It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 29

Episode Date: April 9, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where we talk about things falling apart and this week we're talking about our ability to have things that that don't get co-opted by uh fascists falling apart garrison hello take us take us away yes so today we're going to talk about kind of why maybe it's great not to cede any aesthetic ground to fascists anytime it's uncomfortable. And to do so, we've brought on someone who I found on Twitter who wrote a very, very great article about some kind of ongoing debate and drama around anarchist symbols and fascists trying to use symbols. But we are talking to uh black ram hello

hey how's how's things i'm i'm i'm actually i'm actually doing okay i've been i've been looking forward to this chat for a while so yes if um if people are unfamiliar it looks like the past few weeks people have really freaked out about uh an eight-pointed star people really really seem concerned about it. Yeah, this has a lot tied in with what's been happening in Ukraine, because as always happens when there's a new story that has anything to do with the far right, people got acquainted with some symbols that they had not been aware of before, particularly the sonnenrad, which is a common symbol that you'll see on

members of the Azov Battalion, kind of some other far-right organizations in Ukraine, as well as elsewhere. The Christchurch shooter wore a SON and RAD. And then they started identifying all sorts of things that they felt looked like SON and RADs everywhere on the internet, and things kind of spiraled from there. Well, and I think there's actually a little bit more to it than that well we're gonna get into we're gonna get into black ram's article here shortly but yeah i kind of first want to briefly go through i think why it's this kind of why this debate happened now because the debates happened before but it's never gotten this like intense a big part of this is tied to russia's invasion of ukraine and everyone wanting to play

Where's Waldo with symbols being like, can you spot the sun in red on the pictures of the Azov battalion? And I think the other, so everyone's already looking for symbols as a fun game. But the other thing that's happening is because of the Russia

Dugin connection. Dugin's like a political fascist writer who's very influential inside Russia. But because of the russia dugan connection dugan's like a political uh fascist writer who's a very influential inside russia um but because of the russia dugan connection some people are now seeing dugan's symbol the eurasian square for the first time right and now that they've seen the square they're seeing anarchists using the chaos star which looks a little similar they're not the same but they're because they just because they just learned about the eurasian square now they're seeing the chaos star and they've never really noticed the chaos star before maybe they're they just don't really care about what symbols random people use but now that they see the eurasian symbol and they see the

chaos star they're making this connection here and they think this is a new development, right? They think this is like, they're asking themselves, why are anarchists suddenly using this fascist symbol? Which they either think to themselves or they think out loud on Twitter.com. Which is really rich because anarchists have been using the Chaos Star

longer than Dugan's been using his Eurasian square. And if you have been watching anarchists for any amount of time on the internet, I know you would have seen them using the Chaos Star. It's not a new development by any means, but because everyone's trying to like, where's Waldo and oscent their way through the war, they're kind of drawing these false connections,

which is kind of unfortunate because there is actually some interesting things to talk about in terms of how Dugan did kind of base his design off of Michael Moorcock's Chaos Star and a whole bunch of stuff around like why anarchists use the Chaos Star. And, you know, there's a nice debate to be had there around fascists always inserting themselves in these subcultures and trying to gain ground, whether be like the punk scene the industrial music scene uh you know online gaming right fascists always try to do this uh just often we want to we try to push back on that right like nazi punks fuck off but it seems specifically with the chaos star a whole bunch of people

just want to cave and let them kind of take this symbol which is i don't i think not not a not a great instinct um but to to kind of talk about this and other kind of background stuff uh like i said we brought on uh black ram hello uh to help to help talk about this so yeah what kind of prompted you to write your article i guess on you know watching this debate kind of go down what kind of actually just like what, what was the straw that broke the camel's back of being like, okay, now I need to write a decently long article on this topic?

I think I've said this on Twitter a little while before writing the actual article, but I think the spark was a thread from a guy, you may or may not have seen him around he's like somebody he's like well dem sock but but he has like anarchist leading on his bio which

i guess sort of which i guess sort of communicates the idea that he would probably like anarchism if he did not consider it to be impractical sure yeah but anyways i actually i kind of wavered on the idea of covering it at all i thought it would i thought it would only go for like a few days and it was sort of a johnny come lately by maybe a day or so admittedly but they figured it would be sort of ephemeral but but there's things I sort of kept seeing. But in the midst of writing it, there was like some tanky who went even further and made the link to the Chaos Star. And I think it was the logo of the Sith Empire

from certain Star Wars media. Yeah, we'll talk about that. It's like, well, one has six lines and they're not even arrows. They're just like blocks in like a sort of hexagonal shape. But it's like the same guys really like the idea that the logo of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is actually the Iron Cross. Yeah. I think kind of the prehistory of why this became such a specific problem started with kind of unite the right in the period after that, where you had all these new fascist groups on the

ground in the United States, and they all had their symbols. And I was a part of this, to the degree that there's some culpability here. A number of researchers, including myself, were warning people like, hey, there's some symbols that people are taking to right-wing gatherings, and they're claiming to be normal conservatives. And these are symbols of groups like the Phineas Priesthood or groups like different kind of fascist organizations. And you might not be aware of them. And so you should know what kind of these, you know, the Kekistan flag or whatever means, because people are trying to kind of signpost the Kekistan flag or whatever means, because people are trying to kind of signpost their sympathy to these extreme groups. And I think that was important because those people were legitimate problems,

and they were trying to kind of stealthily hide their very radical right-wing sympathies behind some like obscure uh images but the problem is that it got a lot of people looking not just looking for fascist symbols and everything but also looking for the clout that comes from like pointing something like that out and i think that's that's kind of the root of a lot of these these problems and it's not surprising that it happened with dugan's symbol that there's no absolutely not. Because it does. Again, if you're just kind of a casual observer, it does look a lot like the chaos star. It's an eight-pointed star with arrows, yeah.

And it makes sense. If you know anything about Dugan's philosophy, Alexander Dugan is essentially a Russian political theorist and author. There's a lot that's kind of said about how close he is to Putin. He certainly was at one point closer to Putin. There's a lot of debate as to whether or not Putin kind of saw him as more of like a useful person to kind of a useful propaganda organ or whether or not he really bought into what Dugan was saying. But Dugan is and was a really big advocate of like what he called like multipolar international politics. Yeah, multipolarity. Yeah, multipolarity, which is this idea that like the United States should not be the hegemonic power in the world, right? Which

it kind of was after the fall of the Soviet Union. It's this idea that there should be a bunch of equivalent powers, which is, number one, you can see how a lot of folks on the left would be drawn in by that, even if they weren't particularly fans of Putin, just the idea that like, oh, well, yeah, it's been a problem that the United States is this massive hegemonic power. Perhaps it would be better if there were a bunch of equivalent powers. And it's one of those things where there's a logic to that, but it does kind of require ignoring all of the times in the past when we had a multipolar world and there was tremendous violence there's a root error in this sort of pathway which sort of like refuses to deal

with imperialism as a global system yeah the reason that's a hang-up is because you know once you once you think of imperialism as a global system, you then have to move on to the idea that it's a global system that then has to be dismantled globally. You can't quite do that with capitalism because it implicates nations that are supposed to serve as moments of world historic progress against hegemonic capitalism. And it is one of those spooks of the mind that people kind of have to do away with, which the anarchist movement sort of does pretty successfully, because that mostly comes from the fact that it starts off from the position of the state as an actual sort of structural presence. It's sort of funny that thexist argument is usually down to like hyper focus on the state and hierarchy is idealist which is odd when you consider that hierarchy and

the state are very much material in the same way that capitalism itself is so it's like it's it feels more like a sort of argument that's like, well, my materialism is the materialism. Your materialism is, in fact, a form of idealism. I think with that, we're going to go on a quick ad break, and then we're going to come back, and I think we should probably now talk about the origins of of the chaos star and, and Michael Moorcock and discordianism. Um, and then we'll kind of get into the kind of current, current debate on it,

uh, some more. So yeah, anyway, here's, here's, here is some, uh,

here's some, uh, ads for your ears coming in through the ear waves. Oh yeah. Yep. It's time. It's time to talk about more time for more. Okay. Well, you beat me to it

so um i guess uh black grab you you actually did a pretty good succinct kind of thing on how the chaos star came into being initially uh via michael moorcock uh do you want to just like as brief briefly talk about kind of how he came up with the symbol for his books and stuff? Okay, so full disclosure, I haven't really read the books themselves. I've read some Michael Moorcock. A lot of my

familiarity from him is pretty second hand. One of the main things of that is Sirifungal being like this sort of 80s band that I sort of think back to. Yeah. Their whole vibe is Morkok's works. But anyways, the reason why the Chaos Star

is the shape that it is, is because what it's supposed to represent is meant to extend outward endlessly. Yeah. The counter symbol for order is a single a single upward pointing arrow voted with funny enough when i thought about that i thought about the tiwas rune or like tear it doesn't really have the same meaning but it's like upward pointing arrow in a symbolic context that's the other example i have yeah but but that upward pointing arrow signifies a straight and narrow expression of where possibility goes, where potential sort of goes, which creates structure.

The Chaos Star, by contrast, has like the eight directions are meant to represent all directions in a circular sort of space, like a compass of sorts. And the energy and the potential and possibility goes out in all of them. With no set path, no definite limit, no boundaries. It just sort of goes out there. It's little wonder why the Chaos Magic movement embraced it

for a very similar set of reasons. Because even though it is kind of a myth. That there's absolutely no rules in chaos magic. What is true is that. You can explore very. A very. Very broad and like almost limitless range.

Of like practical possibilities. Within that movement. Within that sort of. Within that sort of framework. It's a very post-structuralist. Post-modern view of it. Post-modern is how I've heard it described. And kind of getting back to what Moorcock was in brief,

because I do think we need to kind of give an overview of who he is. Yes. He's still alive, last I checked at least. He is alive. I heard him talking at an anarchist sci-fi conference a few weeks ago. If you didn't immediately know who he was, he is the most influential fantasy author you have not heard of. He is like a George R.R. Martin level of influence, if not significantly more so. Some people will say he's the most influential fantasy author since Tolkien.

And among his, you've noted the band Cirith Ungol. If you've been a fan of any of the Warhammer games, he's a huge influence on that, because the thing that he created was kind of the concept of chaos as a sort of religious entity. And I'm not going to get into like the depths of the lore in his books, but a lot of it is about kind of the struggle between order and chaos. And so the Chaos Star, he created that specifically like for this kind of theological like conflict that occurs throughout his books. And it became the symbol of like one of the sides in Warhammer in this very, like there's tens of thousands of people who have the Chaos Star tattooed on them, not because of Warhammer, but not because of any political reason or because of Chaos Mansion, because they were fans of like Warhammer 40,000 or whatever. And it's interesting because in the same time, when I first got into anarchist

political theory before, long before i considered calling myself one it was because i came across a book published by ak press um i think i bought it in 2007 called no gods no masters and it was it's a collection a lot of people have a copy of this book in in their house if they're into anarchist theory it's like a collection of early anarchists like people like prudhon um essays on like kind of the first wave of anarchist political theory. And it has a chaos star on the cover. Because number one, Michael Moorcock is an anarchist, is both an author and someone who identifies as an anarchist. Politically, yeah.

Yeah, politically. And so his books were particularly popular among anarchists who don't always get a lot of chunks of pop culture to themselves. Absolutely. And so it was kind of from the beginning both this nerdy fantasy symbol that you could see, you could put alongside a bunch of different shit from The Lord of the Rings.

I love The Lord of the Rings, but you could see it as somebody having a tattoo in Elvish, but it also took on almost immediately this dual meaning where it was actually representing aspects of anarchist political theory. And so it was put and printed on books that were about political theory and had nothing to do with fantasy so it's i can't actually i cannot actually think of another symbol with a similar pedigree it's it's a really pretty unique case it is it is because it's it's less of like an anarchist symbol but more a symbol created and used by anarchists like it was it was it was it was invented by an anarchist it was it was a symbol invented by an anarchist to represent something in fiction that had such resonance that people adopted it as an actual political symbol yeah it honestly it honestly doesn't require that much reach to see why people who invite

people who like the idea of there being no hierarchy and no state even if not total freedom there's still like the most range that you could get that results in that negation it doesn't take a lot of elaboration to see why the symbol expressly meant for the symbol of chaos would gain traction absolutely absolutely yeah i was talking with margaret kiljoy about this a while ago and she was like yeah like if you were in the 2000s and you were like a traveling cross punk at least like 25 percent of people would have chaos star tattoos because yeah that's because that like it's about yeah expanding out in all directions you know you're the the single arrow is law and order

instead we're expanding out every in in every possible way yeah i mean i have a chaos star tattooed on me and i i it's a it's it's for primarily ideological reasons as opposed to the fact that i spent my entire childhood playing warhammer um so so yeah it's i think now so it is worth mentioning so the chaos star was invented in the 60s by michael morcock of course there is there's been other eight pointed stars over the course of thousands of years of history jesus of course it is it is it is like a broad, like, geometrical shape. Every kind of star has meant something. Yes, but the specific design was made by Michael Moorcock.

And then because of Moorcock's, like, anarchist tendencies in fiction, his work was used, or at least appreciated, by a lot of the Discordians, which is also popular around the 60s, a lot of the Situationists. And then as the around the 60s, a lot of the situationists. And then as the discordian and situationist movement kind of morphed and started to kind of intermingle

with parts of occultism, we have the chaos magic movement starting in the late 70s, which started also using the chaos star, which makes sense because like, Robert, you were talking about how it's like, it's almost like personifying's almost, like, personifying chaos as, like, a thing to worship, which is actually a big part

of early chaos magic text, is, like, reveling in the idea of, like, chaos as, like, a primordial god, which there's a lot of primordial gods in, like, the actual, like, world, you know, like, if you look through histories of various cultures, like, chaos is one of the original primordial gods so it is there is a big part of that in

early chaos magic books about kind of looking at chaos as this like this very ancient force that should be kind of respected and i think that that is of that is a big part of why they cast chaos magicians started using uh the the star i mean obviously there's a lot of crossover between like sci-fi writers like robert anton wilson um and michael moorcock who then robert anton wilson was very influential in the chaos magic movement so you you can see how this gets carried over from like anarchist sci-fi to chaos magic and then because it's in chaos magic it gets way more visibility so then it starts then you start seeing it inside more underground anarchist scenes. And then, so around this time, Dugan was starting his political career,

and he was dabbling in a lot of various occult circles himself, right? Now he's more of a traditionalist, more like a Christian traditionalist. That is his primary kind of occult interest. as long as it can be called occult yeah it's not worth getting too much into the weeds on Dugan at this point I think people it's worth mentioning

because he obviously did rip he did take inspiration from the Chaos Star to make his own version of it because he was in those same circles occultic leanings and and a degree of knowledge i think again like with a lot of things a lot of things about dugan are overstated including his like closeness to putin because he's this really easy in part because he's like so prolific and and there's a lot available on him in english it's really easy to kind of tie everything happening in Russia to Dugan.

To him, yeah. Yeah, and I think that's kind of a degree of what's happening here. There's a website I've forgotten the name of, but I think it had a bunch of online reproduction of Dugan's various writings from the 90s. All sorts of weird shit about occultism.

And yeah, I do think that there's a very obvious gulf between the Dugan of that weird eccentric, esoteric Nazi phase of his relative youth versus today, as a kind of Christian crusade against a hegemony that he legitimately believes to be a satanic empire. He has basically said that, and it's not the only thing he considers satanic. We should point out that one of the main forces that were going against Pussy Riot were Eurasianists at that time. He called them devils and witches and taught his followers to show up with pitchforks. People in the West don't really understand them, so you get guys like... You get both Alexander Reed Ross,

describing him as an adherent of chaos magic, and some guy from the National Review referring to him as the leader of a satanic cult somehow yeah and and boy i mean there's a long history of people liking to flat liking to flatten um fascist movements with an occultic tradition to just satanism we're not gonna talk about that at length but it but whenever you hear people talking about a problem and they reduce it to it's Satanists, you should be a little on edge because usually they're wrong or at least incomplete. And they just have kind of over. Anyway, we don't need to get terribly into that. wanted to bring that up is because like this is around the same time that people that are fascists were trying to enter in a lot of different political like subcultures whether it be like

the punk scene and industrial music um including like the the occult it's what fascists do because that that is like their primary means right like they they try to like they are an aesthetic driven movement they try to co-opt any aesthetic and use it for their own gains. And to kind of overlook the anarchist origins of this thing just because fascists tried to co-opt it at some point, I think is very silly. Because then, like, what? Are you going to throw away all punk music? Like, come on.

Or even like crosses. Like, a lot of fascists still use variations of Christian crosses that still have essentially political Christian meanings. In fact, I'd probably still assume that the majority of religious fascists do lean on some kind of Christianity. And to the extent that there's neo-pagans involved, there's sort of a minority. There's a couple of things that this is like. One of them would be kind of in the United States, fascist co-option of the flag of the United States, which we can talk a lot about, like the fact that the United States is an imperialist power and the genocides done under that flag without, while still acknowledging that attempts by fascist movements to co-opt it as a purely fascist symbol are problematic in part because that symbol, the United States flag, has a lot of power to a lot of people. And so if the fascists kind of

co-opt it totally, that's a harmful thing. That's a thing that can allow them to get their brain worms into more people, which doesn't mean you should take and wave the u.s flag but it does mean that like it's just a matter of don't you don't have to let them take the ground you know um and i i think on a kind of a different angle one of the things i think about a lot is uh the first time i went to india seeing especially in a large parts of india you'll see swastikas hanging over the doors of many many houses all over the place you'll see them hanging from, you'll see swastikas hanging over the doors of many, many houses all over the place. You'll see them hanging from cars. They're constant things. And it's only unsettling if you have allowed yourself to forget that the swastika is a symbol that the Nazis stole from another culture, co-opted and invested with a new meaning.

You should see Japan. Yeah. And why should people in other parts of the world who have been using it for a totally different purpose for thousands of years, why should they be like, well, I guess we don't get this now? Also, it's like India has had to deal with their own fascists as well. Yeah, well, yes. And there's, I mean, again, we're delving into a lot of very deep topics because there's a lot to be said about how the fact that the Nazis took the swastika led to degrees of sympathy within areas of Indian culture that allowed some fascist ideology to creep in. And like, that's also tied to the fact that both the Nazis and a lot of Indian nationalists were fighting against the British Empire.

It's all very complicated right so we don't need the guys guys like vd savarkar did who were founders of the hindu movement yeah did openly praise hitler oh yeah yeah it's kind of easy for some people to think of it as entirely motivated by religion but his whole concept of nationhood is entirely racial yeah it says himself that it has nothing to do with religion so yeah and it's it's it's one of those things if you actually want to understand things and engage with them in a useful area you have to understand that history and grapple with it without like looking at a 2500 year old hindu temple and going, well, I guess they were Nazis. Hash, hash, hashtag problematic. Yeah. The last thing I actually want to talk about is how,

how, how the kind of debate around symbols and use of symbols has just kind of morphed into just fast jacketing anarchists in general and worrying about like, Oh, the fascists are secretly infiltrating the anarchists, and they're going to turn anarchists into fascists, which is pretty silly, because if you're going to turn

anyone into fascists, I think anarchists are one of the hardest people to do that to. There's a lot of other people it's way easier to convince to become fascists than people who are... Although when anarchists go fascist, they tend to go fascist pretty hard. Well, yeah, but the type of fear-mongering around it is still, it's really frustrating because like I'm looking at all these, I'm looking at all these tankies, like fast jacketing anarchists for using a symbol created by anarchists, which has been used by anarchists for decades.

Right. But then you also have like tanky superstar caleb malpin regularly hanging out with like like malpin regularly hangs out with dugan um and then you have someone who's another like pretty like popular like like tanky influencer uh like ben norton who openly uses dugan's multipolar theory right and so if if you're looking for the most visible example of fascist and nationalist rhetoric trying to enter into leftism, you should look at the growing patriotic communists. I believe it's referred to as patriotic socialists, but the idea is basically the same. growing like patriot communist socialist kind of live streamer grift um which is like because like the easiest entry on the left for fascism is in forms of nationalist authoritarian communism right

it's like you know that that's that is how you get like national socialism right uh it's like they just had this like super cringy uh nosble convention just a few weeks ago with some of the best moments on twitter up until will smith slapped that guy yeah but like you know you have you have like coffin and malpin hanging out and like malpin regularly regularly hangs out with do good like it's like if you're gonna live if you want to be watching out for like a fascist creep maybe you should direct it towards the people just like doing it out in the open and not fast jacketing like queer anarchists who have been doing the thing that they've been doing for like decades i guess one of the last things i will mention is uh the the

hilarious incidents with the sith empire thing of people just fully of like fully getting consumed by their own brain worms and trying to insist that a star wars symbol uh is secretly a fascist chaos star and then doing the same thing to the Warhammer symbol. It is, yeah. I mean, it's funny because like in Star Wars, it is a fascist symbol, right? That's not a fascist symbol in the real world, but it is within the world of Star Wars. That is absolutely a fascist symbol.

But it's also not a chaos star. It's not a chaos star. And in Warhammer, it is within the world of of star wars that is absolutely a fascist but it's also it's also not a chaos star it's not a chaos star uh and in warhammer it is a chaos star but it's not a fascist symbol it's actually an anti-fascist symbol within the world of warhammer you can't basically argue that yeah yeah because it is it is just frustrating looking at all these people being like trying to play trying to play the where's waldo game just to all like dunk on anarchists and it's it just kind of shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of anarchist culture um and the history of like anti-fascist anarchists you know most of the anti-fascists that i know use the chaos darks it's because it's a red symbol it looks rad it looks cool um and yeah trying to like in insisting that we must cede this ground

and let fascists use anything that they think is aesthetically cool i think is uh is a first of all like a losing battle to actually just like to just just to to to start that now i think is uh would have some pretty bad implications for fascism and its use of aesthetics you don't have to give them things just because they want to take those things. It makes sense that you would see like tankies do it because then with your a tankie, you could basically get into a position where you can basically discard all

sorts of symbolisms and just replace everything with like old, like Soviet symbology or something, which is, which is obviously not tied to any atrocities that have happened. Right. Oh, incidentally, don't ever tell them about Georgia.

Yeah, don't tell them about Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine. Ukraine? That giant lake that was like the largest lake in Europe that they turned into a pile of poison you know don't mention a few things and trotsky would be proud considering he wanted to turn mountains into like city structure i mean that that actually is one of the things i think trotsky

was on the right ball about more minister it's Tiriths. Let's Tirith up some mountains. Any final thoughts on our lovely circular Chaos Star? I'm thinking of a quote from Pablo Friardi. I hope I've gotten that name right. A quote I've

seen going around that I think goes around something to the effect of, when the point of education isn isn't liberation the goal is to become the oppressor um you could sort of usually that quote is like relevant to like the material processes of like being inculcated into a capitalist system so so so you can kind of make the most sense of it as basically like you are educated to become a boss instead of wanting to abolish all bosses. But on a micro level, you can sort of apply it to the ways in which people, even in like radical spaces, sort of become like self-styled cops, as it were. That, I think, is a phenomenon that a lot of the anarcho-nihilist tendency sort of responds to. Anyway, this is coming from a perspective that is sort of flirtatious towards anarcho-nihilism, but not necessarily. the interactions with like, like certain people demonstrate that there are some instances of it where I think I can't quite tell if it's Poe or not. Somebody, I saw somebody posted like a photo of themselves with like a,

like a jacket and they had like the upside down cross and the inverted pentagram on board. And somebody, someone, somebody with like basically no followers who somehow blew up when they posted that photo next to like a Nazi uniform

to try and compare the inverted cross to a swastika or no, if not a swastika then like maybe some other part of the jacket and the pentagram to like the armband or something like that and to this day I'm still not sure if that was entirely serious

that's the thing is like we have to be careful like I don't like anarchist infighting it's rarely useful and we have to be watchful for like how much of it is just people trolling or people trying to prompt infighting just for the sake of infighting, right?

So I tried for a long time to not engage in this debate because I don't like infighting with anarchists. I don't like having these types of debates. So hopefully the next time this debate starts, we don't need to because we can just point to how this last one went and say, We don't need to because we can just point to how this last one went and say, no, look, we clearly demonstrated that this has a long history of use by anarchists, invented by anarchists, and not start the debate again because we don't need to do it. And there's no telling if people are doing it sincerely or people doing it ironically or people just doing it just to get people upset. doing it just to get, you know, people upset. And I mean, like, if you want to look at anarchists and look at, okay, where is right-wing people, where is fascists trying to kind of blend in with anarchists? Like, look at, like, Boogs, right? Look at NCAPs, right? These people who try to claim to be anarchists are very bad at actually blending in because they can't help themselves when they start talking about, like, the validity of anarcho-capitalism or the validity of like small nation states like it's it is it is it is hard it's hard to actually

infiltrate anarchists this is the thing that the fbi has said multiple multiple times it's hard to actually do so whenever fascists try to blend in whether they're boogaloo boys they can't help but use their old like boogaloo symbols they can't help but just give hints. It is astonishing how bad they are at this thing. They're also bad at the protection that they claim to offer. There was an article from last year going over. Well, part of it mentioned that they were basically at this purported protest that they were supposed to offer protection from. And most of what they did was get drunk and piss on the sidewalks.

The Boogaloo Boys I've seen at actual protests, with cops attacking protesters, the Boogaloo Boys are the first ones to run, because they're cowards. Yeah. Alright, well... Where can people...

Where can people find you online, and where can people read your article, Chaos, N... I guess, where can people... Blackram, where can people find you online, and where can people read your article, Chaos, Nihilism, and the Way of No Surrender? WordPress, basically. I call the site LF's Heretical Domain, but the link goes like mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com. I actually tried changing the URL once i changed it to a

left theoretical domain i think in 2013 14 but i figured that doing so would fuck up all of the stats and whatever so i just didn't bother well thank thank you so much for kind of writing what i would say probably the most definitive stance on this debate at the moment, which we can always point back to whenever this inevitably comes up again in like a year or two. It's gonna come up again. I've seen it come up every few years you see it.

So, thank you for that, and thank you for coming on. Yeah, if you want to follow us, you can do it at the thing. You know the thing. You know the thing. You know the thing. Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia. You can look at my unhinged chaos tweets at HungryBowTie.

Yeah, nothing is true and everything is permitted. Also, at AceKatinus is where I go to ramble about politics and occasionally the occult and other things. We do love a good ramble. Alright. That does it for us today. Fuck fascists. Nazi punks

fuck off. Etc. Etc. 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. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast welcome to it could happen here the only podcast where the host asks all listeners and guests to provide their social security number and bank account number routing number all that good stuff. This is a podcast about how things aren't always great and maybe are kind of falling apart a little bit. And it has also not been, for the most part, a podcast about the expanded war in Ukraine for a variety of reasons.

We have done some coverage of that, but we've focused specifically on stories of individual people, and that's generally where I feel like our strength is as a program. But people have been repeatedly requesting we do a little bit of a bigger picture look at what's gone on in that conflict, and so I have brought Aram Shambanian into the studio. Aram, how are you doing, buddy? Oh, not too bad, man. How are you doing today? Fine and dandy like sour candy. Now, would you describe kind of who you are and what you do

and why you're someone people should listen to when we're talking about a conflict like this? Because you are one of the people who, when everyone was like, there's no way Russia will invade, was saying, well, it might happen. Yeah, I mean, well, I think one of the things that sets me aside from a lot of other analysts out there is that I never thought I would become an analyst, and I never thought that I would do this. It wasn't set in stone for me from the beginning. I thought I was going to be like a high school history teacher. And so I've always studied the world in terms of reading books on

different conflicts around the world. And I've tried to keep appraised on where these books have led to, right? So if I read a book about the second Congo war, it makes sense to then follow current events that are related to what happened after the second Congo war. Yeah. As a result, I followed things going on in Ukraine, starting in 2014 with Yerom Aydan and elsewhere in the world. But, but Ukraine has been one that I focused on pretty heavily because there's been a lot of information about Ukraine ever since 2014, because of how late the war happened in terms of human history and in, in terms of recent conflicts, 2014 2014 isn't that long ago.

And so I started following it back then. And I think that if you combine modern open source tools, modern technology, some of the stuff that organizations like Bellingcat can do with traditional research and knowledge, some of the stuff that I've done in school, you have a really powerful tool to combat disinformation. I think that's one of the best tools we have to combat disinformation is wetting OSINT with traditional research. And the Ukrainian war is actually kind of one of the it's not the conflict where that really started to become a thing. It would probably be the Libyan civil war when when that began to be something people were talking about in a big way. But the Ukrainian, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, in particular, in 2014, is really where open source intelligence kind of came into its own in a really widely known way. That's when Bellingcat's reporting on the downing of MH117 like went out. And that was kind of like the first really huge international story involving like open source intelligent cracking a case. And now since the expanded invasion of Russia back in February, we've kind of entered, and again, this isn't really where this period started, but this has been kind of,

we've seen an explosion of what I think would be fair to call open source intelligence disinformation. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about kind of some of the stuff that you've seen, because there's a number of accounts claiming to be doing OSINT on the Ukrainian war. And boy, howdy, they are not all giving out good information. And it can be difficult for people to tell what they should trust. Because if you're if you're kind of just scanning over it, bad OSINT or even outright fake OSINT can look very similar to good OSINT. Right. And so I would put a lot of the OSINT community into four rough categories. There's OSINT analysts, and those are pretty rare. Those are the kind of people who combine what they're seeing in real time on social media with a background of knowledge in the area. So like a Ukraine regional expert combining that with what they're seeing happen in Ukraine, that's an OSINT analyst. There are some

Twitter accounts that are more OSINT aggregators. They don't really have much analysis that they put into what they're producing, but they spit out a lot of information in real time. And so if you follow the right ones that use the right sources, you can get some pretty decent information from them. Then there's more of the misinformation aggregators, which are accounts that just kind of spread whatever they see without regards to whether it's true or not. rare command and control plane takes off somewhere in america that's known as the doomsday plane during the cold war they'll tweet out the doomsday plane is in the air it doesn't mean a clear war right and they're not doing it to be hurtful they're doing it for likes and then there's disinformation aggregators who are deliberately out there trying to sow discord and sow problems and those are four categories that i've seen all of them develop in their own ways in the last 10 years. I think the best example of that final category, there's an account on Twitter called SMM Syria.

And if you look at the account, it looks almost identical to the OSCE's special monitoring mission to Ukraine. It takes the same kind of graphics and it has the same kind of terminology, but it's an Assadist disinformation outlet. And so, but they've woven their way into, if you just took a casual glance at the war in Syria, you might believe that it's a valid source. And that's the kind of more malicious disinformation that I'm talking about, where like they know what they're doing and they're trying to confuse people. And it's there's, you know, I think one of the best examples of something that really struck me recently as problematic in the war in Ukraine is you've got a video going around of that purports to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting captured Russian soldiers, which is a war crime. And I think credible people within the OSINT community have said, this is something that desperately needs to be investigated more seriously. This like,

is very, has a very good chance of being legitimate, and people should be looking into this. Whereas you've also seen folks who kind of reflexively jumped to defend Ukraine against these allegations, putting out what I think is fairly shoddy OSINT, claiming to show like issues with the video and stuff. And it's like people circling blurry sections of the video and saying like, this is, you know, looks like it could be edited or this doesn't look credible. And it is the kind of thing,

I think one reason people get tripped up by that is prior to the invasion of Ukraine, there were some Russian false flag events that involved like cadavers, bodies that had been autopsied and stuff, which was broken down by people like Elliot Higgins at Bellingcat. And one of the things that, again, if you're just kind of looking at the surface level, you can see like, oh, well, that those were videos that were faked. And so these like the OSINT around this people like pointing out different sections of the video looks the same. Some of the differences differences are for example um when they were analyzing the bodies in those those false flag footage they brought in actual you know corpse cutter uppers morticians

yes to analyze like the cuts in the in the skulls and whatnot as opposed to again just kind of a guy circling aspects of a video and being like, this doesn't seem right. And it's like, but you can, I can see why people get tripped up by it. And it, it is important not to get tripped up by that kind of stuff because war

crimes are bad. I think is a general attitude that we, we both share and, and should be investigated regardless of like whether or not they're being done by the side. Who's also towing Russian tanks away with tractors that you're on the side of, right? Right. And I think that that's exactly an important distinction to make, because there are certain claims that have come out from the Ukrainian side, certain statements that have come out, that as an OSINT analyst, I could probably look into more and maybe poke holes in. Stuff like the number of kills that the ghost of key. Right.

Okay. Maybe it's not 30 kills or whatever it is that people are saying. Maybe he's not real. But that's not harmful as much as did these guys shoot people in the legs. Right. Right. So one of those bears examination just because of the nature of the claim. The other one, maybe we can examine it after the war when it's not. Yeah, it doesn't

really matter if there is an Ukrainian ace fighter pilot who's dropped a bunch of a crazy number, like obviously in a military sense of Russian jets are being downed, that does matter. But like from the perspective of people just kind of observing this war as news consumers, it doesn't really matter. Whereas whether or not a country gets away with a war crime absolutely matters. And people are treating it with the same reflexive hand wave as they do when they accept these the ghost of Kiev. Yes. Myths, right? They're saying like, well, no, but I want the Ukrainian side to win this war.

So we can't even look into any claims of war crimes. And that's just not how it's supposed to be. Like, no, you condemn the crimes up front and you investigate and you try to move forward. And that's how we prove that we're better than the opposing side. Like that's, that's been the rule in this war. And it's been the rule in the past. You know, you, you prove that you're better than your opponents by being more decent. You know, you you prove that you're better than your opponents by being more decent. Yeah. And it's it's I have seen some really unsettling logic from some people along the lines of like, well, these were artillerymen who have been, you know, shelling civilian areas. So why shouldn't they be be shot in the leg? And the answer is because, like, that's number one, it is a war crime to shoot captured prisoners like that. That is a thing that we as a as a species have attempted to make illegal and ought to be.

It is a thing that like should not be done. And there's actually a wide variety of like tactical reasons why it's bad for Ukraine if Russian soldiers believe they will be shot after being captured. It makes, among other things, it makes soldiers less likely to turn themselves in. Among other things, it makes soldiers less likely to turn themselves in. One of the wiser decisions that the Ukrainian government has made in this war has been really deliberately pushing the idea that, like, hey, Russians, if you surrender, we'll pay you. You can get Ukrainian citizenship, like bring in your tanks, you know, land your planes or whatever. Like we'll, you know, we'll make it worth your while, which is a lot, which is potentially a force multiplier. Right. If Russian soldiers think when I get captured, they will shoot me, then they will fight to the death and Ukraine will lose more people in that fight, as opposed to if Russian soldiers think, well, shit, I could actually have a pretty decent life if I just turn myself into these guys and refuse to fight, that means less people you have to fight. So it does it does really matter whether or not this is happening. And it's also just like on a moral level, you shouldn't accept it. And I see some really I think one of the things that I find so unsettling about that logic, like these are these are, you know, artillerymen who have been targeting civilian areas.

Why shouldn't they be shot? It's not that much of a leap to like some other shit we saw people saying in Vietnam. You know, these villages are harboring insurgents. Why shouldn't we treat them like the enemy? You know, like all of this logic leads to people getting murdered who don't deserve to get murdered. And that is bad. Right. There's the snowball snowball effect the slippery slope effect with the moral side of it and then like you're saying the tactical side of it i mean if you look at

part of the reason members of isis fought so hard in places like mosul oh god yeah it was because once you're in that organization your options are a bullet or like a desert cell if you're lucky they're not going to treat you well and reintegrate you into society come on like no that's not how it works so you fight like hell you know that's that's a very basic rule that's pretty easy to understand i would think yeah so that's why this needs to be looked into and if it's proven false if it's proven to not be a correct uh true video that just strengthens the ukrainian side but if it is proven to be true it's something that needs to be investigated it can't be overlooked it can't be swept under under the rug just because we we want one side of this war to come out on top doesn't mean that we have to ignore yeah you're committing like one a good rule of thumb to approach a war from when you're trying

to analyze it is that there there has never been a side in a war who have not committed war crimes. So that should always be on your mind when you're trying to evaluate the reality of a war crime. It doesn't mean every claim of a war crime is true. That would be a very silly way to translate that. But it does mean that when there is a claim that the side you support has been responsible for a war crime, your default should be, this is not impossible. And I should proceed from the area

that this could have happened, and it should be analyzed without reflexively dismissing it. And also without saying that war crimes committed by a group of soldiers in a single part of a theater necessarily mean that the war itself is being prosecuted in a criminal level by that government. Because, for example, well, I mean i i was about to say u.s soldiers committed war crimes in world war ii but actually the prosecution of that war was criminal in a lot of fundamental ways yeah they don't let that one go for a minute but that doesn't mean that like your granddad committed war crimes because other u.s soldiers who were in the field executed captured german ps, you know?

Right. Yeah. Which I think is something people have an easier time understanding when it's not a war. They feel the need to have a series of 280 character or less takes on in Twitter. Yeah. That's the weirdest thing about the social media age and kind of OSINT in general is that while it does make it very accessible and easy for anybody to get involved in investigating these crimes and these events, it also means that everybody thinks they have an opinion that matters on it. And in that sense, they muddy the waters.

A lot of people can imitate the OS oscent look pretty well they can circle things in pictures that look similar or as we saw in syria a lot they'd take two pictures of two totally different dudes and say these are the same guy they're both members of al-nusra or something like that and they would compare the eyes and compare the chins and stuff and it looks kind of like a bellingcat image but it wasn't right yeah that's the danger here is that like everybody can can help but everybody can hurt now too yeah yeah and it's one of those things every every aspect of this cuts both ways because like i think people started saying rightfully so after the invasion or the expanded invasion i should say

of ukraine by r like, well, now all of these people who were experts in whatever the last big story was are going to become experts on the Ukrainian conflict, right? Which is absolutely a thing that happened. You get all of these people who I think are pretty bad journalists and reporters who suddenly like rush to have their commentary on this thing that they have ignored for the last eight years. But at the same time, to talk about Bellingcat, the founder of Bellingcat, my old boss, Elliot Higgins, was like literally an unemployed dude sitting on his couch when he started analyzing war footage

and is now one of the most respected conflict analysts in the world. And that is a thing the internet has made possible. I think a great example would be the caliber obscura Twitter, which is just like a dude in the UK, who has an almost impossible ability to recognize firearms and pieces of firearms. And so just analyzes, people send him footage from all over the planet. And he'll say like, these are these guns, and this is where they came from. And this is, this one is like looks like this kind of gun, but it's actually a fake one that's being made locally in this country and it's supposed to look like this. And you can tell because like that don't know any people who are working at institutes and better at the thing that Caliber does than Caliber is. Right. But they did just start as a person on Twitter, you know.

Well, that's the thing about this. This is that you get people who were not kind of born with the idea that they were going to become analysts in this field. they were going to become analysts in this field. And so you have people like both of the people you mentioned, whom I don't know Elliot personally, but I remember him from our shared days on a comedy website together. Yes, the website that shall remain nameless. That shall remain nameless, right. And then, you know, Caliber and I have talked on Twitter a bunch

and, you know, we're friends there. And it's just interesting to see that like, both of them are very real people behind like their professional personality and their, their expertise. They're also down to earth, real people, which is rare in this field because a lot of people are kind of elitist, um, and, and, and, uh, gatekeeper E and neither of them are about that they're both all about like getting as many people doing this as possible because more eyes are better like yeah elliot is is uh i mean the whole reason my career with bellingcat existed is because like i emailed him out of the blue one day and said hey i've been noticing this weird thing in videos of fascists

talking to cops can i write a thing for you and And he was just like, okay. And that was, I mean, like, that was how that started. And he's, I've met him since a couple of times. And yeah, is a very, I think is very informed, because of the fact that he did not come from sort of this big institutional background, has a humility with which he approaches his investigations that I think is one of the things you should look for in trying to decide whether or not open source intelligence that you're seeing on Twitter, whatever is credible, is how conclusive are they stating their claims are? How many times do they offer only a single possibility for what something is like, you know, there's a number of things you can do. possibility for what something is like um you know there's a number of things you can do i think at this point we should probably move to a separate area of discussion which is how's the how's this war going who's who's winning well well so i i made a statement on uh my facebook page my personal facebook page about three weeks ago and i still feel confident in that statement. And that is that while Ukraine has yet to win this war, Russia's already lost. They've already lost their objectives. They've already lost what their goals were. And at this

point, it's a face-saving venture on the Russian part. But Aram, Russia carried out a cunning, faint action to distract while they took the east by burning a fifth of their general staff and all of their armored vehicles. It was a cunning feint. I saw someone on Twitter posit that it was actually a move to use up all of Ukraine's ammunition. Brilliant. Yeah, just a splurge. Very Zap Brannigan logic on behalf of vladimir putin uh ukrainians have a preset kill limit and once they hit 10 generals the army will shut down

right exactly uh but no the war is not going well for russia um and that's not to say that it's going great for ukraine either but no Ukraine needs to do less well to succeed here. Yes. Than Russia does. It's, I mean, because one of the things that is a black box, right? I do think, because there was a lot of discussion earlier in the war, particularly like how credible are these numbers that the Ukrainian government is putting out for dead and for destroyed vehicles? putting out for for dead and for destroyed vehicles and i think the oscent out there like the verified vehicle casualties and stuff that we could verify means that like obviously the ukrainian government is padding their numbers but not by as much as a lot of people might have

like it's not wildly off no i saw their first casualty count i think first casualty count i think it was like 2500 dead okay guys come on was like, okay, guys, come on. It was like day two or three. It was like day two or three, right? And then like all of the Western intelligence. Yeah, I was like, actually, yeah. They were like, yeah, it's probably about 2,000. Oh, my God. Wow. I mean, that perspective for some people who may not,

that number may not jump out to them. We lost, you know, just shy of 3,000 soldiers killed during the Iraq War. So 2,000 in a couple days is an extraordinary number of losses. Yeah. And of course, the black box here, we don't have nearly as good an information on, is what kind of casualties has the Ukrainian military suffered and what kind of civilian casualties have been suffered. And obviously, civilian casualties nearly always take much longer to get to the extent that it's ever.

I think we have a better chance of getting objective civilian casualties for this because unlike a lot of other conflicts, these civilians being killed are civilians under the aegis of a government that is a functional state as opposed to Syria, for example, where there's basically the only people with an interest in accurately reporting the death count are a number of different non-governmental organizations because the people are being killed by one government to the other, right? technically under the Iraqi government's, you know, whatever protection seems like the wrong word to say. But I can tell you from my experience there, there was no, we still do not have anything that approaches a credible civilian death count for that conflict, and probably never will. Right. And on that note, on the civilian casualties note, we were talking earlier about how you can identify a credible ocean account versus a one that you probably shouldn't give too much credence to and one of the best ways to do that honestly is is uh look at their their morals i guess yeah if they're ever posting and celebrating the death of civilians anywhere you should probably disregard them like yeah you'll never see elliot higgins

being like yeah suck it people of bello grad like yeah you got hit with a missile like it's not it's you know it's not gonna happen yeah it's not it's the same thing as like i i get why people celebrate uh you know battlefield victories obviously i don't think especially if you're literally a ukrainian living you know in the area affected i don't think there's anything morally wrong with celebrating opposing soldiers being defeated. But I am I continue to be deeply unsettled by footage celebrating things like the destruction of armored personnel carriers full of 19 year old kids, even though a non insignificant number ofificant number of those 19-year-old kids are accessories to war crimes, right? Like, it doesn't mean, like, I'm broadly okay with it. I do feel a lot better about celebrating losses of special forces units like the VDV that have been heavily involved in war

crimes around the world. Like, that I have less kind of an issue with, but... No, and I felt that personally, you know, I'm Armenian. And during the Karabakh war in 2020, it was just day, every day I would wake up to dozens of videos of Armenian conscripts and soldiers being blown up and hunted from the air and people on Twitter cheering for it because they were for one reason or another on the Azeri side. And like, I get it, you know, like you were saying, you want to share your battlefield victories. And i understand that from people who live on the

battlefield and live near the battlefield i get it it's happening to you sure people thousands of miles away cheerleading on the internet what the hell is wrong with you yeah maybe don't do that maybe don't do that like you what the hell like you know those are real people in that video that never did anything to you and this is not like a sporting event where like they go home at the end of the day and they've just lost like they're dead even when they do like i've spent a huge amount of my career talking directly face to face with victims of isis right i have been to like eight or nine refugee camps in two countries at this point specifically for that war. In addition to days spent on the refugee trail in between Hungary and Serbia, talking to to Syrians and talking to people who had like fled the region. But at the same time, I can't help but like I've literally been under fire by ISIS and then had those ISIS guys gotten killed.

And I have celebrated and cheered when that's happened. And I'll never forget. We were embedded with this mortar team and we were under fire from this sniper and the mortar team. I forget you can in the article I wrote on it. I list the exact number of rounds fired. It was like nine or 10, something like that, where they're gradually walking in mortars until they they get this guy um and obviously we like cheered when they fucking killed this dude because he was shooting at us and i remember like kind of on our way out away from the front my fixer sangar was like how many rounds did they drop before they got him and i was like i don't

know i think it was like nine or ten i've got the footage somewhere and he was like, I don't know, I think it was like nine or 10. I've got the footage somewhere. And he was like, I wonder what else they hit. And Sengar was born and raised in Mosul. And it was one of those things we spent the very next day. We were talking to people fleeing their homes and stuff. And not only did we see some of those people who lost family members to misses, both by Iraqi forces and by coalition aircraft and stuff. But like we came upon this dead ISIS fighter in a fighting position where you could see he had been in there with his wife for days and he had been wounded two or three days before he got killed.

And you could see the evidence of the first aid she had done on him. And it was one of those things, I guess I could try to make the case that like, well, maybe she was a captive and didn't want to do it. But quite frankly, everything I saw in there makes me believe like she cared deeply for him and stayed with him until the bitter end, trying to keep him alive and fighting. And that doesn't mean he's not like a monster and it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been killed because he's a fucking dashi who was in the middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things. fucking dashi who was in the middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things but he's also like you can't you can't ignore the humanity of of somebody when you have seen that element of what what happens in the conflict and that has stayed with me quite a bit ever since yeah and it's it's one of those things you know you, you gotta, you gotta remember that the majority of,

of young men of fighting age around the world who join a military or an armed organization or an insurgent group, whatever it may be, they do so typically because it's whomever is in charge of the area they're growing up in. Right. You don't join the Russian army because you weighed all the options and the Brazilian army offers some good aid,

you know, some good healthcare packages. And I looked at the Italian army, but really I want to go with the Russian. No, you go with wherever you were born. Yeah. Whether, and you know, and I was talking to my roommate about this last night, we were watching this footage from the flood of 96 here in Oregon, you know, and it's this national guard helicopter where they're pushing bales of hay out of the back of the helicopter down to cows stranded out near tillamook and so depending on when you join the national guard you either fed cows hay from a helicopter or deployed to iraq yeah that's the luck of the draw right like that's not fair no they don't deserve to die any more than the guys dropping the hay out of the helicopter did

right but people get yeah they get carried away with like turning it into a sport almost and they forget that there's people on the other end and that like well some of them are threats and they may need to be dealt with it's like you know a bear comes at you in the woods you shoot it you don't you don't skin it and make fun of it like yeah you know i go kill its kids you know that's not that's not how it works you know so like yeah yeah don't don't be don't be a piece of shit like don't don't don't don't lose your humanity um because i mean one of the things that makes it easy to lose your humanity is that like videos of shit getting blown up looks dope right like it does it looks cool to watch things get blown up that's in fact I suspect how a lot of people who become very good OSINT investigators, part of what

draws them in is just like, I'm sure that was a part of why caliber started obsessively researching guns is like, they're neat. Guns are neat. You know, weapons are interesting. People are inherently interested in weaponry, which is not a good thing. It just a thing you know it's not a bad thing either it's just like a thing human beings will always be interested in because warfare is as natural to us as eating and fucking right um well you're talking about the mortars right the mortars walking in and there's this video on on youtube of made by an american navy attack squadron um of them dropping bomb after bomb on targets in mosul and and uh raka places like that yeah and it's set to uh the devil's gonna cut you down and every time there's a beat in the music you see a bomb drop yeah and some of these bombs it's like

four bombs dropping at a time dropping an eight-story building and so i'm sure there was a guy inside there with a weapon but like you want to tell me there wasn't anybody else in that eight story building? And like, okay, yeah, you're celebrating the death of the combatant there, but like also all those other people are being celebrated indirectly. And so like, you got to remember that, like these bombs explode and they take out a large area and these fights are happening in cities a lot of the time. the weaponry that the United States uses is more precise than something like a barrel bomb, but not by as many orders of magnitude as you would hope. Right. And precision doesn't precision matters.

Yes. It's not a non important thing, not an unimportant thing, but ultimately it doesn't matter if your missile went right into that living room full of civilians and blew them all up. Or if you leveled the block and maybe you know killed them indirectly like you got to know what you're hitting the target is what really matters right so it doesn't matter if you can hit the target you got to make sure it's the right target and that's where we're starting to have

issues now it's like we can hit targets really well we just aren't always sure that it's the right yes as opposed i mean and and you are seeing, so let's, let's talk about, we started this chatting about Ukrainian, a potential Ukrainian war crime. What we have absolute documentation of is a tremendous amount of war crimes on behalf of the Russian invaders, including a thing that they have done repeatedly in Syria, which is the targeting of hospitals and medical facilities with facilities with terrible civilian casualties as a result. And this is something that the New York Times actually published an incredible article based

on a mix of OSINT and like, I'm not entirely sure how they got them, but combat flight recorders, like the audio that these Russian fighter pilots were sending back and forth to command as they attacked hospitals in Syria. Um, so we actually have a tremendous amount of detail about like what it looks like inside the cockpit and in like the control room and whatnot, as airstrikes are being ordered on medical facilities. I really recommend people check that article out. Um, it's, it's pretty harrowing shit, but, um, yeah. Are you, are you surprised at all by kind of what you've seen so far on behalf of the Russian forces in Ukraine? No, no, not even the slightest.

Because I followed the war in Syria rather closely. And I mean, there was a point when they had to stop marking the hospitals with hospital markings because the Russians would target them so consistently. The United Nations had to stop giving the Russians the coordinates of the hospitals in Aleppo because it kept getting targeted. There was an aid convoy that was struck, I believe by Syrian aircraft, but it was the targeting was given to them by Russian aircraft. It was just an aid convoy coming into Aleppo, a United Nations aid convoy, and it was bombed and strafed repeatedly for several hours. nation's aid convoy, and it was bombed and strafed repeatedly for several hours.

Things like that, that happened so regularly in Syria to the relative silence of the rest of the world that led me to believe that when they go into Ukraine, they're not going to be any gentler. A lot of people suspected early on that like, well, it's harder to demonize people who look like you, so they're not going to have as much of an easy time demonizing ukrainians and i think there has been some degree of difficulty with that at least in terms of some of the conscripts on the russian side but the other thing we're seeing is that like a lot of these a lot of people seem to genuinely believe the mission of denazifying ukraine and so if that's what you believe you're doing then the the bombing doesn't surprise it doesn't become a surprise right if you think that you're going

into ukraine to suppress it and occupy it then bombing cities full of russians russians and russian speakers seems like a bad idea but if you believe that they're all nazis then it makes sense that you might just blow them up because they're all nazis then it makes sense that you might just blow them up because they're all the enemy i'm not saying i'm not condoning it i'm saying no but i mean that is literally what the u.s government and the british government did in world war ii you know right exactly there have been claims made that what russia is doing in places like like maria pole um amounts to an act of genocide. Um,

what is your opinion on that? Genocide is a big word. Uh, it is, it is. There's a big word. It's yeah. Um,

but you know, it has a lot of meaning behind it in the sense that like, just because somebody is killing large numbers of people and doing so in heinous ways does not make it a genocide. You have to prove it was an attempt to destroy culture and destroy heritage and things of that nature as it stands i would say that it looks likely that there are signs of potential genocide yeah in mario i am not confident enough to come out and say that i conclusively think it's happening but the way that it looks like the the city is being deliberately targeted

to either force the entire population to flee or to radicalize them yeah one way or the other is it goes beyond military uh targeting you know i think the thing that were that i that is the most like troubling potential sign of of an intention of genocide is the reports that the Russian government has been evacuating civilians in parts of Mariupol. They have captured to places in Russia, which is, this is a misconception. You don't have to just be killing people. As you stated, it's an attempt to destroy a culture, which you can do by killing, but you can also do by things like separating,, moving people like forced migration and whatnot. Like there's aspects of

that. Again, look at like the genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. It was not all straight up killing. A lot of it was forced migration, which is an act of genocide as well. And that's the kind of thing where I'm kind of waiting for more reporting on that to hear exactly what's happening and the extent to what's happening. But that really troubles me in terms of potential signs of a genocide. Yeah, and when they coined the term genocide after World War II, it was with reference to the Holocaust. But what they had in mind was the Armenianmenian genocide yeah when it when they when they drafted these words up and and because it was beyond just sheer number of people killed if we're talking sheer number of people killed the nazis also killed six million other people yeah in addition to the six

million jews they killed the reason we talk about the jews is one six million is a lot of people and two it was a deliberate attempt to destroy their entire culture yeah make them have never existed yeah and that's very different and very scary dying is also very bad yeah the idea of dying and then all the people who were like you just don't exist anymore and all your books and your literature are gone like that's that's monstrous yeah that's why there's a difference between genocide and mass killing. Yeah, and it's the difference, like we talk about U.S. war crimes in World War II, of which there were many, including the firebombing of Dresden, I would argue.

But it's not an act of genocide, because when they firebombed Dresden, it was certainly the killing of civilians without particular regard to the direct military efficacy of the action, but it was not an attempt to destroy German culture or obliterate the German people. And you brought up the Armenian genocide. We'll talk about this at some point on Behind the Bastards, but you mentioned that that was kind of what the people, when the term genocide was invented, that was what people were looking at, even though it was kind of a direct response to the Holocaust. It's also worth noting that like, when the Nazis planned the Holocaust, they used the Armenian genocide as a model. Hitler's literal statement was when people when

he was asked during like, one of his his dinners with a bunch of Nazi officials, like, what, what about kind of the international reaction to what we're planning to do? He was like, well, who remembers the Armenians? You know, like that was his attitude. It's like, we'll get away with it because nobody did anything during this genocide. Right. And I think while I would hesitate to call the entire war in Ukraine a genocide. Yes. As of yet, I would say that there's a similarity between the Armenian genocide and how that led to the Holocaust.

There's a similarity between the Russian war crimes committed in Syria and how that led to the war crimes being committed in Ukraine in the sense that if the world had stood up earlier, we would not be seeing this now. Yeah. The problem is the world looked the other way when the Russians bombed hospitals in Syria, when they repeatedly bombed hospitals. In fact, the world didn't just look away. A lot of people in the West mocked it. I'm sure you've heard it as often as I have the last hospital in Aleppo joke, right? Where they're bombing the last hospital in Aleppo again. Well, the reason that happened is because when you bomb the hospital, they build a new one and then it gets bombed again three days later, so they've bombed the last one again.

So it wasn't a joke. It was just a tragedy that kept playing out that people couldn't really fathom, so they mocked. And so when that's the attitude of a lot of the world, it's no surprise that what's happened in Ukraine has run out of control. Where do you think we go from here? What are you expecting to kind of see next within this conflict? You know, the most recent kind of reporting is that Russia's pulling, Russia's framing it as they're pulling back from Kiev to focus on other fronts. The Ukrainian side is saying like, well, they've been defeated around Kiev and they're pulling back. What do you think kind of we're seeing next? What is your opinion on kind of the next stages here? So I think it really depends on Vladimir Putin's power and how long he remains

in a position of unchecked power. I'm not saying necessarily he will fall from power. I'm saying that how long can he go as the only guy calling the shots? Because as it stands right now, it doesn't look like he's the same Vladimir Putin that we were used to dealing with. It seems like something may have changed with him. And that's a wild card. Because if Vladimir Putin wants to continue to escalate here, he can continue to do so. Because he may not be getting the same reporting that we are about the condition of his army. He may think his army is doing better than they're doing and that they actually are just repositioning.

So if that's the case, there's a chance that he'll escalate against potentially a NATO country. I find that unlikely, but there's still a chance for it. I think what's more likely is that we're going to see the Russian military refocus its efforts in the east, in Donetsk and Luhansk, with an attempt to create a land bridge to Crimea through the area, through Mariupol and Melitopol area. And I think they're going to try to rucify the area as much as possible and remove as many of the Ukrainians as possible one way or the other. And I don't know if they'll be successful in that, but I think simultaneously while they do that, they're going to try to tie down and destroy as much of the Ukrainian

military as possible, which will be difficult because the units in the east are Ukraine's best equipped units. So I don't know how this ends. I don't see a reasonable end to this insight, but that's just because there's too many variables at the moment. Yeah, I do think one thing that's kind of worth looking at this war in an historical context, a number of comparisons have been made to both of the world wars here. of comparisons have been made to both of the world wars here. I think the thing that it most reminds me of is World War One, not in that it's a conflagration on that scale or in that it's a similar war in terms of the combat, but it is an example of the first big war that utilizes a variety of weapons and tactics that have been battlefield tested in a series of smaller wars, right?

And I think we are seeing in Ukraine for the first time the actual – I think one thing that we have seen is that drones, and I'm not talking about the big ones here. They get a lot of the Bayraktar and stuff. That gets a lot of attention. But like small – the kind of drones anyone listening to this could pick up and buy today, right? small, the kind of drones anyone listening to this could pick up and buy today, right? Those drones, I think, are proving to be a game changer on a tactical level in a similar manner to the machine gun in the turn of the last century, the century before the last century.

With the drones, I've often, machine guns are a good comparison. I've often thought of it as like the airplane. We had airplanes and we even had combat airplanes before world war one. We didn't have very many of them because nobody really realized the utility of them in war. And then as the war got closer and then the war started, country started to slowly build up these small fleets of aircraft. And then by the end of the war, everybody had an air force.

I think we're going to see the same thing with these small consumer drones. Is that like by the end of this war or whatever conflagrations are coming after it, every military in the world is going to have little, little, you know, phantom, phantom threes or whatever, basically for every infantry squad. sitting here right now have not an insignificant amount of money let's say three to four thousand dollars and the enough mechanical like competence to carry out modest repairs on your own car you could with things entirely available over the shelf build a weapon system capable of disabling a variety of armored vehicles at night you know like you that that is a thing that individual people you could do that and you could have it up and running in a matter of days i'm imagining the next protest in unnamed city yeah and a consumer drone flies over the police line and drops a little thing on him that says bang yeah yeah yeah exactly like there's a lot people even even as as influential and and meaningful as they've been on the battlefield in ukraine i think people

still are kind of slow to understand the extent like there is one of the wildest stories that's come out of it is that the ukrainian military has a an outfit of civilian drone operators using hacked and home-built drones to attack Russian forces at night. And the documented efficacy of their raids has been significant. And I can remember spending a brief period of time with an Iraqi military unit that was just using DJI Phantoms that they had rigged to drop what were essentially mortar shells with shuttlecocks on them from a height. And they were very effective at killing people, as ISIS drones were effective at sort of spotting mortars for folks. Well, and one of the things I saw ISIS use their drones for, to great effect, wasn't so much to kill large numbers of enemy soldiers. It was to do the same thing that American Predator drones and Reaper drones had done for decades by that point to terror groups, which is let them know you can't gather in large numbers.

Yeah. If you gather in large numbers, you're a target. And so you saw Iraqi soldiers saying no more than two or three in a group. Yep. Any more than that will get targeted, you know, and it's they flipped the equation, basically. Yep. And don't. One of the reasons why I have a general policy, heavily informed by my time in Mosul, that the last place I want to be anywhere near a war zone is an armored vehicle.

Because unless you are in something that's heavily up-armored, like an MRAP, little bombs dropped by drones can do significant damage to something like a Humvee. And that's exactly what you target. You don't target a Toyota Corolla with a drone like that, unless you specifically know an individuals in that Corolla that you want to kill. But you may just behind the lines, see a target of opportunity in an armor, see an armored, lightly armored vehicle and drop a wet ammunition on it. And that's one of the things this has done. There was a lot of talk prior to the expanded Russian invasion about how immediately Russia was going to get air superiority. And that's obviously a bigger story than just drones. There's a lot of factors in why Russia, it's probably accurate to say they have superiority in a number of parts of the war, but they don't

have supremacy. It's not like an absolute matter. And part of that is because it's not really possible to. At this moment, someday, I suspect there will be more effective ways of stopping drones at like a theater level. Maybe, but it certainly hasn't happened yet. the drones and then there's also on the ukrainian side they you know i think they recognize that air force against air force the russians have a numerical superiority so you can deny the russians air supremacy by shooting down their planes with man pads you don't have to have an air force to deny your opponent no you just have to die them the ability to freely operate in your airspace and this is one of those things there's been a lot of talk about a no-fly zone, which I tend to think would be a bad idea in the traditional sense, in terms of like the US and NATO sending in planes

to down Russian planes over Ukraine. There's a number of reasons why that's concerning, but you can effectively establish a no-fly zone by shipping in a fuckload of manpads. Right, exactly. Yeah. And I'm not against that. I think in terms of what

kind of armed support is ethical to provide, giving people the ability to stop planes from bombing cities is broadly speaking one of the most ethical things you can do in terms of shipping munitions around the world. Right, and the other

advantage is that manpads, I'm sure somebody could turn it into a lethal ground weapon but they're pretty hard to yeah use against ground targets against houses things like that not really what they're designed for so it's not like just handing over you know uh some indiscriminate weapon to the ukrainians to use against russian cities you're giving them a weapon that's specifically used against military aircraft. Like most man pads can't reach the altitude that airliners are at even.

So. Yep. So I think that's probably what we want to talk about today. You want to plug your pluggables, tell people where they can find you and your analysis out in the world. Yeah. So you can, you can follow me on Twitter.

My handle is at Shabani and Aram. And I publish occasionally with the New Lions Institute. So you can see my work there as well. And I have a website that I seldom update, thefoldagap.com. Hasn't been updated in probably eight months now because I've been tired. But yeah, those are the places to find me.

And DMs are open on Twitter. So if you ever have questions or anything like that, let me know. I'm happy to talk with anybody who's got questions on these kind of things. Hell yeah. Well, that's gonna be us. So, you know, enjoy this analysis of the war in Ukraine before we return you to your regularly scheduled multi-part series on Nazi cat girls,

uh, the primary focus of this podcast. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows Presented by I Heart and Sonorum An anthology of modern day horror stories

Inspired by the legends of Latin America From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnne Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Money. Money. money money this is welcome dick it happened here it is me christopher long uh this is a this is a podcast about things falling apart things putting back together again and also today it's just about money um and also well okay it is not about money. It is about money and is about seemingly, seemingly esoteric arguments about the nature of money that actually turned out to be extremely important for any post-revolutionary society

or even just this society. So yeah. And, and joining, joining me to talk about this are Kyle Flannery and Steve Mann, who are the co-editors of strange matters magazine, which is a workers' co-op that's in the middle of a fundraising drive. So yeah, go support the magazine. And Steve and Kyle, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Chris. Thanks for having us.

The basis of this interview is a piece that is coming out. Actually, when is it coming out? That's a good question that I should probably have asked before this. Oh, let's see. It will come out later this month. Okay, yeah. That'll be out later this month. That is about the history of money and what money is.

So I guess we can start there, which is, yeah, can you walk us through a bit about the debate over what money is and how sort of various people have gotten parts of it wrong and parts of it right? Sure. I got into this debate as a economics graduate student in 2011. And a book that really kind of shaped my initial understanding was David Graeber's Debt, the First 5,000 Years. Great book.

Yeah, it's excellent. It's very long and it's a bit scattered but i i love what he put together with it and um so he kind of introduced me to ideas of from a school of economic thought called chartalism and chartalism is kind of the theoretical forebear of MMT. And MMT, which is modern monetary theory, is kind of in the news now as a theory which is saying, okay, if you're a government that issues its own money, its own currency, that is not really backed by anything, it's not backed by any other currency or any other commodity, then you don't really face a financial limit as far as how much you can produce. You're the sole source of that money and you can spend it into existence, spend by buying things, the money into existence. And people will accept it to the extent that they either need it or they want it.

and people will accept it to the extent that they either need it or they want it. And that's one theory that's kind of in the air now. But chartalism, over 100 years before this, is putting out very similar ideas around money that is created by states in order to marshal physical resources. They call it biophysical resources, which is just a fancy word of meaning all of the material, people, techniques, physical processes that are required to create economic activity. So to the extent that people either need or want your money, you can use it as a social technology sort of to marshal those resources into action. And you being a state, chartalism says. So from chartalism, we got MMT.

But David Graeber's book is about a lot more than just chartalism and MMT. So it's about the origins of money. And origins of money, it turns out, are at least 5,000 years ago, as the title says. There are examples of early accounting systems that are where people are just, rather than there being a circulating medium of exchange type money, like a coin or something or a dollar bill. There were just records of what people own and what people owe and their debts and credits against each other. And it was in early Mesopotamia, so we have these early accounting systems that yield more advanced credit systems over time that are ruled by temples, which are sort of proto-states in a way, in terms of like they administer the flow of goods and services through their territory and between their territory and another temple's territory using their domestic money, but also

international money. International money was facilitated through trade networks. Trade networks use things like they needed to convert between a domestic money and international money. And Graeber goes through these wonderful examples of silver and other metals being used as international means of payment. That's sort of our term in our piece, basically, which is covering foreign exchange. But he says, like, in order to get from the domestic money into the international money,

you need to have these linkages of experts in the temple and the trade networks to get together and make credit instruments, which knit them together into this trade network. And from there, we go into, I don't want to spend too much time on the history, but we go from there to situations thousands of years later, we get coins. thousands of years later, we get coins. Coins are being minted by starting in the roughly 600 BC, I want to say, Carl?

Yeah. That sounds about right. It's going to be early Iron Age. Right. So the first, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been doing some homework on this because I've been on a few podcasts and they're numismatous in the comments and whatnot. But the first mixed gold and silver coin was sometime in the 7th century BCE. And the first gold coin was not long after. I think it was like they were both Lydian kings.

Like one after another. Anyway, just wanted to hit that because someone said I got it wrong earlier. These coins were kind of the first widely used sort of retail means of settling debts at the point of sale between people. So it wasn't just an accounting system. It was an elaborate credit system with no circulating means of payment. It was a circulating money now. And it's getting around based on military conquest. Military conquest in the Axial Age spread the use of coins

much wider than the domestic spheres in which they were first minted. Yeah, and I think we should just to talk about roughly when this is. If you go back, I mean, this is slightly later, but one of the huge sort of like, the periods

where the entire Mediterranean is using coinage is, you know, this is when you're dealing with your sort of like, like the, the periods where like the entire Mediterranean is using coinage, right. Is, you know, you're this, this is, this is when you're dealing with, you're sort of like classical Greek, like you have your Greeks and your Persians and you have your sort of like Athens and Sparta.

And those guys are very much, they're engaged in this thing that Graeber calls the, the military industrial coinage slavery complex. The military industrial coinage complex. Yeah. And I, yeah. And I think he, he adds slavery on the end because it's yeah it's it's this giant sort of like this giant warfare system right like these are like like athens is an empire right they run around they steal they seize people's gold like this gold and silver mines and they like have slaves that work

in this this whole sort of like like this yeah you get the system of empire that is like what the actual age is sort of defined by yeah yeah and it's like whereas previously like so precious metals did circulate but they weren't in coin form and they were more as like a bulk means of payment stored from one temple to the next almost as if they were central banks but central banks don't exist yet and axial the axial age coinage system gave rise to the more much more sophisticated medieval coinage system and i'm going breezily through this because um there's a lot there but several thousand years there's several thousand years are passing in a few minutes here so um bear with me. But there are, now in the medieval and renaissance times, not only do we have the coinage circulating, but we also have credit instruments, which are being submitted, transferred, transmitted rather, between banks. between banks in different countries and territories that are saying, hey, you don't even need to,

based on what is written on this piece of paper, I already know you're good for it. I will dispense with the coins that I have in my bank because this paper signifies that you're good for it, basically. And so that greatly speeds things up in terms of settling commerce debts and settling bills between different states. But going through all this history, the point of it is that at every sort of step of the way, you see, okay, there's a lot of different types of monies that are circulating, and they're being exchanged against one another.

And there also seems to be a domestic sphere and an international sphere. that I and my co-author, John Michael Colon, thought up is kind of sort of sets the tune as far as what kind of hierarchy of money, if you will, develops in each of these ages. So like in the prior to the Axel Age, there was bulk settlement from one temple to the next in terms of silver, although it wasn't coins. It was just like bullion, basically. And then later it was coins, and then later it was bills of exchange. there emerged gold standards that existed between nations,

and they had central banks eventually, which hoarded gold, not just because they were fetishizing it or something basic like that, but rather because it was the established international means of payment. And either you need that or you need something that is easily transferable into that in order to conduct your trade, especially if you're a developing country or a otherwise like an upstart state of some type. Now, today we're in a dollarized world. The dollar is the international means of payment. in a dollarized world. The dollar is the international means of payment. From 1971 onwards, the MMT story, yeah, that's basically true.

For the US government as the sole issuer of the dollar, which is a fiat currency, which is not backed by anything, you can make as much of that as you want. You can create and spend into existence as many dollars as the US government wants and then delete it from existence by taxing it away. And that makes perfect sense.

Totally acknowledge that. But there's some problems nonetheless in terms of how they apply that into a more general theory. Because it's like, okay, you can make as much of your own money. What about other types of money? From the perspective of a U.S. statecraft-interested individual, why would you care about other people's money, basically, if you're just the sole source of the US dollar, which happens to also be the international means of payment, of course you wouldn't.

Or if you're like, say, Tunisia, the Tunisian dollar is accepted almost nowhere as payment. Yeah, and one of the big things, I mean, it's not the sole driver, and people sort of emphasize this. I'm going to caveat this immediately because people will yell at me. But one of the very important things about the dollar is that the dollar is what you can buy oil in. And this is extremely important because if you are a society in the world, you need oil.

This is basically universally true and and this you know and the but and the fact that you need to buy oil and the fact you need to buy a lot of other things that are manufactured in the u.s means you have to find some way to get u.s dollars now again the u.s doesn't this doesn't matter for the u.s because we can just make them well okay a a this is another thing this stuff gets very weird and convoluted very quickly um But the, the, the, essentially the U S can just sort of make this money. Technically speaking, it's a federal reserve and there's all of this just incredibly

convoluted finance stuff. But yeah, the U S like doesn't, the U S does not have to worry about obtaining us dollars. You could just do it, but you know, yeah. If,

if you're, yeah, if, if you're, if you're, I don't know if you're Tunisia, if you're Denmark's an example, I don't know, if you're Tunisia, if you're- Denmark's an example I like. Yeah, Denmark.

Yeah, you need to find a way to get US dollars because you need to have stuff where you need to use US dollars to buy it. Yeah, and so in our international context, this is after all of the history I just went through since about 1971 or so when we went off the gold standard. 71 or so when we went off the gold standard. We have a system of central banks dominated by the dollar, and the dollar represents about 60% of settlement of all trade. And the next five or so currencies plus the U.S. account for like 80% to 85% of all trade. So there's really just a few currencies which dominate everything

with the US being outsized among them. And when you look at the historical record, this is like very similar to other forms of international means of payment where it's like, okay, I either need to have the one that's at the top or failing that, one of the other sort of reserve

currencies even though that that that terminology didn't really exist prior to about say 80 years ago um but yeah so like if you don't if it's not gold then okay it's the u.s dollar so we need dollars or we either need to be printing dollars because we're the US or if we're not them, then we need to get into either US dollar or the yen or the euro or one of the major trading currencies. And like China, China does a lot of trade with the US and they sell things to us. We give them dollars. They're rational. They put their dollars into treasuries to gain a little bit of return instead of just holding the dollars themselves for no return. Should we explain, I guess, what a treasury is? Yeah, sorry. A treasury bill is if you receive dollars, you can use them to purchase what's

called a treasury note or a treasury bill. And sometimes it's called t-notes too. So if you ever hear someone talk about t-notes, that's what this is. Yeah. So it's a way to learn. It. So if you ever hear someone talk about T-Notes, that's what this is. Yeah. So it's a way to learn. It's like moving from your checking to your savings account, essentially. So if you have just dollars in a bank, it doesn't earn hardly anything. If you go into the savings account, which is basically the treasury bills, you'll earn

a little more. And you'll earn dollars. You won't earn from NB from them. You'll earn more dollars. Yeah, yeah. And dollars are the international means of payment. So that's good. Yeah. and you'll earn dollars you won't earn from nb from them you'll earn more dollars yeah yeah so dollars are the international means of payment so that's good yeah so it's like you basically like there's the u.s government puts out a bond and like you buy it and then it when you will whenever it like expires there's like a 10-year t-note that people talk about that's like in 10 years

you buy it and yeah it'll give you like a certain amount of dollars like later on that is more than what you paid for it exactly so you'll earn a little bit of interest over time yeah and then you may earn like a little lump sum when it matures in in the future so china has tons of dollars it's part of a huge strategy that they have in order to manage their foreign currency reserves, or what's called forex. So forex is the, and it's a term we're going to use a lot, that just is the foreign currency reserves you have on hand in order to pay for things that are only available for sale in currencies that you can't make yourself okay so

you know you have this question of like why do we care about this right like why do we people who want to make the world better care about this and the answer is okay take take take your hypothetical scenario uh your your hypothetical scenario is the scenario in which like a a a a bunch of workers in alliance with like tribal confederations have taken vancouver island right and they've set up a new they've set up a new government they have worked out sovereignty arrangements things have happened you now have a new you have you have a new sort of entity that is in vancouver island um yeah so so immediately you have you have both you have both uh resources and you have problems

right you have a certain amount of resources that are on vancouver island right you have you know you have like you have literally like what you have the things that are on the island right you have cars you have like probably some yachts you've managed to like steal you have you know you have you have shops you have uh production facilities you have a extremely large number of very good chinese restaurants uh you have yeah uh trees got a lot of trees yeah you've got trees major asset yeah you know restaurants i mean also it's true like i yeah my my family spent a lot of time like specifically going going to vancouver island just to eat chinese food uh yeah you know and say say like let's say you've taken vancouver

island and you expand out and you now have like a swath of canada right that is that is that has now sort of been liberated and you know you have you have you have a lot of resources you have sort of timber you have i don't know maybe you have coal maybe you have other stuff you have you have and you also have a lot of people. I was about to say, yeah. You have a lot of labor you can marshal. Yeah, you have a lot of labor. And those people have a lot of skills,

they have a lot of dedication, they have a belief that you can make the world a better place. And I think this is where, this is the arena in which MMT can sort of explain what you're doing next. Yeah, so you have this territory that has undergone revolutionary change, and you have biophysical resources that are in it, and biophysical resources

that could be in it. And you have and you also have the social technology of money. Some of the money you can just make yourself. Other monies you cannot. MMT is applicable in the sense that it says, in this scenario, I think the way MMT is most applicable is to say everyone can be employed who wants

to be employed. One of their principal ideas is a job guarantee a federal job guarantee and it could be applied just as easily conceptually in this situation it says um there's nothing preventing a revolutionary government of some type um not necessarily a state, but any non-state type of administration, from setting up something sort of like a central bank to make its own money, to marshal domestic resources, domestic in terms of within its own territory, and to get everyone who wants to be employed to be employed and to be paid for their work. Not to be too vulgar, but why this stuff is important, this monetary theory and this history is like, people want to be paid for their work.

They're not going to go and barter things. They want to get paid. Yeah. And I think this is something that, if you look at the thing that gets at sort of, like, the thing that gets held up is, like, the classic example of an anarchist revolution, right, is what happens in Spain in 1936. And if you look at what they do, right, like, almost immediately after the revolution, what happens is you have basically, like, a union of all of the bank workers, and those guys take over all the banks. like a union of all of the bank workers and those guys take over all the banks um and you you have you have the individual like workers and different unions start seizing they start seizing the factories that start seizing like the trains and once they've done that they start just pooling all of their resources into you know like into like they they have they now have this like they have

they have the banking union the banking union is is the the sort of central body that has resources that can distribute it and you know what what mmt is essentially saying is like yeah so in as as long as what you're moving around is the resources that you have in your territory like you can just create money in order to do that and you can sort of you know and you can use this to get people to do certain things and like you know the the the catalonians like they they they they equalize everyone's wages for example i mean it would be better if we equalize everyone's wages i i do agree with that yeah well you know i mean they they do have a lot of other stuff that's like okay so like they they get rid of a lot of jobs that are like sort of managerial

stuff or like just bullshit jobs they just kind of eliminate and yeah and you know and this this frees up people to like do stuff that actually matters and is real instead of sort of this like this sort of bureaucratic hierarchy that's above them and yeah but and i think the other thing they do that's that's very important for our sort of scenario for us talking about money is that like they they immediately start like they start seizing gold and they start seizing uh you know like they start seizing gold and they start seizing foreign currency. And I think this is where we can get into where I guess MMT doesn't work because MMT doesn't really think much about

the fact that you have Vancouver Island, you have a part of Canada, right? There is a lot of resources that you don't have. Absolutely. Yeah. That's, that's, that's going to be a lot of why foreign exchange matters so much as that, uh,

you know, inevitably you think, what if we just made an autarkic society? That's a, sorry, that's a little, I probably should have jumped the gun a little bit there. What if we just made an autarkic society that's uh sorry that's a little i probably should have jumped the gun a little bit there what if we just made everything ourselves what if we made a society that was fully economically independent uh um that's what autarky tends to be used to mean

and the answer to that is because that sucks uh that's the problem with it is that it sucks like you you don't want to be trying to manage an autarkic society on multiple grounds uh not least of which is that i mean we've we've seen societies try to do it and uh you know we me me and steve could go for hours and hours and hours talking about historical precedents of previous economic systems, many of which did try to be autarkic because that was something that monarchies liked a lot was the idea that their their kingdom could be fully independent. Because the thing is, is that when you're economically independent, that means that you've got a certain amount of security of international security. of international security uh and there's kind of a trade-off where the more stuff that you're reliant on importing the more vulnerable you are to the people you're importing and screwing you but it's just so massively difficult to be a good producer of every possible good yeah and and this and this is this is true even if you have an enormous amount of resources like i think

you know we can talk about one case study of this which is socialist period china and you know socialist period china they they have they they're getting resources and especially in the early periods they're getting some resources from like hong kong they're getting some stuff from the soviets but you know they they they get into like mao famously does not like markets. This is a, this is a thing that is known about Mao. And so Mao is like, okay, like,

no, we're going to shut off the sort of like market system that we, that we've been running sort of through Hong Kong. And then, you know, China had been getting technology transfers and aid from the USSR, but you know, the USSR and China got into a bunch of political fights and the USSR like

pulls out all of its advisors and, you know, China, China has an enormous amount of resources, they have a large population they have they have just an enormous geographic mass and so they they basically try to you know build an autarkic society and they try to sort of just okay well we'll just we'll just marshal our resources and we'll just sort of like we'll plan a way out of it and they run into this problem which is that there is actually things that they need from other countries, which is technology. And they hit this thing I've talked about before, which is like,

they basically hit this production bottleneck where it's like, well, okay. So in order to produce more industrial goods, they need more food. But the problem is in order to produce more food to support a larger urban population, you need more industrial goods, right? You need your like fertilizers,

you need your tractors, you need your like fertilizers need your tractors need stuff like that and you know and once they're cut off from sort of the rest of the world from through hong kong and from the ussr they don't have a way they they you know they're sort of scrambling to figure out how we do this and their solution is the great leap forward which is essentially we're just we're we're we're gonna just bust through this whole thing and we're gonna do it by forcing everyone to work for an absolutely enormous increase in hours. We're going to have peasants working in the fields literally until they collapse from exhaustion. And it just doesn't work. It is a epochal failure.

There are millions of people die from famines. And the response to this is that China eventually, is that China eventually ends up like winds up opening its economy again. Yeah. And yeah, and yeah. And like, you know, and this is the thing, like if if China, which has like just just an astounding breadth of natural resources, can't pull this off, like it's probably just not a good idea because like. idea because like yeah uh well i mean we even have like a very you know a very contemporary example that uh you know makes they'll make certainly makes my blood boil and i'm sure it will make some of the listeners blood boil the you know vaccines uh you know the the realistically you know the the coronavirus is fun is a more or less is an incredible threat to basically every state on the planet at this point

and the really chemical and biomedical research is done in just a handful of places on the planet and there have been attempts to create vaccines outside of those places and they have been somewhat successful but it has been difficult and most places are just not in a position to create a to develop their own competing technology uh and even china struggled with creating their own competing vaccination technology and i'm not at all a biology expert but i understand it's a not quite as efficient vaccine the sinovac but at the end of the day this is like south africa is not developing their own independent vaccine that's a quite sophisticated economy yep all of all the various south american countries could have pulled

their resources together in theory but it's so hard to turn a dime and develop from scratch a primary research industry uh it's so difficult and it's so not worth it it's you know if you have trade relations with a country that has technology developments in a field that you really care about it's just not really worth it like we don't the united states doesn't really compete with several forms of Japanese technology because it's just not worth the bother. Just let Korea and Japan handle that for us and we buy it. And they accept our forex, they accept our dollars. But let's say you're the Philippines. How are you going to get those?

And this is now international trade and international politics and uh if we're creating our now independent vancouver island we have now entered into this territory uh we have now entered into uh international politics and international uh trade yeah and this this is an arena that's fraught in a lot of ways because it's – as we've sort of been talking about, it's not just that you need – it's not just that you need Forex. For example, you have your new society in Vancouver, right? Yeah. Vancouver Island. The thing you need mostly is dollars.

of violence uh you know you need the thing you need mostly is dollars and this is this is a real problem because this requires you to have something that you can turn into dollars and you know okay so you're gonna have some amount of dollars that are just there right from from when you see society there's there's assets you can sort of just sell off that like okay like do we really need this yacht like okay we can we can sell this for some amount of dollars but this becomes a a real economic problem because you you need to produce something that you can exchange for dollars and you know there's there's a pretty good chance that like whatever sort of new currency whatever new sort of like mmt currency that's like, oh, it's controlled because we're producing it. It moves our resources around.

We can make as much of it as we want. Like, yeah, you have to actually be able to convert that into dollars. And, you know, why is the U.S. going to want your currency? Yeah. It's a bit dialectical because you have to – okay, you have your MMT currency, which domestically is accepted because of tax receivability or something, or national fervor, if you will, to create a new democratic confederalist society. And that's accepted there, but yeah, you need US dollars.

So you need US dollars, but why do you need them? Partly because you eventually want to not need them. Yeah. And so you have assets right now that you can just sell. So that's one way. But long term, you can't do that. So you need to have cash flow over the long haul that allows you to buy what are called capital goods, which is a fancy term for machines that make machines

or machines that make some sort of in-product, which is a physical thing. It's not like a service or something. You want to classic, really classic economic development advice that is actually pretty good is you want to move up what's called a value chain and eventually be not producing just like a stable crop or something, but doing really innovative advanced technology things later on. So you like, here's where I am. Here's what I have.

Here's what I could have though. How do I get there? Part of the formula to get there is, yes, acquiring Forex. But it's other things like saying, how do I cultivate political alliances that will yield trade partners, such that I have a stable flow of Forex and maybe even technology transfers, or something down the line, which could be a game changer. You need to have an education system. If you're a fan of the economist Thorsten Veblen, in his mind, he thought the economic development was ultimately from the human intellect, and

everything was downstream of that. You need to have money to mind he thought the economic development was ultimately from the human intellect and like everything was downstream of that so like you need to have money to um you can use your mmt money to create a basic education system and you can augment it with buying importing things that you can't yet make and uh using it to create like a university or something which can do R&D work. You have to find tools to get enough of the money that you can't just infinitely produce, forex, in order to augment what your society can produce beyond what it initially could. And show, essentially, that you, OK, I can make a better mousetrap.

Like I don't need donations from well-meaning imperial powers or something. We're building what we need in order to move up the value chain and then build out our productive capacity in such a way that it doesn't leave anyone behind. Everyone's employed because we're doing the classic MMT stuff on the home front, such as a job guarantee, but we're also doing the international economic development stuff of assiduously monitoring our foreign currency reserves and then using them to import things that we cannot yet make but can make things internally and then have a a snowballing effect as far as being able to sell even higher value things which um to our trade partners who are hopefully share our values of like democratic

confederalism or whatever you whatever your chosen guidelines are yeah and this is something that like this is something that that becomes very difficult in like the current market you know this is to some extent like why the cold war went the way it did right which is that you know once once you have the sino-soviet split once you have like i mean you have chinese and russian troops killing each other on the border, China, it, like, enters a situation where it's like, well, okay, so we still want to do economic development,

but we've lost the Soviet Union as a way to get technology transfers. And their solution to that was to ally with the US. And this is, like, it works out for the Chinese economy. It is an apocal disaster for like literally everyone else on earth because like it means that capitalism is the thing that wins the cold war and this means that like you know i mean like if you look if you look at how you know like the the the

the things that china are doing in order to be able to get technology transfers for the u.s it's like like there's so there there are joint like chinese cia like operations inside of china that are like monitoring soviet missile sites so there's just like cia outposts just like in china that are just you know doing spying like for for the u.s government there's like they invade vietnam which is a enormous you know and it's not just that they invade vietnam it's like, they invade Vietnam, which is a enormous, you know, and it's not just that they invade Vietnam. It's like they invade Vietnam and then they fight this like, there's really, you know, the immediate war doesn't last that long. But they fight this like horrible border war that goes on for like a decade that kills enormous numbers of people. And, you know, and the end result of this is like, yeah, like, you know, trying to get the technology transfers and they developed their economy. But everyone else on earth.

gets its technology transfers and they develop their economy but everyone else on earth everyone who's ever tried to be a labor organizer in like you know in like El Salvador gets murdered by a bunch of fascists and it's like development econ is

so fucking frustrating because at every single step of the way there's like a really razor thin line between risk and reward at every step of the way, there's a really razor-thin line between risk and reward at every step of the way. And so imperial powers will dangle technology transfers or extended trade agreements on somewhat favorable terms in exchange for allowing them to just go to war with your neighbors or rope you into it. Yeah. if your neighbors like, uh, or rope you into it or, or extract resources that would be valuable for you later in your development phases. Yeah, actually, uh, this leads to me, um, you know, going to our hypothetical here,

thinking about Vancouver Island, the people's Republic of Vancouver Island. Uh, and we can kind of talk about some of the development traps. Cause that's kind of what I'm was churning through my head right now. Cause I'm looking at the Wikipedia pageipedia page for vancouver island is that incredibly deep level of research uh and so what they list under the economy is there's a tech sector logging fishing tourism and food um and so you know we talked first about like you could like sell off like the yachts and the cars and stuff like that uh and that's i don't even know if that counts as a sector of the economy at that level that's uh zero you can have a yard sale yeah you can have a yard sale uh but you know logging and fishing

those are those are pretty solid primary sector economies you know uh you know to that describe the terminology you know they've got this this is part of that hierarchy that Steve was talking about that, you know, the chain of development and a primary sector is like a basic extractive element of your economy, a mine, uh, logging, fishing, food production, you know, basic goods. And then, you know, you talk about a secondary development, which is like manufacturing and then a tertiary which is services. Those are kind of your basic, those are usually considered like sectors of the economy but in a way they kind of correspond to development

and they require different amounts of development and the thing about primary is that everybody needs those things. Unless people just stop using wood for construction, which we are very far from doing. We still use a lot of wood for construction, which we are very far from doing, we still use a lot of wood for construction.

Uh, your logging industry is going to have buyers, um, until people stop buying, eating fish, your fishing industry is going to have buyers, you know, up to a really ludicrously bottomless reserve.

Uh, but you're going to be stopped on that secondary industry until you have capital. Like, I don't mean just like the sense of having a lot of money, but you know, as Steve said, capital. The right money. The right money.

And, well, you need capital production. You need capital. You need the machines. Yeah, you need your factories. You need your, like, producers. Yeah, so you... And wealthy countries, partly in order to maintain their power,

they have... They want to be the only seller of capital goods yeah and they're gonna be very withholding about it um quite like a really good example for right now with like all the inflation stuff going on and like the chip shortage yeah so the machines that make the machines that make the chips holy shit those are like those are they only make like 50 of those a year yeah and it's all two companies yeah well you know i wasn't the thing with the thing with the chip shortage right it's also like so if if you can be like the people who do that that gives you a lot of economic power like this is this is one of taiwan's things right which is that like you know

it's like okay so why hasn't taiwan just sort of been bowled over by by china and like i mean there's a lot of sort of geopolitical reasons for that but it's also partly it's just that like yeah like taiwan has this enormous chip making industry and it's incredibly advanced and you know it has like you know this this is i think another thing that that's a real problem for sort of revolutionary society doing this is that like yeah like taiwan's chip making economy like it's not like people like fall in like vats of chemicals like a lot like there's a lot there's a lot like just horrible sort of labor exploitation and this comes back to even your sort of like like you know if you're talking about your sort of primary primary sector stuff in the economy which is that like okay well yeah i mean like oil is a particular example of this but like you know same with timber and same with

fish is that like these are extractive industries yeah and this becomes a real problem for a lot of your sort of like newly revolutionary developing societies because you you get this tension between um like and you see this a lot in in latin america's like this there's a huge tension like this in bolivia for example you see this in ecuador too where like you have different factions of you have different factions of the political movements where you have people who are like okay yeah i'm okay with just like you know building these highways through indigenous land or just like doing mass deforestation or like digging doing open pit mining and those people will be like those people will be leftist right there'll

be people like okay well we need to do this because we need to like you know this is an anti-poverty measure we have to move up the value chain we have to increase our production but then you know you have the indigenous people who's like homes these are right yeah yeah you can rationalize a lot of evil shit if you've got the right intellectual backing yeah yeah and like and this this happens like in in china too there's like. A lot of the industrialization has been absolutely devastating. And this becomes a real... The fact that you need forex becomes this incredible trap that you sink into because it's like, on the one hand,

yeah, there are resources that you need in order to have a functioning society, but it's also that you can't get in your territory, but also the cost of getting that forex is enormous. And a lot of times it's something that just simply destroys a revolutionary project. Yeah. What hit me when I looked at this list of Vancouver's economic sectors was tourism being listed among the big ones

in my mind immediately went to cuba uh to pre-revolutionary pre-caster cuba and you know pre-caster cuba has all these things going for it off when you when you're looking at from like a developmental standpoint you know it's got this like very good productive base of you know primary resources like sugar uh it has uh great relations with the United States of America, particularly through the mafia. Yeah, wonderful, right? The tourism industry is very successful. It's producing manufactured cigars,

so it even has a secondary industry bridge, but it is still absolutely failing to develop in a way that is meaningful for the people living in Cuba. You know, pre Castro Cuba was a nightmare for most people. And that's that's like Steve said, you know, there's this razor thin thing between risk and reward. and uh during that you know during the 40s and 50s in cuba it was just it just made so much sense to just stick it with this impoverished extractive tourist heavy mafia friendly economy and yeah they were friends with the u.s they could have gone technology transfers in in principle but were they actually going to uh and that's something we have to think about with our

people's republic of vancouver island is you know yeah like people are going to want our logs people are going to want our fishing american tourists are going to come here and go whale watching and that's going to bring in forex but are we going to be able to like leverage that and how will we leverage that yeah yeah and i kind of want to move the conversation to like i think people might be listening and saying like, okay, yeah, I can see why it's really important, but like what are the specific ways in which we can acquire it, but also manage it. And it's like, okay, well,

without being evil, while being socialists who want democracy. Okay. While being socialists who want democracy. Okay. So I think if we're, I'm, I'm picturing some sort of assembly structure taking shape because I'm a lip sock, libertarian socialist.

And it could be something else, but any case, I think they should appoint 50 or so people, some of them experts, some of them not, to examine. They should do a thorough economic analysis of the entire island. And you should do it on the basis of, here are the assets we have. Here's where we want to go in terms of assets. How do we get from here to there?

And one of the assets that you have is, okay, we have so many US dollars. We have so many Canadian dollars. We have reserve balances. So we need to import things. We can make some of it ourselves and we need to buy the rest of it. We can't buy all of it now. We need to cash flow some of this. We need to do export-led growth, as the classic development econ people would say, where we say, we have some industries where we can gradually and consistently ramp up to the point that they give us the types of money which we need in order to input capital goods, the machines that build machines, to buy them, learn how to use them,

and maintain them, and then build more ourselves, ideally. And over the course of, say, basically I'm basically suggesting that Vancouver Island should have a 10-year plan. They should have a 10 year plan. They should have a 10 year plan for further economic development. And it should be as democratically decided upon as possible within the limits of like, okay, there's some experts which will obviously be needed and not everyone can do

that. But whatever assembly structure you have should be given oversight ultimately. And you should say, just be really frank with it. Like we have, these are our biophysical resources now. In 10 years, they should be this. In order to get there each year, these things need to happen. We have to have this much foreign currency. We have to have this many workers involved in this industry. We can change things along the way, but we're constrained by these factors. to reverse engineer some technology that we've acquired or something

in order to educate ourselves on how to create chips or something in the future. Yeah, there should be an extremely vigorous discussion of what assets do we have? What do we need? What's our goal? And then thread together a development plan from there. And then use your MMT money to marshal the resources that you currently have

and that you need for the next year, say, domestically, while monitoring and augmenting your foreign currency reserves and using the tools of monetary policy to safeguard those reserves and economize on them in order to import what you can't yet make so that you can make it in the future. I think the thing that we should learn from the fact

that a lot of these projects haven't worked is... Well, I think it's twofold. One is that you have... Okay, there's constant sort of like there's traps you have to avoid that have to do with like for example like who actually has access to the forex because this is what this is a way that like you know and also like because it it's it's very very easy to like access to sort of like incidentally redevelop ruling classes when you're trying to do planning technology stuff and when you're dealing with enormous amounts of foreign currency.

And this is a problem. And the second problem has to do with sort of like how do you make sure that your economy essentially doesn't end up as a resource colony? And this has other components. colony and this has this has other components and you know and i think i think this is something that like like there is a lot that can be done if you control like a region of territory but there's there's political limits on it the political limits have to do with you know who actually controls the sort of like vast majority of resources and technology. And the only way to really deal with that is that like, you know, you can't, you can't sort of have, like you, if you want to actually have sort of long-term stability, you can't just have your sort of like your, your like libertarian socialist councils in one country. Like that's a thing that

has to like keep moving and keep spreading because otherwise it becomes it becomes just increasingly difficult and you come under increasing pressures you know for you know in order to do things that you do that you need to do in order to make sure people don't starve in order to make sure that people have educations to make sure that people you know are able to sort of live live their lives and also like in order to make sure that you don't just annihilate the like annihilate the entire environment while doing this because that's something that happens a lot in these developmentalist states is that you get groups who come in, the power

in, are like, well, okay, we're going to be an ecological regime and then they wind up doing oil extraction and mining because that's the easiest way to get money. I think i think like i i

think it's it's valuable that like these are things that if you're serious about taking power you have to think about but i i also think it's it's important to keep in mind just the the the the inherent limits that you have if you're just sort of an if you're if you're completely isolated like if you're completely isolated revolutionary but in one place it doesn't have people where that you can you know give stuff to and move stuff around between oh yeah i mean it's it's it's always been i mean that's that's been like a kind of inevitable thing that like you know know, there are communes in my extended family. You know, I've got members of my family who live on, you know, those little farm communes and they're not fully economically independent.

And I'm sure that we could find people who would be willing to say, oh, you know, this is like this is totally fake. This is not a real commune because they, you know, sell, you know, sell sunflower seeds at the farmer's market and stuff. And that's kind of the unfortunate. That's kind of like the tough reality that. that unless you manage to create a truly global revolution, as I said, unless until you've got like two thirds of the population under your umbrella, you're going to have foreign relations and you're going to have foreign trade, which is going to,

it's going to be, it's going to be difficult to manage. You know, you're going to have to be both. You're going to have to have like a you know a diplomatic core that's something we're barely mentioning here but like we're gonna need to have diplomats coming out of this council if we're talking about them having relations with the u.s and canada uh and you know negotiating these trade deals you know these trade deals don't happen out of nowhere um and uh you know we kind of brush this aside but it's a it's

a bit of there's a bit of a misperception that people tend to have that uh the united states is pro-free trade in like an extreme sense that like any trade with the united states is done without any tariffs oh yeah no i don't think that you if you believe that without having done a lot of research, I do not think that that is an absurd thing to believe because that is the propaganda that is passed along in common knowledge. A very quick examination of how trade works between international actors will reveal that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of tariffs active all the time in every trade deal yeah and like the like the the the big one with the u.s agricultural subsidies which are just it is it is it is illegal to have them we have like just in just like billions and billions of billions of dollars of agricultural subsidies that have us producing cheap food that's like we're not even good at making it like it's it's a complete disaster it let me this like this this has just single-handedly

annihilated the economies of like enormous swaths of the globe because because no one can compete with with american agricultural subsidies and it's you know and but like it when you join the free trade system like that's one of the carve-outs that was that's that's that's in the wto is you can't have uh subsidies for your agriculture programs except for the U.S. Yeah. And it's great. And by great, I mean everyone dies. Well, there's all sorts of weird technical ways that you can create pseudo-subsidies.

You know, Italy very famously has a price floor on wine. Uh, and this means that, you know, if you, if you make a bottle of wine that nobody would buy for the minimum price, the government will buy it off of you for that price. And so there are, there are wineries in Italy that just produce wine at such a, this so bad, nobody would buy nobody. You'd have to pay people to drink it. Uh, but the government just buys it at this minimum set price and then throws it in a, in a giant Olympic swimming pool vat to go rot. And there are, yeah,

trade is, there's a lot more complex, free trade is kind of a myth at the international level. It is, at the most cynical, free trade as a doctrine is a cudgel used by more powerful countries. They impose that you have to do free trade with them and that they get to do protected trade with you. Well, firstly, like you mentioned, it's a myth. Historically speaking, we had infant industries in this country that were highly protected from the very earliest days through most of the 19th century and into the 20th century. And we had export-led growth from infant industries in the US.

And that's precisely the opposite advice we now turn around and give via our imperial apparatus from the IMF and the World Bank to developing countries. And countries that examined what the US was telling them to do and did the opposite are the ones that succeeded. Yes. Like South Korea said, nah, fuck that. And they went up the value chain and they did all of the things that we said Vancouver Island should do, basically. Except not being evil. They did not do that. They were evil.

They were evil for a time and they were dictatorial. But in terms of their economic development plan, divorce from political reality, which is probably naive of me to say, they took the opposite advice of the IMF in terms of that narrow scope. I think the other thing that's kind of important

here that we haven't really touched on yet is that part of what was going on with South Korea's economy is that South Korea's economy was a war economy and it was a war economy designed to build. I mean, originally, it was a war economy because they were fighting a war, right? But then it became this, I mean, it was central axis axis of sort of the production of the Korean military development and this isn't this is another really

big problem for like your sort of free state that like you've created like whatever you're sort of like council republic you're like if on the zone you're like indigenous confederation is that like you need weapons and the people who make guns are like the us and russia and this is a really you know and and you know we've we've been talking on this show about about producing like 3d printed weapons but i mean you know in terms of things like you know you're like artillery right like in terms of your mortars and like things like that or like you know you you can't you can't 3d print to best of my knowledge and i'm like 99.99 sure about this that like unless you had extremely advanced facilities and even then it's not clear to me like i i like i don't think anyone on earth has ever 3d printed like an anti-aircraft rocket like you you you know you can't make you can't make stingers you can't make man pads you can't

make like anti-tank anti-aircraft weapons. Not to get too much into it, but, like, the way in which Ukraine is fighting, like, Russian tanks in its very specifics is kind of encouraging, actually. Yeah, but, like, things that you can't... Like, the, like, specific... Yeah, I mean, there's only a few companies who are making the components for these things. Yeah. So that's a problem. And that's the thing... Like, the personnel

launched uh the in-law or whatever things yeah like the the anti-tank and take off weapons like yeah if you can get them they're effective and they they do they do stuff they're mostly just handed out from by the u.s or the uk yeah yeah and that's and that's that's a huge problem if you're you know not trying to like be a political colony of these two things and this this is another trap that you see like you see dictators especially falling into which is that that they you know okay so like on the one hand yeah you do need weapons right like you you need you need some kind of military complex and you you need arms in order to make sure that like you know you're not like the u.s doesn't roll tanks across the border but

simultaneously like there's there's a thing that happens a lot with this is how it's done with Petro states where, you know, okay. So the, the, the, the U S is like, okay, so we need this oil. Right. And how, how do you, how do you deal with this sort of balance payments emphasis? And the answer is we just sell them like a hundred billion tanks and we just like, we just like dump F 35s on them. And you can get into these scenarios where like you get these like because i mean the problem with weapons right it's like okay so you need them to survive but they also they don't produce anything right in fact they're sort of

they're sort of net economic negatives because the only thing you could do with a gun is i mean i guess you could technically hunt but like you know the thing you're doing with the weapon is destroying value yeah yeah and i mean and they require maintenance yeah yeah you know like these things are substantial net negatives yeah and and and you know and countries get sucked into these traps where like you know okay we're just going to keep buying american weapons because of security or like uh we we want to invade some other country or like well you know and you see this with soviet weaponry too like back back when that was a thing and today modern russian weaponry where it's like yeah you can you can get funneled into these

traps where like the ruling class of your society just decides that it the thing that it wants to spend its forex on is weapons and you have to be very very like you have to be you know and this is the thing that happens like like evner hoaxa for example famously like makes just a bunch of bunkers right and like militarizes society and it's like well you know part of this is just hoaxa being extremely weird but like you have to be very careful when you're a society that is genuinely under threat that you're not sort of like just throwing all of your resources into into stuff like that where you you know it doesn't it doesn't produce anything but you know and yeah and also i mean this is a it is a need like yeah whatever the the vancouver economic planning whatever group should like one of one of the

objectives would frank would be military of course yeah um you need to i don't know if you could get your hands on in-laws or man pads or anything like that but you um i think you'd be foolish frankly not to distribute and train on weapons and stuff like that yeah and use some of your forex for that yeah yeah like i think like yeah it's like you have to use some of it for that and it sucks because this is something that like this this sucks you into the arms complex right yeah i mean like rojava rojava is using its oil revenues um to fund like 50 of its expenditure almost is at least like in 2020 or the last time I checked, was to defense forces. Yeah.

And a lot of that came from dollars, euros, and Turkish lira that they acquired through oil. Yeah. And this is a problem if you're in a revolutionary society, you surround people who just literally want to murder you. It's like stuff like this winds up happening and you wind up like i don't blame them yeah it's like it's obviously real it's like reality yeah and i think that's a you know that that that's a good example of like what happens if the

revolution doesn't spread and if you get sort of like you get isolated contained by imperial powers who just want to murder you is that you wind up like you, you basically, you want, you wind up fighting an endless war against both the proxy forces and the real forces of armies that are significantly larger, more powerful than you. And yeah.

And there's a lot of times there's not much you can do about it, but it's like, I think, you know, in terms of like, like in, in the school of high principle, like this is why internationalism is important i mean yeah and of course obviously the other answer is you know selling out on the revolution and you know we we you know that there's

the example that people don't think about of saritsa uh you know saritsa gets elected on all these like radical promises for greece and then just doesn't do any of them um and then you can look at say nepal and you know the the communist one in nepal and then just doesn't do any of them um and then you can look at say nepal and you know the the communist one in nepal and then they establish a government that's functionally you know it's a liberal government yeah my my my my favorite nepal fact is that uh the okay so the nepal has like 17 different like maoist factions but the guy who's the head of of the largest maoist faction uh yeah yeah i think it's him is he's the one who now lives in the mansion of the guy who used to be the nepalese head of

security i think so yeah and it's like huh huh we've well this is this this has gone great we've changed the person in the mansion it's like you've got a yeah and i mean the and you know uh not too surprisingly uh you know the second leader a couple about a year ago kiran was on the verge of declaring a new people's war against the maoist faction yeah it's a maoist war against the maoists like yeah i mean that's you know you you you end up... It's... Yeah, it's tricky to try to game it out, so to speak, because my... Maybe I'm just

squeamish. I am hoping for things to not happen with a river of blood. In life, I hope that we don't get rivers of blood. Oh, plan for war so you get peace. Yeah, yeah. But like Chris has said, you can get trapped into that escalating security dilemma.

And of course, investing in security doesn't actually necessarily lead to security. We have over a century of looking at Latin American countries that investments in the military is just investments in the next civil war. Or you get couped. That's another real problem. It's weird because it's a double-edged sword because the 20th century, there's a lot of socialist-y governments that come into power

just from military coups, but also probably more of those governments get overthrown by their own coups. There was one lesson I learned from playing Tropico. If you try to invest more in your...

No matter how much you invest in your military, it only will ever get you up to 50-50 odds of surviving a coup. Yeah. Don't have colonels and don't have generals. Yeah. The whole point is then you get captain's coups so yeah it's always colonels yeah there's always colonels it's because they're like passed up for generalship by the next administration or something yeah again sometimes sometimes you do get like sometimes you get like your pinochet and

sometimes you do get your captain's coups and it's like this is a that that goes that's ambition right there when the captain who's the government yeah yeah you know once well once your captains have hit fuck it mode it's bad yeah that's indicative of like bigger deeper problems yeah well i think like the bath is an interesting example of this because like okay so like the bathists were never like good but like you know the bathists like originally like were kind of a mass movement but then increasingly like over time as as they consolidate power through military sort of revolutions like it becomes increasingly just the bathists are powerful because they have control of like various portions of the military and you know and like the the end result of this is like instead of having revolutions like you just get you just get all political power has nothing to do with

whatever's happening in the street you get these giant protests that are like we want to go back to being part of the united the uh united air republic and it just doesn't matter because the actual political power is just what happens when the army fights itself and yeah i think like there's no easy solution to that other than just like don't have an armed body that's separate from just the masses of people which is difficult to do but also like i mean or just arm the people somewhat yeah and and you know it's means of violence should be more evenly distributed yeah um i will say that was i guess part of why the the scenario we had started off with like you've declared the people's

republic because the question of how you get that people's republic feels like that's a 75 percent of your podcast podcast episodes yeah yeah you know we've done we've done we've done just like a miracle has occurred but like a revolution has occurred and then i don't know they like blockaded all the roads or something like i as i like to say it's good to have a plan for if you win yeah to win and then fumble once you've already gotten yeah and this this is something that like that actually does happen a lot which is like you get into that you get into these revolutionary like moments but then there's just sort of like no like no one has any idea what to do next and so they sort of bungle it or you know you get into scenarios yeah or you

get to revolution areas where like nobody's thought about what happens next and that that's that's another way that like yeah these things collapse all the time that's another way you get like you know this is in some sense like the the whole of the sort of yep like the trial and error of the 20th century which most of which just sort of ended in error is that you know a bunch of people were experimenting and a lot of the stuff they tried didn't work and there are lots of reasons for that but you like you have to in order to win you have to actually be serious about taking power and you have to be you know you you have to be thinking strategically and have a like have at least a vision of what you're going to do before you like you know like before things happen because otherwise there's just sort of like

you know you just you just get sort of mass confusion and yeah and yeah say what you will about the fascists they know what they're going to do when they seize power. They're not confused about it. Their problems are what you do after. They're not confused about those first 48 hours when things start falling your way. I hope that nothing we've said on this podcast makes people think

they have one weird trick basically to secure your power. Obviously, no. And that we aren't singularly focused on acquiring Forex or something. Also, it's an important lever to

have at your disposal. Well, number one, you should know that it's important. Number two, you should have tools in place, such as running a fixed exchange rate or something to make that it's important. Number two, you should have tools in place such as running a fixed exchange rate or something to make it a bit easier to acquire Forex

on the whole or doing capital controls or doing price controls or something like that. And you should have these tools in mind in order to get from year one to year ten in terms of your biophysical resources. Like, here's what we have.

Here's what we need. And, you know, some of that could be military. Some of that could be economic. And some of that could be political. And no one, like, I don't have the answers. We don't have the answers. But at each step of the way, you need to find groups of people who can come together and think objectively about them yeah i i want uh yeah it's not that i think that there is

an answer i i'm kind of thinking about almost a little bit parallel to like we know that if we create our you know if if socialists manage to seize any amount of power, they're going to reform whatever health care system they're currently existing in. We know that it's going to be better because it would be hard for it to be worse. But, you know, that's making a good hospital system is not the entire thing that makes a revolution happen. It is just one of those things that you need to do and you need to think about it and my objective here and it's uh a lot of my objective with you know making this whole magazine project is that my socialism means that we we have say over our lives you know that's fundamental to me that we have say over what

we do with our lives and i want to make sure that the people who are in this with me which is hopefully everybody i am an optimist i am hoping that everybody is with me on creating a better socialist world that all of us are at least somewhat informed about the decisions we're making i i'm not actually economically trained uh you know i'm i i've learned this stuff as i've gone uh it's not insurmountable uh and uh it's you know i i would want the decision about how do we make a socialist economy you know the the core of socialism worker control of the means of production that the people involved again hopefully everybody uh has you know at least has uh an inkling of what's going on i don't want people to be confused and baffled by the decisions being made on their behalf that's you know a fundamental evil of a capitalist system that we don't know what the fuck decisions are

being made for us by powerful people well part of the part of the problem comes back to education because people are... The bourgeoisie have hogged, they've hoarded the knowledge of how to plan in certain respects. And I think socialists will sometimes look at the body of knowledge in terms of planning an economy

and say, well, because they are the only ones who know how to do that, the knowledge itself is tainted. And I don't need to learn this because it's evil, basically. I don't need to learn how to manage a currency board or do forex management because that's money and that's evil stuff. And I hope what we've described so far says, I don't know if it's evil

or not, but it's important. I honestly think you're going to probably fail if you don't consider these things at each step of the way. Yeah, and even in your... One of the things that you see a lot with socialist countries is they basically have, like, a firewall, right, where they try to keep a separation between the parts of their economy that, like, are planned and the parts of their economy that, like, are about moving forex around.

and i think like okay like there are varying degrees of effectiveness of this but like this is like even even if you're like okay like we want to get rid of the economy right like we want to get rid of labor we want to get rid of all the stuff as a concept like you're gonna have to deal like until until you like win right like until until you've like until you've raised a flag over New York, Berlin, Shanghai, and New Delhi at the same time, you're going to have to be dealing with this stuff. figure this out, how quickly you're able to implement it and how quickly you're able to seize control of and use the resources that you have in order to advance your political project is that's going to be one of

the things that determines whether or not your revolution survives no matter what it's fighting for. In addition to all the military stuff, military and economic, I think you have to just say, you have to get to a point economically and militarily and all the rest of the stuff to where you can just say to international powers, I don't need to make some moral claim to you. I've built a better mousetrap.

I'm going to let the people decide. And it's like, it just shows living freely together uh and enjoying a good standard of living and they don't need to exploit each other to get it and like for not everyone but many people that will be really appealing and you have to have like uh well more than just a diplomatic corps you have to have like an entire full-court international push to say it's just a better mousetrap. I don't need to focus on moral claims about, well, it's better because you should just care about people more than capitalism permits because it's just morally right um that may be the case but also people want to get paid and they want to be treated well and have a decent standard of living at the same time and we can do it so here's so here's how like

you've you've shown them specific steps you've taken and you've shown them the material standard of living that is shared democratically and um it's not just like a state giving handing things out to people it's like a a um true industrial democracy where it's like you you get plugged in you make decisions along the way and um yeah basically that yeah i think i think i think that's a pretty good note to to end on as a a a thing that we want and things that are going to have to be components of it and also i guess thinking about you know like rejecting theories about money as incomplete that don't deal with the fact that you don't have all the resources in your country and you, in fact, need other things to acquire them that you cannot simply create into existence. Yeah.

Do you two have anything else you want to say before I guess you move into plugs? else you want to say before i guess you move into plugs i mean like i said i mean i i you know we this may have sounded like a whole bunch of you know high-minded theoretical egghead crap but again i am i'm not formally educated on this stuff uh this is stuff that i have learned and participated in uh as a socialist first and foremost and it it's been driven, uh, from the get go, at least for me, from, um, a really fundamental desire for egalit,

for egalitarianism and for people having a say in their own lives. And, uh, I, I hope that the people, uh, who have stuck with us through this, uh,

who didn't know these concepts before, uh, feel a little bit more equipped to participate in a discussion, uh, about, um, how you would handle these things. And as,

as I kind of alluded to this scales all the way down to, you know, uh, 12 hippies on a farm, uh, you know, this, this,

this scales all the way up until you've got a total, total global communism for pretty much anything below that uh this this these principles scale and uh i i hope that people feel um more able and more willing to uh engage both first of all you know to to tell liberals to you know shut the fuck up uh that i should have a say over how I participate in the economy, even when that's things like forex that seem very abstract and far away. I'm a person who's affected by this, therefore I've got a stake, therefore my opinion matters.

And you can get there, and you should be allowed to participate in that. Yeah, this is what i'm trying to create is you know that socialists do not feel like they can they'll just get browbeaten out of the room of a discussion because some liberal nerd pushed up their glasses a whole bunch and spun their bow tie and then sense of bullshit like you know you it is your life and uh you have a right to have an opinion on it. And this is not an insurmountable thing to, it's hard. I want to be clear here.

This is hard and I want, but I want you in the discussion. Well said. Yeah. So I guess speaking, speaking of things that people are involved in, I can, I can do transitions like this because I'm a professional.

Yeah. Do you, do you two want to talk a bit about your magazine? Sure. Like we mentioned up top, Kyle and I are both co-editors of Strange Matters magazine, and we're in the middle of a fundraiser right now. You can find the fundraiser at the URL tinyurl.com slash strangematters. No dashes or anything.

You can also follow us on Twitter at strange underscore matters. And the magazine itself is going to be a, we're a literary magazine, and each issue we're publishing in both print and digital. And the print issue one is about 300 pages and it's split in half between the front pages which is um topics like economics philosophy politics um more technical pages is art, culture reviews. Anthropology is a.

Anthropology, more so we kind of attach it to the word meaning, like meaning development. And there's a middle resting spot, which is actually called the futon, which is a play on a play on the word futon, which is like kind of a resting spot between those two halves where there's going to be short pieces of usually of humorous nature. And, um,

overall it's going to cover a wide range of topics. And you can find out more of us. You can find out more about us on our fundraiser on our website, strange matters that co-op. We got a couple articles already up on strange matters that co-op. We have a Steve wrote an amazing piece explaining some very in very layman's terms, some arguments about what inflation is and why we should care about it. You know, very good. Yeah, very relevant right now. why we should care about it you know very good yeah very relevant right now uh we have a truly delightful um review of some of very contemporary very recently made cyberpunk works uh by elizabeth

sandifer author of neo reaction of basilisk which anybody who listens to this podcast needs to read neo reaction of basilisk uh and she did us the wonderful favor of doing a pop culture review for us uh we've yeah we've also got a work uh by the editors uh words for our present reality about what how how can we discuss what actually exists in the world and what are the shortcomings with our current with just like the basic levels of our discourse and how can we advance beyond beyond this difficulty and it's you know it's something that sounds like it's supposed to be this very high level philosophy but we've been i i think uh i don't want to take too much credit for this because i was not the main writer on it uh i think that we've successfully

managed to uh bring it down to a to a lower brow level uh you know level, to a level that doesn't require you to have 18 letters after your name of various college degrees. We also managed to publish a piece by a Russian dissident. And I'm very excited for the works that people are going to see in the future from us. We've got a history of black cooperative movements uh we've i i wrote a nice little ditty about colonialism in modern board games uh i'm i'm very excited for people to get the chance to read these and uh you know it's all kind of in the service of us creating a more of us democratizing the socialist world and making it meaningful, making it

useful, and also making it pleasurable for people to be socialists and to fight for a freer and more equitable world. Yeah, do you two want people to find you on social media, and if so, where? You can say no to this. People do sometimes because, first, hell's okay well i don't have

social media so your channel's not really on social media uh i am on some social media so you can find uh you can find me at at cap'em in whack'em and i'll spell that out because it's kind of confusing. At C-A-P-M-N-W-A-C-C M. Spelling your own username. Yeah, so Strange Matters is, our campaign will run through this month and it's going pretty good so far, but we can use every little bit of support goes a long way. campaign will run through this month and it's going pretty good so far, but we can use, uh,

every little bit of support goes a long way. So yeah, fine. Find us at our website and also the fundraiser. Yeah. We're, we're not getting paid, uh,

just to be clear. This is the, we, we need to pay the authors. We need to pay for the printers, but you know, this is not us trying to make a quick buck. This is us trying to make sure we,

we are not willing to accept paying our writers substandard writing yeah we're going to pay our writers higher than market rate as on principle because we think the market rate is just too low it really is yeah yeah and um oh and by the way our we're i think i mentioned it but we're a workers' cooperative. So we're 100% worker-owned and in control. There are no levels of employment or ownership. We're all horizontal. Yeah. Yeah, so go check out Strange Matters.

Yeah, thank you to you both for joining us. It was a wonderful time, Chris. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Yeah, and if you want you both for joining us. It was a wonderful time, Chris. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Yeah, and if you want to find more of us, we're at HappenToYourPod on Twitter and Instagram. I keep saying Instagram. I've never actually...

I'm not on Instagram, so I've been told we have one. I've never interacted with it. Yeah, and Cool Zone Media has our other shows shows go listen to them uh they're good and we work a lot on them all right bye-bye goodbye 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. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, it could happen here, and it's currently happening there. There being Ukraine,

which is in the midst of an invasion by the Russian government. I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about bad things and how to make them better. I'm joined as often by Garrison and Chris, my co-hosts, and we are talking about

some of the advice, good and bad, that's been going around on social media about how to disable and destroy armored vehicles. This is something we've kind of waited to do until the conflict was a little bit more of a mature state but in brief if you have been following what's been happening in russia through the lens of social media or what's happening ukraine through the lens of social media one thing that has happened is in the early stages of the invasion a whole bunch of people flocked particularly to twitter uh but also not this is not just stay on

twitter there were a large number of mainstream news articles published on the subject of the things people were saying to talk about different ways civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise stymie and thwart the progress of Russian military units through their cities. And this has been accompanied by things like the Ukrainian government giving out information on how to make Molotov cocktails. We talked about this in our Molotov cocktail episode and putting out really neat infographics on where to throw Molotov cocktails to disable armored vehicles. But it's also come with a lot of bad advice that I don't want people who are maybe looking at the potential of urban combat happening in their future to take away from this conflict because there's also a lot of disinfo so that's what we're talking about today yes and i guess one of the first places to probably discuss this urban combat idea is the probably the guy who's tried to make kind of a

career out of talking about urban combat which would be john spencer who who wrote a relatively viral twitter thread on this topic and has been writing about this thing for the past few years. He's the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point's Modern War Institute and served for like a quarter of a century as an infantry soldier, including two deployments into Iraq. And yeah, the past few years, he's tried to kind of make a name for himself

as the guy who writes about urban combat. And obviously, the past few years, he's tried to kind of make a name for himself as the guy who writes about urban combat. And obviously, since this was happening, largely when Russia started invading Kiev, John Spencer put together some of his thoughts that went pretty viral on this said topic. Yeah. And it's frustrating. You've got a quote in here from one of the articles about he was giving out that says some of his advice, such as preparing simple Molotov cocktails, is already being seen on the streets of Kiev, which is kind of framing it as if Spencer advised the Ukrainians to make Molotovs. Absolutely not true. Before he made that thread, the government was urging people to and also like Molotov cocktails got their name from people in Finland, not super far from Ukraine, resisting the Russian military in a very similar way to how they're being used by Ukrainian civilians

now. What I believe what John Spencer did, he's a guy with some qualifications, certainly like not a random person. We'll talk about random people giving advice to on Twitter. But he's also all none of his advice is new. None of it is from him. None of it is counterintuitive. A good deal of it is bad. And most of what he said that is good is just him pulling things from U.S. military combat manuals and from Ukrainian military combat manuals and

then putting it up in social media in order to go viral and try to get another book deal by making it look as if he is giving advice that is being adopted in real time, which is not what is happening. Yeah. I mean, like a good, good instance of this is, yeah, claiming that they're making Molotov cocktails due to his advice. I mean, there's a picture in that very article that was taken before he even posted that thread. So it's like, no, they're, they're people know how to make molotov cocktails that's not hard to find out in a lot of cases the ukrainian ukrainian government was giving out instructions on how to do it and i mean and if you if you look at this picture um it looks very similar to a lot

of a lot of like the the the almost like small defensive weapons factories that we saw across the states in 2020 you would often see just collections of bottles uh just ready to be thrown all kind of laid out in in in milk crates very similar to this photo now there was there was less actual molotov cocktails but the way that this is whole the way this is all set up looks looks very similar to any kind of insurgency tactics of being like yeah there's gonna be spontaneous on the ground organizing because people are just kind of insurgency tactics of being like, yeah, there's going to be spontaneous on the ground organizing because people are just kind of naturally gifted at that. And on a on an objective level, Molotov cocktails have a place on an urban battlefield.

They can be useful weapons for disabling armored vehicles, for causing distractions, for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they are capable of doing that. And they that's part of why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing where to huck the sons of bitches in order to disable transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now, that said, attempting to attack a military column with a Molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal. And I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it. The times that seem to be most successful is when you have areas where the Russians

are attempting to establish control. You have small groups of vehicles that are moving down residential streets. You have a significant amount of traffic of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys. And as they pass the convoy, a civilian Huxamolotov, or as they pass a building, a civilian Huxamolotov. And those seem to be, broadly speaking, the situations in which people have kind of gotten away with it. We don't have any kind of, I'm not aware of any kind of solid overarching analysis of all of the use of Molotovs in this, but that is, broadly speaking, a potentially effective way to use a Molotov cocktail in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier.

What doesn't work and what Spencer and a number of other people suggested is huck and painted tanks or other armored vehicles. Yeah. And that may be surprising to a lot of people. I think there's a lot of folks who want to believe this, want to believe that that could really work because it's like Ewok shit, right? It feels like the kind of thing insurgents should be doing. Yes. But here is the thing. When you have police officers who are tear gassing an area and you huck a bunch of paint and you get it over their face masks and they cannot see, it reduces their ability to tear gas you for a while. It makes them uncomfortable. It makes them have less fun and it damages gear. vehicle, the armored vehicle will return fire with a.50 caliber mounted dashka or some other similar gun, which fires bullets that are large enough to take chunks the size of your head out

of concrete, and you will be torn apart and your organs liquefied in a hail of metal. Meanwhile, the paint that you are attempting to throw at that vehicle is almost certain to have no impact on it. Not only are you unlikely to get close enough to use the paint because you have to be considerably closer to do that than you have to with a Molotov in most situations, but also tanks are built with the understanding that it is possible that one or more of the ways in which they see will be obstructed. Tank drivers are trained to drive blind. There are ways of utilizing tanks when vision is obstructed because in the kinds of fights that tanks are built to get into,

they are often in situations where there is so much smoke around them, so many things bursting. Exactly. That there is effectively zero visibility, which is why when Spencer started talking about people throwing paint at tanks, a number of tank drivers came out and said, that's actually horrible advice. They don't work that way. And I was chatting with a couple of people. There was one fellow, a former Greenbrain named Mike Nelson, who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the Ukrainian government. And then like getting up anytime journalists or media figures would comment about Ukraine would like, like there's a nasty post here where Ann Cabrera, who I think is some

sort of reporter was like, I feel heart sick upon the latest news out of Mariupol. My God, just like expressing horror and humanitarian tragedy. And Spencer posts a link to his personal website and says, me too. Not sure if you saw my mini-manual for the Urban Defender, but it is available in English and Ukrainian. Oh boy. Yeah, it's... Anyway, grifty shit like that. Because all that's very different than also throwing paint at

a squad car or a riot truck that's coming through. Because if you obscure their vision, the worst they can do is crash into a wall. They're not going to start firing uh massive uh head explosion rounds from a central uh yeah so they do not like for one thing the like the police as bad as they can be their default when they come under any kind of like attack is not to start firing machine guns wildly in all directions. Not,

not yet. Which Russian soldiers do not yet, at least. But, you know, the other thing I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's a, is,

has been one of the guys who's been yelling at Spencer on Twitter. Matthew was a Marine Corps tank commander and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he was in a tank that was attacked several times and eventually destroyed. So he has some firsthand knowledge about what works and does not work against tanks. And one of the things he pointed out is that the people who destroyed his tank put together, I don't know,

$100, $200 worth of various accelerants and random scrap metal and made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams tank. That works a lot better than paint. Yeah. And it's the kind of thing where I think one of the things that's frustrating here is you've got a lot of these like American kind of military academic guys. And I know Spencer served, but that doesn't necessarily mean much.

It doesn't mean just being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean you did anything, but they were deployed and maybe they did see urban combat. But I have watched United States soldiers in an intense urban combat environment. And most of what they did was be inside of MRAPs because it's very hard to blow those up while the Iraqi military did a great deal of the fighting. And when US soldiers did engage in fighting, they did so with absolute air supremacy and with artillery supremacy, which isn't to say that it wasn't dangerous, but it is a profoundly different situation than engaging in urban combat when the airspace is contested and when you do not have artillery supremacy. So what does that mean in terms of like, what can people actually take away that's

useful from this? Well, on an individual level, something have been extremely effective. Ukrainian territorial defense militias have been very effective at doing things like picking up small arms, going out in small patrols into rural environments around the area where Russian troops are moving in small convoys. And oftentimes, because of the way the advance went, you would have a single or a couple of Russian munitions trucks, essentially alone and unsupported, trying to find their way around. You had civilians doing stuff like turning signs around, like removing signs.

Which they were instructed to by various Ukrainian officials as well. Yes, yes. And which I'm sure some people just started doing because it seemed like a good idea. But that sort of shit causes them to burn fuel, causes them to abandon vehicles. You had these kind of independent groups of farmers towing away abandoned vehicles. You had small raiding parties attacking convoys and attacking isolated units. You had cases where, you know, Russian military units early in the fight would get into Kiev kind of on accident and be ambushed by territorial defense units and wiped out.

And those are all very effective examples of decentralized kind of ground up resistance against a major military force. Now, one thing we don't know that is important if you think about the potential that you might have to endure something like this, is we have no idea what the casualties were like among those. Yes, it is a total black box. And it's it's probable that part of why Russian forces did the war crime they did in Buka was because they had an attitude that all civilians were insurgents, which is, you know, what happens when you have kind of a people's war, which doesn't justify an act of genocide. But it is something people should keep aware of when you start fucking with the signs and

ambushing the convoys and throwing molotovs. One of the things that will happen is it will accelerate the violence that is being done. Yeah. And it makes it to the civilian population. Justified target in some, you know, propaganda lens. Yeah, exactly. And that doesn't mean like it's you should resist if you are invaded. But these are things that also should be noted is this is what happens when you resist, right?

This is what a modern war of this type looks like. Other things that I'm not sure if they've been effective, but they're certainly not bad strategies is the construction of a lot of vehicle barriers, tank traps. That was what I was talking about next is, yeah, is the construction of a lot of vehicle barriers tank traps that was what i was talking about next is yeah is the barricade thing most than what we've been kind of seeing or being speculated about in the east and then how we've seen you know barricade setups a lot in the past few years in various resistance movements to a you know a variety of success levels and non-success levels yeah yeah and and these are like you know barriers tank traps of a very long history in in a variety of success levels and non-success levels. Yeah. Yeah. And,

and, and these are like, you know, barriers, tank traps have a very long history in, in warfare. So they absolutely can be, and have been effective many, many times on the battlefield.

So this is not an area of, does this thing work, but it is a question of like, and, and this is something we just don't seem to have perfect data on. Did it, did it particularly play a role in what's happening here? And that's harder to tell uh and is probably going to be different you know depending on the tactical in area you're talking about which kind of like theater you're talking about

but um you know one thing that's like the way in which these kind of barriers hedgehogs and like whatnot work is they're they're an area denial tool. It's like an area denial tool for vehicles. And it makes military units slow down. It makes them take more time in clearing area. They have to tow things away or blow them up. And they also can provide, depending on the type of thing, cover for infantry in urban combat situations, which obviously can cut both ways a little bit. But there's a reason why you see these kinds of things in every conflict and also a reason why people put them up in protests. It can be very useful to deny the vehicles of the enemy access to an area temporarily.

And a big pile of metal always does that 100% of the time. It requires something to deal with it. Yeah, that was something that was very considered when there was an increase in vehicular attacks during 2020. A lot of vehicles ramming into massive marches. There was definitely a concerted effort

to try to block off streets where stuff is happening, whether that be corkers for marches, people who specifically block off the sides of streets with their own, corkers for marches, the people who specifically block off the sides of streets with their own cars to follow the march around, or, you know, less effective barricades, like throwing a chain link fence in the middle of a street,

which is, I guess, better than nothing sometimes, but also maybe not the most effective thing. Yeah. In terms of trying to like build layered barricades, that's not just, you know, one flimsy wall, but it's a series of things that can compress down. and tempting to create for the enemy. And that's all insurgent warfare is about creating friction, right? Because friction degrades assets. It's over time.

It basically like, okay, so say you blocked off a bunch of roads and you've added 15, 20 miles to the transport distance that this convoy has to go. Well, generally speaking, in the case of war, when we talk about war, it's assumed that about one mile is in terms of wear and tear like 10 plus miles because of how much more difficult the strain on vehicles is in those situations. So you've added a great deal more strain on the vehicles. That increases the chance that one of them is going to blow a tire. One of them is going to crack an axle. One of them is going to have an engine block go like blow or whatever, which means over time, if you're doing this a

bunch, if you're setting up barricades and you're effectively increasing or all the amount of travel time, or at least the amount of idling time that forces have to go in by a significant amount, you're guaranteeing a certain number of those vehicles are going to break or be rendered inoperable in that time. And you're also, the other thing that they do is they allow you to deny area and funnel the enemy into a specific, into a place more advantageous for you, right? And this can be advantageous if you're trying to set up an ambush, if you're just trying to buy time for forces to move back to a better position. It can, you know, there's a number of uses for it. But if you set up a series of obstacles like this and guarantee that they're going to have to find

an alternate route and you know, broadly speaking, because it's your terrain, what kind of route they're going to take, then you could do stuff like drop, throw a drone at them. Or if because of the damage you've done to the roads and the difficulty, how difficult you made it to advance,

they wind up just parked for a long time. That's also a great situation to bomb people with a fucking drone, which is by far the most effective weapons unit that we have seen built by civilians in this war. By the way, it's not Molotovs. It's certainly not paint. It is civilian volunteers who put together combat drones using generally DJI drones that they have upgraded with thermal imaging cameras in order to see at night.

And they have used 3D printed parts in order to drop bombs from. And they have carried out for weeks now hundreds of extremely successful nighttime raids on Russian positions. This has been effective for a couple of reasons.

One of them is that the Russian military does not widespread have effective night vision. We don't need to get it. The reasons for this are complicated based in the mix of like appropriations, corruption issues with the technologies they do have, yada, yada, yada. But they do not have the capacity in large scale to carry out operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. And so you get when nighttime comes, these forces that were advancing in places like Kiev, clustering up and huddling for the night. And then these hunter killer drones would sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking see in daytime. I can tell you from experience at night, they're ghosts just dropping bombs on on armored vehicles and on groups of soldiers. And these, you. And what you have seen with these units, which have been integrated, they started out as civilian volunteer groups.

They have been integrated into the military to a significant extent. And I think what you do have, some of this is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot of Russian officers and generals killed, generally because they have been communicating over open phone lines. And I suspect some of what's been going on is when they figure out where one of these guys is, they send some of these fucking drone units in to blow them up because it's not hard if you know where someone is to kill them with a drone in this way. I think the other thing to talk about in terms of, you know, building obstacles, building

barricades is the whole cover versus concealment thing where a lot of people think that if they hide behind a barricade, they're now impervious, which obviously isn't true if a drone's going to get you, and obviously isn't true for a large number of the munitions that get fired,

whether they be bullets or tank rounds. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, and I think that's something in videos I have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact. You have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they lost hiding behind vehicles um which if it's an armored vehicle definitely can protect you from small arm fire but if somebody shoots that vehicle with a

with a javelin you may find yourself next to a cooking off tank um And I've seen shit like people hiding behind fucking fences, which is terrible to hide behind. Failing to go to ground, which is always your best bet is to kind of get behind a berm or something, get low to the fucking ground. And it's interesting to me, a lot of the worst videos of responding to contact

that I've seen on the Russian side have been there. The Rusgardia units. I'm not great at pronouncing Russian, but they are essentially police special forces units. That actually makes sense. Yeah, they have every video I've seen of these guys handle being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that.

They're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody, you know, like, yeah, this is not where they're what they're supposed to be doing the other thing that spencer really focuses on is this whole like a sniper idea of of being afraid of someone of someone just cutting you down from above which obviously kind of is you know more more of a thing with the drone stuff as well but this idea of not even being good at firearms, but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere that you can't see, in terms of knowing your terrain better than whatever invading force does, and knowing how to set up spots where you're less likely to get shelled.

Yeah, and this is very basic and old military doctrine, but this is like, you know, the way a sniper can work in a dense urban environment is you have a large number of guys and they're willing to just risk getting hit and generally they're not and then you find yourself kind of holding up for time to take out the sniper which can be an involved and difficult process for just a single sniper and yeah that's definitely a thing like that you don't have to be the fucking uh chris kyle in order to effectively work in that kind of situation. Now, what makes that effective? Because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly. But if you have small units of snipers, oftentimes just like civilians with hunting rifles,

who are doing that within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment, that there's a pretty wide comprehensive amount of resistance going on in those areas. And yeah, a single person, if they're not like the only person engaging with the enemy in that in that area, can make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond to contact. I think the last thing I wanted to kind of get into today is the whole, I mean, this kind of ties into the weaponized and reality aspect of being like all of these people who are giving, you know, unsolicited advice on twitter.com, whether they be John Spencer,

whether they be, you know, the wife of a former Marine, whether they be tank mechanics, whatever, like former marine whether they be there we go tank mechanics whatever like everyone's everyone's doing this now and it's all seen as like completely valid right we're giving instructions on how to do urban insurgency online um and this is totally fine yet when you know when information from hong kong gets used in protest kind of uh propaganda for urban insurgency instructions then it's like international

like organized like terrorism yeah yeah if you're telling people how to use fucking laser pointers yeah it's like the the selective thing how be like okay we're allowed to tell people how to do urban insurgency right now but when this is over or in the past it's it's not allowed right you have john spencer who i doubt would be giving i doubt was a big fan of any black lives matter demonstration um just yeah i don't know personally but but i mean i certainly doubt was giving people instructions on how to disable bearcats yeah i don't think he was giving instructions on how to ambush police officers or you know anything like that so you had this whole whole coalition of people on Twitter.com giving all this advice out,

how to do urban insurgency and whatever, while also, you know, whenever something is happening like that where they live, that is obviously bad and obviously not a good thing. Whether, you know, you could talk about whatever ideological drive people have, but I think this is just an interesting thing worth talking about in terms of how we will

view, you know, this type of discussion of urban insurgency is always like a bad thing, right? It's always this thing that like terrorists do. You're helping, you know, you're always, you're rooting for the destruction of civilization or whatever. Then it just takes a few things for you to get, you know, an instructor at West Point to start, you know, posting threads to help sell his new book on these very same topics. Yeah.

I mean, there's, I think, a little degree to which I might push back on some of that, not necessarily with Spencer, but I can remember during the Fed war in Portland, which was probably the part of Portland that most people are aware of when you had a bunch of federal agents snatching people. It was the most warlike part of the summer. You had, for this brief period of time, a lot of folks, because I took part in this, giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle police munitions that certainly went more viral than it would have gone in a different sort of situation. That's true. sort of situation.

That's true. And I think you do have, I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine, and this is just sort of a general thing that happens online, is when something, a news moment

blows up in a way that is like big enough, it disrupts the norms. And suddenly for a while, you can talk about things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight like,

you know, reality suddenly becomes so much bigger. And what is, what is acceptable discourse suddenly expands out much bigger than what it usually does. It becomes a lot more permeable. And I do think broadly, like we're shitting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. But I do think that, like, really, really broadly, it's good when stuff like it's good for people to think about.

when stuff like it's good for people to think about, even if I certainly don't. I certainly do not want there to be. I don't want anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare to experience urban warfare. I will. Absolutely. I will. I will say that right now. But it is not bad for people to be thinking about and talking about the ways in which

a civilian population can do damage to an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse to exist. And it's not bad for people to be thinking in this way. And it's not bad for the people who are potentially in power to have that in the back of their heads, you know? Yeah. I mean, like one of the first things you sent me when i started working for it could happen here was the was the city is not neutral piece um on why urban combat is is hard

um so yeah it's definitely it's the thing that yeah it's it's always it's it's worth thinking about but you don't want to we're not trying to wish on anybody and i think you can you can look at all of like the weirdos on the internet who have like you know this you know there's some degree of like nazis who have done this but also just like random other people who've like flown to ukraine to help join fight off the russians because they think it's going to be cool and they'll be able to work with the asf battalion or something who then get stationed to basically be cannon fodder because they're this like 20 year old from America who's never actually held a gun before.

I hope that one's true. It is just like a post. Because if it's true, then it means that someone in the Ukrainian government is consciously making the choice to use wannabe Azov veterans as cannon fodder. Which is very funny. Which is funny.

Extremely funny. If it's happening, right? We don't, that's not confirmed. Certainly a percentage probably not an insignificant percentage of dudes who have done shown up to do this have like been like oh my god what the fuck um some of them i'm sure just didn't have much experience i'm sure some of them were dudes who had experience being on the side with overwhelming air power um and were like oh fuck but you also do it's fair to note like the the stories of people like having

like freaking out go viral um there's plenty of videos of like mixed foreigner units in heavy combat including a bunch where you can hear u.s and british dudes like fighting russia like because a lot there's a lot of people who have legitimate like hard combat experience who have volunteered to go do this yeah the one thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is I mean, it's not super unlike what we're doing now, though we're trying to come at it from a more like, critical standpoint, but

like, Americans who maybe have gone to a protest or two, but no real experience just going on twitter.com and talking about how they think beating an army is best done done how that works yeah yeah well and like you know if you look at like the okay like the the times that like the u.s has actually attempted to fight its own army right like the the last time this happened

was the la riots in 92 and they got their shit pushed in. Like, it went really, really badly for the people on the streets. It was really ugly. There was a lot of bodies. Yeah, and like, you know, part of what, you know, and I will say, like, part of what's, I guess,

useful about this is like, yeah, this is, I mean, this is a thing that is, I mean, I wasn't alive for it, but like, Robert, you were alive for that. Like, that is a thing. Like, in living memory, the army has been deployed. Like that, that, that is a thing, like in living memory,

the army has been deployed on American soil. And one of the things that went wrong is that the people on the ground had basically no time. And this is something you can read from, from like the army's accounts of this is that like the people that they were dealing with

had no tactical experience whatsoever. They did it. They had no conception of tactics and the army was able to very quickly crush them. Yeah. And, you know you know if if you don't want that to happen to you yeah like there there there is a way in which this stuff is important to be thinking about but also like dear god that is the worst shit like yeah you don't want that here. Here's what's what's important to understand about that. Anytime you are dealing with.

Any kind of conflict, like physical conflict that involves violence, and that can be as narrow as like a protest, you know, where people are squaring off with the cops or an actual like full on military conflict. the cops or an actual like full on military conflict. The winner is the person who is most disruptive to the enemy's Ota loop, right? Observe, orient, decide, act. It's the loop that you go through when you are trying to decide how to act in any kind of a kinetic situation. On the streets in a protest, one of where i where we have all seen people be the most successful against cops is when you change the rules on them is when they are in a situation they did not anticipate being in because they tend to freak out and they tend to respond

ineffectively right you do not want to if you see them preparing to act in a certain way because they believe you are doing a specific thing you ideally do not then do the thing they are preparing for because that is a situation which you're going to wind up battering yourself against a riot line, right? That's the core of the move, be like water thing from Hong Kong is the idea that do not engage them in a way they are prepared for. And that is a piece of advice, broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as it is in a protest situation. Do not meet them on their own terms. What this also means is that you don't want to be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective in the situation you're getting into.

So like when you had protesters in 93 in L.A. engaging with the military, they were playing by the rules of how do you deal with cops. And suddenly they were dealing with soldiers. And boy, howdy, are the rules different? And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where, again, they had air supremacy. where, again, they had air supremacy. They had artillery supremacy. They were backing the state that was fighting against these insurgents. And so their soldiers gained the combat experience they had with every advantage in their pocket. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military, if you're talking really about like because we've talked about a lot of little things

that have maybe had an impact on the conflict here and there. One of the things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian military has responded and comported itself in this war so far versus the Russian is for years, eight years since this conflict started, the Ukrainian military has developed a posture of having soldiers sign up for these brief contracts, sending and rotating them through the battleground and the Donbass so that when this war started, they had a huge number more than anyone else in Europe of combat veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary when they did not have supremacy in artillery or air support when they engaged them. And then the Ukrainian military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their their units,

which is what you want to do. Any military is going to want to, like, spread out your veterans among units because you're not everyone's not going to be a combat veteran. But you want some guys who know what it's like to be shot at and every kind of unit that might get shot at because they stiffen the back of everybody else. And this is what. So, again, when when the war started, to get back to what I'm saying, else. And this is what, so again, when the war started, to get back to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing for a police action, like the ones they carried out in Chechnya, like what they did have done for Assad in Syria, and they got a war. And the Ukrainians came into that fight prepared for a war. So you, I think one of the things that is important when you look at, consider any kind of possibility of being involved in a conflict is you want to know what are the rules your opponent is going in ready to abide by.

What are the things they are expecting to happen? What is kind of the rubric with which they are looking at what they expect to occur in this conflict? And by God, you want to be going in there with a different one, you know? And that, again, depending on how you do it, that can go badly or that can go really well. Because like I said, if you're going and prepared to fight cops and you wind up dealing with soldiers, that's not great. But if you have prepared, if you are able to kind of lock your enemy into the kind of conflict that they're not ready to face, then generally speaking, you'll win. We have 20 years of experience in the war on terror of more or less that going down.

war against Hezbollah in 2006, where it's like the IDF is a really good army, but they'd spent like, I don't know, they spent like 40 years basically just sort of like, you know, they spent about 40 years doing police actions. And then they run into Hezbollah and they expect Hezbollah is going to just, you know, they've made Lebanon 2006 and their expectation is that

Hezbollah is going to go to ground, they're going to do a guerrilla war. And instead Hezbollah, like, they go into bunkers, but they stand and fight. And the IDF gets smashed. And like you know they they they pull out and they spend a bunch of time just like murdering people from the air but like they don't win the war and like it like that that happens a lot especially with these armies that are used to dealing used to doing these sort of police action things and they lose to enemies that like the the fact that the idf lost a war the hezbollah is like by like balance of forces.

It's like this is inconceivable. Like how on earth did they possibly lose this? But it's like, yeah, this stuff happens because they weren't like, yeah, they were doing this police action thing and they weren't used to. They hadn't fought an enemy that was actually going to stick it and fight them since like the 70s. like the 70s. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the great defeats in military history are because of a force

came into a situation expecting a different kind of fight than what they got. That was a part of what happened to Napoleon when he invaded Russia, right? And the Russians did not respond the way that he expected

a state to respond to having their capital occupied and effectively kind of starved him out. There was other shit going on there. Attrition had really depleted the French military before it got there. But yeah. How I would want to wrap

up this is basically saying all of that stuff regarding how this war has really prompted a lot of things that were seemingly more unexpected and seemingly thought to be previously more impossible in terms of how fast both rhetoric around these these types of conflicts can spread and morph and the role in

which like disinformation and misinformation is used for you know both both sides to to gain to gain ground on the other and how you know relating back to it could happen here is in terms of like the urban crumbles or like you know the small small like urban collapses um and you know escalating escalating like inter inter-country conflict uh in various places around the world how fast certain things can happen that we once thought are kind of more impossible or improbable at the very least you know how how fast you can get people giving advice on how to take out armored vehicles on twitter.com how fast you can get you know people like people who are you

know seemingly are you know seemingly not not tied to certain to certain like ideas or ideologies giving out you know information on types of types of ways to resist invading or oppressing forces. It is an interesting kind of... It's like case study is the wrong word because it's obviously having horrible effects with thousands and thousands of people being slaughtered. But it is

intriguing to watch how in terms of the microcosm, macrocosm idea of eventually if conflict breaks out in other you know, in terms of like the microcosm, macrocosm idea of, of eventually, you know, conflict, if conflict breaks out in other places around the world in the next, in the next few years, how our current like social media landscape, how our kind of roles around like urban conflict, like urban conflict and all of these things kind of interact with each other and how we view, yeah, what is, what is likely and what we you know who

who you're going to predict is going to do x thing based on people invading a city that it's not theirs yeah um i mean i think in terms of stuff that that people can take out of this you know without necessarily needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency one of them is that anytime big shit happens and more big shit is going to keep happening for us, you have a window of opportunity through which you can get things across to people that they would not normally listen to. Yeah. And that is a really important time. And it helps to think about the kind of situations that might occur and the kind of things that you want to push

out into the world. Because this is true with climate change as it is with war, right? We're going to have more disasters. And when those disasters hit, it will be easier to get people to talk about radical solutions to things like climate change. And it will be easier to do things like get out in the fucking streets and get large groups of people agitated. You know, we're at some point fucking God willing, we will have the climate change equivalent to what happened in 2020, where something so terrible and fucked up happens that a lot of people take to the streets. And hopefully we will succeed to a greater extent in forcing actual change than maybe we did in 2020. Yeah. But that's something like that could very well happen.

And so that's one of the lessons I think you can take out of this, again, without sort of obsessing over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers is Ukraine is hard evidence that that is the way the media environment works you get these moments where you can really push some wild shit to people that's that's why i like the whole uprising or insurrection model more than the revolution model because the uprising model posits that basically you have you know base base society based reality you know always at like the baseline level then an uprising happens it's like it's like shooting up onto a graph suddenly so many things that are just outside the normal way that we view you know systems the governance systems of you know social control so many things become so much more possible in this like heightened place um and that's what

the uprising does it gets things that were suddenly that were once so far away and once just only in the imagination it almost it makes them so much closer right yeah there was this feeling in like july of 2020 during the height of the fed war being like so many things feel possible in this one moment nothing is true and all is permitted like yeah you can get away with some shit yeah and so using the uprising model yeah it can really and or the, or the instruction model, like it can really, it can really make things feel so much more possible than what they usually feel like. And there's, you know, brief moments in time where massive social change can happen.

And, you know, you have to learn how to recognize when those moments are happening and then organize effectively when they do happen. yep well i believe that does it for us today um yeah i we've been we've been wanting to you know talk about this topic for a while in terms of you know one of the very first things that started happening was various governments giving guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with molotovs you're like oh wow this is this is intriguing to have a government giving out instructions. This probably has some implications on how we view collapse in a general concept.

So yeah, ever since that started happening, we wanted to talk about it. So it certainly leaves us with a lot to think about. And I didn't get to go on my rant about the structure of the Russian military vis-a-vis their lack of an NCO Corps, but maybe we'll talk about that in the future i'm sure we'll have enough time to talk about this in the future uh well everyone uh i don't know do do something productive yeah do something productive uh don't charge armored vehicles don't charge armored vehicles with paint

but maybe think about the different things you would like to get a bunch of people suddenly radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake of a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of folks are suddenly willing to take to the streets seemingly overnight. Maybe be thinking about that and trying to talking with your buddies about it and being like, hey, if everybody gets out in the streets again, what kind of information do I want to spread? What would be good to get people talking about in that instance when they're suddenly listening for, I don't know, about two weeks. It feels like you get about two weeks. Honestly, yeah.

About two weeks. Yeah. Well, in the wake of the new IPCC report, we certainly have a lot to think about. All right. Bye. Bye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Goblin Mode! Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is today in Goblin Mode. You know what it's about, you've heard us say it like about 20 million times. But yeah, I'm your host Christopher Wong, and with me today we have Juniper, who is a really Twitter shitpost extraordinaire,

of Juniper, who is a really Twitter shitpost extraordinaire on to discuss language, media culture, the nature of reality, and Goblin Mode. Juniper, welcome to the show. Hi, how's it going? It's going good. It's going much better since Goblin Mode has ceased control of the world. We are now living in the age of Goblin Mode. It's the era of Goblin Mode,'s the year of goblin mode as the drew barrymawr show said this morning apparently it's been quite a time i didn't realize just posting

would like just posting would influence so much around me i guess i don't know it's been an interesting time for sure yeah so so i wanted to talk to you about sort of the absurdity that is goblin mode um and i i want to hold off on talking about what goblin mode like is or isn't for a bit because i think that's actually weirdly the less interesting part and i want to start with instead the story of how goblin mode became like a thing and why i am reading uh i i... Every time I look for more Goblin Mode headlines, there's more Goblin Mode headlines. There is, yeah. I think my favorite so far is from Bloomberg.

It's, Diesel prices have gone Goblin Mode. Forget crude oil. This could be the real energy emergency. Yeah, that is by far one of my favorites too. The full headline too, if you search for that one, it's what you said, but then it adds on,

thanks to the Ukraine war. I never thought that I would see an official Bloomberg headline with goblin mode and the Ukraine war. That's just by far my favorite one for multiple reasons. Amazing. The other part to me that's extremely funny is that i so the people who are doing these articles i keep getting asked so someone is someone is asking like an intern to find a picture of a goblin and they keep posting pictures of orcs which is like enormously funny to

me okay so i'm not sure what they're searching to get those yeah i don't know it's really incredible okay so yeah i guess so we should start from the beginning of this story which is yeah can you talk about your shit post and uh what you were thinking at the time when you made a shit post that randomly like has has had months-long ripple effects on the world. Sure. I think you were right, though. The post itself, that's the least interesting part of all of Goblin Mode, in my opinion, as well. Just seeing the ripple effect is what's been super interesting and really funny to me.

But sure, yeah, the post. Basically, I think it was like the day that um Kanye West and Julia Fox which just a quick note I've never heard of Julia Fox before any of this so I just like sometimes if like you know if Twitter is all talking about one thing the most recent thing being like the Will Smith slap like everyone's talking about that so whenever like some like big event like that is happening and everyone's posting about it i try to like think of some creative different post i can do you know just to get in on the the discourse or whatever you want to call it so i just i i really don't know what compelled me to make a fake headline but basically i just i just decided to search I think I was driving home from work, and I just decided to search Kanye West, Julia Fox.

And I just found the first headline, and I just edited it to say, Kanye West doesn't like it when Julia Fox goes goblin mode, basically. And that's why they broke up. That was the whole essence of the post itself. And I really didn't think too deeply about it beyond just making the post. And it just, it caught fire with like, I guess what we would probably call normie, normie Twitter, like people that aren't even like necessarily leftists or anything like us. It just really caught a hold with the whole of Twitter. And pretty much like most of the people that saw it, you can, you can

go back and check the replies. Most people think it's real at the time like people's quotes and replying about it all think it's real and no one like hardly anyone verified it it was like kind of insane to see yeah and yeah i think it's funny because again like you could very you could you could just google this right like you could just google it and it'd be like oh wait hold on this isn't real but like no one did that and it was like yeah like you could have just easily searched the main part of the headline like kanye west julia fox it was literally the second or third headline yeah search you could have found the same website same author but seeing that it wasn't the correct headline. Although that does remind me when there was an initial article about my post, um, I forget who wrote

it at this point. I think it was the focus. Yes, that's right. It was the focus. They, um, they, they, for some reason made the assumption when they decided, when they decided to talk about my tweet that the the website like the headline that i made made up the original website like edited that part out so they thought that my headline was real but it was just edited and taken away and so that also affected what some people thought about it too like they thought a lot of people thought it was really real that's that's what's insane to me about this yeah and like yeah and like like vogue like picked this up this was just like a thing that that like everyone believed was real everyone was just reporting on it as news and there's so much like there's so much like incredible stuff about this like part of it you know so one of the articles uh that gets published about this like after so like there's this initial period where everyone

is running around going like oh my god it was goblin mode and then julia fox has to make a statement that's like no there was no goblin mode no one said this yeah yeah that's that's the interesting about like the evolution of goblin mode like stem said this yeah yeah that's that's the interesting about like the evolution of goblin mode like stemming from my posts specifically is at first the coverage was talking about whether my post was real or fake and talking about that aspect of it but as time has gone on it's kind of evolved away from that like you you won't see any goblin mode article talk about the original like julia fox tweet that jump-started this whole thing anymore it's kind of like shifted away from that initial uh that initial post which

i found really interesting that that's what's sustaining this i feel like yeah i wanted to read a uh i wanted to read a passage from one of the or I don't know why I'm calling it a passage. It's just like a sentence, but read part of one of the articles that, that came from the, the initial surge, which is from the streetwear company called high snobbity. I don't tell me if I'm like pronouncing that wrong.

I, well, okay. That's not true. Twitter. If I'm pronouncing that wrong, my Twitter is at, I write.

Okay. I yell there. Yell there. Yeah, but I want to read this quote because I think it's interesting. So the article, they have this whole thing that's like, okay, they get to the denial. They post your tweet about like, oh my God, I can't believe Julia Fox had to respond to this. And then they say, I'm not saying Fox was lying, but wearing a borderline not suited for work dress, a purse trimmed in human DNA, and DIY eye makeup to an Oscars afterparty is Goblin Mode to a T. And I think this brings up an interesting question, which is, to what extent was Goblin Mode real in the first place before your sort of meme went viral? So like the phrase itself, you mean?

Yeah. What part of the phrase existed before my post? Yeah, and I think it was also like, what were you thinking? Did you have a conception of what Goblin Mode was before you made the post? So the only thing I had in my mind at that point um it stems from specifically um do you know the the user on twitter uh hottie pants do you happen to know that guy uh i don't think so

no he goes by i think his ad is like punish pants or something like that but anyways uh he around that time he was posting a lot about like goblins. He would post a lot about like goblin time and like, oh, it's goblin time. And he would just make like a bunch of just like posts like that. So goblins were on my mind at that point. And then I forget his username, but I think his username is uncontrolled. I forget his username. I'll have to tell you afterwards or something. I don't remember off the top of my head. But he made a post that went viral,

something to the effect of like, Your Honor, I was going goblin mode at the time. You know, that format that's like, you're in court. But the excuse is like, oh, I'm going goblin mode. Really, in my head, that's really the only reference I had. So I didn't make up the phrase. A lot of people think I made up the phrase goblin mode, which I definitely did not. But I think just there was a lot of people posting about goblins around that time, like early, mid-March.

And just in my mind, I was like, oh, you know, I'm just going to say goblin mode on this shit this shit post about Julia Fox. I don't, I really don't know why it's just the first thing that popped in my head. And whenever something pops in my head, like a tweet idea and I laughed to myself, I'm like, okay, I should post it. I don't know. And it seems to work. Did you end up, so one of the things, one of the things I think is really interesting is that right. So, okay. So you have, you have your first wave of like, it's the goblin mode thing. And then you have your second wave of articles that are trying to explain what goblin mode is. And I was wondering if you'd actually even seen the post I just linked to the chat.

There was like, the thing I'd seen from goblin Mode before this all started was this Reddit. Someone on Twitter had a tweet that went viral about Goblin Mode, and it was about this Reddit post of someone creeping around their house and pretending and acting like a goblin. Yes. Yes. So I didn't see that until I made my post, my initial Goblin Mode post, because I think someone linked it under my post

and i was like oh shit is this like a thing like this is actually like a thing and it started popping up more because people saw that reply i'm really like oh shit this is like actually a thing and to my surprise it like totally worked out for me like everything kind of just came together in a really insane uh fashion oh that's another tweet too, the one that you linked. That's when I was in Goblin Boy. That came before my tweet too. Yeah, had you seen that one before you made it? I follow her.

I follow Kelgore. I might have seen it. I don't remember. I remember the other one I was referencing before. I might have seen this one though. Yeah, I think that was what was interesting to me about this other one i was referencing before um i might have seen this one though yeah like i i think like that was what was interesting to me about this was that like the moment it went viral there was this whole sort of like attempt because there was an attempt to figure out what it is and then there was an

attempt to like back project a history on it and so you get a lot of these articles and you get a lot of people like i don't know like i would talk to people about this and they would like you know okay so they do this thing where it's like okay so they they go to know your meme they look at the google trends and then like people sort of like you know okay like there was an urban dictionary thing from like 2009 that was like a complete like a weird sex thing it's like completely unrelated to this but it was interesting to me the way that people like okay so you have this thing that goes viral right and like you're just fucking around like there's no way like it just sounds cool but then like yeah there's an extent to which it becomes this like you know it gets into the sort of like virality machine and so you have all these journalists who like have to cover it right because like you know the way the journalism

model works is okay so you you have this trend right people can see it trending you see something on twitter uh you do like four sets of googles and you write an article about it and it's like well okay because they're trying you're trying to like capitalize on on the clicks as fast as possible so when someone googles what is goblin mode it's like okay your thing comes up but it's like, well, okay, because you're trying to capitalize on the clicks as fast as possible. So when someone Googles, what is goblin mode? It's like, okay, your thing comes up. But it's interesting because it's like they have to fill the content in because there isn't any? Yeah, yeah. That's what was interesting about the specific, that first one, the focus article.

It was just a lot of filling in where there was really nothing. That's what's interesting about that. Yeah. nothing yeah and that's what's interesting about that yeah and then and then like after that like all the other articles are like like you you get to see this proliferation of sort of how the media works where it's like okay so you have the initial article the initial article google some stuff and it's basically just making it up because they're trying to like give coherence or like give a meeting to an empty signifier and then after that it's like all of the other articles are just copying off of the first article and you get get this like Ouroboros of like, everyone just is repeating the same thing over and over again. And none of them seem to understand that like it was not the thing that they originally talking about was just kind of.

France. That's really all it was. It is interesting to see how it is just able to proliferate off of as you were saying, they just Google search urban, they find an urban dictionary. I'm putting that in my article. Urban dictionary is a good

source. I think there's a few interesting things here, one of which is about how I had this before. I'm not sure if I think this, this is like, I mean, I think there's, there's like a few interesting things here. One of which is about how, yeah, I'm like, I had this before, like, I'm not sure if I actually talked about this on the show. So the day of the Atlanta shooting, Garrison and I spent a lot of time trying to like track down the shooter. And there was, there was this like fake Facebook post that was going around and, you know,

Garrison and I had spent like a lot of time looking for this guy. And we, okay, we realized he's like, this guy just doesn't have a facebook right and so we were like so like i was like look at this like i saw this fake facebook post and i was like oh this is fake and then like a bunch of uh a bunch of like a bunch of like actual journalists like found you know people like because journalists have been passing around the fake facebook post as like oh this is a post alleged to be a thing and then and then suddenly they were like oh hey this is fake hey you can see all these things like oh look it's like uh you know like there was like the the it was pretty clear of it like his face had been copied and pasted into like a thing that's supposed to look

like a facebook post there was all these like details about it that were just wrong. It was like, okay, so this isn't real. But the media cycle of it was like, all of these people saw my Twitter post that was like, this is fake, and then they just wrote a story off of it and never mentioned that they literally got it from me fucking around on Twitter.

It was like... And it's like, you look at this stuff and the extent to which these people are just like these people who are journalists who are you know supposed to be real journalists are just like woefully unprepared even people even people who are extremely online like wind up being woefully unprepared to deal with like anything like they're woefully unprepared to deal with anything of any complexity or deal or like figure out that they're being like hoaxed yeah no you're you're you're really right about that i mean i mean i think this it's i don't know what i would call this phenomenon but

it there's definitely something there where it's like, they will see something like, I don't know. I don't know what it is about specifically Twitter that like, I feel like that's where a lot of people get news just in general, but I feel like a lot of journalists just assume anything that they see. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing, but if they see something on Twitter, even if it's like a joke, like they'll just assume it's real or something. I'm not, I'm not entirely sure. Like it's super easy to make a fake post. I do it all the time. I make all sorts of like fake, fake things. Most of them are more obvious than

Goblin, but I guess, but I don't know that there's, I don't want to say journalists are too trusting. Yeah. Well, I will say like, there are times when it's genuine like when you first started posting the headlines of like the actual twitter articles that were about goblin mode i like i didn't even bother looking them up because i just assumed they were fake yeah a lot of people told me like i think specifically the the one that like most of my followers realized that they weren't fake anymore was the one that was like um as a disabled uh woman goblin mode this goblin mode trend is really problematic and people people decided to look that one up and we're like oh it's real and then everyone was like wait were all these other ones that you were posting real and i'm like yes they were all real yeah julia fox one all of them have been real it was different agencies have been all these news

organizations have been writing all this insane shit about nothing yeah and there's there's you know i mean i think this one is funny just because like yeah i mean like it's goblin mode right like it's it's it's just funny like there's no like you know but but i mean i think that there's an interesting thing that happens with with the specifically the disabilities one because the disabilities one isn't like it's basically about something completely different that the goblin mode thing spawned which is that like like the other thing that happened with goblin mode was that okay so people saw goblin mode and then particularly on like tiktok um i i don't know if they knew where it came from but like people like people turned goblin mode into an actual

thing where like it became this thing about like uh i like i i think i think this is also influenced by like some of the like shit post answers that you gave the media people that were like goblin mode could be whatever you want uh it's when you aren't awake in the pandemic like you're not doing your makeup in the pandemic or whatever and like yeah but but it's interesting i'm not sure how much that like fueled like that i really don't know if the tiktok thing came before or after i think it's after yeah was it after okay from what i've seen it it's it seems like it actually became a thing after and that was really interesting to me too because it was like it's this way in which like you know okay so you start running into these sort of like

fundamental problems about the nature of reality where it's like okay so we made this thing that is fake right but then it became real because enough enough people believed it was real that it it turned into a thing that people actually use to describe stuff and then you know that that's how you get to like you get a bunch of people complaining about how like there was an article that was like the great resignation and go in goblin mode or like the two great threats to employers as they try to force people back to work it's like yeah it's it's like the goblin mode like self-manifested into reality like i feel like a lot of journalists are saying like people being lazy and like you know how the whole meme of like oh no one wants to work anymore yeah i feel like a lot of people

are trying to like attributing like oh not wanting to work and being lazy to goblin mode and it's it's self-manifested through the media or tiktok or whatever whatever it might be i actually don't know but it's it's become a thing now in in a really strange way yeah yeah and i think i think this is like this is an interesting way of looking like, you know, like this was the whole sort of like, like in, in, in, in terms of like, okay. In, in, in so far as posting can actually affect reality, which it can, but not as much as people seem to think. Like there are, there are, there are people who like seem to think that like the three letter agencies care what they post on Twitter, which is like, it's like, no, no, no, hold on, hold on. If,

if we post correctly interventions, it won't happen. It's like, if you seen the CIA, like, like, like there's, there's this whole thing where it's like,

you know, I mean this, it, it, it, okay. This, this is going to be the,

like, someone's going to pull this out of context and be like, ah, Hey, look at how dumb Chris is. But like, you know, like this,

this is kind of what happened with Trump, which is like, this is, this wasn't like what the meme magic was dumb chris is but like you know like this is this is kind of what happened with trump which is like this is this isn't like what the meme magic was like if you just meme something long enough you can kind of turn it into reality by just sort of convincing enough people that it's real that it and and you know and once you've done that like you you have effectively made the thing real right and what's interesting about this one is is this like it's like a lot of people like do that on purpose right like this is how like this is like there's a lot of propaganda stuff that works like this or like you know this is like what the the meme like 4chan trump bullshit was like

you did this like completely like as a joke on accident yeah i didn't i didn't intend this i just mean i just wanted to make a one-off joke yeah i didn't think that would happen but you're you're totally right about the whole like i don't know how much like the trump me magic was really a self-manifestation of him kind of just winning the election and becoming popular with a certain people but it definitely feels like uh like that self-manifestation of like posting to a certain extent really can become real if it just like hits a certain zeitgeist of some sort and like i think a crucial part of it is it needs to get picked up by the media and taken seriously by journalists specifically because the the thing that really uh i feel like broke the camel's back for goblin mode specifically

was the first journalist that reached out to me because she she wanted to interview me about the whole the whole experience like and her coverage of it was about the whole fake meme thing and then how it became sort of a thing in that aspect. And then from there, a lot of different journalists and websites referred back to that article. And now it seems to be the one that everyone's referring to now is the Guardian article about it. That seems to be like the media's favorite piece about it, which is the one that everyone's referring to now is the guardian article about it that seems to be like the media's favorite piece about it which is the one that talks more about it being

like a lifestyle trend and i i think that's where it really went off is when like some people took in the tiktok aspect of it and kind of manifested it that way i think there's a couple of interesting political consequences of this one of of which is that Twitter as a platform isn't really... I mean, since Trump got banned, it hasn't really been where most stuff is happening. TikTok is exploding. I mean, you still have the boomers on Facebook. It hasn't been the driving force of politics that it normally is. But the one thing that it has is that all of the journalists are still on there and that means that like yeah like there's all these weird political consequences where like yeah you can sort of like like you can just sort of will things into existence by convincing

journalists that it's real and that's i think really scary in a lot of ways for because you know, like the people who are really, really good at this sort of manipulation are right wingers and right wingers have sort of like, like, I don't know, like uh like there's a bunch of like all a bunch of people are really mad about like they're being a black stormtrooper in star wars and oh god yeah the whole the whole last yeah yeah the thing that was interesting about it was like uh yeah i think i think that was yeah yeah there's the thing was interesting about it was like so i know people who like who like looked into it beforehand and it was like the only people who were talking about this, it was like people who were confused because they thought that storm troopers were all clones and were like,

wait, why? And then, and the other thing, the other group of people who were mad about this was stormfront. Right. And stormfront was able to like turn this into like, like a discourse.

Like they, they, they able to convince, they were able to convince journalists like this was a real thing that like a significant number of people are mad about and then it like actually turned into a thing that a significant number of people were mad about because you can sort of just like like you you can start these like panics and like this is one of the things we were talking about in in our trans episodes were like you know a a fairly small network of well-funded people can cause like enormous swaths of the u.s

to just lose their shit and get extremely violent and get like you know and and the specific thing they're mad about changes like pretty frequently but you can just sort of like if if you're able to manipulate the media well enough and you you know there's other ways to do this like you know you could do it by like weird memes you can do it by you know being the cops or just like having press releases that you send out you can have you can do it through like these sort of like astroturf like uh i don't know you have like an astroturf intellectual like what's his name margaret ufo but it's it's interesting to me that like they all seem to work like the the pathway through it all seems to be very similar which is you what you do is you convince a bunch of media

people that something is real and then once once they start taking it seriously it sort of manifests itself into reality yeah no that that is what i realized what was happening like i one of my initial points that i was trying to make after um the whole goblin mode thing after the first article came out i was like it really made me realize like how potent fake i hate saying this phrase just because it's become such like a nothing sort of phrase but like fake news how easy it is to just yeah like what if instead of goblin mode i I decided, like, let's say I'm like a crazy right winger, and I

had this weird zeitgeist moment causing a panic about like trans people, and I made like a fake tweet, like, that you would, we see that happen all the time, like trans people, a lot of people hate us, and it would be super easy, put it in the right community,

make this fake tweet or a fake headline and people right-wingers specifically will go wild and it'll really influence the discourse i mean look at the the current i mean it's it's kind of over now but the the last i think it was last week the swimmer the the trans swimmer that won the women's competition i mean the amount of vitriol that was able to be created over that. Just imagine what, as you said, a well-funded, tight network of, I don't know, for lack of a better phrase,

fake news creators. All they need to do is put something out on Facebook. The boomers see it, and then it's over. It becomes real to them. One of the things I learned about like while i was doing research for weirdly an episode about reverend moon was that like people figured so this is sort of like this is like how the republicans came to power like they figured out you could do shit like this and like uh robert vigueri like in in like in like the 60s figured out that like if you just if you

sent like you you could just send letters to like like they weren't i guess they weren't even boomers at that point if you just send letters to old people that would say stuff like uh planned parenthood is uh harvesting baby fetuses you could just get them really mad and it's like and it's funny because you know in the 60s like he's doing this like by mail right like he he is mailing you a chain letter it's just stuff yeah it became this like yeah yeah it's like it's weird because you can watch them invent this and then it's like oh yeah this guy was funded by like a weird cult guy who was trying to take over the world who was being backed by the korean cia and it's like i don't know it gets into this yeah it all sort of comes back into this weird thing where

yeah i mean i i like one of the sort of political transformations i've had since i started working here was like i didn't take like it's sort of similar to what you were saying like i didn't take the like weaponized unreality like fake new stuff like that seriously and then it was like you cover it every day and it's like oh my god like the like the the weird like like watching like 4chan like invents the i actually don't know if it's fortunate it was i one of watching like just weird right-wing like message boards invent uh like the whole ukrainian bio lab thing which like grand glenn greenwald now tweets about and like like like the like the official state media of russia and china are like talking about these bio labs and it's like it's turned into this weird like like thing

where like yeah like like actual countries with like nuclear weapons are like basically using shit posters as like as like a way to do propaganda it's just like really weird i don't know it's just really weird and incredibly disturbing media space to live in yeah it's like it's a weird synthesis of uh shit posters just posting online to whatever audience, and I guess media of some sort. Maybe not in the case with the Biolab. I don't know too much about that, especially because I'm blocked by Glenn Greenwald, so I don't see a lot of his stuff anymore. Yeah.

But yeah, it's interesting how kind of interlocked they are. And to your point earlier about the whole Trump meme magic thing, I didn't take that too seriously at the time. In 2016, I was like, oh, all these silly right-wingers making these dumb memes. This isn't going to do anything. I truly don't know if it really had an effect. But I mean, we can't really ignore the power

that just simply manifesting something, even if it's artificial, can actually have a hold on certain people. As you were saying with the mailing letters, I mean, if you just say enough, if you say something enough to the right type of person, they'll just believe it. I mean, it's not hard to lie to people as horrible as that is to say it's really not that hard to lie to people yeah like i mean that's the the whole sort of like everyone yelling groomer like constantly about trans people it's like yeah they just lied over and over again and like half the people who are like saying this stuff are actually pedophiles and it doesn't matter because you know if you just like do this shit over and over again you get these you get you just get these like hate mobs and it's yeah no the right wing right wingers specifically are phenomenal at creating hate mobs yeah it's kind of incredible to witness it's it's really scary but it's it's an incredible thing to see there's not really an equivalent i would say on the left in the way that um even maybe in liberals there's an equivalent but like on the

left there's not really like an equivalent to like some like a mob in that way yeah i've noticed yeah i mean i i think that's you know like okay there's always an extent to which like these stuff the stuff has like material constraints like you know i talk about like constantly on this show the fact that like this is like this is the stuff that the material constraints like you know i talk about like constantly on this show the fact that like this is like this is the stuff that the neocons believed and then they ran into the material constraints of the iraq war and their entire project imploded and like i mean i think one of the reasons why this is easier for the right is that like there's there there's a there's a there's there's always a political base for them that is there that they can access fairly easily,

which is, okay, they have access to like, you know, they have access to like a vast swath of petite bourgeois. They have access to a bunch of white business owners. They have access to like this sort of like this like white professional class. They have access to this sort of like white gentry class. And like those people can very easily be sort of like whipped into a frothing rage. And like part of it is because like that,

that's essentially, that's just what their, that's what their class interest is. That's what the sort of like, like their status, the racial hierarchy, like brings them to do already. And you could sort of like,

you know, if you just shuffle a bit of coal on it you can you could make the fire go absolutely and i mean it's talked about a lot i'm sure but like the the one thing that is really powerful is fox news yeah yeah fox news will pick up literally anything like i saw i saw a post on twitter just the other day a screenshot or just a just a picture of uh fox news and they they cited the the libs of tiktok twitter account yeah talking about school classrooms it's like what is that like no like right-wingers will just take the source of a random twitter user that has a tiktok that takes messages from random people that message them and then that's their news like that is just insane to to to to be fair to fox news which is not a thing i will ever say again

uh it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if that whole thing like well because so the the i don't know if you saw this the the lives of tiktok person is like is is that that thing is run by an old bush administration person really i did not know that yeah so it wouldn't i mean okay like there there's probably a three and four chance that they just saw someone who's like trying to own the libs on tiktok but there's like a one in four chance that like all the the old like bush network people like know each other and that's why they're promoting it i know that's that's a good point that's a good point i mean they have to know that they brought it well maybe. I don't know. It's one of those things where it becomes

really difficult to know the extent to which the world believes. Yeah, well, how organized they are and to the extent to which they believe what they're saying. Because part of that, if you know who's behind that,

it becomes easier to be like, oh, yeah, we're just playing a game. But it could like that becomes like, you know, if, if, if you know who's behind that, it becomes easier to sort of be like, oh yeah, we're just sort of playing a game, but it could also just be like, nah, this is, this is content that we like. Uh, we were all too lazy to go or just message the person to see who they are. Like, I mean, they had the specifically in this case, the, the lives of TikTok lady, they had her like on Fox news once talking. Oh yeah. Yeah. I referenced her multiple times. times so they they have to know her yeah they probably do yeah they have yeah that that's that that's another technique that they do a lot which is that they they take someone who is like it you know like an like an old part like an who's literally a republican operative right

and just launder them as an actress actually the funny part is you you see like like the new york times and shit like all the main street outlets do the same thing too where it's like oh right yeah well like anytime you see an article that is like i was a democratic voter but i'm gonna vote for the republicans like nine times out of ten that person is a republican operative and if you google their name and look hard enough you can just find it and it's like and that's everything you're sorry yeah that's another thing was like i i don't know whether they whether they're just lazy and don't check or whether they're just sort of like doing this kind of like i don't know that what what whether they're doing this on purpose because i mean that you know that's that's the thing with journalism like it's it's difficult I don't know whether they're doing this on purpose because I mean,

you know, that's the thing with journalism. Like it's, it's difficult to like when someone screws something up, it's, it's difficult to determine a lot of times whether it's malice or whether it's, they're just the only research they did was they Googled something.

Yeah. I feel like, I feel like in the, the, the realm that we're talking about right now with right-wingers, I think a lot of it obviously is pretty malicious a lot of the time, at least with the main outlets. But in terms of the whole goblin mode situation

where that stemmed off just from random Guardian articles, I think that was just more of like, oh, let's try to explain this thing that is apparently now a trend and we're manifesting it in real time. I do think there's a distinction between that. I feel there's no like, like with Goblin Bone, there's no nefarious aspect of it.

But that like technique can be used in a very nefarious way. And I think that manifests in the most easy to waste, easiest to see ways in right-wing media. If you see a story about the police in a mainstream newspaper and you see the same story in another paper, it's because they're basically printing a press release. And, you know, I mean, this this gets used to like launder just straight up police lies about shootings. They manufactured like the entire crime wave thing, like the whole thing about people taking boxes off of trains. It's like, yeah, you look into it and it's like, yeah, there's like the there's these sort of like shadowy police networks of people who are basically running i mean they have enormous budgets to do this too like they have these enormous um like departmental uh like public outreach budgets and those public outreach budgets are basically them running information

ops on us which is incredibly fun. Yeah, no, that is absolutely a real phenomena. I don't know too much about it, specifically in cops, but I know the White House does that all the time. They've done that forever too, where it's like, oh, there's a White House leak. And it's like, oh, no, they wanted people to see this. This was entirely intentional.

Yeah, they try to balloon stuff a lot. And that's, I don't know. This is entirely intentional. Yeah, they try to balloon stuff a lot. And that's, I don't know. And like, this is... Goblin mode is like the fun version of looking at how all of this stuff works. But this stuff happens with stuff that is extremely deadly and has real-world consequences.

And yeah, it's something we need to be thinking about and trying to... I don't know if use for good is the right thing, but it's something that we need to be really conscious of as we're dealing with a bunch of fascists trying to murder everyone. Absolutely. I mean, that's been the most interesting thing about this to me is watching, like, I hate calling it this, but just for lack of a better word, kind of like goblin mode is like being manufactured, like manufacturing consent in real time, like from the genesis of my post, watching it in real time, seeing all these articles come out and kind of all tie into each other and refer back to each other it's been it's been kind of eye-opening about this topic that i i think a lot of leftists kind of know a lot about like in terms of like media manipulation and you you're it's you're right when you said it's like the fun version of that yeah and it has been the fun version of it but deep down it's like oh this is kind of like watching like how they did like this might be dramatic but like how they did the iraq war in real time like this is on some level a very similar strategy like media strategy and i think i mean i think i think there's specifically goblin mode i think there's because like the iraq war there's a lot of just malice

there and but in this one it's like yeah like you know, not all of the media, like all of them, like, OK, in order for something that's completely fake to get traction, it doesn't require everyone involved being malicious. What it requires is one person saying a thing and then a bunch of journalists being too lazy to actually look into something and then just, you know, basically reprinting the article, but like rewording a few things, which happens constantly. you know basically reprinting the article but like rewording a few things which happens constantly right and yeah and and that like you know it the the thing i think that's scary about that is it reduces the number of actors who actually have to be involved in a thing for it to just sort of like take off like this which yeah like and i think like there's there's an extent to which, okay. Like it rocks, like something on that scale is pretty rare because it requires like an, an enormous amount of buy-in from a lot of people. But there's lots of small examples of this stuff that just happens sort of constantly. And that stuff, like, yeah, I mean, you know, as we've been talking about, like that kind of thing with small numbers of actors and then people just sort of lazily reprinting articles like that stuff. Right.

I mean, I think the best example of this currently, at least just in my mind, because I am trans, the whole trans panic that's happening right now. I think that's a really good example of it was just where like some website will print this certain thing and then it becomes a hysterical panic yeah and then more people keep talking about it yeah like i think the best or the most recent example that was that spa where it was like some person claimed like made it made a bunch of claims where they were like they might have seen a trans person maybe and it turned into just like literally mobs showing up at this spa like anti-trans mobs just like a bunch of fascists showing up a bunch of like and like yeah and that kind of stuff yeah that affects reality yeah that really affects

people yeah and and like the the other one the other one that we've talked about in the trans episodes is people to people are starting to uh do this kind of stuff with gender clinics and it's you know yeah it's like yeah like that that's only a matter of time before they start killing people like yeah as sad as that is to say yeah the media can easily whip someone into frenzy to do that i mean we've seen that in the past with i think as you referenced before like the whole like abortion yeah the whole like it was in the 90s and the early 2000s the whole abortion panic yeah i mean we saw we saw people die over stuff like that yeah it's it's insane yeah they did bombings like yeah and you know

and everything is that like they're winning like they are on the verge of after this like half a century long battle like they are on the verge of overturning roe v wade they are yeah yeah like you know that and that's i think a really grim thing for the left where it's like like what one of the asymmetries here is that like if a leftist like assassinated the head of ice right like there would like i i would be in prison in like a day and a half there'd be like 15 people who'd be shot in police raids like yeah yeah but you know but like when the right wing does terror like what does terrorism like just murders abortion claim writers it works and that's a really grim asymmetry but it's sort of the reality of of the situation that we're in right and yeah that reminds me of the this is a while ago this was during the black lives matter protests i don't even remember why he was on the the um feds radar but there was the

dude i think in port Portland and there was like a raid and they just shot the dude in the street do you happen to remember that yeah yeah I mean it happened again yeah they just murdered him and then like it happened again with Winston Smith in in Minneapolis where like the cops were mad

at him because he was like he was one of the leaders of this happening in Minneapolis and they just walked up and shot him yeah and that's insane yeah and it's it's it is a really bleak look at you know how this country actually works which is not really what i expected this episode to be ending up i was like we'll do a fun episode about goblin mode and now it's like yeah here's the state just assassinating people and uh they're gonna keep doing it and also they're gonna like to start bombing abortion well i mean keep bombing abortion clinics and start bombing gender clinics and it's like yeah let's hope that doesn't actually happen but but yeah i think i think it was our

point was that it was like we've seen that happen in the past yeah yeah by the arm of the the reactionary media fueling this hysteria through, it doesn't even matter if it's real or fake stories. That's, that's the main issue is it can be totally fake and it'll, it'll just fuel hysterics against anyone, any,

any target. Yeah. And it's just that easy. Like, yeah. Like what the, we should probably close out, but like the,

the, the one that's been fun for me and i by fun i mean dear god has been the the the fucking the wuhan biolab shit which was like literally like like literally this this like literally this whole thing was a psyop by steve bannon who was like this is how we can have trump win the election by by by uniting everyone in like anti-asian hate and And like, it worked like, well, I mean,

okay. He, he lost the election, but like, you know, all of like eventually this, this, this just like completely crank,

like absolutely bat shit. All of the people who are advocating for it are like, like they like, they're like mushroom scientists or they're like people who like, you know, like, like they're, they're like weird. I've remixed in truthers, like all these people like you know like like they're like weird ivermectin truthers like all these people you know like we're legitimized by the media and like that

had that had an enormous impact on the last sort of two years of anti-asian violence like that's like that that's the thing that made it get as bad as it did and again it's just completely fake there's nothing it's it's they're just, they're just, you know, like a bunch of fascists made up a lie about a plague so that they could try to win an election by like murdering Asian people. And yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's that's the interesting thing is that if you look at like polls about like, Oh, how do you feel about China? Like you go back even just four years ago, most people were like, I don't have you feel about China? Like you go back even just four years ago, most people were like,

I don't have exact numbers on my head, but most people, it was like maybe split, like, oh, like China's kind of scary or like China's okay. But like most Americans at this point, even like a lot of liberals do not like China. Like it's like even the red do not like China. It's like, it was just manifested through the whole,

maybe not all through the whole Wuhan lab, but just the last few years of both Biden's government and Trump's government ratcheting hard against China and just anti-China or even anti-Chinese people sentiments. Yeah. There's an interesting thing there too, where it's like, okay, so for the first about, so this pivot starts in like 2018 when Trump starts a trade war, right? And there's an interesting thing there too where it's like okay so for the first about so this pivot starts in like 2018 when that's when trump starts a trade war right and there's this interesting thing where it's like for the first about two years of it it was like the views about china were changing but the actual level of anti-asian violence wasn't doing much but then when covet hit it was like because you know it was it was kind of like an abstract

thing right it was like okay well we don't was kind of like an abstract thing, right? It was like, okay, well, we don't like China, but like there was nothing – there wasn't like a super strong like thing you could point to to directly tie it to Asian people. And then the moment the pandemic started and then the moment the like Wuhan shit started, it was like suddenly there was like a concrete thing that you could point to. And that was like, hey, look, it's the chinese people the they're they're spreading the plague they manufacture the plague in a lab it's because they're dirty and like the the moment became that was when everything just like all the attacks skyrocketed like that that's that's that's when like everything just sort of like really like kicked off and right that was like hysterics that was like the targeted hysteria of yeah 2020 and most of 2021 i would say yeah yeah and it's well you know the the the the fun thing i'm bracing for is like yeah this looks like it's gonna be the democrat strategy in 2022

as well as republican strategy and it's like oh hey uh more of us are going to die. This is going to be fun. So, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of scary. Yeah, this started out as a fun episode. Yeah, it's now gotten less fun. So, I guess... It was still a lot of fun. It was still a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah.

Do you have anything else that you want to say or do you want to tell people where to find you? I don't really have anything to say necessarily all i really do on the internet at least like my whole my whole internet presence right now is just on twitter um if you want to follow me it's um at meow meow me you um i don't know if you'll have like that linked or anything it's kind of hard to spell with the last the whole me you it's m-e-u U W, but that's really all I have is just my Twitter. Yeah. That's all I really do online. I mean, it is extremely funny.

And every once in a while you'd create goblin mode as a actual thing, which is, yeah, it's fun. I have a good time on Twitter. People, people complain about that website a lot but yeah i i since i joined in like 2019 or whatever i haven't looked back it's it's it's a lot of fun i've met a lot of cool people i yeah i've known of you for a while but it's nice to actually talk to you yeah you too yeah uh yeah it was a good time i yeah so uh go goblin mode i don't let the fascist murder trans people uh yeah uh this this has been it could happen here

uh you can find us on twitter and instagram at happen here pod uh yeah have fun find cool trinkets. Suppress the turfs. You got to have the trinkets. You got to find the... That's what Goblin Mode is all about, getting trinkets. That's right. All right. Bye-bye, folks. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Broth. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.