 is basically a blueprint for a Christian fascist takeover of the US published by the Heritage

Foundation. And a lot of people who have been affiliated with Trump who were in his administration last time are on board with it, have talked about it, have boosted it. So people are obviously scared of it. I think what Trump has actually promised to do in office, which is the Agenda 47, we did a whole week of stuff on it, is a more realistic thing to be afraid of. But either way, I think that some of that tightening is probably a mix of you've got a bunch of kind of on the fence voters swing away from Biden because he performed so badly in the debate. And then it has, DIMMs have done a pretty intensive job of spreading out a lot of, you know, what you might call fear porn over a fascist takeover of the country. And

I think that's part of why things might be tightening back up. I mean, it would be nice to eventually one year vote for something instead of just be voting against something. But again, I'm not sure if we'll ever get to that point again. Yeah. Hasn't happened yet. Well, no, no, no. I mean, I was, I remember I got to vote for Obama the first time he ran and it was hard not to be optimistic. So immediately after the debate, we had a whole bunch of like friends of Biden, kind of upper level Democrat, not like online influencers, but like actual, like influential, like, like pundits and people, you know, call for perhaps Biden should step down, perhaps we should find somebody else. And this has kind of been the ongoing post debate ever

since the debate has been this question. And we'll get, we'll kind of get to this a little bit more later. Honestly, I think we had a stronger chance at this possibility a week or two ago. I think by now, Democrats have largely kind of closed ranks around Biden. But this is definitely still developing. And I've been keeping up with all of Biden's appearances in the media since the debate, just because I've been interested to see how he will handle this kind of universal flub. I watched his ABC interview and his recent phone calls into various morning news

shows. In all of those, he did not perform especially well. As expected, they were slow and sometimes kind of mumbly, but neither have they been the death blow to his campaign needed to finalize the shift to an alternative candidate. Instead, we're just kind of coasting along with this general uncertainty regarding the Democratic candidacy. And Instead, we're just kind of coasting along with this general uncertainty regarding the Democratic candidacy. And meanwhile, Biden is just continuing to affirm that he will be the one to lead the ticket. I'm going to quote from Washington Post here, quote, as of Sunday, nine House Democrats, four privately and five publicly, had called for Biden to exit the race. In addition, at least 18 current and former top Democrats, as of Saturday,

had publicly raised concerns about Biden's fitness for office and his ability to defeat Trump. exit the race. In addition, at least 18 current and former top Democrats as of Saturday had publicly raised concerns about Biden's fitness for office and his ability to defeat Trump. Unquote. And it has remained the same since then. There's going to be meetings in the next few days, including the day after we record this. We're recording this on Monday. So there's gonna be meetings in the Senate and in the House about kind of this issue. So this is definitely still developing, but you're starting to see more and more politicians fall into rank. AOC just put out a statement saying,

no, we're going to all support Biden. So like there was this uncertainty for a while, and now I think people are kind of being told to like, come on, get on the platform. Yeah. Biden hasn't been handling this well, like personally either. No.

He's come across like very angry. No, the emails I've been getting from the Biden campaign have been wild. He's been blaming podcasters. He's been blaming press and media. And I'm kind of bummed that it's the pod save guys he got angry at. We've been shitty to Joe Biden for so much longer than those assholes. Yeah, but he's been treating it very weirdly. He's been doing a lot of like a denial of the polling.

He's been doing some kind of revisionist history. Very magical thinking. Regarding like 2020 polling, I think kind of referencing the Democratic primary, but still the way that he's talking about it, it's making it sound like he, you know, like he was behind in the polls in 2020, that he was, that Democrats were behind

in the polls in 2022, which just wasn't true. The red wave comment was, was certain pundits and Republicans trying to conjure a red wave, but the actual polls were very accurate in 2022. And he's also crediting himself for, for that red wave not happening in 2022. So he's been having a lot of weird statements like blaming media and blaming the elites for trying to replace him on the ticket. I'll include one clip here from The Morning Joe. Come on, give me a break. I'm getting so frustrated by the elites. Now, I'm not talking about you guys, but about the elites in the party who they know so much more.

If any of these guys don't think I should run against me, go announce the president. Challenge me at the convention. Kind of his continuous line to justify his own candidacy has been him claiming that he won the primary, which is a ridiculous thing to say as an incumbent because like, come on, come on. And he has repeatedly said that the, that democratic voters in the primaries have quote, spoken clearly and decisively. They've chosen me to be the nominee of the party. That's not how it worked. Quote, do we now just say that process didn't matter that the voters don't have a say? I declined to do that. How could we stand for democracy in our nation? If we ignore it in our own party, I cannot do that. I will not do that. How could we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?

I cannot do that. I will not do that. Unquote. Which is just absurd, right? Because like, especially there was many people who actually voted in the like false primary for like the like other option. Yeah. I mean, one of the polls I just saw was like 70% of them, 75% of Americans would prefer

to vote for someone besides Biden. Like it's. It's absurd, especially when you're running an uncontested as an incumbent. If you want people to challenge you, you could have said so. Come on. This is pretty goofy. There was no real primary for the Dems, and there usually isn't. That's not abnormal with an incumbent.

But in this case, people have severe questions about the incumbent's fitness to do the job in a physical way. Like, I hate to say it, but like Trump might physically be better able to survive a four-year term than Biden is, you know, not that I think he's mentally a better president. Like, I don't think, honestly, part of what we are accepting here is that like, that doesn't really matter. Right. Like we're all kind of acknowledging if you're on team anything but Trump because he might end the concept of democracy in this country, then you're accepting that like, yeah, I am not. I am voting for a guy who probably can't really do the job anymore.

And just assuming that the people around him will not be as evil. Like you do kind of have to accept that. Otherwise you're just lying to yourself about the state that Joe is in because he's not all there. He's not all there the way he was in 2020. No, but do you know what still is here? Just like it was back in 2020.

Capitalism, baby. We didn't manage to take it out even though we elected this, our communist leader, Joseph Biden, Chairman Joe. Enjoy these capitalism sponsored ads. All right, we are back. All right, we are back. Yeah, so there was a report that came out from Chip 50, which is like an analytics project.

It's like the Civic Health and Institution Project. So it's like a survey of all 50 US states. And they did a survey on like opinions of voters before and after the debate and there showed like fairly small movement like very little was changed at all in terms of like and primarily what was changed wasn't people going from biden to trump but from people preferring from preferring biden to preferring other right someone else someone else right and so that does kind of go back to what we're like people are not making their minds up about trump like no and i think what the dims can do if biden stays in and he doesn't seem like he's leaving it seems like the primary thing that will make progress for them

is hitting on how dangerous trump having a second term will be that seems to be what moves the needle which is part of their current strategy but their strategy is kind of all in flux right now because of the poor performance in the debate. They're trying to save face on Biden's part as well as emphasizing that Trump is like a dangerous possibility. And again, like even if Biden does decide to drop out or step down, he is going to keep saying he's running until literally the day that happens, right? Because that is what you do as a politician. You are going to keep insisting it until one day you are no longer doing that. And that's just kind of how politics goes. But he has made continuous, continuous gestures towards the fact that he is going to stay.

He has no plans on stepping down. He wants to win in November. This Monday, he personally made 20 calls to congressional members, trying to convince them that he is going to be the one on the ticket no really guys it's going to be me again really and i think part of what he's doing here is like he does not have to demonstrate at the moment that he will like survive until like november what all he has to do right now is run out the clock until the convention, and then it'll be too late to swap him out for anyone else. There's a few other people kind of saying this, and I believe that is kind of what is happening. All they need to do is just

keep delaying this question, keep this uncertainty until the convention, and then it's going to get locked in there. And that's all he needs to do. He doesn't need to demonstrate his viability come November. He just needs to make sure that he gets the official nomination this August. And I don't know. Biden supporters' reactions to this have been really weird, including we've kind of had like a new upgrowth of a pro-Biden personality cult among liberals. personality cult among liberals. Boy, do we.

I feel like largely like a culmination of like MSNBC, Russiagate, like Blue Anon type stuff that people are just now convinced there's like a secret conspiracy to take down Biden. And any attempts to question Biden's legibility as a candidate could only be rooted in some secret agenda to get Trump elected. So I think this is why they're so volatile about this, is that they think the only one who would ever propagate questions over Biden's legibility would be someone who secretly wants Trump to be in office again. And that is such a threat to them that they're lashing out very, very oddly and very conspiratorially against anyone raising questions about maybe Biden's not the best guy, actually. And they're spinning this into like actually being secret Trumpers. It's odd because even the way Biden talks about

his own drive to beat Trump is kind of wishy-washy. Certain like more polished statements will be like, yes, this is like a threat to democracy. We have to do this to keep Trump out of office. This is an existential threat. But in that ABC interview, he gave a really kind of soft answer to this question, saying that all that he needs to do is just give it his all. And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest jobs I know I can do. That's what this is about. So that's not convincing. That's such like a, like ninth, like cartoons for ninth graders way of saying it like, well, what matters is that I tried, put it all my best work forward. No man, that doesn't matter at all.

Yeah, it is. It's not great. It's not reassuring because it doesn't matter if you give it your all. People's lives are on the line here. And you're just like, eh, I'll give it the old college try. You're like, okay. It means one of two things. He either is completely delusional to the point where he doesn't realize how nonsensical that is, or he doesn't really think that Trump is a threat to democracy in people's lives. And I guess the third option would be he doesn't care. Like if he loses reelection, fuck everybody. If he doesn't get to keep being president, like maybe he is just that kind of person. I do have a feeling that only

that kind of person can become president of the United States. Yeah. And I mean, like, that was kind of my read after the ABC interviews that he seemed just kind of like delusional and narcissistic. Like, yeah, he really believes after 2020 that he's the only one that can beat Trump. And this feels like a very genuine view of himself, that he's the only one strong enough to beat Trump. Yeah. And the more and more that there's been pushback against his legibility, the more he's been digging his heels in.

And I think if things continue like this, I don't think the Democratic Party will be able to organize and unite enough to do like a soft coup and convince Biden to step down. And without a complete united front against Biden, he himself would need some kind of like excuse to allow himself to step down without sacrificing his pride and showing weakness both in himself and the party.

This could be a convenient medical diagnosis, right? Although the increasing number of calls for him to undergo thorough neurological examination will probably have the same backfire effect of Biden attempting as much as he can to avoid any in-depth medical and neurological testing. He's been making these comments like, every day I take a neurological effect of Biden attempting as much as he can to avoid any in-depth medical and neurological testing. He's been making these comments like, every day I take a neurological test by doing my job. And like, come on, man.

Also, we're watching you do your job. It's not convincing. That's part of the problem, bro. Like, you got up in front of the, like, again, referred to the last episode you and I did on the horse race. Our attitude was like, yeah, things have really improved for Biden. I think he's probably the smart money bet. And like, sitting down and watching that, it was horrifying.

Like, yeah, there's no denial. That's part of why this, you have to, if you're still on team, like, I don't think it's fair what people are saying to Joe. If you're on team, this was bad strategy from the beginning expressing any kind of doubt well maybe that's right but i don't know what else people are supposed to do if you don't if you really think that this is he has not demonstrated like a seriously concerning incapacity for the work think about how unprecedented having this degree of open challenging of him as the candidate this close to an election. I've never seen anything like this. Especially on like an incumbent. Yes. The president. Yeah. And an incumbent who served two times as vice. Like

that's ridiculous. And like the last real neurological medical examination that he undertook was last February, which for an 81 year old is a very long time. Especially if you compare like news clips of him from like the debate to clips of him from last February or last year, there actually is like a decent difference. And I don't know, it seems it seems kind of absurd that he that he keeps harping on this line for his ABC interview. He, he declined to take a cognitive test and make the results public in order to reassure voters that he was fit to serve another term saying that I have a cognitive test every single day doing this job. Everything I do is a test.

No, not great. No. He also said that only the Lord almighty could persuade him to change his mind and drop out of the race. What the fuck? What the fuck, Joe? There we go. Seriously, man?

So that's, again, not super reassuring. But you know what? I can be reassured by Robert. The fact that sweet lady capitalism is always there for us you know it's always there like a good uncle or something i don't know yeah yeah yeah something something that state farm ad i agree all right we are back it is certainly feeling like 1968 all over again isn't it yeah uh yeah i mean and that's obviously having an open convention in 68 the chaos around that

did not help the democrats they did not know in that election no we got fucking dick nixon so that's not good no it's not great with with with campus protests and everything it all is starting to feel like 68 over here so yeah a lot of people are saying if if if biden does step down before the dnc in chicago this august we could have ourselves an open convention to nominate a new candidate the last time this method was used by by Democrats was in 68 at the also Chicago DNC after the leading candidate, Senate date, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated weeks before the convention by a 24 year old Palestinian man for his support of Israel during the six day war. So again, there is a lot of, a lot of parallels here. And if it's not going to

be Biden, then who is it going to be? Right? This was a bigger question last week, and it still is kind of a lingering question in a lot of people's minds. Who's it going to be? Probably Kamala. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, there's really, for a lot of reasons in terms of, including, like, I think what would have to happen with, like, the donations. Like, if it were to be a totally new group of people, that would cause insurmountable bullshit. And also, like, if you're talking about from a war-gaming-this-out perspective,

you know, Kamala does not look bad in the polling and might in fact be, just for a variety of reasons, one of the better choices. Like, I can in my head think, wow, I sure wish it was, you know, Pritzker and Whitmer maybe. But like, I think that a lot of what I've seen in the polls has kind of convinced me that Kamala is probably our best all around bet. And if you include practicality and actually like beating Trump. Yes. In the polls, she is consistently higher than any other potential

democratic replacements and doing, if not as well, often better than Biden against Trump, usually closing that race out. I think a CNN poll from last Wednesday showed that she's in the margin of error against Trump nationally with 45 to his 47, which is much better than Biden is doing nationally. And she's projected to do much better in an electoral college race than Biden specifically. So there we go. I'm going to quote from CNN here, quote, an anonymously written Google doc titled Unburdened by What Has Been, The Case for Kamala, written by self-described senior operatives within democratic political institutions, has been popping up in group chats of Democratic donors and leading coalition groups. It lays out a detailed argument and plan for a campaign. So this doc, I was able to get a hold of a copy,

and parts of it definitely read like an Aaron Sorkin script. Like that is the closest thing I can describe this thing as. But I think it is worth digging into here for our last section. So I'm going to read some small parts of this doc. And Robert, I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on this. It starts by saying, we are currently losing.

We need to do something different to win. The number one most important priority above all others is defeating Donald Trump. Nothing is more important. And we need to be very real that we are currently losing. So off to a good start. Okay.

That is, I would argue, accurate. Quote, Biden's debate performance, the campaign's defensive response, and the total lack of plan to reassure his base and the voters about his capability should shake everyone's confidence that he can win this election. Now, we have three possible options. Biden can take the necessary steps to demonstrate that he

is up to the job. He can step aside for another candidate or Trump will win. The discourse around potential alternative candidates in the event that Biden does step down is increasingly detached from reality. Donors, pundits, and democratic elites are freely slinging around wild ideas about dream tickets. This chaos is used as a shield by stay-the-course advocates who frame the choice as Biden or chaos. The swirl over different possible candidates is obscuring the fact that there's a single clear path forward. There's one path out of this mess, and it's Kamala, unquote. And this is one of the interesting things I found about this doc is that the way that they view this kind of current chaos as we win just as a deliberate strategy and as a deliberate tactics just to continue this uncertainty all the way to the convention. And a lot of what this doc advocates for is that we need to call this as soon as possible to give whatever option we're going to go forward with the most amount of success.

Whether that's Biden, whether that's Kamala, we need to decide what it is so we don't spend the next few months doing weird Democratic Party infighting and instead actually lock down what's happening so that there's a cohesive strategy. And they argue that Kamala has the strongest claim to Democratic legibility among all other alternative candidates. Quote, she's the only candidate that can take the reins right now instead of in late August with less than three months to go. To be clear, this isn't an argument about deservedness or why you should personally love Kamala.

It's about strategy and winning in the face of unimaginable electoral stakes. Yeah. Now, the doctors point out that only Biden himself has the power to drop out and choose to head off chaos by anointing Harris. But Biden does listen to people and the people that he listens to listens to other people. And that is the audience for the people reading this talk. That's what this is circulating among. That was like the intention. And they argue that if Biden does drop out, Democrats have to unite quickly behind the elected successor, as opposed to inviting this extended period of chaos. And although Kamala has limitations in

polls regarding her name recognition, she currently wins any poll of alternative Democratic candidates by a very wide margin. This doc does point out that Kamala is by no means a perfect candidate. She does have real deficits, but they are mostly addressable. The doc mentions her Biden-level approval rating, her involvement with Biden's immigration shortcomings, and her kind of awkward camera moments reminiscent of a drunk aunt. And, quote, after years of a relatively low profile, voters don't see her as a strong leader for the country. But running as a presidential candidate will allow Harris to present herself in a more commanding light. She'll be a prosecutor going up against a convicted felon, a woman fighting against the man who ended Roe v. Wade, unquote. And that is a lot of the

tight sort of messaging that they are promoting if Kamala does end up being the option. A morning consul's political poll on the vice president from June reflects a number of advantages she would have over Trump in a head-to-head match based on his greatest vulnerabilities. A majority of voters see Kamala as mentally fit, level-headed, and prepared, contrast to Trump and even Biden. And a majority of voters trust Kamala on jobs, abortion, climate change, and LGBTQ rights. Public opinion is already moving towards Harris over Biden. 43% of voters indicate Harris is fit to run compared to Biden's 35. And while the issue is complex and the distance here is relative,

she's broadly considered to be on Biden's left on Israel-Palestine, an issue where he has major vulnerabilities. Kamala also has advantages with the younger and POC voters that the Democrats are currently bleeding. In the doc here, they contain some stats on this, saying Biden won the 2020 election by just 44,000 votes, and most of those are votes that he is bleeding. A New York Times-Siena poll in February found that Harris is nearly 10 points ahead of Biden with Black voters and 15 points up with Latino voters, 20 points up with young voters. These are massive advantages. Now, that is older data,

but it's probably worth some consideration. Part of the reason why she's also favored among other Democratic contenders is that she has direct access to the Biden-Harris campaign war chest of over $91 million in cash, which would create a smoother transition. Yeah, and is probably, I mean, again, just given the amount of chaos that would be inherent in a totally open convention, it just seems like the only feasible option. And what they're advocating for

is that if Kamala takes the position now or soon to now, she'll have an extra month and massive structural advantages. Quote, if we can unite behind Harris in July, we have an extra month of massive structural advantages. Quote, if we can unite behind Harris in July, we have an extra month of party unity and message unity. That's a month where we can keep the media focused

on Donald Trump, Project 2025, and mega extremism instead of waiting in dread for the next Biden misstep or talking about Democrats fighting it out to win delicate count. Fear of racism and sexism is playing an outsized role not supported by data. The impact of sexism and racism on the vote is playing an outsized role not supported by data. The impact of sexism and racism on the vote is marginal compared to the potential to make gains in the

crucial block that will decide the election. Right now, this race hinges on alienated and unenthusiastic double haters who dislike both Biden and Trump and want an alternative choice. Some polls put the size of this group at 25% nationally, or even higher, nearly 30%. It's basically everyone I know. Especially among inconsistent voters who are likely to decide the election in key battleground states. For these double haters, vote choice is being driven not by prejudice, but by anti-enthusiasm. For the two currently 80-year-old white men presented here as the only options. Yeah, of course.

These voters are also more likely to be young, Hispanic, Black, and women in urban or suburban areas, the exact kind of voter profile that Kamala is gaining appeal with. Yeah. And I find this little bit to be the most compelling statement in this entire document, because that lays out an actual map

towards how Kamala would have a better election viability than Biden, especially the voters that he's been bleeding dramatically in the past six, seven months. Now, the DACA does close by saying, if Biden stays the course, we need Kamala to be strong. The most likely outcome is that President Biden declines to step back. In that case, Kamala's role is more crucial than ever. She will be the strong communicator on the ticket, especially on our most important issue, abortion. Second, many voters will understand her to be Biden's near-guaranteed successor, and we will need to feel comfortable with her potential ascent to the presidency to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket.

For anyone in the Biden's the nominee and we must rally around him camp, it's essential that we project confidence in his selection of a running mate. By one, pushing the administration to stop sidelining Kamala. By two, promoting Kamala as the leader of the party and country. Three, be prepared to align with political and financial support. And three, debate over and ultimately organize around a new running mate. Consolidation around Vice President Harris will not guarantee victory in November. No option is free of risk at this point, but this is our clearest path to win.

We should take it. And that's how the document ends. And I like some of the arguments they make here. I don't like Kamala as a person. I think she has many, many issues, both as a person and as a- She's a cop. I don't like cops. Absolutely.

Especially if their messaging will be like, Kamala the prosecutor against Trump the felon, which I personally don't like cops. Absolutely. Especially if their messaging will be like Kamala, the prosecutor against Trump, the felon, which I personally don't like. But that could work. That's not going to lose her important voters. That's not going to lose her all of the anarchists who already aren't going to vote. That might be a really good strategy because Americans do not feel the same way about prosecutors as I do. And you do. Right. We have to accept that at a certain point. Because Americans do not feel the same way about prosecutors as I do. And you do, right?

Yeah. Like, we have to accept that at a certain point. I think, so I, and I think what's most frustrating to me about the fact that it doesn't look like Biden's going to step down is that, like, the smartest thing they could do strategy-wise would be to drop that announcement on, like, Monday of next week and utterly, like like cut the wind out of the sails of the RNC. Yeah. Like suddenly the biggest story is that, and not, you know, everything that the Republicans are putting out,

like you could actually really do some damage to them because there's, there's not really anything that they could do in response. And so much media attention right now is being focused on biden very clearly not being fit for office yeah all of that would go away if kamala gets put into the spot then then then everyone will start focusing once again on how bad trump is and i can understand some of like the biden camps like upsetedness at at like the fact that currently there is just so much attention on biden and everyone kind of is ignoring trump but that just is due to how poorly he himself has been behaving like that, like that is ultimately the Biden campaign's fault that they didn't plan for this contingency. And if they want all of that, you know, like discourse to stop, they have a very easy option

to and it's just reliant on Biden not being too personally prideful and acknowledging that he's just too old for office and there are better candidates out there. So, yeah, that is that is the current that is the current situation on the rise of the K-Hive. Something I at this point am very skeptical to think will actually happen, but it may be actually a viable strategy for the Democratic Party. Yep. I mean, we'll see what they actually do. Probably keep running Joe Biden and, uh, hope that Americans panic enough about Trump to,

but you know, I, we can all dream. To that point, we could also dream that like, that, that like the delegates will just like rebel against their like polite duty by, by not committing to their,

to their non-binding promises. Although that would be extremely unprecedented and it would make the DNC a lot more fun. Oh, we would, we would have a great DNC if that were to go down. Yep. Anyway,

well, we're going to have fun at the RNC instead. Yeah, we sure will. Garrison, you and I are going to be on the ground in the exclusion zone and at the convention itself where we cannot have backpacks or gas masks or canned food,

but I might be able to carry a gun. Let me see if they do reciprocity. Uh, where, what is this? Is this Minnesota? No, this is not Minnesota.

This is Wisconsin. Oh, Wisconsin. This is Milwaukee, uh what is this is minnesota no this is not minnesota this is wisconsin oh wisconsin this is milwaukee milwaukee you can see how well prepared i am let me see that could make a fun episode all its own i i do have an idea for an episode that I will mention to you off air that I really want to do for the RNC. Wait, it looks like yes. With restrictions.

Yeah. I love, I love restrictions. That's great. We'll see what those are. Stay tuned to hear about those restrictions. Stay tuned, everybody.

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Esports! Oh, God. Okay, that was not a great intro. This is the podcast that we do. I'm Neil Logg.

With me is James. We're doing we're doing another via james episode yep we're back then we don't have a theme for our episodes i feel like yeah maybe it is petrodollars i guess it is yeah yeah we brought to you today by big fossil fuel you know this entire episode is is the what do you do with your fossil fuel money episode. So we did an episode like a year ago about sports washing, and it has gotten much worse since then. So the big kind of sports washing thing that's happening right now is this thing called the Esports World Cup that the Saudi government is putting on. It is going on right now, barring unfathomable disaster.

It will still be going on by the time this episode comes out. We kind of talked about in the last episode how the Saudis have been getting into sports. I mean, it sort of starts with soccer. They start doing WWE. They get into tennis. They're in golf. They're in boxing. They're in Formula One.

And in the last, like, two years, specifically, they've gotten really, really deep into esports. specifically they've gotten really really deep into esports in 2022 they spent 1.5 billion dollars wow to acquire face it and esl gaming which were two organizations that ran esports leagues esports by the way are professional video game competition for the people who didn't spend their youth waking up at five in the morning to watch korean starcraft tournaments like i did yeah that's me i fall into that category yeah i feel like on this episode we have both the sports washing angles covered because you have the sports washing like regular sports angle and i've had to do the sports washing esports angle yeah i have i know what we call them p sports like physical sports uh meet space sports uh yeah I've been privy to a decent amount of sports washing. I raced a lot against Iranian teams when I was cycling. Those dudes weren't so much sports

washing as just straight up national state sponsored doping programs. But then the UAE, Bahrain, Dubai, all these different better states-states and Emirates will sponsor cycling teams. Very, very common. Brunei, another one. I raced for Quebec once, which is not a petro-state. Well, I guess it's not a petro-state. Yeah. They've got big maple syrup behind them.

Yeah. And Catalonia, which again, not a petro-state. But yeah, it's very common in all kinds of professional sports right because as sports has become more of like an entertainment industry it's become unfathomably expensive to own and sponsor a team for like enthusiasts and the value proposition isn't really there for brands I don't think the amount that it costs now to even a sport like cycling which is not a massive sport in global terms right it's not football soccer for the americans out there it's not worth it for many brands to sponsor an entire cycling team billions and millions of euros

but like if you can use that cycling team to launder and normalize your uh your state's reputation if that cycling team can be what people think of when they hear about your country, then maybe that is worth it, right? And when you have a bottomless pot of oil money, you don't have to worry so much about whether it's worth it. Yeah. So the thing I want to do with this episode

is to get into why specifically the Saudis are doing this right now. Because again, like most countries do sort of versions of this, right? But again, you know, that is $1.2 billion they've thrown into two StarCraft leagues right now because again like most countries do yeah sort of versions of this right but again you know that is 1.2 billion dollars they've thrown into two starcraft leagues that i primarily know them for starcraft they do a bunch of stuff but those those things were not worth 1.5 billion dollars like there's no way but most of the money that had been sponsoring this stuff was crypto money right okay you know and but i wanted to get into why this is sort of happening something i think is very important to note going into this is that the sort of league thing that's being run right now is being run directly out of the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is called Public Investment Fund.

So this is directly state money. So the Esports World Cup that's happening right now has $60 million in prizes, which is unreal. It is an extraordinary amount of money. Split around 21 esports. There are 30 esports teams involved. I am going to read the names of every single fucking one of them because fuck you. Okay, let's do it. Fnatic, G2 Sports, Guild Esports, Carmine Corp, Movistar, KOI.

Actually, I've never heard of those ones. OG, Natas. Movistar, I'm guessing it's Spanish. That's a Spanish telephone network. Yeah, probably. You know, there's a couple I don't know, but these are like the largest esports teams in the world. Okay.

Ninjas in Pajamas or NiP. Team Liquid, which I'm really sad about because I was a Team Liquid fan for a fucking decade, and I'm no longer one now because fuck this shit. Team Secret, Team Vitality, Tundra Esports, Virtus Pro, 100 Thieves, Cloud9, FaZe Clan, Gaming Gladiators, NRG Esports, Space Station Gaming, TSM, Blacklist International, LGD Gaming, Jenny Esports, T1, Talon Esports, Weibo Gaming, For Real Esports,

Loud, Team Falcons, Twisted Minds, fuck all of you for fucking doing this and doing this stupid pr thing there's been a backlash and the backlash is largely focused on you know saudi's institutionalized state homophobia and you know i mean the fact that women are not full citizens yeah like misogyny yeah i mean just are just straight up owned by their husbands right like that's that's that's how the sort of legal conservatorship works. I'm not very familiar with eSports, so I can be the podcast grimace here. Are competitions in eSports like gender segregated? Do people all compete together?

Basically, no. There are like women's leagues, but like if you just if you want to compete, you can just compete assuming you get you don't get forced out by sexism this is actually a kind of big deal for starcraft because you talked about this before but like probably the number two or number three best starcraft player in the u.s is scarlet who's a trans woman okay and i mean she's just in the regular league right like right yeah are the turfs mad about it you know it's funny inside the starcraft community this was a huge thing for a long time, and eventually, the

tides just turned against them, because everyone likes her, because she's really good, and she's also just, like, a good person. And so they kind of... I gotta watch over the years as they just kind of got obliterated. Weirdly, the, like, regular TERFs haven't really found out about this. Probably because StarCraft is, I don't know,

too good of a game for them to be fucking dealing with. Not understanding things has not stopped them trying. That's true. It's kind of too obscure by this point. But, you know, there's been a lot of real concern for sort of queer players there. A lot of these teams,

like right as they were announcing they were going to the fucking Esports World Cup, were doing all of these fucking pride posts and talking about how they're going to let their players wear pride jerseys. And it's like, are you fucking kidding me yeah you know so they physically present in saudi arabia to play yeah yeah these these tournaments are happening physically in riyadh okay yeah you know this is this isn't the first one they've had they've had some other events before this too there but you know like yeah and yeah i think things are very very bad

there was a well a story that was famous among trans people, but I don't ever think broke containment, was there's a Saudi trans woman named Eden who was tricked into going back to see her family, and her family just kidnapped her and locked her up, and she killed herself. Jesus. And this is not an uncommon thing.

It happens to cis women, too, sometimes, when they try to get out of the country. Sure, yeah. They'll be kidnapped and renditioned back. back yeah there have been some pretty good reports on that yeah we'll link to them or something because it's too it'll be too lengthy to go and do here yeah but i think i think kind of the weakness of the backlash is that it doesn't it doesn't really quite understand exactly why the saudis are doing this you know they understand that this the saudi government is incredibly repressive and that it's you know institutionally homophobic and it's

institutionally sexist it does not understand like just exactly how fucking bad these people are like this is like the most feted up state in the entire world it is like it is it is the fucking cia state and the rest of this episode is going to be us running through the exact sequence of stuff that caused the Saudis to need to do all of this fucking PR bullshit. And how the sort of structural economic cycle of funneling petrodollars around has led to genocide. And then also the stupid fucking esports tournament for PR. Two things which are not the same. But first, do you know who's probably not a large enough company to have sponsored this tournament, although I can't promise that it's not KitKat or whatever the fuck.

Hopefully it's KitKat. I would like some KitKats if they're listening. They're one of the sponsors of this fucking esports world cup. You keep your wafer biscuit, KitKat. Your hate cookie. I don't want your hate chocolate bar anymore. Yeah, it is the products and services of this podcast, which hopefully are not supporting a genocide, but good God.

We can't be sure. Yep. So we are back and we are going to talk petrodollars so saudi wealth takes the form of what are called petrodollars um petrodollars are in some sense they're very very simple right it's dollars that you get from selling oil this is important for a number of reasons though technically speaking you can sort of sell oil in other currencies now but like most oil in the world is sold specifically in dollars and so around the world dollars are one of the things that if you are an economy you need dollars in order to get oil from people so huge sinks of

american dollars from all across the world you know from the u.s because u.s imports a lot of oil flow into these sort of uh oil oilcing countries. These are called petrodollars. The most obvious manifestation of this in Saudi Arabia is the country's sovereign wealth fund, which has $900 billion of assets. Right. This is an unfathomable amount of money. It is so much money that it is a structural problem for the global economy, trying to figure out what the fuck you do with this money.

This is a problem that has caused disaster around the world it's something where i'm fond of talking about on this show but we're going to talk about again because it's important here in the 70s and 80s as sort of opec realized that it could you know use its sort of political power to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power and gain enormous amounts of petrodollars by controlling the price of oil suddenly they had you know that you have hundreds of billions of dollars floating around and because this is capitalism you can't just sit on that money you have to find a way to turn that money into more money but again you know i mean just the sovereign wealth fund is almost a trillion dollars right and so this is extremely hard and it means that this money is constantly flowing around the

world trying to find a way to get returns on it you know and and in the modern era these are things like people remember we work oh yeah an incredibly stupid dune from the beginning office space rental scheme that went under that that was a lot of that was funded by by saudi money because saudi put an enormous amount of money in this japanese bank called soft bank and soft bank was trying to figure out what to do with this unfathomable amount of money and they were like okay what if we what if we fund the dumbest project of all time yeah it became a thing where they could fund it and like just by them funding it its stock price would go up right even if it was like we work a really shit idea yeah and this is something about global capital that I don't think has been fully processed really, but the sheer extent of capital concentration, the amount of money that the richest people in the world and the richest families in the world, the Saudi case.

Saudi Arabia is a country where a family has access to the resources of an extremely wealthy nation state. access to the resources of extremely wealthy nation state right and that being true has structural effects on the entire rest of the economy because you know we've been seeing the consequences of this for a long time in the tech sector right where you don't have to fucking make money like your your revenue stream can just be investor money and you can you can coast for a decade yeah off of just taking money from the saudis who are like trying to find some way to turn this money into more money i think this has downstream effects that we haven't even begun to really understand yet. But very famously in the 70s and 80s, there was all this money flowing around and what it was poured into was the third world debt crisis. People bought state debt with it. And then these

loans were on adjustable rates on adjustable interest rates so when uh the volcker shock hit and the u.s like massively increased interest rates the interest rates on these loans like skyrocketed suddenly you know you're paying like 50 interest on a loan of like several billion dollars and all of these countries are just systematically looted their economies are destroyed i mean david gray rememberably talks about this thing in madagascar where madagascar had eliminated malaria you know but the other way you eliminate malaria is through mosquito extermination like programs they're not that expensive but they are a little bit expensive

and when the fucking government of madagascar had to like pay off this imf debt they had to get rid of the uh they got rid of these mosquito programs and there was a and there was a malaria outbreak and it killed unfathomable numbers of people. And stuff like this happened all over the world. And the source of all of this, right, partially the source of this is these loans, and partially the source of this is these enormous piles of petrodollars that you have to find some way to sort of turn into more capital. Right. And, you know, so there are sort of trademark things you can do with this money. One of them is buying a bunch of military equipment.

Mostly what you're doing with that is sort of buying American patronage. If you spend an enormous amount of money buying American tanks, and this is something the Saudis have been doing for ages, right? You spend a bunch of money on American defense contracts. You know, you can sort of buy U.S. protection and guarantees that, you know, for example, as is going to happen later in this episode, you can buy a guarantee that an invading army won't sack your capital. But the thing with the Saudis is that they have a lot of equipment, but the Saudi Arabia cannot maintain a strong functional army, right? If they had an actual serious army, there would be a coup tomorrow. So their army is extremely well equipped, kind of, but it's trained like shit and it's run by like just dipshits intentionally so that it sucks but you know so that's like sort of one thing you

can do with this money a lot of this money ended up going into real estate and there are sort of cycles of this happening the one that's of concern to us is what happens after 2008 in the sort of aftermath of of 2008 there are still places in the world where you know you can park an extremely large amount of money in real estate and have it be a relatively liquid asset if you have like property in a market that is you know where the housing market is really hot and prices are increasing rapidly you can pretty quickly get rid of it and you can also there's hot and prices are increasing rapidly, you can pretty quickly get rid of it. And you can also, there's liquidity, there's sort of financial instruments you can do based off of your ownership of real estate. And this is something that drives the Saudis into a bunch of very, very, I don't know if risky is exactly the

right word, but a bunch of moves in Yemeni real estate that really, truly were about to not pay off. There's a very good book about this uh it's by isa blumi called destroying yemen which is about like a lot of the factors that start the war in yemen and this this is one of them right um we can't really do a full recap of the yemeni civil war because that's it's that's its own 700 episode podcast like podcast. Like, oh, God. It is... Yeah. On a surface level, it's not that complicated, but the moment you get any granular detail on it,

it's, like, the most complicated conflict I've ever studied. Yeah, I mean, so many conflicts are like this, right? Yeah. Like, a Spanish Civil War appreciator. When I was studying Yemen in college, I longed for the simplicity of the Spanish Civil War. Like, this conflict is nuts. But for simplicity's sake, there's roughly-ish two factions. There are the sort of forces allied

with what's called the coalition government, which is the government backed by the Saudis. And then there are what's sort of in the West become called the Houthis. I mean, it's more complicated. All of this is enormously more complicated than that. These are all alliances. A lot of these alliances are extremely tenuous. But one of the things that happens is that when a government that is hostile to the Saudis, which is the sort of

untrue law, that whole coalition is very hostile to the Saudis because the Saudis suck shit. Suddenly the Saudis are looking at an enormous amount of capital they've sunk into real estate that they are you know based on these like incredibly corrupt land deals with the previous administration which have been friendly to them they are looking at suddenly losing all this land the saudis weren't the first people to come into sort of the amendi real estate market right on the uae oman a bunch of other states had sort of been in there before and so

part of what a big part of what this sort of this like what's called the coalition is is this like basically a bunch of these assholes trying to protect their housing assets look that's a lot of what a lot of wars are if we're honest it's people trying to protect x or y assets right like unfortunately yeah and it's it's not really seen in these terms in the way that's covered, but that's a lot of what's going on. And this produces one of the worst wars of the 21st century, which is saying something because the 21st century has had a lot of really, really terrible wars. Yeah, we've had some rough ones. Yeah, and we're going to get into what the Saudis were doing during this war after these products and services we have returned and the thing we're returning into is a really really bleak war so we said this kind of from the beginning right the saudi military is not very good the saudis attempt

to sort of end the war by like rolling a tank column over the border it's just like i think it's 2014 2015 in like the early period of the war they try to end it by just rolling tanks and tanks get obliterated because the saudi army isn't worth shit right all of their ground forces are a joke but their air force is very very very well equipped with a bunch of incredibly modern U.S. warplanes that we sell them all the fucking time. And so, you know, they don't really have good infantry. What they have the ability to do is just obliterate people with airstrikes. The kind of terror air campaign that they're waging is something that I think we're all familiar with from Palestine, but they're doing airstrikes on school buses full of children. They're taking the American thing, they're doing

double-tap drone strikes on weddings where they're hitting a wedding, and then when rescue workers come up, they hit the rescue workers with airstrikes, right? I'm pretty sure it was the end when they had the triple-tap fucking airstrike where they did an airstrike on someone's funeral, they did an airstrike on the rescue workers, and then when they had a funeral for those people, they did an airstrike on

fucking that, right? This is a just unbelievably brutal war and you know and again which we talked about right like there there are some there are some parts of the saudi coalition that can you know field ground forces right that stuff's mostly the sort of southern secessionist groups and those people are not really that loyal so you know so they have to start importing infantry to try to fight the houthis and so they're importing a bunch of colombian mercenaries yeah so these are guys who've been like death squad guys in colombia the colombian guys are the new i was gonna say the new rhodesians that it's a dark shadow to cast on a group of human beings.

Yeah. It used to be that when you were running into private military contractors abroad, it would be people, white folks from Africa, right? Like they call themselves Rhodesians, South Africans, what have you. Now you'll see a lot of like a lot of private military contractors at the the boots on the ground you know infantry level of colombians yeah and so so that that's one of the sources they went to but then you know part of the saudi coalition is the uae and the uae has a lot of very very close ties to militant groups in sudan specifically a group of militias that's now known the west is the rapid response forces but these are the people who did the genocide in Darfur yeah and they are like right now like

doing a genocide in like in Sudan as they attempt to sort of seize control of the country and because the UAE is very very well connected to these one of the ways that the coalition tries to get ground troops is by using troops who were you know kidnapped by these militias and when i say troops i mean child soldiers what the the forces that they are deploying in yemen in an attempt to use as cannon fodder are sudanese child soldiers it is unbelievably bleak i mean kind of funnily a lot of these people end up not fighting because they you know they they get handed a rifle rifle get thrown into yemen and they just immediately sell their guns and like refuse to fight but like you know but like that that's the kind of shit like again the kind of pure evil we are dealing with

is we are having the guys who did the dart who did the fucking darfur genocide kidnap fucking villagers from sudan like child soldiers from sudan and attempting to use them as cannon father in their fucking war in yemen so they can like defend their fucking real estate assets yeah right i think friend of the show eric prince makes a uh makes an appearance in yemen as well by his triumvirate of companies which are the same company right blackwater z yeah probably i quite frankly don't remember that part but you probably also yeah you can rely on ep to show up in a situation like this yeah i mean the part of this we haven't gotten to yet is the worst part of it which is so this the saudis and the sort of coalition

government they you know they do okay in the sort of southwest of the country because the southern yemen secessionist groups are well organized and are good soldiers even if they eventually sort of rebel there's this whole it's a whole mess but in the west of the country everything is completely different and you know they're basically getting their shit kicked in and in that theater the the saudis plan is we are going to starve the country so you know and the saudi the saudi's have naval assets nobody else really in this war does right and they just set up a blockade on like all of the ports on that side of the country we do not know how many people get

starved as a result of this um the last good mortality figures i could i could find this war is still going on by the way i mean fighting has gotten a lot less intense since sort of 2021, 2022. But, I mean, it's still going. The last good numbers that I can find suggest 377,000 dead. And it's probably way, way worse than that because, again, we just don't know how many people died in the famines that, you know, that the Saudis set off. And this was, you know, this was explicitly their plan here was to just kill off the population of this part of Yemen by starving to death. You know, this is the genocide, right? They were attempting to do genocide.

It doesn't work. And it doesn't work because, I mean, there's a number of reasons why it doesn't work. Basically, they get defeated militarily. Houthi troops, like, take several cities like inside of saudi arabia and like they like they march across the border and take them and you know i mean it's it's bad enough for the saudis that like there's there's a moment where it like it looks like they're going to lose riyadh and the u.s has to step in and be like no like okay you guys need to fucking pull out of this shit but that you know that and that that makes the war less bad you know like the blockade's not still in place but this is the situation in 2022 that we walk into when when suddenly they're buying all these esports companies that they have

just attempted to commit a genocide right they have just attempted to exterminate a vast part of the population of yemen that's i think like really the true sort of heart of darkness, evil shit, right? Like, I don't know. It's like US and Cambodia shit. But, you know, there's stuff that got more media attention, too, which was like in a lot of ways more harmful to them because the PR from it. think people have forgotten now because this was six years ago is that in 2018 they kidnapped and then killed a a washington post columnist named jamal kashogi yeah by tricking him into going into a consulate killing him carving his body up with a bone saw and we're pretty sure the way that they got the body out of the consulate was by stuffing the fucking again bone-sawed parts of

his body into into embassy bags in a diplomatic immunity and walking them out of the embassy yeah this is one of those things that like should never be forgotten right like yeah he says he was a citizen right was he a green card holder i'm not a hundred percent sure but this is obviously like a fucking unbelievable crime i think i i wish that you know the fact that they were doing fucking airstrikes on school buses had gotten as much attention as this did but you know for for for a long time right like in the late 2010s and the early 2020s i mean this this was this was an issue in the 2020 presidential campaigns because you know i mean trump fucking went and touched the orb with muhammad bin salman who's the the crown prince of now well at the time was known as muhammad bin

bonesaw because he just straight up ordered this guy to be fucking bonesawed you know but like that it was it was a real sort of issue and this is the reputation that the saudi government has that causes them to kind of go really really hard into the into the esports angle. And there's one last kind of angle to this, which is like the worst kept secret in the of the oil market is that the Saudis are running out of oil. It's like it's technically a secret, but it's like everyone knows this. Like everyone knows that a lot of sort of oil that's technically sold by saudi aramco is not their oil it's their labels and other people's oil and people have known this for a long time and the saudis obviously know it and so the trick they have to pull right in order to

continue to be this fucking like nightmare dictatorship state propped up by the cia is to find something else to base their economy on and their plan has been a lot of like they're trying to do just tech bullshit we're not going to get into neon because that's its own thing i'm so sad i'm so sad not to be talking about the line i'm so sorry the lines yeah they're trying to build a city that is aligned yeah that is also a city a really really long city is aligned that's going to be their tech thing you may sound like we're oversimplifying this we are not no it is they are trying to build a city that is aligned it's not going to get built but what it has done is they've

absolutely destroyed the lives of a bunch of sort of people who are just like farmers and cattle like herders like somebody about a cattle herders people who've been there for a really long time have had their land taken away from them and their lives have been destroyed by it so you know but the thing is in order for them to try to do their tech pivot they have to fix their reputation people they they cannot be the state that is remembered for like bone sawing a journalist and attempting to starve an entire population and doing airstrikes and school buses right this can't be the reputation they have have this, is it Vision 2030 or Plan 2030 or something?

Yeah, yeah. For their, like, rehabilitation and diversification of their income. But, like, post Jamal Khashoggi, a lot of big companies were like, we can't be like, companies like Google, right? And big, big tech companies kind of took a noticeable step back.

And so, this has been why they've been going into sports because they can throw around like we're talking 900 billion dollars of assets right they can just swamp a sport right especially something like esports where people are not very well paid there's not that much money sources of income are tenuous they could just sort of buy off these entire industries and it's's kind of, and it's working. And part of the reason that it's working is that, you know, the focus is on, and like, I understand why people are doing this,

but the focus has been on the fact that set, like the Saudi government is, you know, is sexist and homophobic. And that's true. But if that's the reputation that the Saudis have, that is a win for them because a, they'll be able to find people who agree with those views.

And, B, nobody's talking about, again, the fact that they did an airstrike on a school bus. Like the bodies of children and their fucking school bags were flying over. They've been able to sort of avoid any kind of more reckoning with this because people are off talking about other stuff and if this keeps working like it's it's going to work they're going to be a country that killed 370,000 people and probably more i think also like one of the reasons they've been able to get away with this is that our media has normalized massive amounts of death and dying of muslim people in the middle east yeah for 20 plus years right so a lot of people's entire life of media consumption every day we've dropped bombs and killed hundreds of people in the middle east and it's just yeah it's the background noise in u.s media yeah i i want to mention one more thing they did that wasn't the

script but i need to fucking talk about because this is one of my formative political experiences was, so when the Arab Spring started, one of the biggest uprisings was in Bahrain. This is one of the earliest uprisings in 2011. There was an attempt to knock off the monarchy of Bahrain. They probably could have won. The kids in the streets in Bahrain are probably some of the bravest people I've ever seen. And the Saudis rolled tanks into bahrain to crush the protests and fucking keep the government intact and for i mean years for years like a decade afterwards

every once in a while you'd get a video coming like that came out of like the of these kids dressed in all black chasing down an armored vehicle that's shooting at them with molotovs right i've never seen anything i've never seen anything like it like there's some of the bravest people in the world and the saudis fucking rolled tanks into their country to fucking crush them the the fucking esports companies here those are the people whose money you're taking right you you were you were taking the money of a bunch of people who rolled tanks into a country whose people wanted fucking democracy and yeah that's that that that's all I got about this. I'm extremely angry about all of this. And yeah, fuck them.

Yeah. If I can say from the perspective of someone who's, you know, been paid to do sports for a decent amount of my life. Yeah, you make shit money, but like it's so much better to not make shit choices as well. And like that goes way beyond like not cheating in the manifest ways people cheat in in sports but also just like get don't compromise things that are way more important than like playing right like sports is supposed to be fun

and if you allow yourself to be a vehicle for things that are terrible like you're going to be miserable in your fucking 40s anyway because your body will fall apart like don't make yourself feel guilty for this as well yeah and one last thing i want to address because one of the defenses that saudi people have been rolling out is this like oh you guys don't respect muslim culture like because because because the main line of complaint has been about sort of about homophobia and sexism and it's like yeah man those fucking children and their school bosses were muslim too like fuck you yeah the people in bahrain are muslim too right the people whose yeah bodies are all over the streets because they asked

for a chance to have some say in how the country was run like that's just you don't get to do that yeah so this has been it could happen here fuck every single one of the that's fucking doing this shit fuck them all yeah Fuck ball, yeah. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts

dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to the 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. terrible things depending on the week it's me it's shereen and today it's a terrible thing it's not not a vegetable or a or a sea animal how are you shereen how are you doing i'm good that's honestly a great premise just for a show in general like we talk about either food or something terrible

yeah like and you never know you know yeah yeah it's just in your playlist and then is it a fucking artichoke? Is it genocide? You don't know. You have to find out. Yeah. And the only way is by listening. Yeah. But hi, I'm good.

Thanks for having me. Good. I'm glad to hear that, Shireen. So what I wanted to talk about today is what is happening in Turkey. Why are they like this? What is going on? Specifically, I want to talk about some of these attacks on Syrian refugees in Turkey that people may have seen and may not have seen. I see them in my timeline,

but maybe that's because of the people I follow. I think to start off with, to understand what's happening in Turkey, you have to understand the relations between Turkey and Syria since the civil war began in Syria, which is more than a decade ago now, 13 odd years ago. So from the start of the war, Turkey has backed anti-Assad factions, right? So those are the rebels in Syria. This is a big change. In 2008, Assad and Erdogan's family went on holiday together. Really? Yeah, yeah. They went into southernan's family went on holiday together really yeah yeah they went into like a southern turkey and a little beach holiday together it's fucking disturbing yeah yeah what

is what a time yeah just to do to rocking uh by the beach but unfortunately they're no longer they might be holding again soon as we'll see yeah that's what it sounds like yeah they are becoming uh tight again and erdogan referenced their family holiday and in his like most recent comments on really yeah it's like our relations have been familial i don't like that at all yeah yeah i you don't want to be going on holiday with bashar al-assad just as a moral principle i think like it's just crazy to be, because you're right, I feel like we're very open about supporting the anti-Assad forces. And so to be like, suddenly, why can't we have diplomatic friendliness?

Like, come on. It's just like the weirdest plot twist to me. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it comes from anti-migrant sentiment in Turkey, which I want to get into. I think it's so, like from anti-migrant sentiment in Turkey, which I want to get into. I think it's so like we are witnessing this global crackdown on migration, on refugees. We see it in Europe. We see it here at Southern border.

We see it here in Turkey. We're seeing it in North Africa. We're seeing it all over. So this hasn't always been the case. Like at the start of the war, Turkey threw open its borders to Syrian refugees, right? They built camps to house them. They were strong backers of the revolution they spent 40 million dollars uh caring for the refugees the national intelligence organization the mit actually trained parts of the fsa so the free syrian army and then later they brought together

the sna there will be many acronyms right like every civil war loves a three-letter acronym and the Syrian one is no different but they were really open they were really public about being like we welcome the refugees I remember that was like I don't know as as a Syrian I was like oh that's nice it was nice it's a nice thing to do like i mean like at the time no one gave a shit for the most part so to have like a country out loud be like we welcome the refugees come over here we'll we'll help and now they have the largest population of syrian refugees like in the world i don't know if you're gonna mention this coming up but i feel like the only thing that changed not the only thing one of the only things the main thing that changed is that no one in turkey thought it would last this long

yeah no yeah absolutely not yeah yeah we'll get into that because the nature of their legal residence there is very temporary yeah yeah okay so turkey has used the sna syrian national army right which is it's more explicitly turkish backed faction as a directly linked proxy force they've used it in their operations against the stf sort of syrian democratic forces it's another acronym for you the organization which includes the epigay right their ypg the ypj uh the other elements of the uh the military forces of the autonomous areas north and east syria and sometimes called rajab they have also used the SNA outside of Syria, right? In Azerbaijan, Libya, and Niger,

like just as a private military, right? As a mercenary army, more or less. And you'll hear them referred to sometimes as mercenaries. Certainly, like when they're being used outside of Syria, it's hard to argue that they're not. And other times, like when they're being used in Syria, a lot of these folks were previously parts of other groups that have kind of been repackaged and bundled up together by turkey and and there are still many factions within these like broadly speaking turkish supported

arab rebel forces in syria there are some kurdish groups as well but not so many and there are some turkic groups that are not Arab. So these proxy forces are really vital to the Turkish strategy in Syria. I wanted to get a sense of how numerous the redirected or re-recruited jihadists were from other groups. So I reach out to Zagros Hiwa. People are not familiar with Zagros. He is a spokesperson of the Kurdistan Communities Union's Foreign Relations Commission. If you're not familiar with the Kurdistan Communities Union, it's the umbrella organization for the several democratic and federalist political parties of North, South, East and West Kurdistan,

which are inspired by the ideology of Abdullah Osnab. So we're going to hear more from Zagoros next week. I have a number of questions about the ongoing Turkish bombing there in the Kandil Mountains in the north of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq. But we're going to drop a little quote here where he talks about the interactions that the SDF and the YPG and the other units, right, HPG, have had with the Turkish army's Arab-Syrian elements. When you hear Zagros here talking about Daesh,

what he's talking about is the so-called Islamic State, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, right? It's just the Arabic acronym of the same organization. So if you weren't aware, that's what he's talking about. The invasion of the Turkish army is that many jihadists have been incorporated into the Turkish army. They are acting as units, separate units with the Turkish army. They have been embedded with NATO's second largest army. I can say these jihadists are ex-Daesh members, ex-Nusra Front members, ex-Al Qaeda members. They are from many nationalities.

According to PUK officials, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan officials, they say that they have learned the names of 300 of these Daesh members in the Turkish army ranks. Turkish army ranks. So, also, underground, Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas themselves have observations about the inclusion

of jihadist members in the ranks of the Turkish army, and many of the close-range clashes, blanking point clashes with the Turkish army and many of the close-range clashes, Blankenpoint clashes with the Turkish army. Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas hear some of the soldiers speaking Arabic, shouting, yearning in Arabic.

To understand further what's going on in Turkey, I think you need to understand the phenomenon of Turkish ultra-nationalism and social Darwinism. This is not just endemic in Turkey, but also in European countries with a large Turkish diaspora. The most extreme and concerning example of this is a group called the Grey Wolves. The Grey Wolves are the militant street wing of the Nationalist Movement Party in Turkey. The Grey Wolves are the militant street wing of the Nationalist Movement Party in Turkey. And they've been involved in political violence there since the 1960s, with their primary targets being Kurds, Greeks, Alevis, Arabs, Christians, Jews, and Armenians.

These are all minority ethnic groups. I guess to understand this further, you have to be able to differentiate between race, state, and nation, which is getting into things that i lecture about but the idea of a race is like a so like a fictive biological link right this isn't born out necessarily but the idea of a shared biology the idea of a nation a nation is an imagined community right which can which can have many races it could have a state aligned to it or not right so the turkish nation doesn't necessarily align with the turkish state there are like other groups within the turkish state you have turkish citizenship but do not see themselves as nationally or ethnically turkish for what the gray wolves believe is the superiority of a Turkish race and they strive for a mono-ethnic Sunni Islamic

Turkish nation. They're a pan-Turkic organization, so they want to join together all the Turkic peoples in one kind of renewed Turkish empire, right? After collapse of the Soviet Union, they called for this revived empire that would unite Turkic peopleic people they like many of these extremely right-wing violent organizations have their roots in anti-communism right uh in the cold war and specifically in something called operation gladio which was a sort of anti-communist guerrilla training supported by the cia and other groups they began as government condoned and a sort of sort of deniable government force to use against the left right i'm not going to be able i like i can't detail everything the gray wolves have done and

this isn't what that episode is about i do want to explain one incident it's maybe one of the most heinous things that they're known for and it's called the marash massacre are you familiar with this shireen no i'm not actually okay a little history for you so in december 1978 in karaman mirage karaman mirage mirage you'll hear those two terms uh used both right like karaman i think means hero in turkish there was a battle there uh in the early part of 20th century i think it's in the first world war um and so they added like hero to the start of the town but alibi people won't don't tend to use that when they talk about the massacre because it seems a little weird to to be like a great town

where this horrible massacre occurred uh so you hear both um it's m-r-a-s but s has a little diacritical mark so it's a noise the massacre starts in 1798 when an anti-soviet movie is being shown in a movie theater in town and someone throws a bomb into the theater, right? Communist boots were blamed for this. It's a little unclear if it really was them or if it was someone who wanted to start some drama by pretending to be them, if that makes sense, right? So many Alevis. Alevis are a group of Kurds. Are you familiar, Shireen?

uh alavis are a group of kurds are you familiar shireen i was actually just trying to remind myself because i'm really not familiar with this sect because i know it's completely separate from sunni islam and shia islam is it more like sufism yes yeah yeah that's what i thought they're like a 12 uh sufist but with syncretic elements from like uh like veneration of nature and they have this sort of idea of sainthood. Right. I probably used a lot of words that people aren't super familiar with. So can you explain Sufism and Sunni and Shia, maybe? So maybe you're familiar with the two different main sects of Islam,

which are Sunni and Shia. The main difference between the two, if you want to really boil it down, is who they believe the successor should have been to the prophet muhammad uh the shia's believe that his cousin and his son-in-law ali should have been the successor versus the sunnis don't believe he needed a successor at all and uh it was more just like passing down his teachings there's a lot of history behind that and there's a lot of drama and violence but that's like the most simple way to put it and it kind of grew from there the sufism sect on the other hand is a little different it's described as a contemplative school of islam that aims to

develop an individual's consciousness of god through chanting recitation of litanies, music, and physical movement. Yeah. Maybe you know or you've seen the Sufi like whirling dervishes. It's basically a form of like physical active meditation for them. So it definitely differs from both Sunni and Shia Islam. It's more in a way spiritual. Is that a decent summary? Don't ask me. Yeah, I think you've done a great job. And Sufis are like broadly Sunni, I guess. And Alawites are like, there are Twelvers and Seveners, which is like to do with the amount of people you think are the imam successors to Ali, which we don't need to go into.

I don't think a very great depth. But I guess Alawites would fall into the Twelver camp, not traditional Twelver Shia. That's with a V. You're saying the V, Alawites. Yes, as opposed to Alawites, right? Another Shia group. Yes, Alawites is very different. Yeah, yes. Like, I feel like it's very confusing because they sound so similar. But Alawites, they're considered disbelievers by the classical Sunni and Shiite theologies.

They're their own separate group. It's like a religious sect that kind of splintered off from early Shiism in the 9th century. And they are the sect to which the Assad family belongs. And many other military families in Baathist Syria belonged, right? Yeah. other military families in Baathist Syria belonged, right? Yeah. When the Baathist party, like led by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's dad, when he took power, the Alawites in the military sect were, or the Alawite sect in the military were really supportive of that regime. And I feel like it's a big reason why he gained popularity and was able to like overthrow the government.

Yeah. But yeah. Okay. So that's a little breakdown of islam for you i know it's good there's just so much like like little details that i know i will miss and it's just it's so much more complicated but yeah there's just many sects that stem all from the one religious book of the Quran. And then shit happens. I don't know what else to say about that. Well, maybe we'll explain it another day for people. Because I do think like I went to school at a very woke time in the United Kingdom's history. You could do Islam as your like religious studies.

Wait, really? Yeah, yeah. It's because Tony Blair and the wokeness. That's crazy. Yeah, no, it's cool. It was really good. I learned a lot. Well, so what did I miss?

You tell me. No, I'm not here to fucking... No, I'm serious. I'm absolutely not here to tell you what you got right or wrong. I think you did an excellent job. Shia comes from the party of Ali, right? That's what the word means. And I think that's the main reason why sufism is more associated with sunni islam if i'm being honest

because that's like the main tenet of being shia is that you believe that ali was the successor and so i think anything that is not that usually is more under the sunni umbrella yeah i think like sometimes you'll see it like as a third like sufism is its own thing yeah generally like more muslims in the world are sunni than shia yeah i'm not gonna do the thing that people do where they go around naming the governments which are one or another and like i don't think that's very useful so let's go back to 1978 in marash right these alavis for reasons that we have just explained are perceived a they A, they are Kurdish, right? So they're not Turkic.

And B, they are perceived to be heretical by people with a more conventional Sunni Islam, or some people, I should say. So the day after this bomb goes off, a left-wing cafe in town is bombed and two leftist teachers are murdered on their way home from school later at their funeral it's attacked by a mob of turkish nationalists right later that week exes start appearing on the doors of the alavi homes in this area of town which is predominantly alavi right they made announcements from the mosques saying that communists and alibis are burning your mosques you should attack them and kill them well and on the 23rd of december crowds stoked by and comprised of the gray wolves rampaged through alibi neighborhoods children women and men were murdered in their homes and their bodies were thrown in the street

women were raped and injured people removed from the hospital beds and murdered. Children were burned alive in the furnaces of their own homes. Estimates of the amount of people who were murdered vary from like 111, which is the official government number, to 150, which I saw in the British Alibis Society. 550-something houses were burned and destroyed. Nearly 300 businesses were looted. Writer Aziz Tunk, my apologies, I got that wrong. I'm trying my best. He has written a book about the massacre,

believes that the Alevis were killed for refusing to assimilate to the Turkish language and culture. And he adds that Kurds were not the only victims of the attack. Progressive and leftist Turks who had opposed the official policies of Ankara were also included the trials for this massacre actually continued until 1991 so it happened in 1978 right yeah it's a long time a total of 804 people were put on trial which kind of shows you the scale of the mob that you have was it mostly the gray wolves yeah so it comes out of the mhp which is just turkish

nationalist party right and it's generally attributed to the gray wolves as like causality right and when you get these massive crowd violence things it's not like everyone's a card carrying member necessarily you'll hear people say that they they consider there to be like like state or organizational complicity beyond it it wasn't a spontaneous thing. Right. And that's an allegation that's sometimes made. 29 people were sentenced to life in prison for this by 1991. Out of 804, 29 were sentenced? Yeah. And all of them were released in 1992.

Okay. As part of an anti-terrorism law. Now is a good time, Shireen. Do you know who will not commute your life sentence? Oh my God. They won't do it. Whatever it is. Yeah.

All right, we're back. We're moving on from massacres, thankfully. So we're talking about the Gray Wolves, right? That's where they come from. Today, the party that they were sort of founded by the MHP is allied with Erdogan's party, and they've continued their violence, and particularly they've begun to focus on Kurdish people, right?

Last year, groups of them in the diaspora could be found in Belgium attacking Kurds who they found to be celebrating the Kurdish New Year, right? Kurds celebrate New Year often with fire outside. It's pretty fucking easy to see who's doing it, right? And they were attacked. You could see videos of this. If you scroll far enough back on my Twitter timeline, you'll see I've shared some of them.

2015, they protested and burned Chinese flags and attacked people who looked Asian, to include Korean folks and then folks who certainly were not Chinese, in response to the Chinese government's ban on Turkic Uyghurs fasting during the month of Ramadan. They also opposed Russia due to its collaboration with Assad and its attacks on Syrian Turkmen. Some grey wolves had gone over to Syria to fight. They're fighting against Assad with Turkmen units. I guess perhaps their most famous incident in the war was in 2015 when they shot down a Russian plane was shot down and the pirate parachuted out and then they machine gunned him while he was parachuting down.

Whoa. Yeah. So they're pretty strongly opposed to the Russian support of the Assad regime. I mean, they're one of the many reasons why i really get frustrated with all these different sects that are like anti-asad and i am also anti-asad but then they make it so complicated because they're terrible people and so it's not just the rebels and these citizens of their own country trying to to stand up against their government it becomes this larger political clusterfuck that gets hard to keep track of and i think that's why it's gone on for this long it's not simple it's not just like government versus people anymore it's just too many elements

right like you have people fighting within the revolution and the government constantly exploiting those divisions right yeah so yeah as i said the wolves have significant support in the turkish diaspora and they represent the largest right-wing movement in germany which is pretty impressive when you consider like germany yeah like germany is not known for not having much right wing go ahead you're looking i can see there's a question inside you i'm just okay because so the gray wolves believe in the superiority of the turkish race correct that's correct and you're saying that they are also big in germany i feel like germany for a time also considered themselves to be the best race this is true shereen there are some things that they share yeah yeah it does feel a little

bit on the nose doesn't it uh yeah it does yeah it does if it makes a difference in austria the gray wolf salute is banned oh well we're going to get into the gray wolf salute imagine making a little wolf with your hands right you're that's they took that that's like a shadow puppet yes yeah they really fucked that up that's not fair yeah no yeah you're no longer can you do we're gonna learn about the solution uh so for those not familiar your big finger and your little pinky finger up in the air your other two fingers are touching your thumb it's almost like the 666 rocker sign like yeah but yeah it's not it's just a shadow puppet i feel like i've done that as a kid that's not fair they can't take a shadow puppet whatever they've done worse shireen's

hard right youth is coming out so if you weren't familiar with the gray bulls before and their salute you might have become uh familiar with them this week when a turkish footballer received a two-day ban for flashing the salute after scoring when the team beat austria in euro 2024 turkish fans responded to the ban by giving the salute en masse at the quarterfinals so that was the next game whoa right yeah yeah it was it was a scene like uh people have obviously drawn the comparison to the previous german movement which thought one race was better than the other races right but seeing a whole crowd of people doing that in the stadium is... It's disturbing.

Yeah, it's concerning. They did it in a game in Germany, so the salute's not banned in Germany. Right, right. And then Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan postponed his plans to visit Azerbaijan and attended the game after the suspension to show his support for the team, right? He defended the player saying he'd merely expressed his excitement after scoring germany was big mad about this in their defense um they summoned the turkish ambassador to foreign ministry to uh explain what the fuck was going on and it has

resulted in considerable amounts of violence across europe right we saw in austria we saw in germany we saw in belgium where there is a large turkish and often a large kurdish diaspora right because of the tensions between these two groups which the football has increased then we saw like street fighting between these two groups in predominantly migrant neighborhoods right but i don't want this episode to just be about the football or the turkish participation in the syrian civil war i want it to be about what's happening to Syrian refugees in Turkey today. So many Turkish people have come to resent the Syrian refugees who relocated there since the start of the war. Estimates range from 3.1 to 3.5. I've seen 4 million evidently. They have a land border, right? Turkey and Syria. So some of the people crossing will have come without being documented, whereas others will have come in the more formal process and be

documented right so whatever it's millions of refugees i think that's what matters they are largely baselessly and evidently baselessly in some cases accused of causing the economic troubles that include low wages and inflation. Inflation exceeded 75% in Turkey in May. They have also been blamed for the earthquake that happened in February 2023, which I'm not quite sure how, like who or what the process exactly that they're postulating is there. That's crazy. Yeah, just to clear things up, people generally can't make earthquakes happen. Yeah, just to clear things up, people generally can't make earthquakes happen.

So across the political spectrum, we've seen support grow for sending these refugees home. In 2016, Turkey began to accuse the SDF of ethnically cleansing Arab areas in Syria. And the UN refuted these accusations, right? But in 2018 and 2019, and 2019 with the explicit approval of President Trump, the Turkish military and its proxies attacked the SDF and seized territory inside Syria, right? Operation Peace Spring and Olive Branch. In these areas, Turkey has attempted to resettle Arab refugees, right? This is why we can't understand anti-Syrian sentiment in Turkey without understanding Turkey's involvement in the Syrian civil war, right? It's trying to create what it calls a safe zone. And in this safe zone, it's trying to take the refugees that its people have decided they don't want and relocate them back into a country which is at war.

Turkey's already resettled Syrian refugees in this safe zone, but obviously some of them have been in Turkey for more than a decade. Their children have gone to school in Turkey. They speak Turkish. They've learned a new language. They've learned a new alphabet, right? They have lives there. So not all of them are just taking the chance to,

yeah, let me get straight back to Aleppo. For very obvious reasons, people don't want to go back. Since 2018, a cost of living crisis in Turkey has been leveraged by the right to stoke anti-Syrian sentiment. Research found that in 2020, only 23% of Turkish citizens

would accept a Syrian bride or groom into their family or consider having a Syrian as a business partner. And only 31% would want to have their child educated in a class with a Syrian in it. That is...

Yeah. That makes me so fucking mad. One of the things I've come across, which doesn't by any means apply to all Turkish people, I've met some very cool Turkish people who I like very much, but people who are ultra-nationalist in Turkey, America has its fair share of bigots, right? Generally, they know that it's wrong.

They're like, say it with your whole chest of the certainly the anti-syrian sentiment that i've heard expressed online from turkish people is that it's not something that like it's considered shameful they'll just they'll just fucking say it which is kind of wild no it's scary like yeah it's very scary like if you've raised your child in turkey and that's the only that's their first language essentially or that's the only thing they know that's just one of the most unsafe places for them to be then yeah that's scary and not fair yeah and like i know i've met lots of kurdish people who like you know they come in to the united states right where i'm helping out the, and I'll greet them in Kurdish.

And, like, I was talking to a guy the other day, and my Kurdish is by no means great, but I took a little class and can say some words. And then also a dude walked around the market with me every morning in Kamishlo and just pointed at vegetables and shouted. So I'm pretty, pretty good when it comes to, like, the eggplant spectrum. So I'll greet them in komanji and and they will they only speak turkish right like it's not that they could just drop back and

i'm sure that's true for kids who would have grown up speaking arabic in syria yeah if they went to school in turkish that's a language and it's also like not necessarily something they wanted to happen i think that's something that really frustrates me it's like bashar started attacking his people and they needed somewhere to go turkey welcomed them yeah and when you resettle and you make a home somewhere it really feels like especially now in this world like if you're a refugee it feels like you're always going to be kind of displaced in one way or another it's heartbreaking yeah at best you're like temporary yeah after the earthquake in 2023 which folks will remember we did a little fundraiser for world central kitchen syrian

refugees were accused of looting a lot on social media turkish twitter had trending slogans like immigrants should be deported just straight up saying it syrian refugees were kicked out of like tent camps and left homeless they faced verbal abuse were trying to access services separate shelters were set up for syrian refugees like literally like they couldn't be together right resentment simmered amongst the groups yeah i read some ngo reports one of the things they cite is that like women who were refugees especially women who were on their own preferred not to drink water because they didn't want to go to the bathroom like they were afraid and they wanted to stay in their tents and like and well yeah that's something i've seen in other settings too but like it's

obviously like that's a pretty fucked situation to be in right yeah you're in a hard place and you're choosing to dehydrate yourself ngos later reported that refugees did not receive mobile container homes until displaced Turkish residents received them, and that refugee women in particular experienced violence in these container camps, right? So that's when they're dropping shipping containers for people to live in because all the houses fell down because of the earthquake. Many Turkish refugees have a sort of temporary protected status. So that temporary protected status only allows them to live in the provinces that they arrived in. And many of those provinces are obviously border provinces.

Initially, many Syrian folks would come to Turkey, hoping that they could then continue. Turkey kind of bridges between Asia and Europe. So they had hoped that they could go through Turkey from east to west and then continue into the European Union perhaps and live there. But that didn't work. Many of them found themselves stuck in Turkey and are not even able to leave the province that they lived in. After the earthquake, Turkey lifted those restrictions on movement. And you saw tons of Syrian folks traveling around Turkey and being like, whoa, like Istanbul. How cool is this?

Like having lived there for 10 years, right? But they couldn't leave their province before. For this generation of Syrians, some of them, like I was reading some of their like social media, like some folks, I think meaningfully became, felt more Turkish when they were able to access those things. But other folks, they went back to Syria to visit family. They were briefly allowed to do that. They weren't allowed to do that before.

But it also broadened their resentment against them, I think it's fair to say. And in the 2023 presidential election, there wasn't really an option that wasn't hostile to refugees. Erdogan was probably the least hostile, but still hostile. Neither did the Turkey-EU deals to prevent further migration westward help right so all of this just continues to turn up the temperature between january and december 2023 over 57 000 syrians were deported according to human rights watch these deportations took place with the authorities quote pressuring the border authorities to list the majority of border crossings as returnees or voluntary turkey's voluntary returns are often coerced returns to quote-unquote safe zones

that are pits of danger and despair that's a quote from adam kugel who's a deputy middle east north africa director at human rights watch it's bleak yeah that's pretty bleak right like oh look we're going to volunteer you to go back to aleppo or free shereen do you know who will not force you to return to a country that is uh well decade long civil war that took me by surprise i'm not gonna lie yeah that's what i strike to do shereen just when you think it couldn't get any worse i hit you with a terrible ad pivot we're back and uh i want to talk about the most recent like outburst of tension there have been outbursts of tension outbursts of violence against syrian refugees before in turkey and 2021 springs to mind but recently this all came to a head in early july when a syrian man was accused of molesting his seven-year-old cousin in a public toilet in central turkey which is a pretty

fucked thing to do the guy was arrested the young girl was taken into protective custody i think along with her mother but it didn't stop violence exploding then the town where this happened that night cars were destroyed syrian shops were attacked and homes were set on fire the next night the violence spread in the border city of gaziantep which has like a 25 syrian population a man was stabbed i've seen other videos of like teenage boys like i don't know if they're dead or unconscious but they're certainly not uh capable of responding and mobs of people are stamping on them kicking them and it's pretty horrible stuff yeah the

videos i've seen of the the riots and the mobs are really terrifying yeah like it's petrifying to think of like a mob of people coming for you because of who you are where your parents came from yeah with nothing you can do to defend yourself right turkey's interior minister said that 474 arrests have been made and erdogan did condemn the violence and but also blamed the opposition rhetoric which like like the opposition to him yes the opposite to him yeah when he himself has said they're going to try and send a million more people back to syria Unsurprisingly, several nights of these pogroms have led to anti-Turkish sentiment in areas of Syria that are controlled by Turkey and its proxy forces, right? Indeed, those very proxy forces in some cases turned on their Turkish

backers. And you could see on social media, again, I shared some of them, numerous videos last week of SNA, so that's Syrian National Army fighters, firing on Turkish positions, tearing down and burning Turkish flags, and even mobs attacking Turkish civilians in Afrin, which is one of the cities that Turkey captured from the SDF. You can see it in other Turkish occupied areas too. Demonstrators tried to storm the headquarters of Turkish-backed administration. SNA fighters withdrew from their frontline positions to set up roadblocks and attack Turkish bases. Dozens of people stayed to sit in in the Al-Hurriya Square in Afrin. Again, these are not tensions that have popped up overnight, right? This didn't just happen

because mobs in turkey attacked syrian refugees but this was kind of the cork popping if you like and one of the things that has caused tensions to increase in recent weeks is this sort of detente between asad and turkey right so in response to these protests turkey shut off the internet closed border crossings and sent more troops into the area masses of people were arrested and people were charged with things like desecrating national symbols of Turkey. Which, again, this is not in Turkey, right? This is in Syria. Yeah. But in an area occupied by Turkey.

I think any time a government or an occupying power shuts off internet, that is terrifying to me. Because you know they're trying to do something they don't want you to see yeah totally like fortunately it's 2024 and like there's only so far yeah that they can go like i've seen lots of videos from those protests but yeah they're trying to stop people organizing they're trying to stop them and the world seeing it's more it's more so the act that that power, like choosing to do that, is so purposeful. And that's like a choice. Yeah, totally.

Everyone knows what you're going for there. Yeah. On the 5th of July, detainees who were arrested during protests in northern Aleppo, including a child, were forced to film themselves with a Turkish flag behind them and apologized to the Turkish government and people for burning the Turkish flag. One of the videos obtained by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights showed a child under pressure admitting to, quote, burning the Turkish flag and apologizing to the Turkish people before kissing the flag. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Again, when people kiss the flags on TV, it's not a great sign. I did see videos of some of the SNA who appear to have captured some Turkish soldiers, making them kiss their flag as well. The Syrian revolution flag. So I want to talk about these Turkish safe zones, right? So-called safe zones, I guess. They're anything but safe. They've been seized through military incursions and they're rife with corruption and human rights abuses both by turkish back forces and and turkish forces directly and you'll be familiar with some of this stuff from

what israel does in in palestine specifically the destruction and theft of ancient olive orchards you can see it like listed on the syrian observatory for human rights if you go to like they organize the areas by the name of the tur mission. So like Operation Peace Spring Area or Euphrates Shield or Operation Olive Branch is a real fucking on the nose name. And you can see like 10 olive trees were cut down and sold for firewood or like people reselling homes that were seized from civilians. Right. right wow and i've spoken to people who have left to freeing like in my time in in uh in kurdistan in syria and kurdistan and and in the united states um i've spoken to people who uh were there as part of the sdf and and fled backwards and like a lot of them have confirmed the same stuff right destruction and property theft of homes and houses and And then there's evidence of extortion. There's evidence

of corruption in these areas today, right? Sexual violence, even torture. So it's pretty bad. There are a ton of links that will be on our sources page. If you want to read more, I don't want to sort of traumatize you all on your way to work here. I'll just traumatize Shireen. Oh, yeah. Thanks. Yeah, you're welcome. Just another day at work. Yeah, it's a normal day. Most of the protests seem to have died down now,

but the situation doesn't really seem to have become any more stable. In Turkey, just like many other countries, politicians have run to the right, respond to an economic crisis, and blame refugees for problems caused by capitalism. Reports of abuse of Syrian refugees caught crossing the border are rife and some of their data appears to have been leaked in the last few days i can't confirm this but i've seen this from a few places right that like data from a registry of refugees has been leaked which would obviously be very concerning like if we look at things like the marash massacre we look at like

the totality of this sentiment and the people doing it yeah tensions in the turkish occupied areas of syria remain high with people there strongly opposed to the turkish oppression seizure and sale of their landed homes and the potential of a detente between the two countries earlier this week erdogan said we will extend our invitation to assad with this invitation we want to restore turkey syria relations to the same level as in the past our invitation may be extended at any time that's uh a readout of an interview by turkish media that's obviously translated that's so vague it's like at what point in the past yeah yeah i mean look i i think it's the correct number of relations to have with asad is none yeah and so like any more than that is bad there are also reports that turkey is going to open crossings between the territory it is controlling and regime territory

right there are protests about that i saw in aleppo syria has said that normalization can only happen after turkey agrees to pull out the troops that it has turkey is opposed to this because it doesn't want the sdf which it believes to be an extension of the pkk which it considers to be a terrorist group to have territory along its border right and and the sdf still does already have territory on this border like kamishlo where i was you can go on top of a tall building and look across the border but that does seem to be kind of a red line for turkey so i don't know where that leaves us but yeah that does seem to be kind of a red line for Turkey. So I don't know where that leaves us. Yeah, that does seem something that they would never want to do. So Bashar really called their bluff there.

Yeah, which is kind of funny given that he's not exactly in a strong position to negotiate. No. But maybe Turkey has given up on the revolution in Syria and it just wants to join with assad and and as long as they can both say fuck the kurds and you know that's enough for both of them right but like if they can both get together on a state level and be like fuck these kurds and therefore i guess the cost of that would be sending these refugees home and for turkey which is i guess not considered to be a cost by some of them and that's millions of people right millions of people who like something in

some cases people are worried about having a citizenship removed yeah like they went there to be safe and of course it's a violation of international law and of course that doesn't matter because international law is as real as unicorns. But it leaves millions of people in limbo, right? Erdogan said he's promised to send another million refugees back, but that's not possible without the cooperation of the regime, really. I guess he could just pump them all into, like, Afrin or whatever, but he's pumping people into a situation where people are already actively opposed to the Turkish occupation there, right?

If he pulls out his troops, he's going to have to accept that there will be Kurdish forces on his border, which he hates. So it's a question of like, what value does he assign to the safety of these 3 million refugees? And it doesn't seem to be very high. And like, every time when we talk about migration, people are leaving terrible things. That's why people tend to end up as refugees.

But there's never been, I don't think, a more pronounced global crackdown than I've seen right now. It's not like these Syrian refugees, they can't leave their province. I've spoken to hundreds of people who have left Turkey in the last six months, a year. It's very hard. It's very expensive. And lots of the people who have fled from Turkey only went there for a few months, right? And then kept moving. Every country has made it harder than it ever was to immigrate. Like even, you know,

we talk about the Syrian refugee crisis in 2014, 2016. That's unleashing 3 million people, right? They need a safe place to go. If you try and force them back to syria it's either going to be an absolutely terrible humanitarian disaster or we're going to have more refugees entering the refugee system at a time when governments all around the world are indifferent at best to the survival of refugees right including the fucking biden government in this country yeah yeah it's uh it's pretty bleak yeah that uh that fucking sucks james it does fucking suck shireen i will be back in two weeks to talk to you about what turkey is doing in um the kurdistan autonomous region of iraq where they are

bombing kurdistan freedom guerrillas they're setting up roadblocks and again like making massive incursions into another country so that'd be great we can you can all look forward to that over the weekend yeah i guess i guarantee that there are refugees probably refugees from turkey or syria in the town where you live or in the nearest big town to where you live and you can do something nice for them this weekend if you want to especially if you live somewhere where it's hot as shit you can i don't know help out drop off water somewhere or something yeah like like uh i know i've just been talking to kurdish refugees who are in like the northeast you know i spoke to some uh they're not Kurdish or Turkish, but I spoke to some refugees who are in Scranton, famous for Joe Biden, always talking about it.

But yeah, there are folks everywhere who need your help. You can make a difference, I guess. The fucking government isn't going to. Joe Biden isn't going to. Kamala Harris isn't going to either. And neither is fucking Hillary Clinton. I'm damn sure of that. So it is only you.

And that doesn't need to make you desperate. You can do something. I spoke to so many podcasts. Like another of our podcast listeners was at the border on Monday. And I met them and they were lovely. And we drove around and helped people. And you just need to take that yourself. And you can do something.

But the first step is you know logging off twitter and and uh getting out there and like i promise you you will feel less hopeless if you if you start helping even if it's only one person it makes a difference yeah that is something that james did tell me that i think about is because i get really overwhelmed with the idea of how many people need help in this world. And I'm just like a big softie. And I really just overwhelms me. Like, what can I what can me a little me do to help anything?

But James is right. If you change even one person's life, that's one person's whole life. That's a big deal. And so I think it has to start there. And if there are many more of you doing the same thing then that's how actual change happens because yeah our government is useless but yeah listen to james james is wise and british please don't listen to me because i'm british because that will lead you down some dark paths in terms of gender ideology i mean maybe i meant that you

sound wise because you're british yeah yeah that's all i got going for me but just be nice to people i know take buy someone fucking lunch this weekend if you have the money if not make them lunch you know make some rice it's cheap uh and yeah you can make a difference no one fucking else will if you want to talk about being a leftist that's great but like i have so much more respect for people who want to do stuff. So do stuff and the rest will sort itself out. Like you don't have to argue with people about the minutiae of ideology. It doesn't matter. Like helping people matters,

making the world better matters. So do that. It's Friday. Hopefully you can use your weekend to do something nice for someone. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails.

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