It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 20
Episode Date: February 5, 2022All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propagand...a, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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.
What up?
Alright, the show
started. Garrison?
Hey, we're going to be talking about
Canada again.
So, yeah.
And to discuss Canada
and politics and
the happenings here,
we have another journalist who
writes for, I believe,
Anti-Hate Canada
and the Canadian
Anti-Hate Network and also Vice, I believe,
right? Yeah, I've written for Vice.
I'm currently researching full-time.
I'm an
extremism researcher for, it's a new initiative called the Online Hate Research and Education
Project. It's actually partnered with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, and it's under the
New Burger Holocaust Education Center, which we might be renaming very soon.
I'm very excited for you guys to get into a Twitter fight with James Lindsay.
I'm very excited for you guys to get into a Twitter fight with James Lindsay.
Can't wait.
So yes, Dan here has joined us to talk about Canada because I've gotten a few messages about this thing that's happening.
My mother, who's in Alberta, called me a few days ago to talk about this thing that's happening.
So I'm getting a lot of
things and it's definitely worth discussing specifically on some of the rhetoric that
people are using around this. So I'm actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hand it to Dan to talk about
what, like, how did this thing, like, what is it and how did it kind of get started?
Yeah. Uh, well, so Garrison's not alone by the way for anyone not in canada every single
person's mother in the entire country has called and asked them about it i just got another message
literally right now like literally this second it's got another one moms of canada have been
activated moms of canada have been activated but not in exactly the same way that they're being perceived to be.
Yeah, not all the ways.
So the quote-unquote trucker convoy,
which I might get into a little bit later,
but I'm kind of like against even calling it a trucker convoy.
Yeah.
It was started on January 14th
and by a former Wexit
party now called the Maverick Party member
Tamara Litch and a group of
very active
far-right grassroots
protesters who do a lot of
organizing like this
and most of their activities
kind of go back to like 2018.
Yeah, they go back a decent amount.
Yeah, like this, I mean,
there's links to people that have been doing it
in the 90s in Canada's movement right now,
but a non-binding motion against,
I think it's M183 a few years ago,
really mobilized people.
And it's kind of been more consistent since then
of the same groups of people.
Yeah, that's what we talked about in our first Canada episodes,
about kind of how we got to that point.
And now, like, those same people are still kind of behind what's going on right now.
So yeah, there's this alleged caravan of truckers,
of all the truckers in Canada going to Ottawa.
Statistically, all the truckers in Canada.
All the truckers.
And so this thing was kind of originally organized by some known far-right figures
and the people associated with the Canadian Yellow Vests, which kind of died down.
But it didn't die down.
It just morphed, right?
Morphed into a very strong anti-vax presence in Canada right now.
The anti-vax movement is gaining a lot of popularity in Canada.
And it's run by these guys who were doing WEGZT, which is like West Exit.
It's like for Alberta and BC
to go away from Canada
because the rest of Canada is too liberal.
So WEGSIT and the LFS have really
changed all of their focuses
into this anti-vax thing as a way to do
recruiting, and they've prompted this
kind of movement of truckers
going to Ottawa
for a few specific reasons, which I think
Dan probably knows a little bit more about than I do.
Like I,
I know the gist of it,
but you,
you,
you've been focused on the,
on this slightly more than I have.
Yeah.
I guess the main reason is it works.
Like just from the perspective of,
of getting attention and being able to get a message out.
There's been a lot of traction on this,
that this groups don't normally get.
I think the last trucker convoy that was done under this sort of umbrella, it had like nine, I think, was the total amount of like trucks that made it to Ottawa.
The last time this was tried to be done, it was basically the same demands and the same reasons.
So this one was started on January 14th and it didn't get that much buzz the first couple
of days. The original goal was set at a hundred thousand dollars. I don't remember the exact time,
but once it hit that pretty fast and it hit the first million pretty fast in ways that like these
fundraisers really, really don't like the last big one we saw in Canada that was quite alarming in that fast, capped out at under $400,000. And that was
for a barbecue, for a barbecue that got defied protests last year and ended up getting like all
its pad doors shut down. So there's a lot more money now in this one.
Yeah, because this, this fundraiser, which was supposed to go like hand in hand with these
truckers protesting the vaccine mandates,
because they're upset that they're not allowed to truck into these states because they're not vaccinated.
So they have decided to all truck into Ottawa as a pseudo-strike-slash-blockade type thing,
because they're saying that we're not going to do our jobs and we're going to block off access to these roads until this mandate is removed.
access to these roads until this mandate
is removed. Now, of course,
the funny thing here is that
the mandate to
not being allowed to enter the states to do your
trucking routes, that's not a mandate by Canada.
That's done by...
That's the rule in the United States.
Because you're entering the United States,
the states are actually the ones doing the blockage.
The Canadian government has no control over
this.
It's not actually the thing.
The way to get the message out and support is incredibly effective
because something I think like 28%,
there was a survey recently of Canadians,
are against the mandate,
which is like really huge for like Canada's anti-vax movement
to kind of get that like support.
And like a lot of people
are mobilized too by there's a trend of posting uh it starts on 4chan in 2018 but it's getting
revived a lot again now of uh people posting like empty grocery stores uh even a conservative
member of parliament recently posted an empty grocery store and asked for people's emails to
try to like change the laws uh it turned out to be from the UK.
It was a stock photo.
And there's been like,
even like the stores themselves have had to come out and make statements being like,
no, we're not empty.
We have things.
Or like we are in the process of restocking.
That's happened in the US too,
where it's like we're literally emptying that shelf
to move stuff to another shelf.
So many snowstorms. We've had really bad snowstorms in Ontario in the US too where it's like we're literally emptying that shelf to move stuff to another shelf and you just like took a picture.
We've had really bad snowstorms
in Ontario for
a lot of the real photos of like
empty shelves and it's just like oh no the
salads half out and the store would just make a statement
and it's like yeah we had two snowstorms
a day in a row and our truck arrived a day later.
The narrative that they're trying to push is like these
mandates are causing these shortages.
And it's working. And the propaganda is working even though it's all on a false premise because first of all it's not like that those aren't that's not causing that and second of all
complaining to canada's that's not canada's not the one who's making the restrictions
the states is the one that's that blocky from doing this but but it's it's not actually about
these issues it's that's not the reason why you're getting all these people driving to Ottawa.
Because there is a lot of people.
There's not many trucks.
But there is a decent amount of people that are going this because it's not actually about these specific issues.
It's this general seething hatred of Trudeau and a generalized grievance that it's gotten this broad support, it's gotten enough financial
backing. The fundraiser is
over $6 million now.
Jesus Christ.
It's just what it actually is
is an incoherent kind of
intention just to go to the capital
and cause problems.
Right? That's what they're actually
that's what the underlying
thing is for a lot of
a lot of the of like explaining why it's gotten so picked up some some official demands like have
been put out uh and they would be even more confusing like to read than like some of them
are a couple of the most recent ones are just very general like stop this divisive nature that our
government is imposing kind of thing like i'm parap paraphrasing, but it's really quite bland. Some demands from tangential groups involved, one,
they say they won't leave until Trudeau steps down. Others say at one point said until every
politician stepped down. I think that was when before someone kind of pushed in more realistic
goals into the movement. But like in terms terms of what they're talking about for the rhetoric surrounding it,
we're seeing a lot of rhetoric around the sentence being like,
this can be our version of January 6th.
But they're saying that in a good way.
That's the thing that at least some of the organizers,
and then it's being carried out into the generalized rhetoric,
is that this should be our own version of this, which is interesting on a few ways.
But, like, also, like, this would not have been said, like, seven months ago, but it's being said now, which means, like, there's been a shift in how January 6th is being viewed.
There was this initial, like, really distancing, and now it's, like, it's becoming almost, like like more acceptable to acknowledge that it was maybe a good thing in your eyes and it's like that's an
interesting rhetorical shift that that's been going on but then it's also concerning on just
like a regular level to be like yeah these people wanted these people are saying they want to do
their own january 6th that has obvious like physical implications for all these people
trying to drive to ottawa um do either blocking off roads or just like making the government inoperable.
Yeah, a co-streamer or a streamer
in what's called the Plaid Army.
And now that's sometimes kind of just being rebranded
as like Diagonal Network, quote unquote,
which we can get into more, but it's going to be sillier.
Yeah, they're kind of their own.
They're their own issue for later. their own they're their own issue for later yeah they're their own issue but uh it was um uh one of their streamers who
is very tangentially connected to like a lot of the um the far-right people that are involved in
this protest movement leading up to and in fact pat king who is officially uh one of the organizers
of the convoy um until he wasn't And then he was again, that was a whole
dramatic thing for a day. Like he streamed alongside Plaid Army guys before. So someone
on Plaid Army said, and I would quote, I would like to see our own January 6th event, see some
of those truckers plow right through that 16 foot wall. And on January 24th, that was put up on CTV
News made alive. And it's kind of scared a lot of people.
I think at that point, former conservative leader Andrew Scheer had already voiced support for the convoy.
There have been a lot of other like members of parliament voicing support for the convoy, some of whom really didn't seem to know like what was involved and really just kind of heard like in passing.
Oh, it's against these mandates and I oppose these mandates too.
And it's like, if it's against
Trudeau, you may as well sign on because it's going to help you.
You're going to help your political career.
Yeah,
it's completely true.
So have they actually
started blocking roads or
is it just a bunch of random people driving down the street?
So there's
a few different converging points of the convoy.
I would say probably the biggest one,
but it's hard to kind of keep track.
Started in British Columbia and it's going,
so I'm sure not everyone knows the map for Canada.
So British Columbia is like our West Coast.
That's our California.
And Ottawa is close to the West and it's in Ontario, but it's on the border of
Quebec and Ontario. And that's where our parliament is. That's our capital city. So it's coming from
every which way, but I think the largest contingent comes from British Columbia and it just basically
goes eastward to Ottawa, picking up people along the way.
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it Yeah. It's heading in that direction.
How do we know about...
I know some people have kind of already...
Some people have kind of already
sort of arrived in Ottawa,
but mostly people are expected
to more arrive in the next, like...
Well, we're recording this Thursday night,
so this episode will probably come out on Monday.
People are expected to arrive on Saturday
is the day that
people are expecting like everybody to be there uh at least that's my understanding of it the
convoy itself arrived saturday um there are people like coming from further east uh who are like
staying overnight in town and kind of just showing up the parliament event so like by by all accounts
uh the parliament show will probably be a lot bigger than so far.
I guess we haven't mentioned numbers yet. Sorry.
Numbers nor what they actually really plan on doing once they get there.
Because it's been so much talking about why this got started and what's driving motivational factors.
But yeah, their goal is to get to a place and do a thing.
Yeah, the thing is unclear. That's the unclear part.
The thing is mostly unclear.
I have seen discussions about
trying to assemble a trucking strike
and then blocking off access
so that the government's forced
to obey their demands
or else the country will shut down.
Then some people maybe are
just kind of doing it
as a one one day protest.
It's, it's, it, again, it is, it is, it is pretty unclear,
but people are headed to there. What, what is the,
what is the numbers at least from where we can see like online and stuff?
So their numbers have been the number of 50,000 people.
50,000 trucks. Yeah.
50,000 people became 50,000 trucks. Yeah. 50,000 people became 50,000 trucks, uh, very quickly. Um, and that same
number, I think Rogan repeated it. I know Joe Rogan said it. Yeah. Yeah. Joe Rogan said it.
Theo Fleury went on Laura Ingram and repeated the 50,000 number. He said 50,000 truckers,
not trucks specifically. Um, as far as I know, Theo Fleury has no official involvement with the
convoy
and is just a fan and is just repeating some numbers that like organizers themselves have
kind of echoed um this is all so complicated for me because this is very troubling in a lot of ways
but also i'm a huge fan of the song convoy so this is really devastating please continue
it's all right yeah so canada's far-right protest movement has kind of a habit of doing this uh in So this is really devastating. Please continue. for a while, who's kind of the most outspoken person in organizing the current convoy,
claimed that 100,000 people were coming to Parliament for what was then like an anti-mask
demonstration. Before the event, that outlook changed to 50,000. And I was actually there,
it looked closer to like 200 people. I had friends that had counted like 170 people,
so not quite 50,000. For all intents and purposes,
the current one will be longer. Reporters doing great journalism along the way have estimated
up to like 400 people so far, including I think 15 trucks outside the Bass Pro Shop in Toronto
this afternoon was counted. Side note, if nothing else, got to give them points for stopping at Bass
Pro in Toronto. It's a pretty sweet Bass Pro. I do love a good Bass Pro Shop. My favorite is was counted side note uh if nothing else got to give them points for stopping at bass pro
and toronto it's a pretty sweet bass pro i do love a good bass pro shop my favorite is the one
they built into the giant pyramid yeah oh yeah obviously nashville baby so the the bass pro in
toronto if you're ever in town robert it's the only place around that i've been told that sells
subsonic 22 rounds so if you're like in the woods, but you don't want to scare your neighbors
because the woods aren't that big.
Yeah, I used to have some friends
and I used to go shooting in a suburban neighborhood
with Subsonic 22.
Because it's technically...
Well, don't do the Subsonic part.
You can definitely...
It was legal.
Oh, right. Canada doesn't do that. I't do it I don't endorse the
might have to
cut this part out
for regional sharing
no leave this all in
just a bunch of words make it nonsense
with bleeping please continue
yeah so only
15 trucks were counted
by CBC at that point.
And like videos and stuff have been...
Slightly short, yeah.
Yeah, there might have been a couple dozen.
Slightly short, but I think by the time, by Saturday,
I think there's a decent chance that there might be
maybe around 50 trucks to 100 trucks.
If there's anything more than like 500,
all of the media footage will look like there's 50 000 that's enough trucks absolutely nobody's camera is going to be able
to show the extent of them realistically and then yeah once they're there it's unclear what they
want to do some people just want to do the fuck shit up thing some people want to carry on the
tradition of like what the most of the anti like uh vax anti-mask protests in Canada have been,
which have been pretty big, but it's been mostly standing with signs.
So it is really unclear because, again, most of the truckers in Canada
probably are not going to be there, nor to necessarily endorse this idea,
nor is like, right, because they're pressing the their their initial issue is not
even based on an actual like thing so it is i'm not sure how many people are really going to show
up because i don't know even how specific it is to an issue um one one just really interest funny
interesting thing that i thought about is like with with some of these people um you know talking
about you know going to ottawa and not leaving until the mandates are dropped or the entire government resigns.
Like these people who are talking about this like blockage and shortage and stuff are also like the same people who get very angry at indigenous people for blocking off roads and trails for like oil and like pipeline protests.
A lot of them, yeah.
Some of them are indulged in pretendian stuff. Like Pat King, back in September, kind of went on like a kick where he just let a lot of people believe he was indigenous and claimed so and not correct them.
That is weird. bombarded people with information that he was not in fact indigenous and it was all very weird
and a lot of people held him to
comments in the past where he talked about
Anglo-Saxons having the strongest
bloodlines
yeah that is
Pat King probably deserves his own
little deep dive on one of the pods
but yeah
it is like
with all the people talking about blockades and stuff,
most of them coming from the western side of Canada,
it is, yeah, you're talking about all these things.
There's really big pro-oil sentiments
in all of this crowd.
Yeah, because a lot of it is connected
to financial and political stuff,
not necessarily even this vaccine issue.
It's been more like a symbol to represent their general kind of upsetness at um at the way at the
way things are going for them it is interesting to me so so when i first heard about this my i was
i was like oh okay so this is going to be like the chilean truckers and i was like okay well
this is really bad but it's like it's interesting to me like how few people they've been able to mobilize like that's
like not a large number of truckers like it's it's tough because they actually get yeah it looks
like a lot of like vehicles when you when you see like footage uh photos and videos like like in i'm
gonna like a lot of like telegram and facebook
groups of just people just like sharing pictures and photos um of the rally of the convoy passing
through their town and like it it's like what robert said like it's when it fills up both sides
of the camera and you have a wide depth of field it looks huge and it's it's really hard to count
uh the money is preposterous uh also side note on on the money um it the funds were frozen
uh a few days ago on the 25th but today one million dollars was released back to them because
they gave gofundme a pretty clear plan allegedly according to gofundme for for how they're going to
distribute it uh the rest of the it's it's i think it's like 6.7 million now so the rest of the, I think it's like 6.7 million now. So the rest of the 5.7 million I think is still frozen.
Okay.
It is so much money.
Yeah.
We should do something like that.
They could actually buy truck nuts for 150,000 truckers,
which is the most I've seen them guess truckers are coming.
They could buy $20 truck nuts off Amazon for all of them
and still have
the vast majority of their funds left over yeah but see that would be an act of actual heroism
and they're not going to do that yeah the reason why i wanted to talk about this is one to like
acknowledge that it's happening right acknowledge the tactics that they're using in terms of trying
to go into an urban area and block off uh like trade routes essentially yeah um and then i wanted to talk
about like first of all it doesn't matter that like the fact that this is happening is divorced
from any kind of direct cause right because their their actual grievance is false and the grievance
doesn't really actually matter it it just need there needed to be some kind of cultural or
propaganda push in order for this physical action to happen, and that's been done.
It doesn't even need to be coherent.
And then escalation.
People driving here, doing this thing.
And then I know there was this one interview.
I forgot on what news channel, but they interviewed this one trucker guy, part of this convey in my hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
part of this con part of this convey in my hometown of saskatoon saskatchewan um and he's he said um i advocate civil war if people don't want to step up we have guns we'll have some
we'll stand up and we'll bring them out but like so that's the quote so like in the fact that you're
just openly saying i advocate civil war in relation to this movement is like,
my goal is,
my goal here is being like people fantasize about Canada as being a place to escape,
you know,
Canada,
like Canada is like the other from the States and like,
no,
it's the same.
Like we are like,
you cannot escape away from fascism.
There is no really,
there's no real away right now in terms of like safe ground.
There's no safe ground.
It can spread to where you are. And for people living in Canadaada when you have people on the new on like global news saying i
advocate civil war within the context of this of this like um you know convoy movement it is it is
an actual thing worth paying attention to it is an actual problem it's it huge. And earlier today, and I might pronounce his name wrong, but
Dale Manukadok from CBC Toronto tweeted a story because he, on behalf of CBC, contacted
an actual organizer of the convoy. They have different regional organizers and their website
lists them all. And it had Pat King. Funny side note, it had Pat King listed as an organizer
while their GoFundMe had a statement saying they had no connection to him, which was very funny.
But yeah, so CBC Toronto contacted them and the guy responded, enough lies.
You quote slave blooded traitor. Evil will get its due in the end.
Slave blooded?
Yeah, after. Yeah. After a back. Yeah.
Yeah, after a back and forth, a very brief back and forth, and just like a couple of questions the organizer ended with, you know, you tow the line for the global corporate coup taking place under the guise of public health. You can't be that dumb. Traders will swing in time.
Oh, boy. Yeah. I do think Americans don't fully understand how much the anti-vax movement is tied to far-right politics within Canada.
And it's been like the driving force of far-right politics for the past two years.
And it's gotten so much larger.
It is a thing. When you have people on camera saying, we want to January 6th, I advocate a civil war,
talking about not leaving until the government either resigns
or mandates are dropped,
and then threatening physical violence on top of that.
Yeah, it is a thing that could happen there.
And that's kind of why I wanted to talk about it.
Yeah, when I have my mother calling me, dozens of messages from random to talk about it is like yeah when i have my mother calling me dozens of messages
from random people like worried about this then yeah it is an issue like i've um it's it's it's
not it's not not a thing no it is and the the rhetoric is so universal against uh anyone they
perceive to be leftist to that it is really dangerous like
there's been a little bit of talk of like counters in in ottawa um when the numbers are this big like
there's no safe way uh for people to to stop that sort of thing especially when all the vehicles are
on that side like it's uh it's dangerous there's a lot of violent stuff um even uh like i was uh looking
today uh the people's party of canada's they got like five percent of votes in our last election
they had a little bit of a scandal uh during our election uh which is the end of last year um
where uh a writing director for uh i think it's uh
director for uh it's uh it's uh the greater area of london it is elgin middle six london uh so they're they're writing directors so not their member of parliament writing um was revealed to
uh post like skull masconazzi memes and memes comparing bernier the leader of his own party
to hitler so like probably not a negative comparison um and he was not fired
for it uh but he was fired after it came out that he was being charged for throwing rocks at our
prime minister okay that's fine yeah he actually he recently said on a live stream uh he was asked
if he was currently on trial and he said yeah i mean as far as i know uh like he's been posting images of like trucks
running people over and that's just like one connection to uh to the legitimacy of it all
um like i mean the uh the platt army guys the ones who talked about uh driving the truck 16 feet
they're also connected with bernier they've had um randy Hillier on their podcast before, who's a sitting
politician and a member of provincial parliament, which is kind of like our state Senate equivalent
over here. They've had him on and like there's some like legitimacy to it getting on. And when
you just talk about the broad movement in general, a former Conservative Party of Canada leader Andrew Scheer, who had
kind of a rocky departure from the party, because he allegedly used campaign funds to pay for his
kids' private school, side note. Like, he'd already signed on and endorsed and been interviewed.
Aaron O'Toole, the current leader of the Conservative Party, just today actually said he was going to engage with
them. Earlier this evening, Sergeant-at-Arms Packeridge McDonald sent an email to our
parliamentarians ahead of Saturday's trucker convoy protest. I'm quoting Justin Link's Twitter
here. There have been attempts to collect MPs' home addresses. As such, the Sergeant-at-Arms
is advising to avoid the rally and go
somewhere safe. That apparently wasn't listened to Aaron O'Toole, who said, I'm going to do it
anyways. And Justin Link tweeted later, tomorrow I will be meeting with truckers, O'Toole announces,
right after parliamentary security warned MPs to avoid the protests entirely. So it's not great.
Yeah. I mean, again, this will
probably come out after Saturday, so
if we don't talk about this again, then that means
it probably... It's good.
I mean, they showed up, they
protested, and they kind of dissipated. If we're
following this up in a few days with another episode,
then that means something bad happened.
Yeah.
But again, even at this point, it is
still worth talking about in terms of
like the generally like this is like this is the kind of like the nut of why this is so important
for everybody is what you were saying about like when you've got this many people this many trucks
coming from an outside and moving into a city there's very little that can be done against them
um like there's not there's not really much of an effective counter other than trying to get another mass
of people in cars to confront them.
And that's, you know, a potentially dicey situation.
So this remains a very powerful tactic.
We've seen it used all over the United States too.
And it's this idea of like blockading a city, even though this is kind of the earliest step in taking that is,
is this is going to be the last time people try to extend to this logic.
Yeah.
So that,
that's kind of the surrounding cultural reasons and shifts in rhetoric and
like applicableness as like an act of like an act of like protest or like,
like revolt or insurgency,
whatever,
whatever team want to use is just interesting.
Cause like a lot of these,
the other interesting thing about the States compared to Canada is like in the States,
we have like,
we have like an actual like far right movement.
Like we have like,
we have like conservatives when then we have like the far right movement in Canada.
The,
that distinction is not much of a thing.
A lot of,
a lot of,
there is,
there is some far right figures trying to push stuff forward, absolutely, but a lot of – the space in between conservative and far-right is kind of a little bit more fluid.
They are kind of regular conservatives, but they're still getting sucked into saying, I advocate a civil war. Like, that is just a regular conservative dude. He's not a member of any kind of political thing. That is just kind of what this culture on the Western side of Canada really kind of defaults to, almost, when you start going into this kind of like anti-trudeau territory because that's the their their main
their main politics is anti-trudeau like that is that is what they are so anything that gets to
that point is allowed whether that is conservative or that is like more far right as long as it's
anti-trudeau then it's it is a valid politic and that's the distinction in the state that
there's a thing in the canada that i had don't really see as much in the states it's very familiar to me when you talk about how anti-clintonism fed into trumpism like that that
is i think a worthwhile comparison to make because there were a lot of american conservatives who
could get in bed with anybody if they were staying against hillary or bill um cool stuff well this is all fun i hope to not talk with you about this again dan um but there
is a chance there is a chance we will have conversations um if you wouldn't want to after
this episode airs if people want to see what happened right because this airs probably monday
um and the convoy is set to arrive on sat, where can they find work talking about this?
Whether that be like your Twitter feed
or if you know if any articles are planned.
Yeah, so I'm planning on live tweeting.
I can't make any promises
because safety is always a thing.
Yeah.
And I won't know what it looks like
until Saturday happens,
but I'm planning on live tweeting.
My Twitter is at spineless L. That's the word spineless and then just the
letter L.
So yeah,
you can check in on his account to see if he has a thread by the time this
episode's out. And yeah, that's,
that's how you can kind of figure out what happened if you're just listening
to this now. And then in the meantime,
there'll be a lot of Ottawa media covering it uh if you just want to see the fallout um i imagine the canadian
idea network might talk about it more they put out an article today on it uh that covers more
of the the kind of problems that the far right that we talked about today than the most other
media will go into they did uh that was a very good article and And then also today, Elon Musk tweeted in support of the Canadian truckers.
So just in terms of, let's just, as a good example, I think this situation is a really great way to start thinking about politics and culture.
And how they relate to each other and how this type of thing succeeds and how it succeeds.
And why this rhetoric is so successful in bringing in so many people
in Canada and raising $6 million.
Almost $7 million.
But anyway, that is
the show. One more plug, Dan,
so people know where to find you.
I only
really am active on Twitter.
So again, it's at spineless L.
The word spineless
as in I don't have a spine, and then the letter L on Twitter.
Thank you, Dan.
You don't want to plug your Gitter account?
Your Gitter? Wow.
Yeah, real Gitter user vibes coming off of Dan.
The only social media platform that Joee rogan looked at and said
robert's just trying to get me to plug my sock puppet accounts
yeah yeah everyone follow his socks this is a fucking op you can follow all my sock puppets
at fascist wizard.ca um anyway that is Anyway, that does it for our
show. Thank you for listening
and yeah,
convoys, Canada
can't escape.
Excellent. Thank you for having me.
Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.
Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?
Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.
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Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,
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or wherever you get your podcasts.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,
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At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.
Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.
Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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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,
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Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,
where we get into todo lo actual y viral.
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It's the New Year's again! Woo!
Yeah, welcome to the year of the tiger.
This is a special
special
Lunar New Year's edition
of It Could Happen Here,
a podcast that is today just
about, well, it's still about
things falling apart and things being
rebuilt, but I wanted to
specifically, you know, do
a special Lunar New Year's episode
and spend some time
i think talking about chinese-ness and how what sort of being a part of the chinese diaspora
in sort of in the us and canada is like and you know how that how that influences how we organize
how what we're afraid of what we're sort of proud of. And with me to talk about this, we have JN,
who I think first time ever returning guest.
Yeah, who works with Laosan.
Hello, JN.
Oh, what an honor.
Thanks for inviting me back.
Yeah, thank you for coming.
And we also have Jane Shi,
who is a queer Chinese settler living in unceded traditional and ancestral territories in the Musqueam, Sasquamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations in what is falsely and fakely considered Canada.
She is a poet, writer, editor, and an organizer and does many other cool things.
Hello, Jane. Welcome to the show.
Hello, thank you for having me.
Just wanted to share that it's Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh.
Yeah, sorry.
Unfortunately, I do not live up north,
and so my pronunciations of tribal names are even worse
than they are for the tribal names that are around me.
So my apologies.
No worries, no worries.
Yeah.
So before we get into a bunch of extremely grim stuff,
I wanted to, because this is the,
if you will be listening to, well, okay,
unless you're listening to this on Monday night,
in which case, congratulations on beating time.
But most of you are probably going to be listening to this on Lunar New Year's.
And so I wanted to, before, yeah, before everything gets completely dark,
I wanted to know what you two's favorite Chinese New Year's food is,
because this is like maybe my favorite holiday.
It's basically my favorite holiday because in grand Chinese tradition,
it's just an excuse to eat a lot.
So yeah, opening the floor up.
Yeah, I think you're the expert here,
Jane, so feel free to
lay down the knowledge.
I am not an expert
just because
I fold
dumplings does not mean
I'm an expert.
But I mean, I haven't spent like
Lunar New Year's with really that many other people in a very long time. So my sense of like
breadth of food has really, really narrowed to what is available to me. And
really narrowed to what is available to me.
And I also have been really struggling with the dumplings that I've been making because of like carpal tunnel issues.
But I've been thinking a lot about jellyfish lately.
Like I keep thinking about jellyfish and I keep thinking about like the
sesame, anything with sesame in it. Yeah. Like I keep thinking about jellyfish And I keep thinking about Like the sesame
Anything with sesame in it
Yeah and like
Just boiled dumplings
I feel like are really
Great for me
At this particular moment
Yeah my favorite is
In Cantonese it's called
Ningou which is
You stole mine
Oh really Yeah is uh in Cantonese it's called Ningou which is you stole mine oh really yeah
yeah
um and the way my mom
used to make it all the time was like
dipping it in an egg first
oh cool
and so it has this kind of like eggy crust
on it which is really really awesome
and I've been making that
for the past couple years myself where I am.
And I can't wait to go to the grocery store and grab some because it's only
available around this time.
I guess they don't really produce it any other time.
And last time I went to visit my mom,
she like loaded my suitcase full of them and I wasn't able to eat them fast
enough, unfortunately. And some of them went bad.
Oh no, we have a, and some of them went fast. Oh, no!
We have one in our refrigerator.
I think it was in the freezer,
and it's now, I think, in the refrigerator,
and we're all incredibly excited to cut into it on New Year's.
Yeah, do you guys do the... Because I know...
So we normally have red bean ones.
I know there's brown sugar ones or something that are like plain.
Wait, I just wanted to check.
Like, is it nangal?
Yeah.
Or at least...
So like the sort of like flower thing
that is like
shaped like a semicircle?
Yeah.
Wait.
I feel like there's different...
Or like an entire circle. Yeah. I feel like there's different... Or an entire circle.
We usually cut them into square strips,
but I think that's just
a cooking...
ease of cooking thing.
Yeah, and it usually comes with
a date or something on top.
Yeah.
When it's packaged.
That is so interesting, because I feel like
the Nangal that I grew up with
doesn't usually have a lot of thing on it.
It's kind of like sticky and kind of plain.
And I'm just, this is a new thing for me.
Yeah.
Yeah, the one we usually get just has red beans in it.
And then there's like the one date on the top.
Oh, I don't know if you're thinking of like Caoou, which is a different type of dish, where it's white rice cakes, and then you can...
It's saucy, and then you put different ingredients in it.
Yeah, I think it's a different... Ours are just... They're pretty close to the...
It's like a sweet dessert, yeah.
Yeah, I think I'm just talking about the regular Ningou. They're pretty close to the... Like a sweet dessert, yeah. I think I'm just talking about the regular
Ningal. They're just like...
They're basically plain,
but there's some red bean
stirred into the dough, and then it's just
like the flat
brown thing that you fry.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of.
Yeah.
Alright, this is... We've now done dessert chat uh
honestly much much less grim time than most of the stuff that happens on here
and you have all been now subjected to it i go eat chinese new year's food it's great
uh yeah so on to things that are somewhat more grim um i think there's there's two big
things i want to talk about that sort of related to like
i guess chinese diaspora-ness um i guess we can start with talking a bit about anti-asian
violence and police violence because i mean it's like so my sort of into this is that my my someone
uh okay so one of the things that's happened in the past about two years was this huge sort of spike
in anti-asian violence but then you know part of what happens politically around that was there
was this huge attempt to essentially turn anti-asian violence into i guess like the anti-blm
like especially in the u.s but i think I think this happened elsewhere too where there was it
didn't I don't know it it it worked in some places and didn't work in other places so I went to the
University of Chicago and a few is it a few months ago now maybe just a couple like a month or two
ago a uh Asian Chinese international student like got on campus, and this turned into a huge, sort of, like,
bring more
cops on campus. There was this huge petition
that got signed. It was, the people were, like, asking
for more security cameras, and
asking for more cops, and, like, the UCPD,
like, a couple weeks
later, just, like, shot a dude.
And so that, there's been, I've been
seeing this tension a lot. I was wondering if you two had
also, sort of, run into similar stuff stuff and what your thoughts were on it. validation in this weird way that I find really delegitimizes the unique struggles that are here
that are different. There are, there's a different kind of police system. There's like the
local police, like Vancouver Police Department.
But then there's also the RCMP, the Royal Mount Canadian Police,
which are in other municipalities.
And the RCMP was created specifically as a tool of settler colonialism to enforce the Indian Act, which is, I guess, the most succinctly
way I can put it is segregation of Indigenous peoples from settlers. And there is a lot of displacement of Black communities across Canada, and there was also slavery in
Canada, even though we like to pretend that there wasn't. And so against this background, I guess,
and ongoing police brutality, whether it's in Wet'suwet'en territories or just the police killing people.
There's a lot of mainstream Asian Canadian and Chinese Canadian institutions that are very,
very much complicit in the system. Like there is an organization an immigrant chinese canadian organization in
vancouver who one of the board members is a cop who is married to a a a uh
city counselor and a lot of the discourse that institutions, not people themselves necessarily, but institutions
create around, for example, the revitalization of Chinatown or the preservation of culture is around,
oh, there's graffiti in the neighborhood. Chinatown in Vancouver is in the downtown east side which is considered um the poorest post is considered
the poorest post-so-cold in Canada and it's like a tight-knit community with a lot of indigenous
peoples black people people in poverty struggling against the poisoning massacre um wherein the government is not providing um safe supply and where the
police just kind of like are everywhere pointing guns at everyone displacing the tent cities and so
when there is an easy not an easy but just like a demonized group of people that um the general public
doesn't know enough about um if you walk through the downtown east side and talk to people you
would talk to people about their experiences with residential school their experiences with
missing family members experiences with poverty and in the in the broadest terms it's like
the way that Chinatown's being gentrified people tend to blame the poor um and there's like this
divide and conquer mentality within the Asian diaspora within the Chinese diaspora specifically and so similar to what happened
with um Michelle Goh similar to her um there was a South Asian elderly woman who a group of
people who lived in the tent city had killed pretending to be cops when they knocked on her door and
the count one of the city counselors um in Vancouver was like this we need to stop indulging
in these tent cities um meanwhile there's a lot of like marginalized people in these tent cities who, who, who cats, um, who need to live there
because it's COVID times and, um, society has abandoned them. So it's like anti-Asian racism
and violence has also the hate, the so-called hate crime thing has so apparently increased.
And I don't think that it hasn't increased.
It's just that like the way that the media, the way that the institutions within Canada is also jumping onto the police wagon, the police, the hate crime angle,
rather than learn from abolitionists, rather.
Yeah, this is a long way of putting it.
It's like similar, it's similar.
And I know a lot of details, yes.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, I think that tracks.
I mean, the targets are slightly different just based on sort of scenarios,
but on the sort of local context.
But I think that does, yeah, that tracks a lot
with what we've been seeing here as i think there's a there's another thing that
i don't know so i i really don't like the term like because the the is it the twitter hashtag
stop asian hate like i hate that framing of it as sort of hatred not racism but even the sort of the anti-asian
violence framing which i've been used a lot i think has problems because you know i mean this
is one of the things you're talking about one of the things that i've seen a lot is just you know
anytime like you know there are genuine sort of racism attacks, right? But then there's also just like,
I mean, one of the sort of scare things
that happened here was it was like a bunch of people's,
like a bunch of Chinese restaurants
got broken into and robbed.
And everyone was like, well, this is anti-Asian violence.
And it's like, well, no, like this is just theft.
And there's been this sort of like collapsing
of something bad happens to an Asian person
with specifically sort of like collapsing of something bad happens to an asian person with specifically sort of like
targeted racist attacks and i think that's been well i mean that's been a problem and there's also
the secondary problem of you know who even who even gets included in this in the first place
like one of the biggest things i've been frustrated about is you know the sort of
selective inclusion of south asian people like i
there there was there was a shooting at a fedex uh facility last year by a guy who was like
very much very far right kind of like pilled online guy and it killed a bunch of seek workers
and it killed a bunch of Sikh workers and there was
never there was just nothing
like no one
talked about as anti-Asian violence but then you know
selectively you get inclusion to Southeast
Asian people when it's
like it's like
people get folded
into being Asian
when it's like useful to
call for more police
but then when it's you know not useful for that or when it's you know especially when it's like useful to call for more police but then when it's you know not
useful for that or when it's you know especially when
it's working class people getting killed
there's just sort of nothing and I've been
I don't know I've been really
frustrated by this dynamic a lot
um yeah
Jane I want to know what you think about this too because
I have no talks
long enough about this
yeah I mean you know, wasn't there,
there was a hate crime bill that was passed in Congress, right?
And it was supposedly, quote unquote,
supposed to be addressing all this, quote unquote,
anti-Asian hate stuff.
And, you know, the only thing it accomplished
was it created like some government organ
to like oversee these efforts to address hate crimes and then more
funding for the police, right? So I think it was a very kind of direct impact. We could just see
how this discourse transformed into exactly what a lot of, you know, organizers had said would
happen, which is more funding for the police and not making communities safer, right? So
I think the real conundrum for me, and not making communities safer. Right. So, um,
I think the real conundrum for me, and I think that really kind of, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I get, I get kind of frustrated
is, um, you know, whenever these,
these attacks happen on Asian heritage or Asian identified people, um,
the response, I mean, it's, it's a good nature and it's well-meaning and I agree with it, but, you know, the response is always like the telling folks who have been victimized or those who know them, um, that's true. But then I think what I'm struggling with is how to make this message resonate with those folks. Right. Because I think there's a way that in some ways that can alienate them even more and make them even more reaction. Right.
on that argument uh they use further instances of violence to spin that argument of like when when people say the answer is not more cops it doesn't make us safer uh the media is able to
spin that to say look this isn't working right it's things are actually getting more dangerous
uh all the kind of like scaremongering tactics with uh crime statistics and all that stuff which
are usually false anyway so So I think that's
what I'm trying to figure out now is like, you know, cause in, in Chinatown, LA where, you know,
where I've done some work, there was community meetings with CCD, what's the D stand for? I always forget. Develop.
They had some meetings with community folks to kind of like, you know, hear what they wanted to
do to address this. And they kind of like, a lot of those organizers had, you know,
they're coming from that viewpoint that calling for more cops is not the answer and
so some uh of the male they're from the community but they're not they weren't part of the kind of
like senior population of chinatown which is you know it's like low-income seniors is kind of like
are the folks that are being pushed out and by developers and all the gentrification happening
as well um some of some men were kind of like okay
well we should start uh kind of like armed neighborhood watch um and you know i think
in in some way that taps into this kind of like we protect us type of uh ethos right it's it's not relying on a state or government or whatever police paramilitary force.
But then I think the question that some folks had, I heard the second hand was that, you know, are these people actually from the community and are they actually doing this to address the needs of the folks who are most affected by it, right? And so I think some folks
were uncomfortable with the idea that there should be these kind of like street patrols.
And so there's just so many different ways to approach this. And I haven't, you know,
I'm not laying blame on anyone, but I just haven't seen an effective way to
counteract that call for more police yet. That's a really good point because
I feel like in when especially Asian women, people who experience like various forms of sexual violence or street harassment, that sense of unsafety is
amplified when we witness other people getting murdered in public spaces. And so I think in a way it's like understandable why people want to grasp for any kind of solution.
And also why that kind of trauma can be weaponized or like taken advantage of immediately.
Like just because I'm like, who asked for you to be street patrols of Chinatown?
Who decided that you make the community safer?
Have you consulted the seniors?
Have you talked with all of the seniors, all of the elders to ask them, like, how would you feel if I did that?
Like, where is that suggestion coming from?
feel if I did that like where is that suggestion coming from and I think that like the other argument is that like mental health resources is an alternative to policing even though
um policing and mental health systems are very very very connected. Edward Wong has an article about that in Upping the Anti.
And I don't know, I just think that like, there has to be like a way to talk about this without
invalidating each other's trauma and invalidating people's survival instincts as well, because I feel like for years, as someone who's done work
in the anti-violence sector, it's not that I wanted there to be more policing. It's just that
a lot of survivors might be like, hey, I actually do want to use the court system because
this person is dangerous. that's like as somebody supporting
a survivor I can't just go no you're wrong less cops right like that's that's not um a compassionate
response and it's also not a compassionate response to go hey you're making this like all
about yourself and you should like be talking about yourself, and you should, like, be talking about, like,
Black and Indigenous people, like, like, like, that's, that's also really insensitive,
so it's, like, I feel like there's a way that,
there, there is, like, a way to talk about abolition that really needs to respect every
really needs to respect every survivor or every like communities like trauma and it's not an easy thing because it's not like our communities have had a good way to respond to trauma
like we haven't really like we're still breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma
yeah and i think think this kind of comes
back to another sort of
difficulty of this whole project because
a lot of the sort of
the abolitionist
framework is about
transitioning
things towards
community solutions,
but what is that
even mean when
you're dealing with you know this is this is part of the problem with well okay you have armed
self-defense groups but you know what happens when inevitably and this is this is just something that
happens just you know this is this is this is the nature of security forces right is eventually
you're going to get abusers in it and it's like okay well what happens then and what happens when you know like the abusers of
people inside the community and and this is compounded i think by this problem of
like what like what even you know the the i i think i think there's there's there's there's
a broader problem of like what asianness is and there's a broader problem of what Asian-ness is, and this is also a localized problem of what even is the Chinese community at all, because you're dealing with something that's incredibly fragmented.
You're dealing with people who speak different languages.
You're dealing with people who've been in these places for, you know, some people have been here for centuries, some people who've been here like two months.
for you know some people have been here for centuries some people who've been here like two months and i think that makes it really difficult in a lot of ways to sort of
like even even just bring together something that could be a community and i know i know
what happens and i know you know there's there's there's lots of different sort of like fragmented
There's lots of different fragmented communities, but I think it makes this harder because there isn't a ready-made thing you can turn to and go, okay, well, this is how we're going. This is the group of people, and this is the social sphere, and this is the community that we're going to turn to to deal with this stuff.
There's just this kind of a bunch of amorphous different groups.
And then also you have the problem that if you're going to talk about political forces and Asian communities, the business associations are extremely powerful.
extremely powerful and you know we have different objectives than they do but they're also like extremely well organized in a way that most other sort of like chinese groups aren't i don't know
that that's that's that's been where my thinking has been going on this yeah i think um this there's
some resonance with what you're saying and the kind of dynamics that you're identifying and
what i've kind of witnessed and experienced in like Hong Kong diaspora
organizing, which I think, you know,
there's a lot of overlap with that same type of like, you know,
small business organization type of thing that usually dominates Chinatowns
across North America, which is the case in LA.
And actually CCED spends a lot of time fighting the small business organizations because they are very friendly with developers
and they're usually pro-securitization and anti-poor folks and all that kind of stuff.
So there is that element where a lot of the
times you know you are fighting against people who might have like the same heritages for example
um and you know for me personally that's that's very much the case with hong kong diaspora groups
right because you know many of them are very conservative uh are right wing, and not only just kind of held personal beliefs,
but advocate a lot for these kind of, you know, these policies and politicians and all these
different things that I really can't stand, and I'm aligned against. And, you know, I think it's
a lot of folks want to take the kind of pragmatist route of like we'll work with you on things that
we where we have points of unity uh otherwise we don't whereas you know i guess some people see me
as a little bit more rigid in the sense that like i don't want to work with these folks at all
because um i see them as kind of themselves as as a force that is causing more harm than good,
especially if with these Hong Kong diaspora groups,
the usual mantra is like Hong Kong first,
like everything that we do is serving Hong Kong.
And in the diaspora, that usually means kind of like non-partisanship,
lobbying Congress, all those different things.
And then kind of like completely
ignoring or being agnostic of uh local and domestic issues um to oversimplify a little bit so
you know i think that's been on my mind a lot i know your question was about chineseness but i
guess for me that kind of filters a little bit further down to like what is being a hong konger right yeah
it's really difficult to organize with your specific quote-unquote ethnic or diaspora
community when the the meaning of diaspora is not a cohesive community but people's memories of home um it's like a
difficult thing to kind of but but your head against because it's like you have your um
diversity equity inclusion framework of organizing. And then you have the everyday, like what, what,
what these frameworks can't simplify, which is the tensions between your communities. Like
I didn't grow up experiencing overt racist violence when I grew up in Richmond. Richmond is an extremely East Asian and Chinese suburb
that saw first, not first, but just like at some point, a wave of Hong Kong diaspora because
of 1997. And then afterwards, more like mainlanders um and so on the playground somebody was like are
you from Taiwan mainland or or Hong Kong and that was when I was like seven and that was my
introduction to what it means to be in diaspora in this particular kind of way and being like,
just right.
Like in that,
in,
in that and,
and figuring yourself out within that and seeing how there is just an absence of community because of how like these different geopolitical
experiences have like separated us um and made it more difficult um like when we filter our
parents political beliefs onto each other it's kind of like this awkward thing yeah but but i
think that like um in in trying to contend with that in the, in the present, it's sort of like, we have these older institutions that other people that,
that the older generations have built. What new things can we build?
What things can we,
cause I feel like I'm, I'm really rigid too.
I'm like really not great at talking across the aisle.
And when I do, it's not, it's not really about anything substantive. It's like, Hey, like,
hi, it's good to see, you know, like when you live in a place, you, you don't want to make,
like make enemies, but like, it's, it's a really hard thing. Um,
enemies, but it's a really hard thing. And it's even more heartbreaking when you find out slowly that people are just taking advantage of you, right? And I don't know, it's a really difficult
thing to organize against when you're like, you all hate me. Great. Love it.
This has been Naked App and Here.
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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,
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I mean, he looked so fresh.
And his name, Elian Gonzalez,
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Elian Gonzalez.
Elian Gonzalez.
Elian.
Elian.
Elian Gonzalez. At the heart Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.
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At the heart of the story is a young boy
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His father in Cuba.
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Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.
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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that recognizes that Lunar New Year's is not, in fact, just one day.
And in that spirit, our special New Year's episode is going on for a second day.
So, here's the rest of our conversation with JN and JN.
You know, the other thing I wanted to sort of touch on, like, this is, I think, kind of diverting off the topic,
but I think it's also something that I've been running into a lot, which is that, know you have this kind of like you know you have this kind of bind right because on the one
hand you're stuck between you know like a lot of the organizing and sort of in asian communities
has all of these problems and then you know okay well you know the other thing that's happening is
is the sort of mainstream american left and the mainstream american left i think the canadian left has problem similar problems with this is that like
it's a bunch of just like it's a bunch of tankies it's a bunch of people who love the ccp
it's a bunch of just weird genocide deniers and like people who think that every asian person
who like doesn't like the government is a caa psyop and i don't know
this is something that i've like i mean i've i ran into a lot trying to i mean help people doing
kong kong organizing is something i've run into just in like every organized like i've run i've
run into this in anarchist spaces too like it's it's just i don't know it it it feels really bad because it's like like you're you're just sort of
caught between and i guess this is sort of there's this three-way triangulation right because on the
one hand you have this sort of like you you have the the local dynamics with you know the sort of
descendants of the the sort of reactionary small business owners you have this you know the the chinese
community also being sort of split in between like pro and anti-ccp factions both of whom have
like are absolutely chock full of just fanatical right-wingers it's like well okay it's like the
ccp versus the epoch times and it's like i don't want any of them to win. And then you zoom out and you're caught in the middle of this sort of, you're caught in the middle of this sort of, I don't know, I think it's sort of like a Fox geopolitical struggle, but like one of the big sort of ideological conflicts being between both the CCP and the US sort of like using the specter of each other to sort of like disturb their bases.
And I don't know, I'm incredibly frustrated by it.
I'm incredibly frustrated by the way that these groups have – like the anti-CCP – like the pro-CCP groups have sort of selectively been using anti-Asian violence as, you know, basically making the argument that the importance
of anti-Asian violence is that, well,
this only happens because people say mean things about the CCP
and if no one didn't like the CCP
then there wouldn't be any violence
even though anti-Asian violence
here predates the existence of
a communist party in China
by centuries.
We invaded China, china like how many times
at least twice maybe three i think at least twice and maybe three times like before there was a
communist party and so i don't know i i i feel trapped a lot between these dynamics in ways that
are very frustrating and
yeah i guess i want to open the floor to talk about that i guess i see it as like co-optation
partly um but i i guess i also see it as how power works like Like, I, there's, like, this local paper, and I was researching,
sort of, the history of Chinese diaspora one of whom is from um a newer Hong Kong diaspora
there was like a whole spat um in the paper about his history and there's
the history of like those tensions are like written in the community itself like it's it's
it's not a new thing that people argue about what happened on June 4th it's not new that people are
really mistrustful of each other and that there are actual, like, government forces that infiltrate and create, like,
basically deny other people's struggles, like, when that government is themselves perpetuating it.
And I guess it just is really hard when fellow organizers that you otherwise really like want to get along with are
are like uncritical of the state that has oppressed your family because you're just kind of like
you're kind of like wait so are we have we had a conversation about this like we clearly haven't
talked enough if this is what you
believe in and it's just a little bit hard because it's like community building is not
assuming that we're in solidarity community building is actually like doing that hard work
like what is your community experiencing and what is my community experiencing how are we being like weaponized against each other
like yeah how are these governments like manipulating like communities but that's
like really hard when trust has been probably broken like yeah immediately yeah i think you're
so right that it's it's really about co-optation and a lot of it like
what i've witnessed is really so much about um and this is like like you're saying jane this is
a much older dynamic than you know just the past couple years is like uh states being able to use
this kind of home and diaspora framework to um demand loyalty through like targeting diaspora people's guilt yeah um and so
there's so many like guilty diaspora people i know who are like you know usually from usually
from a class perspective right because they had the reason their family had the resources to leave
or uh they were not born in the home country or whatever because of their family background, that type of thing.
And they want to subsume that by taking this radical, you know, anti-U.S., anti-Canada stance, which is fine.
Like, obviously being anti-U.S. and anti-Canada is a good thing.
the thing that's really kind of frustrated me the most is seeing these kind of like radical folks, uh, in North America, um, especially queer folks who are like, they'll take the most reactionary
positions against women and queer and, you know, LGBT folks in China, for example, uh, by supporting
a state that is, uh, repressing them. Right. So it's, it's such cognitive dissonance to me. Like,
I don't understand why these folks can't see,
um,
that they're kind of perpetuating this violence in,
in the service of this kind of overarching imperative of not ever saying
anything bad about China,
because it'll help.
It'll,
it'll bolster the U S propaganda war machine,
which is like,
there's absolutely a way that, I mean, that
absolutely happens if you do that, uh, uncarefully, right. If you just kind of repeat, um, U.S. media
narratives and stuff like that. But I think there's absolutely a way to do both. Right. And,
um, to me, the way to do that is to not support the state discourses that demand loyalty from the
diaspora, but to actually, you know, it's the grassroots thing, right? It's just kind of like,
we support queer folks around the world who are struggling under repression from their governments
and that type of thing. And being able to very carefully say that with nuance,
to be against both at the same time for example um that's really really
difficult right um and people have very kind of vitriolic reactions when you try and do that
um as you know she said up top uh chris so i don't know this this is still the conundrum for me
because i i tend to take the more rigid stance against these folks. But I know people who are very kind of, they take a more compassionate stance,
which is like, these are newly politicized youth.
They're just coming to a lot of these politics and positions.
And, you know, being anti-US is better than not being anti-US,
is what a lot of folks say.
And, you know, I agree to a certain extent,
but then it's also like,
if they're being miseducated in these histories,
that's okay to a certain point when you're exploring
and discovering these things and becoming radicalized.
But, you know, like Jane said,
there's also these kind of material direct impacts
that you have on people that you work with,
that you organize with, that are your friends or loved ones.
That, you know, that kind of explanation of like, oh,
they're just learning is like,
it's insufficient in that kind of individual way because you're still hurting
people and threatening people around you. Right.
So I think there has to be a balance in like being able to steer folks in,
into these like non-stalinist
non-statist uh directions even while they're discovering i hate how we're even having to
be like steering people into a non-stalinist perspective i'm just like i i'm not horny for
stalin i like the thing that pisses me off about this is they're not even Stalinists.
This is the thing that's frustrating.
If they were merely 20th century Stalinists, we wouldn't be having this argument.
Because 20th century Stalinism is like, well, yeah, okay, 20th century Stalinists are anti-market economy.
And it's like, no, they've somehow found a way to take literally the worst aspects of Stalinism and then be like, okay, but what if Stalinism but also capitalism good at the same time?
And it's just like, how did you do this?
Like, how did you come up with an ideology that like, I don't know. I mean, I think also a thing that's been frustrating to me about this is like it's a way of sort of – it becomes this way of channeling – you know, you have the diaspora guilt on the one hand, then you have just random sort of like white leftists sort of white guilt and and it becomes this way of like channeling that into this sort of fall anti-racism
where you know you get you get people who are like actual professional like hacks right like
roger day for example being like uh you know doing things like well if you if you if you
criticize the chinese state at all it's xenophobia and like you're directly leading to people getting killed and it's like no that's not how this works and there's this kind of it's it's it's it's this
problem of they have this this fundamental inability to see chinese people as people
and not a sort of undifferentiated mass that can be sort of rallied
behind an ideology and i don't know that's been
i think weird to deal with because you know like yeah like you you're always just in in chinese communities
like you're always you're just you're just gonna have like you know there's gonna be a few people
who are just sort of like pro ccp right-wingers right that's just that's just a sort of default
political position but there's there's this way in which you you get this you know people adopting i mean just things that like if you
said this about any like white american for example if you argued that any like a white
american making a thousand dollars a year wasn't in poverty or like you just couldn't do it you
like you know it's it's literally impossible like you'd be laughed out of the room or you know like
you're you would you'd be like ratioed until the cows come home but you can just but everyone and
people just say this constantly like this is just a thing that was like well if you look at poverty
reduction it's like well chinese china has eliminated uh absolute poverty it's like yeah
okay a thousand dollars a year is outside of this now and i think there's these ways in which
it becomes hard to to intervene in this stuff because like every every asian person specifically
every chinese person just becomes a sort of token that like you know you just sort of like throw at
each other as just like oh well yeah uh here's a chinese person who says the CCP is good it's like well here's another Chinese person
who says that it's bad and it's like you
never
it's like on both
sides whether the pro CCP people
realize it or not it's their agencies being sort
of stripped by them and they've been turned into this sort of
instrumentalized
like you know in
the same thing that they're also doing to us is that they're
turning into sort of these instruments that you can use to like back your own sort of political agenda and this
i don't know i like this has gotten me to just i i just don't work with these people anymore
like we tried it it was a disaster they screwed us over and so i don't know but but i think that's that's that's a lonely stance in a lot of ways like you
know if you take this kind of like hardline position you're not gonna most people even
other people who don't support it probably won't follow you there know. It's weird because I find a lot of organizing is really lonely. It's like,
it's, it's not like, like, I want to boast around being like, why aren't you all donating to this?
But that's not, that's also guilt, right? That's like projecting guilt onto other people.
That's also guilt, right? That's like projecting guilt onto other people. And that's not an effective tool. And I think that like, like, you're so doing it in a little group project, for lack of a better word. But it's sort of like, how do we make this sustainable when
it's so lonely? And how do we use the resources that are available to us to not replicate these systems yet again and I guess when it comes to the lefts
or progressives in Canada it's like so frustrating because it's like there isn't
actually a lot of community outreach to like racialized communities there's no translation there's a lot of like
non-profit work that is frankly very draining and co-opted themselves um like it's it's a bunch of
social service organizations in a trench coat and a bunch of political organizations that don't work together or talk to each other in a
trench coat. And so I understand why youth would join like leftist,
like radical organizing, but it,
it's just really heartbreaking when it's your,
they end up reading, in reading groups where
they're reading historical, or so-called historical texts that erase your histories, like, it's just
such a, like, like, reading is great, like, political education is incredible um but I'm like it's hard not to grow
resentful when the guy at the top is a university educated white dude and they're reading texts that
literally erase your entire family and it's um that like, yeah, for me, it's like, just really personal that way. It's like,
there are people who are suffering in the present and you're reading a text
by a white sociologist from the eighties. Like, like not like I'm like,
it's not that like,
I don't think that we should do that political education. It's just that, like, at a reading group, will you listen to me when I call you out?
this work is really lonely especially if you take if you stand up for yourself or you you really kind of stand by your principles it's i think that's so true and um you know not to speak
for everyone in lausanne but just my experience has been like you know everyone just everyone
hates us yeah like it's you know we get hate from the right we get hate from the left um
and from hong kong diaspora from hong kong locals hate from the left. Um, and from Hong Kong to
ask for from Hong Kong locals, like it's, it's just, sometimes it's really hard to see, you know,
because we're, we're trying to stay true to our principles, but it's hard to see sometimes, uh,
whether there's an impact or whether we're just kind of like in a little echo chamber with 20
other people, you know what I mean? And, um, it's hard to find that balance because I don't want to become more and
more pragmatist where I'm just like, all right, well, you know,
I'll work with these people,
but I don't agree with them on these fundamental issues just on this one
campaign or whatever it happens to be. I don't know.
I know that's a part of like building power, quote unquote,
like that a lot of certain socialist groups like to do or they really focus on that kind of thing but
uh i don't know if it's too much of an academic view to to be like if you're gonna do it that way
you're you're changing the outcome already right because you're not addressing these kind of
fundamental issues from the start.
And I think that view can sometimes lead to a lot of non-starters,
where things don't ever get off the ground,
because you insist on whatever fundamental principle that you want to stick to,
like anti-nationalism, for example. So yeah, just kind of reiterating and commiserating with you all in the
loneliness of that people think that like not working in these sort of united front things
is is this like sort of pure ideological position but like you know i mean so
when occupy ice was happening right occupy ice wound up being a kind of big friend thing and
one of the groups involved with it was the was the party for socialism liberation who are this sort of
like very much sort of like the the base the tanky cult like they've there's not a lot of other
horrible stuff that we'll talk about at some point but i mean one of the things that happens
in occupy ice is that they you know in philadelphia
they they destroy the encampment uh like they they they convince enough people to just leave
and do this completely pointless like march they can do a photo op of like people in front of the
mayor's office and they do it and the camp collapses because suddenly there's not enough
people you know they don't even get a majority of the people but it doesn't matter because they
pulled enough people out that you know that the camp couldn't be held against the cops anymore and i think that in some senses
is this kind of microcosm of what they of what these people actually do which is that you know
these people will never have any actual institutional power right you know they're
never going to create their like salinist state or whatever like they're never going to get this
they're never going to hold any power what they can do is there are enough of them they can they can siphon off enough people from actual leftist
movements into this sort of just like white room pro-capitalist stuff that they can they can cause
movements to collapse and i mean they've done this they did a lot of this during the uprising in 2020
there is a lot of them you know intentionally leading people on pointless marches there's a
lot of cooperating with the police and stuff like that.
And I think that, you know, it's like having seen that like multiple times, right?
I, you know, I, you know, for me, like not working with him is an incredibly pragmatic position because we tried it and they blew it up.
But it's this problem, especially, you know, you have people who are radicalized in like 2020 and it's like well yeah i mean i don't know like
a lot of them never saw this stuff right don't know who these people are and their first introduction
to the left is this like incredibly well financed uh like media blitz and i think that has consequences both for us as sort of like people on the left doing – like Chinese people on the left doing our own diaspora organizing.
And it has consequences for the broader left.
And you can see other sort of versions of this, right, where you have a sort of right-wing movement infiltrating leftist spaces and destroying them like they're like there was thing like deep green resistance basically blew up a uh like an
anti-lithium protest in the u.s by just like going there and just hammering transphobia constantly
and so i don't know i i think there's there's this sort of dilemma because
fundamentally they will say a lot of the same things we do,
but we have fundamentally different goals.
And that manifests itself
on the level of organizing individual campaigns,
but it's something that's really hard
to get people to see.
I think we've lost a lot of movements because of it yeah not to be you know
not to pile on the cynicism or anything but i think i i honestly do think uh you know as all
this new cold war stuff ramps up which is like completely independent of what a lot of folks
like grassroots folks are even thinking or advocating.
It's all just kind of up to the,
the two,
you know,
Chinese and U S governments as they ramp up their own tensions.
I think it's really going to start like people are going to start these people
who are,
you know,
tankies or whatever are going to start narrowing our choices further and further,
right? Like, you know, soon, it's going to be anathema to not, you know, take the
anti US position. And that's it. You know what I mean? And I think that's really scary. To me,
I don't, I, last year, I thought there was still room for intervention, but things are closing so quickly.
And my personal opinion is that a lot of these bigger groups like No Cold War and others like Code Pink,
they have much more funding than a lot of other groups who are forwarding more nuanced positions.
a lot of other groups who are forwarding more nuanced positions.
And so, like you were saying, it's just like these media blitzes,
these shiny events and all those different things are very appealing to newly radicalized folks, right?
Because they think that this is where the power is
and this is where we can actually make a difference.
And yeah, to me, things look pretty bleak in the near future.
Uh,
it just takes one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I will say,
I think,
I think they,
they,
they made one major mistake,
which is that they tried to do the new,
the push,
the giant,
like new cold war with China thing at the exact moment that the U S and
Russia were like heating up and actually,
and this left them like kind of off balance because they'd been for the
last two years the whole thing's been the u.s is going to accelerate tensions with china u.s is
going to accelerate with china and then it turns out that they're not doing that and in fact like
they're gearing up for just more proxy war stuff with russia which is the thing they've been doing
for the past decade so i think like i don't know like i I think their problem essentially is that they run into reality
and there are certain points at which
you can
lie a lot,
right? But
when the lie that you're pushing
is about what the mainstream media is going
to say, and the mainstream media just
pivots and is just completely
about something that's entirely unrelated,
I think that hurts them. everything that the other problem they have that that makes me hopeful is
that the way their their base is getting split by just the anti-vax grifters because so many of
their media people just you know are are just are just full-on grifters and you know and you're
you're seeing splits right now in gray zone about like basically between pro and anti-vax factions and i think that also will help us in
the long run because you know say say what you want about most leftists and even most tankies like
anti-vax is like a bit far even for them and because because, you know, and the other thing is like the, the, it's,
it's hard to do anti-vax without beginning to take positions that just
like,
it's been baked into just sort of anti-Chinese racism in,
in so many ways that like,
you can't really like,
you know,
like you can't simultaneously be pro incrediblyincredibly ccp and then
also be talking about how the u.s is trying to implement social credit right you know these are
these these positions are just contradictory and i think that's something that plays to our
advantage and i think is weakening them to some extent because they've they they tried to have their cake and eat it too,
and now they're sort of, I don't know,
their conspiracy theory base is interfering with their left base
in ways that I think are helpful for us.
It's just so interesting how the anti-vax position
is literally rooted in racism and ableism like um there's
an article in the conversation called the inherent racism of the anti-vax movement that has like
really good history around white settlers being afraid of African medicine.
And then there's also just the ableism of assuming that your kid will get autism.
If you get vaccinated, that's been a huge thing before the pandemic.
And that was part of how this was effective in the first place and um yeah and obviously the anti-chinese um like uh anti-asian like scapegoating as well but um I guess that also ties into like just how broadly ableist the left
is and how like disability justice is not something that a lot of people know about um
or care about and it's yeah I don't know It's a huge problem for me as a disabled person.
Yeah. I wanted to add really quickly too. I mean, I totally agree with you. And, you know,
I think one of the pernicious things that I've noticed though, is like these kind of big,
you know, quote unquote, anti-imperialist accounts, like on Instagram, for example,
imperialist accounts like on instagram for example um they they take this anti-vax position precisely by saying that it's anti-racist to take that position which is like it sounds that
sounds very counterintuitive it's not that does not reflect reality but they will point to instances instances of, you know, anti-Black U.S. medicine, for example, you know, like the Tuskegee
experiments, and then say, this is why we shouldn't trust the U.S. government on any of this,
right? Because look what they've done in the past. And it's like, that logic makes a lot of sense
in a lot of ways, right? But, you know, they obviously ignore the impacts that, you know,
But, you know, they obviously ignore the impacts that, you know, anti-vax and COVID has had on, you know, Black and other POC populations, right?
So I think, I don't know if it's exactly, like, I don't know if it is appearing as hypocrisy to those people and then their audiences too, right?
Because I think they're able to spin it in this way. Yeah, but I think my argument here is I don't think those are the same bases.
I don't think that the majority of the tanky base are people who are anti-vaxxers.
And you can see a line of this, right, of one of the big things that they're obsessed with the Cuban healthcare system of like with the cuban health care system right and like cuba's cuba's vaccines you see this stuff from them a lot
and you know and they'll also talk about like yeah like china's doing really well containing
i don't think those positions are like i don't think those people are the same people who are
also turning around and then talking about how like you know talk doing the kizuki
experiments the vaccines are actually like racism thing i think i think there's some overlap between
them but but i don't think that those bases line up enough for it to you know not have the effect
of just kind of like tearing them apart as their media people flip into into one of the
sort of camps and i think the other thing like you know if you look at what's happening with like uh
like max blumenthal right now is that he's just like full-on like like he's just full-on touring
with like just straight up right wingers to an extent that even like even people who've
been habituated by the sort of like syria false flags stuff into sort of working with right-wingers
like you can't look at these people that you know it's just these actually just like republican
operatives and be like well okay we're we're on the side of these people and also like support cuba i i just
i don't know i i i have i have some faith in these groups being separate and they're being
they're being a point of cognitive dissonance where the system breaks down i i guess i i've
seen people who have gotten out of tankyism by having to interact with the actual ccp
and and that that that gives me hope that there's there's there's a point of cognitive dissonance
at which it falls apart and i don't know i maybe maybe i'm just sort of like hopiumming here but i feel like it's so interesting how like there are a lot of people
for whom politics is a parlor game yeah and not their everyday like lived experience like i would
not be so like i like if i see my communities struggling um and when people are dying or people are really, like, struggling with
intergenerational trauma, I'm not gonna sit here and pontificate and theorize about, like, um,
things that don't impact my communities. Um, and yeah, like, the, the angle about class is so important here because it's like a lot of people can't insulate themselves from like the broader communities around them. in the media and your communities are like, Hey, that, that makes no sense. Like if you're actually connected to people, like,
like you would hopefully, unless you're just a big asshole,
you would hopefully take some accountability for what you're saying.
And I, yeah, I just,
I just worry because this pandemic has also like really isolated people.
Yeah.
Like they, people are not like talking isolated people. Yeah. Like they,
people are not like talking to each other and that makes it more easy for
people to,
to be like,
Oh,
I'm,
I'm just right.
Like,
this is my perspective.
And I just,
yeah,
I think about that,
the conditions in which we come to certain conclusions,
like the conditions under which we become more vulnerable
to culty type things, or, like, oversimplified, like, understandings of history, because, like,
I feel like the, the anti-vax, like, not taking the vaccine, being anti-racist is a very, like,
uh anti-racist is a very like manipulative like argument because it ignores the fact that these experiments um on black and indigenous people in north america and beyond are like about
neglect and are about um deliberately deliberate ongoing genocide and how like it's completely
understandable for for people to not trust the government but but like when the vaccine is
actually a tool of protecting people like there's not a lot of campaigns other than people who are rooted in disability justice
saying, hey, vaccines are here to protect us.
And how can we resist the medical industrial complex
enough such that we can make people feel safer
taking a vaccine how can we
bring people in as opposed to fear-mongering because i think that fear is so powerful it's
like once you're afraid you're you're not gonna you're not gonna even look into the research
right so i don't know it's for me i just think of all of this as like manipulation and
human psychology on a on a like broad social basis because it's like the the stage is a big cult and
these little groups are little cults yeah yeah do you two have any other uh things you want to say before we head out happy new year yeah
year of the tiger i'm looking forward to retweeting art like actually
okay not january 1st yeah yeah we should i think my okay okay close closing less depressing question yeah what do you think is
the etiquette on retweeting
by like yeah
retweeting like you're the tiger art before
the actual before like Luna New
Years
I've been torn on it
because I just I like the art but also
I'm like it's not
the years yet I haven't seen any I, but also I'm like, it's not the years yet.
I haven't seen any.
I guess I'm lucky.
I have been either guilty or just not guilty,
depending on how you see it.
I have retweeted all of the tiger art on January 1st
because I did not care. i wanted to see the tigers
um but i hope that i see more tigers like in the coming days because if the tigers aren't coming
or if we aren't retweeting it that that is an issue like there needs to be like a second like a
like a like a like like an like a second wave of the tiger art um no pressure
to all of the artists well all right so if if people want to find you or work that you have
that you want people to find uh where where can they do that or if you also do not want them to
find you that is completely also valid uh the internet is terrible and a mistake yeah i'm mostly in do not perceive me mode
completely valid if you want to check uh out laosan stuff feel free uh laosancollective.com work? My social media is, um, keepakallpoetry. Um, on Instagram, I, uh, am, I have this graphic
that I've turned into a sticker and it's, it raises funds for families who were affected by the fires and floods.
It's a sticker that says immunocompromised people are worth protecting.
And it went viral multiple times.
So I guess I cannot help but be perceived at this point, despite objections.
So yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, I got poetry.
Yeah, this is what happens when you create things
that are i both incredibly politically powerful and also gorgeous so yeah uh be be be cursed with
i the reward for good work which is also being perceived
yeah yeah well you can find uh you can find us at happen here pod
on twitter and instagram
there's the cool zone you can find it
yeah go go go go retweet tiger
art
go throw a brick at your sheriff
non-actionable
and yeah destroy the American and Chinese states
happy new years
Chinese states. Happy New Year's!
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It could happen here is the podcast that this is about things falling apart and how to maybe unfollow them apart.
I'm Robert Evans, your host, and your other hosts are Christopher and Garrison and our producer Sophie.
How's everybody doing today?
Great.
How's everybody feel about war?
Oh.
Yeah.
Now, if you were to guess,
based on your knowledge of history,
what generation of war we're in right now,
what would y'all guess?
I feel like war isn't...
It's newer in relation to like human beings like the idea of war i'm guessing like there's been like battles but like the idea of like war i feel like
isn't super old compared to how long there's been humans walking around so i don't know this is
maybe i mean i i know the answer but like it's it's like i don't
know like it's definitely we definitely passed through like at least a couple of stages and
we're at least a couple yeah chris like gotta be at least 12 12 okay at least 12 you are way ahead
of william s lynd who spoilers is the guy who came up with the concept of fourth generation war
which is what this episode is about, right?
One of the things when we talk about things falling apart is the unsettling growth of a number of different hybrid conflicts, Ukraine being the most like blatant modern example, Syria being the deadliest example in our lifetimes.
But like these weird hybrid conflicts that are a mix
of shit happening on the internet and like disinformation going out all over the world.
You could even think to like what was happening in Bolivia a year or so back and like all those
weird accounts that were like based around Langley, Virginia claiming to support the military coup.
And you can look at like from the same, this disinformation brought out by like the Russian
state that is usually as part of like a conflict, either, you know, they have disinfo operations in Syria, disinfo
operations around the conflict in Ukraine that are kind of designed to muddy the issues
and detract international support and also to like drum up support within for like in
the case of Ukraine, you had like this media blitz against the legitimacy of
the Ukrainian state in favor of like a more like traditionally Russian style of government in the
east and like that led to this breakaway republic that was supported by the Russian government and
like – so these are like hybrid conflicts is kind of how these are referred to.
And there was a guy named William S. Lind who in 1989 wrote a book with a couple of US military analysts.
Like he was an analyst for the military.
He was not serving in the military.
The other guys he wrote this thing with were serving at the time.
And they wrote this book kind of trying to – basically what Lind was doing, he was very influenced by our loss in Vietnam.
When I say our here, like the loss of the American state in Vietnam.
And he was trying to determine like number one, kind of like find a way to codify and explain the changes that were happening to warfare in this period. He was also influenced by what was happening in Afghanistan, what the Russians were experiencing,
and find a way to like move forward and allow the United States to win wars again.
That was William S. Lynn's goal.
And so he came up with this concept of,
or he and some other guys came up with
what they called fourth generation warfare.
And first generation warfare
is like Napoleonic era warfare.
So as Garrison was saying,
you may note that he kind of starts his that's pretty
late that's pretty late we had a lot of wars before the 1600s or the 1800s yeah there's a lot
of stuff that leads up to like i yeah i if i was going to try to categorize different types of
warfare that would not be the one i start with well and like the reality of course as we'll talk
about like when you start looking at different kinds of warfare is there's wars that look
remarkably like the shit going on in afghanistan and ukraine that are occurring like
several thousand years ago um like i mean some of those in like in the same places too like yeah
it just like if you wanted to if you wanted to talk about like kind of the modern style of wars
that we saw and that we've seen really in the last like 150 years they're not all that dissimilar in
a lot of ways from like the kind of conflicts you saw between Rome and Carthage, which are these
really like big nation state style conflicts and have a lot of similarities.
But William S. Lynn described the first generation of warfare as beginning after the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the 30 years war.
And it's the kind of warfare where you have these like big, tightly ordered groups of
men marching towards each other and like firing very inaccurate weapons in mass together, right?
This is ended by the era of the machine gun and the semi-automatic rifle or the bolt reaction rifle, I should say.
And that leads us to second generation warfare, which is linear fire and movement with heavy reliance on indirect fire.
So that's still huge groups of guys charging, but they're not marching in close order. They're not like firing in volleys. And they're supported
by heavy artillery, like World War I kind of shit, right? Really, we start to see this in like 1870,
and then World War I is kind of the height of this kind of warfare. And over the course of
World War I, we merge in, again, this is William S. Lynnn's way we merge from second generation to third generation
warfare which is where you've got infiltration tactics to bypass enemy defensive lines and
collapse it which is kind of the germans and their aufdrags tactic and stormtrooper tactics
are really kind of uh pioneering that you've got the idea of defense in depth um and so this need
to bypass the enemy and like this leads to blitzkrieg and leads to all sorts of shit.
And then that kind of starts to collapse and Lin's estimation around Vietnam.
And you get what's called fourth generation warfare.
I'm actually just going to read a quote from a military history wiki that I thought had a pretty good description of all of this.
Fourth generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non-state
actor fighting a state. This fighting can be physically done, such as by modern examples,
Hezbollah or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ilham. In this realm, the VNSA, these violent
non-state actors, use all three levels of fourth generation warfare. These are the physical,
actual combat, which is considered the least important, mental, the will to fight, belief
in victory, et cetera, and the moral, which is the most important, Lind says, and includes cultural norms, etc.
So obviously, I think that this is kind of nonsense.
There's a lot of people – so there's a lot of folks – the people who buy into this, and it's very popular on the right, will look at like what's happening in Ukraine. It's a perfect example of fourth generation warfare because you have Russia flooding the zone using Sputnik and a bunch of other kind of media organizations
to drum up discord and like anger between East and West in Ukraine and support for potential
Russian action at the same time as you have them backing this dictator. And then you have like the
West sort of supporting the people protesting against those dictators and like – so you've
got like this digital conflict, this information conflict that eventually leads to fighting
on the ground.
One of the areas in which I think Lind is really off is talking about like the physical
as the least important, especially if you're going to consider Ukraine an example of fourth
generation warfare because if the Russian military had not intervened, there would not still be a
conflict in Ukraine.
The separatists would not still hold land.
And in fact, the separatists were on the edge of getting completely wiped out by the Ukrainian
military because they were a bunch of non-state actors with minimal support and minimal weaponry
before the Russians moved in brigades of active duty combat troops and armor, including like
gigantic fucking missile launchers, which they used to shoot down that Malaysian Airlines flight. Like it's just not, I don't think that what Linda's saying is very,
very well describes what's actually going on in the world. But it is important to understand
the concept of fourth generation warfare and fifth generation warfare, which we'll talk about in a bit,
because it is so useful in
the way in which particularly guys like Steve Bannon conceive of conflict because you will
hear the term fourth generation warfare constantly.
And it's also something that is used a lot within our military establishment.
Now, a lot of people hate it.
And within – you can find a lot of papers by dudes writing like analysts who are working
for the defense department for the army
actively like shitting on lind and talking about how he's at best is kind of like reinvented ideas
that have existed in warfare for thousands of years and he's kind of summarized things in a
way that that is unneedlessly flattening and like some people will say you basically like ripped up
like added the internet to klauswitz uh and pretended that you'd invented a new style of – or that you defined a new style of conflict.
Anyway, that's like an introduction to the idea of fourth-generation warfare, right?
And there's a lot of things that he gets.
Again, like if you're a history – a military history wonk, which Lind pretends to be, a lot of shit that he gets wrong.
pretends to be a lot of shit that he gets wrong.
So one of the things that he says,
like one of his famous phrases that every military eventually craps in its own mess kit.
The idea that like every military that is great
eventually like has a gigantic fuck up
because they get too used to doing the same thing,
which is true.
And he describes it as like,
the Prussians did it in 1806,
after which they designed and put into service
a much more improved model mess kit through the Scharnhorst military reforms.
The French did it in 1870, after which they took down from the shelf an old model mesh kit, the mass draft army of the First Republic, and put it back into service.
The Japanese did it in 1945, after which they threw their mesh kit away, swearing they would never eat again.
And we did it in Korea, in Vietnam, and now in four new wars. So far, we've had the only military that's just really dumb statement.
That's all really historically inaccurate.
So, for example, it's true that, like, the Prussians had a great military, which then got its butt kicked by Napoleon, and they had to completely redesign it.
And by the time 1870 came around, they were extremely dominant on the battlefield against the French. Number one, he's crediting the military reforms of like tactics and strategy
and ignoring things like Krupp inventing an entirely new kind of cannon that was utterly
dominant on the battlefield. He's also ignoring the fact that this Prussian army, he's saying
like the US is the only army that does the same thing over and over again and fails and keeps on
eating. Well, the Prussian army is the army the Germans took into battle in World War I and II.
And spoilers, they didn't learn enough
from either of those wars.
He also talks about how like the French
had their, you know, crapping in the mess kit moment
in 1870 after the Franco-Prussian war
and they changed their army and it was much better.
And I was like, well, they didn't win World War I.
Like they were on the side that won,
but if it had been them against Germany, they would have gotten fucking steamrolled.
Like it was not going well for them for quite a while, and they lost a whole generation of young men.
So maybe – and again, this is like what he's saying is basically we – because we're losing so constantly, the reason that we're losing is not because we are picking bad conflicts. It's not because we're picking to engage in conflicts when we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. It's not because we use military force in like a fundamentally venal and corrupt way in order to benefit a small cabal of military industrial corporations.
we don't have good battle doctrine, and that's why we're not winning in these conflicts,
which ignores everything about the reality of the conflicts that he's talking about.
The problem is not a lack of combat dominance, which is what you were seeing with the Prussians fighting Napoleon.
It's what you were seeing with the French fighting the Germans in 1870, right?
In those cases, the Prussians had a massive failure of combat dominance against the French, and the French had a massive failure in combat against the Germans.
Their doctrine was just worse.
U.S. soldiers are great at getting into gunfights and great at winning gunfights.
The problem is not a lack of combat ability.
The problem is that there's no way to win the conflicts that we're getting into.
They are unwinnable wars uh that were never things that
like no amount of change in doctrine would have made afghanistan a success because it was a stupid
war yeah like it like if if that were true like coin would have worked and coin yeah no like a
coin counterinsurgency absolutely yeah yeah just complete total and utter failure like enormous numbers of people dead enormous
numbers of like people traumatized for generations and the u.s still just lost both wars yeah it's
just and and and if you really dig into lind and others like him what they're actually saying when
they say that like we need to reform like the way the military works with new battle documents
we need to be killing even more people we just didn't kill enough in vietnam like the way the military works with new battle documents, we need to be killing even more people. We just didn't kill enough in Vietnam,
like the 5 million we bombed or so.
That wasn't enough people.
Like that's the reform that he's really talking about.
Is Lin one of those people who like rants about the,
like the El Salvadorian option?
I'm sure he does.
I don't know exactly what he said about El Salvador.
He's a fascinating kind of fascist um he is absolutely a fascist he was the director of the center for cultural conservatism
at the free congress foundation um he wrote a or he helped to to popularize a declaration of
cultural independence by cultural conservatives um which is like these it there's a lot of the
seeds of the shit that we're seeing today right
that like american culture institutions are being collapsed because of like liberal decadence
and conservatives cultural conservatives should separate themselves and like set up parallel
institutions oh so that is where bannon comes in and that's where bannon comes in that's where
like fucking andrew torba and gab come and they all advocate this shit yeah because they're all they all adhere
to that kind of uh uh yeah like politics has culture uh and and there's downstream yeah
and there's some weird differences with lind like he's a huge mass transit and urban rail advocate
which i guess i agree with him on like fine every once in a while a bad person does have a good
opinion he loves he loves him some fucking city trains and stuff.
But he's also – he was a major factor.
He was one of the earliest like prominent conservatives who was like yelling about cultural Marxism in kind of the modern political period.
I mean that makes sense because he was real – it sounds like he's real into metapolitics.
Yes, he's super into metapolitics. Yeah, so like all of this stuff makes a whole lot of sense if you're – yeah, if you know what meta-politics are, it also kind of explains how he developed the different generations of warfare.
Using it through a framework of meta-politics actually really makes that fit.
If you believe like Breitbart famously stated that like politics is downstream from culture and if you also believe what Klaus – I think it was Klaus Witz that said that like war is politics by other means then like you can make cultural changes that can cause wars and like
yeah like that's a lot like kind of i think the thought process behind lynn yeah because this
this really defines what he means by fourth generation warfare of war being handed out
specifically by the culture instead of having it be abstracted to be like people marching towards
each other with guns because yeah he's he's putting the he's putting the culture instead of having it be abstracted to be like people marching towards each other with guns because yeah he's he's putting the he's putting the culture kind of back into it
yeah and he and he's and he's and it and obviously culture was never not a factor
and of course not like every single war has been a major factor like all of this shit he talks about
as being characteristic of fourth generation warfare has been happening in one way or another
for thousands of years it's not that these
things are done in like temporal succession it's like because like a lot of the stuff that makes
up fourth generation warfare like the more like guerrilla warfare aspects come way before people
with guns marching towards each other right afghans doing that to alexander the goddamn great
before the birth of christ a lot of a lot of this fourth-gen stuff is actually like kind of more similar to what original warfare probably would have been like.
Yeah.
Which I think to his credit, I think he does actually recognize that at some point in his writing.
No, and the thing about this is, well, we can pick at it, and I think there is a lot that's ridiculous in his attitude.
It's close enough to the way that reality works that if you're
going, if you're thinking about conflict
in this framework, you can be very successful.
It's not like an, it's inaccurate
in some ways because he's
wrongly describing why certain things
work, I think is a lot of what he's doing.
And he's wrong about winning wars, I'll say that.
If
the American military were to make
fucking Lind the Secretary of Defense and give him total power, like he would keep on losing wars as hard as we've been losing wars for everyone listening to this his lifetime.
They're kind of like the propaganda arms and stuff in order to – the media, for liberatory movements or for like just like what's happening in Ukraine. among the people of a country, it's probably the CIA carrying out some sort of op.
That's Lyndon, his people, and people influenced by him have been a big part of pushing that.
It's why Steve Bannon is so friendly with some guys on chunks of they call themselves the left and whatnot.
It's because there's a lot of ties there.
And that is an area in which they've been successful
because international support really matters.
You know, it's, and I think like the death of internationalism
is one of the bigger successes
that like these thinkers have kind of had.
But yeah, I don't know.
That's a chunk of what I had to say.
You guys want to know more about William S. Lind?
Because he's...
I certainly want to learn more about William S. Lind.
William S. Lind, cultural conservative, right?
Big on the traditional Christian values of America.
You want to guess who he considers his ideal leader?
JFK?
No, the House of Hohenzollern.
He's a Prussian monarchist. Waitist wait no is he a hegel guy oh my oh yeah yeah i mean i think he is okay everything's clicking if he's into better
if he's into better politics he's certainly into hegel and he thinks that the prussian
the prussian monarchy was the best government there ever was and was like unfairly crushed
by the rest of the world and like should have won world war
one and everything would.
And like he's,
he's,
and so he's,
he's very much like a conservative monarchist and a weird kind because like,
my God,
dude,
if you're looking at like monarchs who were like the,
the Hohenzollerns had like in the modern era,
like the first Kaiser Wilhelm was broadly competent,
but, like, it went to shit as soon as Wilhelm II.
And he blames all of World War I on the fucking czars.
Like, it's very silly.
Like, his ideas of history are, like, very stupid.
I have an incredibly silly theory of history
based on Hegelgel which is that
like every explain hegel for the listeners i know do not this is this is this is the thing okay okay
this this is this is my crank theory of history based on hegel which is that every about 40 years
someone attempts to apply hegel someone like takes charge of an incredibly large state
and tries to use Hegel to run it.
And every single time
they don't understand the dialectic and it
doesn't work. So this, for example,
like if you take this on a
very sort of granular level, right, you have Mao.
Mao has no idea what a dialectic is. You
can read Mao's work. He has no
clue. Like he just doesn't,
he doesn't get it he
thinks that a dialectic is when one person with a bat hits the other hits the other side and then
when you destroy the other side the dialectic is resolved right like that that's not what it is
right uh Mao like because of this the entire Chinese revolution just implodes everyone dies
it returns to capitalism is a complete failure right you know and and like a lot of
the nazis are very much into hegel they have a again incredibly similar failures the other group
people like lind i think is part of this is that all of the people who planned the iraq war were
like enormous segelians right but they they they'd gotten to hegel through this weird like they they
they'd been doing this they'd be doing these counterinsurgency stuff and so but their
counterinsurgency stuff was they read mao and you know so that so they're they're reading Hegel but
then they're also reading Hegel through Mao and Mao doesn't understand what's going on either
and so when they try to apply the Hegelian dialectic and they're like okay well the end of
the end of the end of history the end of the Hegelian dialectic is the United States we were
just going to impose this on Iraq and it catastrophic failure so the moral of the story is do not attempt to apply hagel you
will completely annihilate your entire political movement like every every everything everything
you love and dream of everything like every ideology you've ever had uh it will it will
crumble beneath you and uh yeah you will watch your cities you watch your cities and armies burn
that's that's fine because when i start resistance movement, we're just going to be post-canty
and object-oriented
ontologist terrorists.
You guys are just going through a bunch of names
and I'm going to get like 80% of people
are just, why the fuck am I hearing about
these dead people? The thing I actually wanted to
bring up on this is like
how 4th and 5th
gen, the ideas of 4th and 5th
gen get applied onto like more insurrection-based, like, revolts or groups, right?
You can see, like, groups like the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front kind of pick and choose elements of the fourth and fifth generation warfare to kind of, to see how their groups formed or were operated.
to see how their groups formed or were operated um and even you could argue that like ted kaczynski was like a fifth generation warfare because he was completely autonomous and the actions okay
let's let's introduce the idea of fifth generation because we just talked about fourth generation
warfare which was lynn's idea fifth generation warfare is a concept that's come up i believe
daniel abbott is his name. And the idea was that like,
it's a new type of warfare that like characterizes a lot of conflicts in the modern era,
where almost everything is non-kinetic, but it is still military action. So military social
engineering, misinformation, cyber attacks, not just like decentralized, but like states actually
using organized and often fighting non-state actors who
are using kind of the same doing the same thing yeah yeah and this and a lot of this would involve
artificial intelligence fully autonomous system systems not just botnets but like algorithms that
can like handle a lot of the quote-unquote fighting um william s lyndh hates the idea of
fourth generation fifth generation warfare because he's a narcissist and he doesn't like anyone using other ideas that is out see he misinterpreted the dialectic it keeps going
so what i was what i was thinking is like is like a lot of you can apply fifth generation
warfare to like these types of groups who are mostly like they they they do some they do some
fourth gen tactics in terms of like terrorism right like they they they do some they do some fourth gen tactics in terms of like
terrorism right like they they try to make political statements through terrorism
and have terrorism be an influential thing but their demand like you rarely like fifth
generation stuff has not been around long enough and no one's really been super successful at it
in the past enough time for us like to like recognize that right because you can look at
a lot of a lot of like uh instructionary type stuff around like the again i'm just going to
use the earth liberation front as an example of like a group that attempted kind of these types
of tactics um and they may have succeeded in the physical sense but they did not succeed in like
the cultural sense really um so trying to like look at these types of things and how they relate to like specific you know if
you're going to use like the ty guzinski example same thing except he's not a group he's just one
person which is kind of more of a fifth gen things he is like fully autonomous whereas i think uh
you know stuff like the elf tried to have that kind of militant group dynamic that is more similar to fourth generation warfare
so it's like this picking and choosing
of trying to do physical action
than trying to do cultural action
and it's
not like the things that have
succeeded
let's take for instance
the defend the
Cascadian forest thing who just got
just got
the
specific action they were working on to protect
a specific chunk of the forest,
the judge approved their
motion, because they were
actually successful, because they
did not form this militant thing
right now, they were just doing the
cultural, and it actually really succeeded.
As opposed to just, you know,
burning down buildings and stuff to try to get your action forward.
So just trying to look at, like, examples of when, like, the goal is kind of the same and certain types succeed, certain types don't.
How that may influence, like, organizing and how to selectively use, like, insurrection.
But have it not be, like, a default mode for, like, always your group is better if it like insurrection, but have it not be like a default mode for like always your group is better if
it's insurrectionary.
Yeah.
And I,
one of the things that does characterize that I think is useful if we're,
because again,
I have my criticisms of the value of any of these like phrases as kind of
discrete concepts.
But one of the things that I think is useful
about the concept of fifth generation warfare
that does talk about something
that is legitimately new to conflict
that has not really existed before the internet
is omnipresence.
That the conflicts are not limited
in geographical space or in time.
And in fact, it's like a constant factor
all around you at all times
because of the way the information sphere kind of
actually functions. You can look at kind of like the mix of street fights and information warfare,
doxing and whatnot between fascists and anti-fascists for the last few years.
It's omnipresent. It's always going on. And the battle space is kind of potentially everywhere,
even though it's fairly rarely kinetic or physical.
And I do think that that's an area in which it is really worth having a new term and kind of defining a new term because that's one of the few things I think that has legitimately changed.
The internet has made all of this stuff that's been happening for thousands of years faster.
But the thing that it's really created that was not present before is this
omnipresence. So I do think that that's really useful when we're focusing on how conflict is
different. I would like to kind of think about January 6th within these frameworks, right,
of how disinformation and information was used relatively successfully to get a lot of people to actually move towards the more
backed by half
the state,
not backed by the larger majority.
And yeah,
it's like a synthesis of the
fourth generation and fifth generation ideas, which is why
there's a lot of overlap with these terms
specifically.
But seeing how one leads to another
and they're not necessarily
exclusionary yeah i think it's like the result is whether they win or lose right yeah that's that's
like that's what makes it a war is is the is the is like you decide afterwards based on the result
yeah i mean it kind of yeah that's certainly like how more modern wars happen like with afghanistan
it wasn't so much like a clear, like World War I, there's an
armistice and like a negotiated end of the war.
And at a certain date, it all ends.
It was a lot messier.
We haven't done that since, we haven't done that for the state.
Like, you know, I've never known the states to do that for my life.
No, because if you don't do that, you don't have to admit you lost.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, right.
If you just kind of like leave and shit gets real fucked up um you
can just be like for one thing you can say like ah if we'd stayed and spent more money on that war
we could have we could have pulled it out um which is one of my like there's a lot of great criticisms
of how the biden administration handled things in afghanistan last year a thousand of them but at
the end of the day it's like it was never was never going to be good. Like it was always,
it was this horrible war. We were killing way too many people. We weren't achieving anything.
And that fact was made really clear by the fact that as soon as we pulled out our guns,
everything collapsed. And that was always going to happen. And you can needle around the edges
of how we could have, you know, better taken care of people who we'd made promises to or whatever.
But at the end of the day, it was always going to be fucked because it was a thing we never
should have done.
And that's like this idea that Lind has that like, no, if we fix our doctrine, we have
better tactical doctrine.
We have better like we have one of his big ideas is he came up with this concept called
movement warfare that's been hugely influential in the way the Marine Corps functions.
And the idea behind movement warfare is like's been hugely influential in the way the Marine Corps functions.
And the idea behind movement warfare is like,
you should always have a bias towards action.
And Lind is very consciously trying to make this basically the evolution of, of a German tactic called Aufstragstaktik,
which is like individual unit tactics basically.
So it like midway through world war one,
the Germans start to realize like all these mass wave human charges aren't working great um and we should probably like figure out a way
to get around these defenses so they start training what are kind of the prototype of special forces
these like stormtroopers whose job is to like sneak in and not be seen and jump into the trenches and
like you know with fucking axes and clubs and and automatic handguns and fight in a way that
like soldiers had not really fought in a long time. A lot of it was like melee. It was this
really, and there were a lot of technical things, how to get around barbed wire, how to not be seen,
how to like deal with machine gun nests. And one of the keys to it was like the German
started to retrain their soldiers to where like, you have to have like these individual units of
five and 10 men have to have like total autonomy and then unit commanders have to have autonomy and
they need to be able to like we'll tell them we need you to be in this this place at this point
in time but it's up to you to figure out how to do that because if you're if you've got this one guy
who's three miles back giving the commands everyone's just going to get mowed down by
machine gun fire it needs to be more nimble um And that's part of why in World War I and in World War II, because the rest of the
people fighting the Germans, like even the US, had not caught up to this kind of battle doctrine by
the time World War II was over to the extent that the Germans had. And it's part of why there's such
a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of the Germans in that war is they had what is very close to,
because all modern combat tactics are
based on what the Germans started doing at the end of World War I and had really like
nailed down to a science in World War II.
And Lind is saying that like we need to extend that and like that's the thing we've gotten
too far away from and we need to have – you need to have like this bias towards movement
and this – like officers need to be super aggressive and like always
pursuing these kinds of kinetic options.
And again, as the Marine Corps battle record will show, this is very effective when you
are getting into gunfights.
But when was the last time the Marine Corps was on the side of a winning war?
Like, again, it doesn't, we can all needle about how to make our troops better at like
killing people.
But at the end of the day, we're losing wars because we're getting into wars that are not winnable.
And that's not something you're going to fix with battle doctrine.
And Lee doesn't understand that because he's a fascist.
I think it's just like this is the real like weakness of their politics, which is that it's like, yeah, well, like it's – they're trying – it's like they can't tell the difference between war and like they don't think there's a difference between war
and politics right yeah and that means that they think that there's a military solution to every
political problem and it's like no there's not and like this is this is how this is why they keep
destroying themselves right is that they they you know like like this is what happened to the
neocons right i mean the neocons are sort of held on in this kind of rump shell but it's like neoconservatism yeah and how they're just
lincoln project yeah but but it's like you know like they don't they don't have like like even
the people who used to be their base like aren't their base anymore no like those those people are
all moved on because that shit doesn't work yeah yeah yeah and it's it's like maybe they could have
maintained it if they hadn't just like literally blown it apart like trying to
conquer iraq and it's like they they all do this they all eventually are like well okay we'll find
a military solution to this and it blows up in their face because it turns out that no you can't
actually do this i mean i think all this indicates a general progression into the more meta politics
idea and and culture as punk's idea is that we're trying to solve all these political problems at least like locally within us you know we're trying to try to do them
culturally and choose through them and selectively in other countries right because the more kind of
my the idea of like let's just keep entering wars which we're also doing at the same time
only for a very very like like very specific regions but i mean the the trend of like, first, you know,
like Trump's not necessarily,
like Trump's not really a neocon.
He preferred the cultural jamming.
Like that was his preferred method.
And it got him relatively far in four years.
And there's an argument
that Lind is a big person who,
that he learned a lot from Lind.
Even though I don't think he ever read his books,
all the people he surrounded him with
were fans of Lind.
There's a picture of Trump and Lind together in like a copy of – or at least
Trump together with a copy of his book, which is titled The Next Conservatism. I'm going to read
a quote at this point from The American Conservative, which Lind has written for that
describes this book because it's useful.
The next conservatism offers a comprehensive agenda of what Lyndon Wayrich, who's his co-author
on this, call cultural conservatism.
While the book aims higher than mere policy, the specifics mentioned are Trumpian, reductions
in legal and illegal immigration, an America first trade policy, and robust investments
in domestic infrastructure, particularly streetcars and trains.
In a less Trumpian vein,
it also promotes homeschooling and incorporates some ideas from the new urbanism as part of a
broader program called retroculture. Of its connection with Trump, Lind says the book runs
parallel to what he has been saying, but he doubts the billionaire's familiarity with its more
philosophical ideas. Now, here's the part that is going to be really unsettling. And this, I think,
is what
lind may actually be going for rather than any kind of reform in the military to improve its
ability to win foreign wars quote in 1994 an article appeared in the marine corps gazette
by lind and two of the authors of the 1989 piece where he introduced the concept of fourth
generation warfare it ended on a dire note the point is not merely that america's armed forces
will find themselves facing non-nation state conflicts and forces overseas.
The point is that the same conflicts are coming here.
The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil.
So that's what's going on here.
Yep.
And that's the thing where bias towards action and increased killing power, if all you're really trying to do is murder everyone who disagrees with you using the military very quickly, well, that might work for you.
People should know about this.
He has a fucking fiction book called Victoria, which actually, if you go to like TV tropes, there's a TV – it's not just TV tropes anymore, but like there's a trope page for my book After the Revolution, and it's directly compared to Victoria as like they're the opposites of each other because Victoria is like a book about a civil war in the US that these like weird fascist like monarchists win and like it's uh it's pretty fucked up like the problem is that like like like
all of these like the northwest is controlled by like uh environmentalist like leaders who get like
eaten by these animals like wolves that they reintroduce to the to the society and like
california is so feminist that it's illegal to have sex and make babies oh my god and the south
fails because it's it's too multicultural.
Oh God.
And yeah, like it's all-
This is so cringy.
So the person who wins the war
is like the governor of Maine,
who's a retro culture practitioner
and considers himself a subject of the Kaiser.
Oh no.
I may be getting a couple of details wrong,
but not that part.
I know it's a fucking nuts.
Nuts.
So I've only read like little bits of it.
Maybe one day I'll get through the whole thing, but what a,
what a sad fuck.
That's the thing with all,
with all of these like cultural jammers,
like they try to put on like war aesthetics
but all of them are the nerdiest fuckers he'll ever he's so stupid and i like he's so stupid
to be actual wizards all of these guys are so they're so nerdy all of them yeah and like lind
everything about him makes sense when you understand that his primary guiding directive is anger over the
fact that there's no longer a kaiser um he's he's a loon but also like again he was not lying about
there's a picture of like trump with his fucking book he's not lying that like fucking everybody
who was like pilled in that white house knew about lynn's ideas and have been he's been hugely
influential and not just among
like the american right his books have been found in like al-qaeda hideouts and shit like he's that
makes sense though that yeah that that like all of all of that really tracks is because yeah like
the barrier between like terrorist action as a part of fourth generation and in some ways fifth
generation warfare and then the type of like culture jamming those things go
hand in hand like that is like that is the goal of it is is to make it work that way so that doesn't
surprise me that those types of terrorist groups would be reading his books for advice or for like
to like figure out how the other side thinks yeah all right well that's probably enough talking
about william s lynd for today and cultural and the fourth generation.
We'll talk.
There's a lot to dig into about how these ideas have influenced chunks of the right and how they're currently still being used for like these omnipresent conflicts that are going on right now.
And again, I do think particularly the idea of omnipresence is really useful for understanding modern conflict.
I would go so far as to say like crucial.
modern conflict i would i would go so far as to say like crucial um so this is necessary background information to people to have for people to have for like some of the other shit
we're going to be continuing to talk in this about in this series as we you know as we talk more about
kind of kinetic conflicts or at least building towards kinetic conflicts um but yeah i think
this is this is a useful kind of grounding and now i'm going to send
uh chris and garrison off to write an episode explaining who hagel is and everything he
believed i yeah it's gonna be great you're gonna you're gonna you you will watch me go mad in real
time it's gonna be great yeah the other option is i can just read the wikipedia page for hagel
with like a really offensive German accent.
That's better than reading Hegel.
It actually sounds better.
I'm going to go to – I promise you one thing, which is that I will wind up either Russian or Australian by the end.
I can't stop that drift.
Whenever I start doing –
Oh, I am a good German.
Yeah, my name is Mr. Hegel.
You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod.
Or follow at CoolZoneMedia.
We're going to stop that right now.
Yeah, we probably should.
Welcome.
I'm Danny Thrill.
Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter...
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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,
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Omicron!
Great timing.
Mm-hmm. I love Omicron.
I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here,
a podcast about
Greek numbering
schemas.
Garrison,
how do you feel about Omicron?
This has nothing to do with the topic
we're talking about.
So, this is an update.
A few, probably last week, or earlier this week, we discussed the trucker convoy.
We brilliantly scheduled our episode recorded before the truck convoy for after the truck convoy had already done a bunch of things.
Yes.
Which was really good.
So we recorded to talk about the 50 000 trucks that were that were going
to show up at ottawa and thing things did happen maybe not that they did not because like i've been
listening some of their claims are like and alex jones is parenting there now that it was like
800 000 to a million truckers and there's 300 000 truckers in all of canada like but it was like it was a lot
of people like not to not to downplay what happened so we're going to give an update on
what happened there and kind of discuss maybe any ramifications that stuff like this could have
going forward but to help with that um we have uh dan who came on uh last time to help discuss
hello thank you for coming on again to talk about the same thing.
Thank you for having me.
We last less off with you saying that you hope I don't come back on again
because that would be a good thing
and it would mean that the bad things did not happen.
So sorry to be here under such circumstances.
Yeah, you want to go over the bad yeah so let's let's briefly do a
like a recap of like what this thing was like like why why was it happening and like what was the
idea when we last left canada a bunch of truckers were angry that they had to present evidences
evidence of vaccination this spiraled and as I'm understanding it, at some point,
them rejecting all public health measures? Yes. Actually, the exact demands are for the federal and provincial governments to, quote, terminate the vaccine passports and all other
obligatory vaccine contact tracing programs, to terminate COVID vaccine mandates and, quote, respect the rights of those who
wish to remain unvaccinated.
And here's where it gets weird.
Seize the divisive rhetoric attacking Canadians who disagree with government mandates.
Kind of hard to say when that one's fulfilled.
And finally, cease to limit debate through coercive measures with the goal of censoring
those who have varying or incorrect
opinions that's what the convoy is for i mean do y'all know what a government is
evidently i was at some debates in 2020 uh with the state that went a lot uglier than it looks like this one went. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we can talk about that.
The standoff has been, well, it's been just that.
It's been a standoff in that regard.
It seems like they've kind of hooliganed around a bunch of towns
and threatened a homeless shelter if they didn't give them food
and left trash everywhere and set up a
checkpoint on the border or just a blockade on the border i think is probably more accurate
there's been blockades going on and off the border um yeah i think the most noteworthy is uh in
alberta and coot right now but i might be pronouncing that wrong and what was the police
it was something along the lines of we don't't think there's a policing solution to this problem. Oh, yeah.
So you're totally up to date.
That happened today. Yeah.
So a little after 2.30 p.m. today, the Ottawa police chief, Peter Slowly, said in a press conference that, quote, there may not be a policing solution to this demonstration.
Is it really that easy?
Evidently, it's that easy if you wait until the media has had a few days
and most of the coverage is just breaking.
Bad things still happening.
So it's not great.
So what was the lead up on sat right because they were
they were all they were all the trucks and caravans and stuff were supposed to arrive on
saturday what was the lead up on saturday like and like what what happened on like the actual like
first day yeah so saturday was technically the first day actually friday throughout the day
uh a lot of people started arriving so the occupation's been uh we're recording now wednesday um it started on friday
and uh the main like the largest contingent of the convoy was staying overnight friday night in a
nearby town called arm fire uh west of ottawa and they moved in from Armpire to Ottawa on Saturday morning. At the same time
people converged from other parts of Canada. To Ottawa's east is Quebec and to Quebec's east are
the Maritime Provinces and 3,000 people at least came from Quebec and met with the convoy too on
Saturday. Kind of coming in from different parts of the day between Friday night and Saturday afternoon.
And Saturday was kind of the big day, the big party.
The main point of contention
and the main thing that happened
was some major streets are gridlocked by vehicles
moving into the city,
into the very crowded core of Ottawa, my hometown,
and staying stationary on busy roads.
Both commercial and residential roads are part of this. Driveways for both businesses and
residences were blocked off. Fire roads are blocked off. Ambulance roads are blocked off.
Local businesses that stayed open had to close throughout the day, Saturday largely. Some managed
to not, and many who just stayed closed already because they knew what was going
to happen and this happened closures uh that happened on saturday are mostly still going on
today as i'm speaking to you wednesday night uh closures followed patterns of harassment some
alleged assaults which robert mentioned before also happened at a homeless shelter in downtown
ottawa and pretty much everyone I've spoken to,
I've been in Ottawa visiting, it's my hometown.
And pretty much everyone I've spoken to
who lives in the downtown core
has had a slew of stories since Saturday
of either harassment at work
or just harassment walking through the streets.
And the worst part of it all is that right now
there's not a clear ending in sight.
What is it like on the ground there
in terms of, I know there's like kind of like
a blockade around the border, but like what else is like around Ottawa? What's like,
what like, what, what is, what's it like to walk around in these places? And like,
how big is the area that these people are staying at? Like, where are they staying at? Are they all
sleeping in their trucks or staying at hotels? What's like, what's like the... It's an excellent
question. There's a, there's a mix. So hotels were booked up the week leading up to the weekend as, as the new cycle kind of exploded more and more
people called into hotels in Ottawa. A lot of people actually brought tractors. People are
also sleeping in their trucks. Of course, if people have like family and stuff staying in
Ottawa, sometimes they're staying with them. It's a mix of everything actually i i know a guy who even his car was like blocked off
uh in the parking lot he has to park in because it's downtown he doesn't have street parking or
driveway parking like it's in a public lot and he couldn't get his car out uh for over a full day
because an rb camper set up near him and just blocked him off. So it's a mix of everything. Starting on Saturday,
there's like a lot of partying, a lot of music, a lot of kids. It's gotten a little bit more chaotic
and less condensed since then. And also the area is hard to gauge because streets are actually
constantly as vehicles move out for one reason or another, streets are kind of being retaken back organically
by the city, but then sometimes throughout the day getting retaken again back by the
convoy.
So the occupation has been a little fluid on some of the outside streets.
Wellington Street, which is the street outside of Parliament in Ottawa, has been consistently
occupied, to my knowledge, blocking off kind of, not actually blocking off, but you have to walk past them as a pedestrian to get onto Parliament Hill.
So that's where the kind of the core of the action is and everything else spreads out from that.
And near hotels, there's a little more action because that's generally where people are staying.
How has members of Parliament and local politicians been reacting since Saturday?
I know there was some videos of, I think, one of the MPs from Alberta was giving an interview that gained some traction online.
But yeah, just kind of curious how the different government officials are talking about this.
I'm actually so glad you asked that because as of today, the divide in members of parliament has actually led to some pretty incredible political ramifications.
So last time we spoke, I think Aaron O'Toole had just earlier in the day endorsed the convoy and said he'd be coming down. Aaron O'Toole, for those unaware, is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
He's a real O'Toole.
Wow.
Whoa.
Whoa.
Mind blown.
No one could have seen that joke coming.
Every Canadian listener just collectively rolled their eyes.
Yeah, so Aaron O'Toole had just endorsed the convoy he'd been getting some tough questions about it uh following everything we just talked about and more Aaron O'Toole
walked that back uh and said you know he didn't approve of the way that the convoy was acting in
Ottawa this led to a swift referendum on his leadership, and earlier today, Aaron O'Toole was voted out
as the Conservative Party leader in Canada.
And that does have pretty big
ramifications. I know I talked about Aaron
O'Toole a decent amount
in my previous Canada episodes for
Can Happen Here.
So yeah, that'll be really interesting to see who
what's... do we have
any idea of when the new person's going to try to get voted in?
Like, when do you think that process is going to happen to fill that spot?
I'm actually not sure. I haven't looked up when it's going to happen.
It feels like there's been months before where there's been leaders of the conservative party.
The main concern right now for those outside of Conservative politics is
because Aaron O'Toole was considered relatively moderate. You talked about in the Fascism Canada
episode how Aaron O'Toole kicked out Darren Sloan from the party for being pretty coy on donations
from neo-Nazi Paul Fromm on his campaign. Overall, that's a pretty great thing that Aaron O'Toole like kicked him out of the caucus
like regardless of other elements of yeah that leadership uh there's worrying that that kind of
thought won't be continued forward especially because Sloan was also in the leadership race
and Sloan has only gotten further right since then yeah it is just despite Aaron O'Toole's not great aspects, which there are lots of, he did kind of hold back some of the more problematic conservative elements, whether that be, you know, people from his own party, like Derekrick and then also keeping kind of the people's party
stuff at bay um yeah and that will be an interesting kind of power struggle now that
will be something to observe i think the thing that concerns me most about all of this is the
implication of the implications for this is a tactic We saw a version of this that was more limited in scope and time in Portland in 2020 when this huge Trump caravan rolled through downtown, blocked off big chunks of downtown and like just maced and shot people with paintball guns at random.
And it was kind of like I think everyone there was surprised at how many folks they got for it.
This is a much more evolved version of the same tactic.
And it's kind of stuff we talked about in season one of It Could Happen Here,
this idea of like people coming from these conservative majority areas
in a place where the vast majority of people are liberal but centralized in the cities
and blocking those cities off or otherwise disrupting their ability to transit, potentially their
ability to get things shipped in like food, like their ability to use free movement.
And we've seen pieces of this, again, in a bunch of places.
In Oregon, during the wildfires, you had these rural communities setting up checkpoints and
stuff looking for people from the cities that they could bill as Antifa.
And it's this world worrying trend for a couple of reasons.
Number one, when you get 10,000, 20,000 people to do something like this, even if the city
has hundreds of thousands of people, that's effectively too large a group to police, and
the police don't want to police it anyway.
So there's not even really an attempt to stop them.
And it's a way in which the vast majority of canada uh at least based on the
polling i'm aware of um is is not in support of the causes these guys are backing what is it like
76 percent of the country supports some level of like vaccine mandates um if i'm remembering
correctly the last one i read so this is not a popular movement it's not even super popular
among the truckers like the actual no most
truckers in canada either it doesn't matter how many people in the cities you can get if you can
get 50 60 000 people to do something like this the police won't will not take action and you can
negatively impact the lives of a huge number of millions of people before it gets radical right
that's when these guys are not coming in with guns with the express plan to eliminate people
or trying to specifically block up food.
They're just kind of fucking around now.
But it's this kind of – it's this thing we've talked about where you have – this is a thing in Canada and the United States.
You had liberals kind of outsourcing the protection of society to this group of increasingly heavily armed and radicalized people who are now in a lot of cases fascists.
armed and radicalized people who are now, in a lot of cases, fascists. And that means that when there's a problem with a large chunk of people who hate everything you stand for, the people
that you have completely outsourced protection to are all in favor of fucking with you because
they hate you. And it's a problem in Oregon. It's going to be a problem in fucking new york city or whatever
at some point it's a problem in ottawa um i don't know am i am i off base here am i am i am you're
not on base at all and uh like there isn't there isn't anything to to really elaborate on past what
you said last time we spoke i think robert you said there's not a whole lot uh was what you said
that could really really be done with the vehicle occupation tactic.
Unless a lot of people are willing to meet them with an equal force.
Which, unfortunately, Ottawa didn't have.
Ottawa is a relatively large city in Canada.
There's over a million people that live here.
It's also, by landmass, I think the largest city in Canada.
Like east to west, it's very spread out. So it's also by land mass i think the largest city in canada like east to west it's very spread out so it's a low population density so even the affected area downtown uh is actually
like pretty small in relation to the city itself uh which is pretty unfortunate and like it's not
a particularly packed downtown for a large city downtown i am i am curious kind of on the violence aspect. I know there's been an increase in death threats to members of parliament, specifically liberal members of parliament, but specifically liberal members of parliament who are women, who are maybe not white.
Right. So I would be curious to see if you have any more kind of information on that side of things and then how violence has popped up in a few places throughout the past week, basically.
Yeah, there's been a lot. So, I mean, even if you're going by what's reported, like right now there is by most estimates under a thousand, maybe at most a few thousand very far spread out people as part of the convoy as of yesterday there's 13 active police
investigations the police of the city the city of ottawa said in the uh in a presser we obviously
know when there's like 13 active investigations and anything this big there's way more that's not being reported not being investigated um like
they took you know like these things are going to 13 is going to be resultful something bad so some
of the things that happened robert mentioned before the alleged assault on a houseless person
inside of shepherds of good hope uh in which a security guard was also called a racial slur.
There was a house that displayed a rainbow flag outside of it that had harassment and poop thrown at it.
We need to get 100,000 people together
to throw their own poop back at these people.
It's the only way they'll learn.
Yeah, fighting fire with fire.
That expression, I'm'm sure just emerged from just
tossing poop at each other strategy it's meant for this yeah there have been suggestions all
of our social media channels on like here's how you can poop in snow banks without getting caught
uh businesses have been harassed there's been violence so like what i think maybe some context
that isn't always known in ottawa on saturday
and until recently dining in in restaurants wasn't allowed we were actually in a relatively
strict lockdown following our overcrowing wave and a lot of people even coming like didn't know
that like i spoke to people on saturday who were like hey do you know like when the restaurants
around here are open so we can like sit down for a meal and meal? And I was like, there's no sitting down in Ottawa.
So what people were doing, they were going inside cafes, like, to Morden's and stuff.
And they were just refusing to leave and eating their food there anyways.
And if there was no seats, they were just, like, eating in line.
It was also minus 28 degrees in Ottawa on Saturday and very, very cold on Sunday.
There was an extreme cold weather warning.
So especially when people brought their kids, there was no other options other than like swarm the malls and swarm restaurants. And even then the mall, the main mall
downtown, Rideau Center was closed partway throughout the day because it was not a safe place.
So I already talked before about routes getting blocked. Also not physical violence, but honking
has been keeping people awake. There's been endless honking. If you watch video footage from it,
and even in the background right now,
I'm coming from Ottawa,
like I can hear honking in my background.
Some people allegedly parked
and then urinated on the tomb of an unknown soldier,
which is, yeah, it's a memorial.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of this isn't,
political is even the wrong way to describe a lot of what's fun about this for these people.
It's that they suck.
Yeah, it's just fucking hooliganism.
And that's, yeah, it's fucking hooliganism.
There's going to be a lot more stories coming out for sure as things progress of stories of harassment, like I've talked to people who have gotten a cat called in the night, people getting violent altercations, street fights, I'm sure are going to break out.
It's kind of at a very tense point right now in Ottawa.
We're at that point. We're like, OK, we're seeing some signs like poops getting thrown at the houses.
What's going to happen next? Because the police are saying they don't have a plan and the truckers
are saying they're not leaving what's it like outside of ottawa across across all the other
places where there's like similar activity happening uh they're all looking to us and
being concerned from who i'm talking to uh anti-fascists in Alberta are particularly concerned right now with the coup protests.
There is ongoing to, it keeps seeing popping up like US-Canada border activities in the same.
There's a few attempted convoys by Americans and even before in Europe, there was a few attempted convoys.
Yeah, some got turned away.
Some Americans got turned away at the Canadian border because they weren't vaccinated.
Some Americans got turned away at the Canadian border because they weren't vaccinated.
Yeah.
Which is, you know,
you'd think because that's
the reason they're saying they're protesting,
they would have remembered that
and thought maybe that's going to
come into play.
Yeah, I don't know. There is a certain point
where if you get enough people going,
it would be interesting to see if people do just try to like drive through the border
yeah yeah and i mean there's been people like you look at social media channels a lot of them
saying like the borders are blocked right now with thousands of truckers supporting our cause so if
you saw that and you believed it and then you went to the board and you're turned away from
getting a vaccine you might thought well i thought i had you know 900 people the same cause as me and we were ready to
use force yeah which begs the question well what happens when you do exactly i want to find out
yeah that's yeah that's the thing is like if if if they do if they did have what they say they had
would they just start doing those things and not even think about it and not even think about like
the politics of it they're just doing it to do it yeah i should also mention too we talked last time about um
a plaid army slash diagonalon members comments uh that were broadcast on the news about uh doing
another quote january 6th uh and it came on the news today was first reported by frank magazine
and i think by the canadian anti-h Hate Network that he was arrested on firearms charges in Nova Scotia before coming here.
Worth noting, he was reporting live on InfoWars on the Alex Jones show on Saturday before this came out.
And Derek Sloan and Ezra Levant were also on the same program.
So I mentioned InfoWars before. That's great.
That's what's going on there.
Can you see any, like, beyond the conservative leadership,
what other kind of political implications
are people thinking about in Canada?
It's really tense seeing what's going to come for other cities.
Also, Ottawa is expecting a second wave.
Some other people in other places
that kind of didn't think the first one
was going to be a huge success are saying, well, now that it's an occupation, we're coming. And police are even
saying there's a second wave. It's a very tense place right now. We don't really know what to do.
Community places are taking direct, community members are talking about taking direct action
because it's been so long. This isn't something that the city of Ottawa is particularly used to, unfortunately, in my lifetime. And so the ramifications of the future
are pretty jarring. But what's alarming is how successful this occupation was with a relatively
small number. I think the highest estimate was 18,000 people into a city of over a million,
which isn't really that many when you think about it. But the strategy was very, very effective.
over a million, which isn't really that many when you think about it, but the strategy was very,
very effective. You think about how many fighters it took for Daesh to take control of Mosul.
If there's not resistance, there's only really a few areas of a city that you need to occupy in order to have a great deal of control over what can be done.
Yeah, and that's the tough part is they have a lot of control over that small area and residents
lives they don't have a lot of control over parliament which yeah yeah what they're protesting
for yeah i'm also interested to see has the canadian military said anything about these
protests and the situation so the ottawa police chief in his presser day was asked a lot about
that and he's still shying away he's still saying he doesn't think military is the only option uh which if you're an activist on the other side of
things and worried about police escalation hurting you in the future yep that might be a good thing
to hear yeah yeah and i see you shitty news i'm not convinced that the military would fix the
problem i'm not either and also ottawa had other police forces
coming to they said uh they're spending eight hundred thousand dollars a day uh initially to
just on cost of policing money's worth yeah yeah they also said they've only like bylaws only had
150 tickets since this whole thing started in the occupied zone so it's unclear what a lot of them
did other than you know know, keep up appearances.
Like I was walking around,
I saw York region police officers
walking around with their patches.
That's hundreds of kilometers away from Ottawa.
So police presence, especially on the weekend,
was not low.
We had plenty.
They either didn't know what to do,
thought it would die later,
or a mixture of all the above
and there's been talk to uh mixtures of some police officers have not been happy with it but
there hasn't been really anything in the news yet because no one's come forward a lot of like tweets
of like from reporters saying i have an anonymous source in the auto police that says they wish more actions were taken.
Some saying otherwise. It's not really united right now.
And yeah, it's scary.
Is there any counter protests being planned for Ottawa?
If I knew I'd say so, because by the time this airs, it would have happened.
So I think it'd be safe to talk about. But fortunately, I'm not really insure i'm not actually sure of it i might
not be the best person to ask okay yeah we're keeping an eye out well the good news is that
all men die and so long as men die liberty will never perish right that's good it's an upside that is an upside it's an up it's a
positive shot all right well that's gonna do it for us we'll keep an eye on this and um what what
results from it because it's all pretty concerning um and worth having having an eye and i'm
particularly curious as to just like what kind of direct community responses to this develop, because I think that's going to wind up being the only long term solution.
You know, it's kind of what people saw in Portland that there's a degree to which like the only thing that really works as a response is outnumbering them.
And on that note, it might be maybe not the smoothest transition, but there are actually some Ottawa mutual aid funds and advocacy groups that are doing some cool stuff.
Buck us up with that.
There's too many to list for everyone.
Oh, well.
But others have compiled lists, and I'm going to point to you there. which stands for Rainbow Ottawa Student Experience, serves 2SLGBTQIA plus post-secondary students on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. They have closed off donations for themselves following a
wonderful spike recently. They have a list of Black-led and Black-empowering organizations
on their website with donation links and you can reach that at roseottawa.org
donations. There's a cool little Instagram account
called Trans is Beautiful OTT.
OTT stands for Ottawa, and that's all one word.
It's been plugging small fundraisers
for queer folk affected by the convoy,
including housing support on their Instagram.
Again, that's Trans is Beautiful OTT on Instagram.
Something we didn't get to talk about,
which is Ram Ranch, ramranch.ca, R-A-M-R-A-N-C-H.
A website was set up in the name of Trolling the Convoy Zello Chats and has been doing a fantastic job.
There's a whole army of trolls in the trucker Zello Chats, and it's been really entertaining to tune into.
They've compiled a list of charities on their website.
You can check that out at ram-ranch.ca
and clicking on the Rancher's Donation Zone.
And yeah.
Where can
people find you on the internets?
People can find me on the internets. I'm
super active on Twitter
at spineless L.
The word spineless, the letter L.
Fantastic.
Well, hopefully this gets all resolved,
and I don't need to fly up to Canada to go to a protest.
If we do, that'll be fun.
I've been wanting to go to Canada for a minute.
Yeah, we can take drugs at Tim Hortons.
That would be fun.
Yeah, oh, God.
You know, I haven't vomited in a Tim Hortons bathroom
in a long time.
Our local McDonald's
that got famous on the internet for
a fist fight that someone pulled a raccoon
out of their backpack during had to
actually stop being 24 hours after the
mayor pleaded with them because it was using
up too many police resources.
That is fascism.
That's the best kind of police.
I'm over 190 at 9-1-1 calls in a year. who's using up too many police resources. That is fascism. That's the best kind of place.
I'm over 190 at 9-1-1 calls in a year.
That's so dope.
Oh, God, yeah.
I want to set up somewhere on the border in the East Coast a Tim Hortons directly across the street from a Waffle House
and just let them fight.
Yeah, we do. we do miss that here.
That's something you'll have to bring that
over. Bring the Waffle House vibes over.
All you need to do is watch a man
get stabbed and then spiritually, you're
at a Waffle House.
And that ties back to the future
of the convoy. You're right.
Well, that does it for us today, everybody.
We will see you later.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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