It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 41

Episode Date: July 2, 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. 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. Ah, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to deal with that and hopefully take care of yourself and your people. Today, we have a returning guest, Carl Casarda from InRangeTV. Now, Carl, every time you and I have chatted on a show together, it has been about firearms, which is obviously your passion and specialty. Well, one of your specialties. But today, we're not talking at all about guns. I mean, maybe here and there.

But today, we're talking about the thing that is has been your your career for what most of your working life. Fair to say? That's true. Yep. You want to kind of walk through your background here, because we're gonna be talking about information security and like sort of the future of threats that are going to be like coming throughout like the next few years of our lives obviously this year in particular there's been a bunch of stories about like russian attacks on digital infrastructure and vice versa and that's always like pretty much has been something that's in everybody's back burner since we got the internet usually through like questionable films with sandra bullock um i think net that was net

right um yeah the net the net yes exactly yes Where they somehow hacked a car in 1998 or something. Very funny. Well, you got to do that when you're flying through cyberspace with your VR helmet on and your gloves, right? Yeah. But yeah, you want to walk everyone through kind of what your actual background is in this industry first? Yeah, totally.

So if anyone watches in Rangers, watched it for a long time, you'll see this reflected in some of my content because I do deal with some of this intermittently on the channel and it's definitely influenced how I approach my work there with the social media and all that. But so way back when I was like one of those kids that was in the hacker space. And I grew up like trying to make computers and technology do what it wasn't designed to do and learn to make it do things that shouldn't have done for my own interests or others around me, in any really negative way but like just a deep curiosity and how does this stuff work and being part of the the early online community we're talking pre-internet where you'd have like an acoustic coupling jack modem and you would dial in like war games yeah literally plug your headset into the

god i was on boards like that way back when we never should have gone past those days doing things wirelessly was such a mistake like i'm so pissed off that when i like sit down to research i'm not like jacking into a gigantic box um like it that makes me livid like shadow run promised me that i was going to be like using one hand to shoot at the the approaching corporate security guards and have another hand on my like keyboard that i wear around my neck that I like plug into the wall to hack buildings. But Hey,

maybe someday we'll have neurological implants or wet wire implants brought to us by Monsanto that will eventually get ERM and we'll just get shut off in our own rooms. Right. From your mouth to God's ears, Carl. Absolutely. Who doesn't want that?

Who doesn't want my neural tissue tied directly to a corporation? Fuck yes. But anyway, so I grew up in that space and it actually, back then, it naturally turned into a career. It wasn't like now. Nowadays, you pretty much have to go get a bunch of certificates and a college a Z at the end, you could get a job. And I landed up doing like help desk at this one company. It landed up. They noticed that that's where my interests were. And I landed up becoming their information security architect over a couple of years. And that turned into a multiple decade career, pretty much culminating in working at a tier one internet backbone provider, doing sub C fiber optic, like routing networking, and DDoS mitigation, and botnet

control search and destroy. So it really turned into a really wide career, not only when I started off, backbone internet, but encryption, firewalls, application layer controls across the board for multiple corporations. So it was a weird and interesting space, but I don't really do that much anymore except on the side. But I've had a pretty exciting career with it. So I think probably a good place to start is just in general because folks are always interested about this. What is your recommendation for people who ask, like, what should I be doing to kind of protect myself as I force my head under the constant stream of sewer water that is social media these days. Well, yeah, you know, the simplest thing and everything in InfoSec is always controversial, just like anything in life. Any recommendation you make, someone's going to be like, but otherwise,

or anyways, or there's a better solution. And there always is a better solution. But the realistic thing is when you talk to the average person, the average person isn't going to sit there and hack a Linux box to have a better social media experience. That's just not realistic. So the best thing anyone can do, the simplest best thing, is to get one of the trusted password managers. There's a number of them out there. I'm not going to recommend an individual one right now because anyone I recommend, someone's going to go, but there's another one. But there's a few of them out there. Having a password manager and having a unique, difficult,

complex password for every account you log into on the internet is the first number one thing you can do as an individual to protect your interests. Because if you're logging in with the same password monkey to Facebook, Twitter, and your bank account, that is a disaster waiting to happen. So the first thing you can do, password manager, passwords you yourself can't remember as a result. I allow the password manager to generate like 24 character long alphanumeric crypto nonsense. You put a gun on my mouth and say, what's your password to your bank? And I don't know. I can't give it to you. I have no idea. And so that right there is the first thing any basic individual can do to protect themselves on the internet. That is totally sensible um i

don't i'm not great at password managers but i never know what my passwords are and they're all different and so my life is this constant stream of like needing to figure out what my password was uh failing and resetting it but it does mean that i change passwords regularly right but what's so great about password managers you can have passwords that you could never human remember. And you can have unique ones per website. Every website you log into could be unique. And by having it in this database that's properly encrypted with a key phrase or even dual factor, then at that point means you literally just can cut and paste your passwords into things. You don't yourself know what they are. And if depending on your privacy levels, you can do that locally with local solutions with files like on your own machine. But frankly, a couple of the cloud

based solutions, as much as the cloud freaks people out, is the better one because it'll work on your phone, it'll work on your laptop, it'll work on everything everywhere. That makes total sense. I think another good thing to get into while we're on this subject, we just started talking about passwords, and obviously it is important to keep and secure those. I think one thing folks don't often think about, especially people who are activists, who may foresee or have engaged in things that are legally questionable, don't think about enough is social media networking. networking um as and by which i mean having social media that like it is possible to to find your other social media by like knowing you know like having the same name and twitter and on instagram and stuff um having social media that like can be tracked across accounts um most people would be surprised at how easy it is to do that a huge bellingcat a huge amount of tracking nazis

tracking even like a ton of the what the work i did not do but my colleagues did to like doc doc's russian like secret service agents and stuff was like oh we found them in you know somebody uh their their boss's wedding like they're tagged in this thing in vk and from that we were able to like find their, their account on this other site. And like, from that, like now we have this like map of everywhere they've been for the last like three weeks and we can like build this social map of their entire life. Yeah, no, by list, by just literally existing in modern space, you're constantly leaking some form of metadata, right? You are, you are always leaking metadata. And the more of you allow to exist in the world,

the more that's the case. So like, there's also, you've got to think about what the threat is and what the risk is, right? There's the risk of the individual having a parasocial relationship with the internet. Like I do as a content creator is one thing people, there's always someone that wants to delve into your private life, but that's a very different risk than a nation state actor, right? Those are two different things. And when it comes to a nation state actor, quite honestly, unless you're real good and have been doing it for a long time, the individual bluntly is kind of fucked.

To be honest, as a general rule, your best security as an individual in that situation is the anonymity of the crowd. But we're also not talking about most people who are threatened kind of by the state in that situation are not being threatened by the federal government. But they may have they may like be attending protests and not want the Louisville police to like put together that they're in an affinity group with people. And like something you can do for that is make sure you're not like if you have a personal account that's under your name with your friends, that account shouldn't be liking and sharing things from like a political account that you have or from the account of like a group that you're a part of or something like that. Like just try to think about and look at your your digital

footprint from the outside and think, is it possible to connect me to people I don't want to be publicly connected to through this? And the minute you've breached that connection once, it's gone forever, right? This is forever. Yes. This is the same thing as like with phones, like someone will have like their regular phone, which by the way, all these smartphones are just surveillance devices in our pocket. Right.

Let's say you, let's say you go get a burner so that you don't want to be connected to the device that you normally use on, on a level that's one step above the regular individual level. If you ever have those two devices emanating at the same time, they're now connected in a way that like, let's say the authorities can associate them together because of triangulation and seeing a burner phone and your phone coming from the same house, you've breached all the privacy you would have had from your burner phone, for example.

Now, Carl, do you have much to say on the subject of, because I know one thing I have seen people do, people who are having conversations that they're concerned about, is put bags in Faraday cages. And I've heard mixed things about how reliable Faraday bags and stuff are for actually stopping signals. Do you have much to say on that matter? My experience with that is not all bags that you can just buy off the Internet are made equally. So what you want to do is test it. And you can only test it to a certain degree. But the really simple tests are you put it in the bag and you try to dial the darn thing or use any Wi-Fi connections to it.

And that's a simple test. Now, is it as good as not having the thing on you? Of course not. Leaving it somewhere else is always the best answer. But a properly, in my opinion, a properly built Faraday box or cage or bag that you've put some testing into is a pretty reliable solution. And it's, you know, there are so a problem that you might encounter is or that I have. So one thing I have heard people talk about is like, well, in order to have kind of a private conversation, we like drove to a specific location and we left our phones off in the car and then went on a walk.

And the problem with that is that now you have both just driven to a location with those phones and those phones are associated with each other, right? Right. Well, so first of all, you got to think of a world where all of this metadata is being collected at all times. So these phones and their associations and physical proximity to one another is stored somewhere at all times, whether or not it's going to be resourced or accessible to the powers that be when they want it to be, It's all there. My phone next to your phone, next to that guy's phone, those associations all exist. They're all talking to the same cell phone towers in the same area, giving them not only GPS coordinates, but triangulation data, which by the way, if you go way back to the hacker, Kevin Mitnick, that stuff was going on back then before they had

triangulation data to get him right so that stuff's all still happening and those associations occur in regards to saying i turned my phone off how do you know that's off most of these modern phones what does off mean and yeah okay pull the battery maybe but even then i would not trust any of these devices in the regards to them, quote, being off, especially things like phones that have unremovable or not removable batteries. Off is more like sleep than it is. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the worst things that's happened for personal security is the end of the phone where you can remove the battery.

Like being unable to actually cut power to it without you know disassembling it is a real issue one could argue that there was like that that's a much much more insidious reason they did that or one could also argue that it was just one of design and comfort and it's like hard to say it doesn't really matter if it was insidious or not that's a reality kind of a por que no los dos situation right yeah totally so now that we're talking about phones here's another thing that's been near and dear. And I think you've seen some posts from me about this.

Everybody really likes the convenience of things like biometrics, thumb authentication, fingerprint ID, facial identification. And here's the reality of that. We know this already and there's legal, this exists in legal space already. But the reality is, is that you can be coerced to provide biometric data against your will. So if your phone is authenticated to you with a fingerprint ID or your facial ID, they can pretty much say, you must give us your thumb to unlock this phone. Or for that matter, frankly, they could hold the phone in front of your face in certain circumstances, even against your will, and it will

unlock the device. And that is considered not a violation of your rights. So for example, if you had a long, strong password on the phone, they cannot coerce you to give that up because that would be a violation of your own rights in Fifth Amendment, which is interesting. But at the same time, one could also argue that in certain circumstances where there's a lot of cameras that aren't necessarily watching everything you do, but you could also consider that passphrases could be dangerous,

like say in an airport, because all those cameras could see you plugging in your passcode. So it's a matter of if, when, and where, right? So what's the right solution at the best time? But I would say that if you were going to be in a place that was contentious, it is almost always better to make sure you do not allow for any biometric authentication on device. Yes. I never, like never never turn on don't even like ever have had it in the like ideally you have never turned on facial recognition on your phone like even if you like deactivated i i don't know i i don't i i really that was that was one of the first i used to be in tech journalism right obviously i'm not an expert on any of this but

like the the the worst thing in terms of like my personal comfort with devices was when they were like, everything's going to read faces and fingerprints now. I don't, I don't love that. Um, but you know, it's, it's inevitable, right? Cause it is. And I had in the past, I did a fingerprint unlock earlier in my life and I do not have any devices that unlock that way anymore, but you do like the, convenient right you miss it when you need to get to your phone quickly and you can't do it but like i don't even i don't even let my phone have just like a four phrase like password anymore like it's eight characters for me it's a little bit of a pain in the ass but it comes with fewer risks and one of the things that's challenging to every individual is they have to look at what

their threat profile is, right? So like, for example, soccer mom driving her kids to school and stuff, she might be really good, well off with a biometric authentication on her phone, frankly. Because if she didn't use that, maybe she wouldn't even use a proper four character passphrase. And if she's not concerned about being at a protest, for example, and having some authoritarian take her phone away from her and authenticate to it, maybe she doesn't need to worry about that. But for a lot of us in the worlds we live in, that's a different risk profile, right? We got to think about what our risks are as individuals and what makes sense. So if your passphrase is going to be one, two, three, four, or use a thumbprint ID, for most people, they'd be better with the thumbprint ID.

But for someone like myself, no, it's not a good idea. Yeah. most people they'd be better with the thumbprint id but for someone like myself no it's not a good idea yeah and that's um yeah i think that kind of brings us to uh probably the the last part of this which is um do you have specific advice on like vpns um obviously i recommend everybody use signal i i just for messages in general but like especially stuff that is secure. Don't if you if you like, number one, first rule of any kind of this sort of security, don't ever put anything on your phone ever. That's legally questionable. If you can avoid it, like conversationally, like, right. Do not don't send it over a phone if it's something you would not be able to survive having read to you in a courtroom. So for the audience, a lot of the audience may not know what Signal even is, right? So Signal is a text messaging alternative.

So like, for example, on your phone, you've got regular text. Or if you've got an iPhone, you've got iMessage. Signal is an end-to-end encrypted solution that you install as an app. end encrypted solution that you install as an app. And because it's end to end encryption, it means that it passes the wire in theory, not decryptable by the parties that are passing the data packets in the middle. So that's a man in middle to decryption,

right? So for example, iMessage is encrypted theoretically end to end, but Apple ultimately has the cryptographic keys. So there is, while they might say one thing, there is nothing really preventing them from being man in the middle and being able to read the message in transit from a to b but if the keys

are stored on your device which are then protected with your passphrase or whatever your authentication mechanism is and those keys are not archived or kept by some hierarchical man in the middle authority if it's done right which which Signal has done pretty well, it means that your data in transit is probably not decryptable. And that's why Signal is a good solution. And it's a good one for the average person. Install the app. It works just like text messaging, but you can have a pretty good level of knowledge that the data you're passing is not being decrypted or caught in transmission or in

the path. So I would say get get signal. It's it's your best bet, right? Like and again, we said I said, you know, you don't want to ever say anything over a phone. That is something that could get you in trouble. But also like life is life. And that's not always realistic for people in certain situations.

So again, signal is your best bet. Nothing is perfect. Life is life, and that's not always realistic for people in certain situations. So again, signal is your best bet. Nothing is perfect. And again, if you're putting it on your phone, there's a number of things that could go wrong every single time you do that. But that's one of your better things that you could do. And then, of course, we talk about VPNs. Yeah, so VPN to those, like, I'm just going to go with the basic levels because I don't necessarily know the level of knowledge that people are listening. yeah so so vpn to those like i'm just going to go with the basic levels because i don't necessarily

know the level of knowledge that people are listening vpn is a virtual private network so what that is you connect to this virtual private network and it passes your data through an encrypted tunnel to an exit point somewhere else on the internet in theory masking the source and origin of your request so like for, for example, let's say you were looking up something on the internet that you didn't necessarily want people to know you're looking up. Yeah. Let's say you're researching the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Bernard Montgomery Sanders. And you know that the NSA is looking for truth seekers who are who are finding out the reality of that situation. You don't

necessarily want them to know that you have become pilled. Right. So if you were to do this from your computer at home, what would happen is to people that don't know how this all works, you would be coming from an IP address that's associated with your account that you're connecting to, whether it's Verizon or Comcast or whatever, and you go and search up that truth, and the NSA finds you with a keyword search for JFK and the truth. And therefore, because of that keyword search, they go to Comcast or to Verizon and say, hey, we are requesting you tell us who did this search. They will get them essentially a request that's a legal request for information, and then Comcast or Verizon will provide the NSA,

this is the IP address and account of the person that did that. What VPN does is you connect to the VPN service first. The connection from your machine to the VPN service is then encrypted. Now, does the VPN service know your IP address? Yes. But when you actually type in that information or go to the internet to request that data, it actually goes through the VPN's private tunneling network and egresses from somewhere else on find an IP address that actually came out of, let's say, Joe's VPN service. And they would have to go to Joe's VPN service and go, we noticed this emanated from your network. Who did this? At that point, you have to trust Joe's VPN service to not disclose their account information about you. So what you've done is you've changed it. We know that telecoms will communicate with the

government or whoever, if they need to, they always will. You don't necessarily know if Joe's VPN service will, you've changed your trust model from your telecom to your VPN service. So if you're going to pick a VPNpn you have to do a little bit of research to know that it's a trustworthy resource that won't just give you up at the lightest form of interrogation yeah and none of them again there's nothing perfect and often like we did find out what was it last year that one popular vpn was like run by the feds like yeah that's not an impossible thing. Um, I know a lot of folks,

particularly journalists use proton, um, which is, I think based in Switzerland and you will get given up if you, if the Swiss government is angry at you, right? You brought up a very good point. Uh,

services that exist outside of the CONUS, the continental U S mean that they are under different legal jurisdiction than ones that exist wholly within the CONUS, the continental US, mean that they are under different legal jurisdiction than ones that exist wholly within the CONUS. So as a result, if something from the United States government comes as a request to the Swiss company, there's a much higher chance that a Swiss company would be like, we don't really care about your request. So that's worth considering.

Also think about this. This actually works in reverse, and I don't want to get too deep into this, but when you're working at a tier one internet backbone provider, you should know that sometimes traffic strangely gets pushed offshore and then back to the United States for analysis that would normally be, let's say not necessarily constitutionally legal in the United States. So there's a lot of shenanigans going on. Yeah.

And again, like, I think Proton's generally a pretty good service. I've had no problems with it. But we should be clear here. None of these are perfect solutions. There is no perfect solution. The only perfect method of digital security is not putting things on the internet or like through, you know,

the mobile networks and stuff. Like that is if it stays between you and someone else um that is your best bet of it not being you know intercepted or something a conversation that you have in the woods without phones anywhere near you is the most secure kind of conversation let me second on proton i agree it's a good service there are others out there we're not trying to pick on one in particular or pick against anyone in particular there's a bunch of that work yeah another thing that you need to consider in this sort of thing is also what you're dealing with like so for example on i put up a post a while back because there was a bunch of stuff going on

in ukraine with with people posting photos that got their locations oh yeah bad things happen i mean that's and that has been happening for a decade in that war, like almost a decade, as long as it's been going on. And I posted something about it. And one of the recommendations I made on there was a contentious one, but I'm going to back it up in a minute. As I mentioned, Tor, the onion relay. So the Tor is essentially a it was originally created as a as a way to deal with the dark web, quote unquote, and to also relay traffic in a way to mask the origins very much like a VPN service. Now, there are a bunch of these. So what it was is there's these onion relay nodes all over the internet. And when you connect to the onion

network, your traffic bounces through three, four, five, six, seven of these nodes. You can sort of dictate what you want depending on the client you have. And so let's say you connect to an Onion Router Network node in Arizona, and then you egress somewhere in France, and you've jumped through six nodes in the process. Well, one of the things that's a well-known fact is that a number of these Onion Relay Routing nodes are owned by nation-state actors, whether it's the United States or others. So one of the things I got taken to task for, and I want to explain this, is people are like, well, that's a compromised network. It doesn't mean that it's useful. Actually, it does, because depending on what you're trying to

do may matter. If you're trying to mask the origin of your data source or your upload or your search for a short duration of time, this will still help. You jump through six nodes, they've got to relay back six nodes to figure out the origin of the person connecting to the relay network. And that's assuming that there was a compromised node in the process. So that means if you're passing data through a compromised node, does that mean the data in transit is safe? No. But is the anonymity of the origin of the poster safer for a longer duration of time? Yes. So these things get really complex real fast. And this is, again, one of the best things you can do because there's no single perfect solution,

but stacking. So not just going through Tor, but also Tor into VPN at the same time. And I think one of the better ways to think about security is kind of the way Sebastian Junger describes how insurgent war works, which is it's all about creating friction for anybody trying to spy on your shit. There's no perfect answer, but the more things you can make be a pain in the ass, the better your odds that you will not have an issue, right? Like that's all you can do is make it potentially more annoying and more difficult for whoever might be looking, right? Like the more friction you can create, broadly speaking, the more secure you're going to be.

Absolutely. Now, another thing to think about, and we're getting kind of deep in the weeds here. This is above and beyond the average person, right? The average person, get a password manager. Don't use your same password everywhere. And don't use biometrics unless you're forced, like pretty much have to, and move on with your life. But once you're beyond the average person, this is what we're talking about now. So like if you have a computer and you use it as your normal day-to-day operating system, talking to your friends, doing dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, but then also need to do something else a little more privacy inclined, you should not trust that device. So at that point, your web browser may have all

sorts of cookies and metadata and storage in it that even if you're going through a VPN, still may be able to reveal your identity, as well as MAC addresses and other stuff. So if you really want to get pretty into the weeds with this, you have to do something like use an ephemeral operating system install that has no legacy data on it. One example of that is that it's a Linux-based one. It's called Tails. You essentially use it like a live USB drive. You boot off of that only, or you use a machine dedicated for this, and you burn the OS down every time you're done because there's no legacy information or data that can be pulled out of your web browser or your cookies or your Mac address information that can associate it with you, regardless of if you've done everything right to mask your IP address of origin.

God, that's the hot girl shit when you're doing that kind of stuff. And again, I think at this point, I think up through most of this, it's been kind of stuff. And again, I think at this point, I think up through most of this, it's been kind of like 50-50 people being like, that's too much. And people being like, okay, yep, this is exactly what I already am or need to be doing. This is probably very few people

need to be concerned about that sort of thing. But it is, I know, like, again, I worked at Bellingcat. I had a number of colleagues who were like personal enemies of the Russian state who had to do stuff like this. And it's, you know, paranoia. I mean, and here's the thing, going above. So, again, like if you're a normal person, you probably don't need to be, you know, doing stacking a VPN, you know, getting signal and all this stuff. But also, why not?, right? There's no harm

in the additional security. It is a little bit frustrating. But here's one of the things I think people don't often think about enough. You're not engaging in that kind of security stuff purely because there's a threat now, but in part because you don't know what the future is going to bring. And one of the things that I would point out for that is a lot of people right now have been having for years conversations about a thing that may soon legally be murder on a federal level, you know, abortion. Right. And so it is possible that overnight an awful lot of conversations a bunch of people have had legally will suddenly be very illegal conversations. And then you may be glad that you took greater care with your personal security prior to that point. Yeah. I mean, like, so think of the, I mean, I'm not a person that menstruates, but a menstruation tracking app is very useful to a lot of people who do.

And those tracking apps now, that metadata in there at some point could be extremely dangerous or incriminating to someone who otherwise was doing nothing more than trying to maintain their natural health. And so that is a really dangerous concept. I hate to say this, those apps are probably dangerous to the individual because that data could be easily used by a government resource to do something bad to someone who's done nothing wrong. So I think we should move. I mean, at this point, I think we've covered the basis that you could kind of responsibly, the advice you can responsibly give someone in a podcast and folks should be able to. Let me throw one thing out real quick. So you mentioned, like, for example, you don't necessarily have the risk vector that requires using vpn or signal but

let me say this way back when gosh when i was doing crypto work decades ago i was by what you mean cryptography and not we should specify these days oh yeah excuse me cryptography encryption yeah yeah yeah yeah i uh i i had the opportunity to work with phil zimmerman of pgp and actually pgp pretty good privacy which was one of the fundamental uh security project or projects way back when was actually written for human rights violations he wrote it because people were doing research of like warlords were getting their laptops taken away and then finding out who spoke to them and getting people killed so pgp was like this human rights thing right from the beginning and cryptography back when i was young and naive, I always thought to myself,

this is what we need. This is the future. When everyone gets proper crypto, we'll blind the government, we'll blind the corporations. We're going to have this crypto anarchist future where the government and corporations can't get us. And the reality is most of that got usurped. And the truth is cryptography is too hard for most people to use and as a result we don't but here's what i will say the more people that do something simple like use signal or use a vpn just to browse the internet not because they're doing anything nefarious just because their privacy like conscious yeah because it makes it normalized and that means that the person that's using it because they need to for, let's say, to protect human rights, doesn't stick out like a needle in the haystack because everybody's already doing something sane in the first place.

Normalizing proper privacy and cryptography is better for everyone. Yes, yes, absolutely agreed. This is a nice segue because you were just talking about the past and how beautiful and bright it seemed um let's talk about what you see as kind of the future of info security threats well i mean so there's so many levels to that first of all if we're talking nation state level i personally strongly believe that all of the big players have already compromised everyone's oh yeah there's everybody's got everybody there's a million zeros got us china's got us we got china anybody right now could go in and pretty much fuck up the grid on someone else like that yeah and there's a yeah and that's not

actually the least that's that's safer than other possibilities like because there is a level of mutually assured destruction there where it's like yeah man russia could take down the grid but like that wouldn't be good for them and vice versa you know yeah no true so the reality is though everybody's in everybody's network those days are over um uh when it comes to the individual and i'm gonna have a the audience there might be people in the audience to feel differently and it still doesn't mean that we don't try so one of the things i want to say is you're going to hear some skepticism here because I've been doing this career for a long time and I've seen things go wrong more than right. And so in that regard, this is going to sound kind of cynical, but when it comes to the

idea of individual privacy, in my opinion, with the exception of when you're taking a very active effort in something very specific that you want to keep private, because that's something you're working on personally. The reality is individual privacy is dead and gone, and we're just starting to smell that corpse. Whether it is credit card data transactions, your cell phone history, your phone numbers, what you've done on the Internet, what you've done on social media or not done on social media, whether you have an account on Facebook or not, doesn't even matter. The metadata and the trail you're leaving behind you is all aggregated, all of it behind big data corporations, all of it compromised, all of it searchable. Even stuff the government has on you has been sold to large corporations because I can tell

you that some of the data that they kept for, let's say dmv or mvd they decided to sell it off to a corporation and they themselves access it through a third party when doing research on you so all of that big data there's a law of physics the more you aggregate the more it'll get compromised um geez i'm sorry that's the truth no no no I mean yeah you're you're you're like it's this uh there's this frustration because I can remember the days when the the privacy hounds and I don't say that in a negative term we're like warning everybody about hey you don't want to be aggregating all of these different social media things together hey you don't want to be using all of these services. Hey, there's actually some real downsides to all of what's happening.

Part of why things are so cheap on Amazon is that your data there is one of the assets that they have. And those people were absolutely right. And they lost harder than anyone has ever lost at anything. That's true. So when I was back there at that company doing all that cryptography work we were trying to give crypto like to the average general population in front of the internet i had this like i said this naive view of like the future that was going to be this place where we're going to have the internet where everyone was connected and it was

going to be not only will we have personal privacy through cryptography but we would be able to transfer information to one another in a way that would make the shenanigans impossible. Well, to some degree, that's been true. We've seen some of that. But to another degree, we also have Snowden dropping the bomb on revelations about what the government has done to the individual and how they've broken the law with all of our privacy and data. And what came of that? A man exile in russia and pretty much fucking nothing yeah right nothing and um i was sitting at a defcon presentation where general alexander was on the screen talking about what they weren't doing while snowden was dropping revelations proving him to be lying and nothing comes of it right nothing comes of it. And one of the things that's so real,

and so whether it's the tribal level, your neighbors across the street, or the internet tribe, we as a people in the aggregate are always willing to give up our rights to something bigger for convenience. And we've done that. And it's called Facebook and Twitter and social media. and we've done that and it's called Facebook and Twitter and social media and in the process what was going to be an amazing resource has become the trap it's such a

it's because you know Garrison my friend who is much younger than me has grown up with the internet being being what it is now right like this this kind of like nightmare trap you know that that's sucking us all in this like giant squid that has us in its

tentacles um and it's i guess i sometimes like dissociate talking with them about certain internet things because in my heart it's still the promised land yeah i wish i i guess my i wish i felt that way it doesn't feel like that way to me anymore to be honest i mean it's not right like in what i mean that in like sort of i have this i don't know i've never entirely been able to like let go of the vision of like oh it could have been there's so many things that could have been uh well it's like you know it's like all technology anything can be weaponized right right like an AR-15 can be used for good or for evil. A knife can be used to make a beautiful meal or to commit a murder. And the internet is technology

and it has been weaponized. It's been weaponized against us. But at the same time, if we just turn a blind eye to it and then not learn how to use this technology to our advantage, we're allowing them to do that unabated. And that's where like the kind of hacker mindset comes from, which is like, how do I make this thing do what I want it to do for me while not letting someone else do it for them? And unless we take control of the technology for ourselves, like I said earlier, normalizing using signal and even basic VPN and cryptography, then we're just giving it up. We're not even making it a challenge. We're just like, here you go, have it. And that's something that I think that's more important as a community, maybe as people grow up on the internet

versus seeing it becoming something that I saw become something, maybe either A, they'll just accept, which I hope isn't the case, that the reality is privacy is dead. Or maybe they'll approach the internet differently than say someone of my age did, where frankly, we kind of messed up and we didn't realize that Primrose path was actually a trap. And that's a, like, that was a mistake. And maybe we can kind of like evolve beyond that. But like you were asking, where is InfoSec going now? I, I don't have good notes for that. Like when I first started working in the career, it really felt like a great thing. We were doing important stuff. We were doing DDoS mitigation. We were going into hospitals and making sure that insulin pumps weren't compromised as a DDoS host. Believe it or not, hospitals are infosec nightmares. And

we were doing stuff that felt good. And then later in the career, I realized, wait a minute, I'm not doing anything to secure anybody's personal information or make the internet safer. wait a minute, I'm not doing anything to secure anybody's personal information or make the internet safer. I was just protecting some corporate coffer. And the reality was that the private information that we were supposedly protecting, the debate would turn into calls, which was what's more expensive, losing the data or the lawsuit for losing the data? Literally, those were the conversations in corporations. And those are the conversations that corporations have now about each and every one of ours, personal information. Now, when you when you think about because so I obviously, I'm in a different was in a different field. But when I was doing a lot of

the research on terrorism that I was doing, I had these things that were like sort of the this kind of attack is going to happen at some point i feel that very much about like um drones there's going to be like a mass killing of civilians not in a war zone by a civilian weaponized drone at some point in the not too distant future it's going to happen it's going to be done it's absolutely an inevitability um that kind of stuff do you what are when you think about kind of the digital equivalence of that, like what are you looking towards? Well, I agree with you about the drone. Like you can see stuff in your phone. Oh, God, yes.

You plot the dots and you know it's going to occur, right? It's not possible to avoid. We've unleashed that out of the cage and it's going to happen. Quite honestly, I think we're seeing it already. We're seeing the level of privacy invasion that I don't think people already know has happened. Like I know some of us realize that we talk about it and we rant about it, but like I don't think people realize the level of the incursion that has occurred to the point where all of this data aggregated to the point they know what toilet paper you prefer to buy like i'm talking like people like facebook knowing that um or the size of the corporate oligarchy that controls the internet whether it's the small like alphabet court facebook apple

microsoft's becoming a smaller player weirdly but when you think about those big names they kind of like control everything and every piece of data about you and everything you move and say that I think, I think what's the end of that. I don't think we're got to the end game of that, but I don't know how we roll it back. And that's the thing. So what's the prediction? My prediction is it's going to get worse and we're going to get to the point where there isn't room to move

without that surveillance tracking you. And like, so for example, you think of things like sci-fi minority report, you walk to the mall and there's facial ID happening everywhere you go with targeted advertising at the mall. Oh, that's coming. I guarantee that's coming. And all of that's happening already. And that facial recognition stuff that's going on is happening currently now. We're just not that aware of it happening. The cop car is driving down the road and every license plate is being measured with the cameras being OCR, optical character recognition. And that's coming back and they're tracking every car they're driving by on the highway, even though there's not a GPS unit on your car, the ability to not be tracked will soon be impossible. How's that?

Yeah. I mean, allegedly when I was younger, there were like certain stupid petty crimes I would commit just because like people will not be able to do this in the future. And I have a moral responsibility to steal the light bulbs from in front of this bar and throw them at my friends. Like what one day that will be a thing that people can't do without getting caught. And so like I just I had to, you know, there are like some bright spots because I think you're absolutely right. There's no on like a broader scale, there's no turning back the clock for stuff like facial recognition and how fucked up it's going to get.

There are states like where I live in Oregon, where like they have passed laws that are just like you, public facial recognition is not a thing that is legal in this state. And I definitely support more attempts like that, because again, anything you can do to stymie them, to reduce the spread of the grid to reduce the profitability of these things even though it's again overall a doomed cause right um yeah i don't know i mean i i obviously i think that that's a good law but i don't know that laws stop corporations when corporations have more power than law yes of course yeah um and it's like i mean obviously you can you can ban it for police to use and stuff, which does something to the extent that, you know, they follow the law.

But none of this is I don't know, like I that's one of the things that makes me most depressed about the future is the thought that like. the the space for and this is not like a major issue i guess but like the space for kids to just like fuck around and do dumb shit when they're 19 is going to get so much smaller i mean i would say i mean i think the thing is like as a natural human being whether you're doing anything wrong even if you're not doing anything wrong the nature to feel like you have a private space that's to you or a private community space. I'm not even talking about wrong or right here. We're just talking about just that feeling that at this moment, this is my space where I'm not being watched is a natural, healthy need of the human orgasm or organism. Interesting. Yeah. But no, it it's a human need and i think we're going to find

those spaces become smaller and smaller and i think when you said what's your prediction i hate to say it but i think the prediction is it will become impossible to not be tracked now yes the bright side of that the bright side of that maybe maybe there's a bright side maybe at some point when that's the reality it could somehow also affect the people that are powerful and the people that are small. And we all realize that humans are humans. And therefore, the failings that sometimes we have as all human beings, we just kind of acknowledge and be like, oh, yeah, of course. That's just what people do. Like, maybe we just realize people are people.

But the idea that there's never going to be a space to not get tracked i don't know to me i find darkly disturbing it is disturbing i do think kind of to pivot off of what you were saying the other aspect of that that is more positive is that all of this stuff all of this surveillance shit um or at least not all but quite a bit of it is you know in, in a way, it's like a knife fight. There's no way that both parties don't get cut. And, you know, the ones wielding the knife might get cut less, but they're still going to get cut.

And part of what that means in this situation is that the prevalence of all of these different ways to surveil and track also allows us to track that in the same way that like police law enforcement watches people through their phones but also a hell of a lot of cops are getting filmed doing fucked up shit now right no that's that's a great it does cut both ways right now again the the balance of the cuts i don't think is going to be work out in our favor but it's not going to be nothing on them either and and you're right. I think there are some things that we will learn in the future about the people in power in the world that it wouldn't have been possible for us to learn in the past or may not be possible even right now. And that could be beneficial. And if we learn that about people in power,

then they can't weaponize it as much against the people that aren't in power, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, one thing that I'm because I'm thinking a lot about the fact that aren't in power, right? Yeah. You know, one thing that I'm, because I'm thinking a lot about the fact that a bunch of folks in the reproductive healthcare industry have pointed out that right-wingers have started using drones to follow people home from like Planned Parenthoods

or followed them to their cars to like build databases of the people who are going to places to potentially like do that kind of reproductive healthcare that these folks don't think should exist. The other side of it though are going to places to potentially like do that kind of reproductive health care that these folks don't think should exist. The other side of it, though, is that it is also possible to surveil them and it will

be possible to track the people doing that sort of thing. And it will be possible to do that in terms of like legal accountability. And it will be possible to do that for the people who embrace uh questionably legal tactics for for frustrating those efforts um or illegal tactics for frustrating those efforts they have access to the same technology um and again it's it's it is a knife that will cut everybody um and i guess that's better than just one person getting cut in this situation that's that's the concern i have right i agree with that like i said technology goes it's a weapon and it's weaponized in all directions depending on how you use it for good or for bad

and so this is the same place i come to when it comes to the gun control argument i mean we did get to guns no no no no i, right? Because if we allow only one side to have all of the control and power and understanding of the technology, then we ourselves are at a huge deficit. We cannot defend ourselves or fight back. of what you can do to protect yourself, understand the reality of what the surveillance state or a corporation is, and then doing your best to not make it easy for them is at least one step forward. But if we don't own this technology, if we don't own the tech,

someone else will, and they will use it against us. It's as simple as that. And like, there's super simple stuff. Like I was going to bring this up, but like you can't see video because it's a podcast, but like there's these cool glasses from Doctorow called Reflecticles that I'm showing you, Robert.

And it looked like regular sunglasses. But when you put them on, they reflect IR light and actually mess with cameras in a way that turns your dying face into a ball of light. That's awesome. You can wear them. They're called Reflectacles. You can wear them and just walk around the mall. And all the cameras get blown out by your by your glasses. Like, see, doing that just because you can is kind of fun.

That's the hot shit. That's the shit. I was promised that that at least does exist. It's not everything I had hoped it would be in terms of its ability, but it is like that kind of stuff rules. And I will be picking up a pair of those. Well, we should probably close out. I did want to note, because I mentioned this, I got something a little wrong when I was talking about the facial recognition ban. It is an ordinance in the city of Portland itself. It's the first city that has done this, and it prohibits the use of public facial recognition technology by all private businesses

in the city. So that is the scope of the band that exists in Portland. I recommend looking it up. It is the kind of thing that I would support everyone pushing for in their city. Because again, the more holes you can make in this thing, the better. Yeah, I don't want to put that down. That's a good thing. But the challenge of this is just like I mentioned earlier moving the data out of the conus and back the minute photos from like i take my iphone and scan the crowd and then put that picture up on the internet yeah it's not under their jurisdiction

and all that facial recognition happens on every face in that yep and that is again we'll do another episode at some point about things that you can do to just get like there that's a whole different bag of tricks um but this has been really useful and really valuable carl do you want to plug anything before we roll out here uh not much just my normal thing if you're interested in this kind of content but with a more firearms oriented thing you can find me at inrange.tv but you'll also find some information security stuff there as well i cover that intermittently when it applies to both topics. So if you even if you disagree but appreciate

my approach to this, come check me out. I appreciate it. Awesome. Check out Carl. Check out InRangeTV and continue to listen to podcasts because the only thing that will save us is podcasts? That doesn't seem right, but

good for business 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

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And you know, a place where things have fallen apart a bit is large chunks of Ukraine due to a Russian invasion. And you know, we've chatted about this a bit on the show. We've had some interviews with some folks who are living and fighting over there. And today we're going to talk with Jake Hanrahan, a friend of the pod, who has been over a couple of times this year, including since the more expanded conflict began, and has just released a new documentary on the Popular Front YouTube called Ukraine's Anti-Fascist Football Hooligans Fighting the Russian Invasion. Jake, how you doing? Hello, mate. Thanks for having me back. Thanks for being on.

Now, Jake, first off, I guess we can get into YouTube censorship stuff, but I want to chat about how this story came about and when you kind of got in contact with these people. Because kind of in brief, what you have, the CliffsNotes that you hear from like folks who have kind of an ax to grind is that like, you know, Ukraine is all neo-Nazis and the government's all run by neo-Nazis. And the reality is that Ukraine obviously has a substantial Nazi problem. problem and some degree of freedom in terms of, you know, your ability to organize for other political purposes. You also have a shitload of people who are anti-fascists and who have been

fighting those fascists in the street, often with intense levels of violence. And this is a story about a group of those people who have now kind of retooled their organization and capacity towards fighting the Russian invasion. Yeah, man, exactly that. I mean, so what I wanted to do with Popular Front, you know, I've been reporting from Ukraine since 2016. I've been there more than 10 times on the ground in the Donbass, like way before, you know, people were focused on the area again before the invasion. So I was very aware of, yeah, there is a significant fascist element to the militias out there,

but it's the same. Any country in Europe that would have a war would have the exact same thing. Trust me, if we had it in Britain, we would have a similar issue. Eastern Europe, obviously, it's a little bit more hardcore, but that's the way it is. That's Eastern Europe for you. And I will mention just at the top as well, I would argue that Russia has a much worse neo-Nzi problem they had um more than 15 people were killed between 2014 and 2015 by an actual neo-nazi serial killer gang in moscow that filmed these attacks they have a massive neo-nazi party um you

know they're exporting nazis all across europe and we know there are several um you know well-trained neo-Nazi battalions fighting for the pro-Russians. So it's neither here nor there. Yes, there's Nazi problems in the region, but I didn't want to constantly be on this back foot of like, no, actually, yes, there's a Nazi problem, but not this, not that. I was like, how can we do a documentary that's kind of a positive way to be like, well, instead of saying, no, not everyone is this or having to film with a unit and then being like, actually, these guysist how can i show you know like black sun patches are uncomfortable yeah right like oh a totem cough again like it was like how how can i kind of put a doc out there where it's like oh no

actually like here's a different side to it and you know this group obviously as soon as the war started again ukraine is a country of 44 million people and it's a different side to it. And, you know, this group, obviously, as soon as the war started, again, Ukraine is a country of 44 million people, and it's a very diverse, a very smart, very open country in terms of people will tell you what they think, and they will argue with you and you won't be, you know, you can have like really serious discussions with people about politics there and not fall out,

you know? So they're very, I think like a very clever people are really nice people i love ukraine love ukrainians so so it's to me it was i knew about the place like yeah of course there's a massive anti-fascist element in ukraine okay it's definitely smaller than the fascist element but already since the war started with there's eco platform there's hard keep hardcore there's the resistance committee there's Harkiv Hardcore, there's the Resistance Committee, there's Hoods Hoods Clan, there's Operation Solidarity, there's a Nesta Magno machine gun repair unit.

There's so many different anti-fascist left-wing elements to the conflict. They just get a lot less attention because the fascists have got really good at propaganda over the years. And let's be honest, a lot of the fascist groups are fighting in the East, and right now it's kind of... combat yeah well it's all hands on deck right it's like everyone's like yeah okay we don't really care like we just want to not die which is understandable so my point is um i looked at this this group the resistance committee which is this kind of anti-authoritarian um you know coalition of various different units they have um rev dia under their wing which is an anarchist group in ukraine that i made a documentary with a few years ago so i was looking at maybe we'll do a doc on rev

deer again now that they're fighting on the front but then i see this other group with them hood towards clan and it's like what who like firstly the name is kind of weird right in the u.s that brings up some unpleasant connotations in the u.s yeah i mean in europe it just it didn't really click to me but i get it what does what does like hoods hoods mean so basically when they would go and do you know when they would go and beat up fascists yeah they'd all be like right hoods up hoods hoods oh oh gotcha because you're you're like putting your hoodie up so you don't get like spotted right exactly quick yeah yeah um there's footage of them beating up nazis as well chanting they had a chant hoods hoods hoods like you know to put the fucking fear into them

like yeah it's dope as hell yeah yeah and then clan i mean the the ukrainian translation of clan it's with a k it's not about the kooks right you know It's just kind of Anglicization can lead to some unfortunate things. But also, they're smart guys and at first I thought this wasn't true but then I spoke to them, it was true. They were kind of aware they're like, yeah, HHK, Hutsul's clan, they're kind of trolling

KKK. It's like a second meaning because in Ukraine, they've got that culture, they're very cheeky, they think it's very funny to be like, haha know fuck you um so for them they were like yeah we're basically trolling the fascists like they hear hood hoods clan and they're like oh surprise sorry we're anti-fascists you know what i mean boom your head's broken so yeah it was kind of that vibe and you know they didn't really think about it and when i asked anton you know he's like the kind of de facto leader. He was like, he told me this.

And then he was like, I just kind of wanted to piss people off as well. And you got to remember, these guys started over 10 years ago before, you know, politics was as online as it is. And they started off in the hardcore punk scene. Now, you know, I'm sure, you know, like, you know, hardcore punk, especially in Europe, is like a very, very exciting, very fun, very happy and like gnarly fucking scene so for them it was like yeah we're the hoods hoods clan like you know what i mean but right but unfortunately some people in america are like why are they called hoods hoods clan i don't believe that they're anti-fascist it's like mate there's over 70 videos of them beating up nazis like successfully it's a whole continent that doesn't have the same history as the United States, right?

You can't assume. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, even if you said in England, like KKK, like now people would be like, who? Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, I've heard of that. It's not like we didn't have it here like that, you know? Yeah.

It's one of those. So, I mean, one of the things that's interesting here that you hit on in your documentary is like these folk, that these are not just like, um, anti-authoritarian folks. They're, they're very much committed to anti-racism, which is, um, you know, a place like Ukraine where, uh, the history of there being, you know, folks who are not white is, uh, not quite as extensive as it is in a lot of places. It's really interesting to me to have people who are kind of organizing specifically for that purpose. And I think really cool. Yeah. Yeah, it is really cool. And it's for them, what I found very fascinating is it's just

natural. So, you know, I said, no, they're political ideologies. Some of them are like, well, some of us are anarchists. Some of us are kind of anti-fascist, but otherwise kind of a political. And, you know, when it's very simple for them it's like why are you i asked them well how come you guys are anti-fascist and they're like well we just see life differently like you know it's like obviously like there was no big political theory it was just like no it's just basically they were like it's just wrong you know like fascism is just wrong and we're tough guys you know and we joined we, we wanted to be the ones that said, no, we're not the fascists. We're the anti-fascists. And luckily for them, they had a really good friendship group and a very solid group who were all very good at combat sports. And like in the doc, you know,

Anton says our enemies is almost every other Ukrainian football firm in the whole of the country. But you will ask even their enemies, they will tell you like, yeah, unfortunately, those guys are tough you know they they can fight you know it would have to be so yeah exactly they had to be they were like we had to be you know so i mean i i for doing my research i found um a kind of a fascist football ultras forum in eastern europe that banned any mention of hoods hoods clan and it kind of boiled down to the fact they were just so embarrassed that so many of the fascist groups were getting beaten up like by by anti-fascist

and often outnumbered you know it even got to a point where hoods hoods clan weren't allowed to they wouldn't even talk to them to do like arranged fights anymore in the field so instead of quitting hoods hoods clan said okay then when we see you we'll just beat you up in the subway we'll beat you up in the street like you know and a lot of people might say, oh, well, this is violence. For me, the football hooliganism side of it, I don't see an issue with it personally. I mean, they're not attacking anyone innocent. They're not attacking bystanders. It was all very contained. It was all very, you know, it was that was their thing. You know, so that to me is whatever. And when you're talking about neo-Nazi groups that were,

I mean, in Ukraine, they've stabbed up the Roma community, they're destroying LGBT events. And, you know, Hudson's clan were just like, nah,

we're not about that. We don't, we don't think you should do that. And so they formed them for 10 years. They were fighting. Um, but now they have called a truce because they're like, you know,

Anton explains in the doc, he says, look, there's a bigger problem now because Ukraine is actually not a Nazi junta, as the Kremlin says. It's actually quite easy to kind of, you know, it's a very small subset in the relative size of the actual military. So, you know, it's actually for them, they said, well, yeah, it makes sense. We put all our other political differences aside because this is way bigger. You're talking about one of the most powerful militaries on earth invading our country and killing our people i mean we've seen the

massacres in bucha in erpin um you know people killed civilians hands behind their back executed in the street um 30 of the people killed in bucha were children like you know this is just insane so for them they were like yeah we, we can call a truce. You know, we don't like them, but right now, we're not going to beat each other up on the front line. But I think it really kind of shows the testament of how serious Hutu's clan are about the anti-fascism, that even whilst in the truce, most of them actually still joined the resistance committee,

the anti-authoritarian group. So they're not just directly next to fascist battalions. But again, you know, a lot is changing out there in the front now. I don't know. Anton said to me, he was like, I'll be honest with you. Like, we didn't put this in the doc. He said, I'll be honest. I think after this war, a lot of these far right guys might change their mind

because now we see what totalitarianism brings. Death, you know what I mean? Whether that's wishful thinking or not, I'm not sure. But You know what I mean? Whether that, whether I, whether that's wishful thinking or not, I'm not sure, but you know what I'm saying? Cause obviously like the, I mean, I,

I would, obviously I would hope that that's, that's what happens, but I tend to doubt it, but yeah, the thing that scares me of course, is there's just as, at least as much a chance that,

you know, they get more powerful, which is again, part of why it's important for folks like hoods, hoods clan to be organizing and and getting weapons and being prepared because like yes that if that conflict comes after the war you know you don't want the fascist militias to be the best uh armed and most organized yeah and this is the issue you know but i think for them it's like okay we'll deal with

that when it comes you know like i think they're very aware that this war the issue, you know, but I think for them, it's like, OK, we'll deal with that when it comes. You know, like I think they're very aware that this war is going nowhere, you know. And, you know, they say in our doc, oh, we just want to go and kill Russian pigs. I mean, you know, what they mean is, I mean, some people are like, well, that's really bad. I was like, mate, you're talking about that. They were in. It's a war, right? They were they were guarding the areas where the massacres happened you know yeah hutsul's clan got shelled trying to get civilians out of borodanka when russians were

shelling you're talking women and children yeah i'm surprised they said that mildly you know like yeah like you know it's a war man it is what it is and also they're football hooligans they're wild people you know yeah it's it's um i mean that is kind of interesting though i i'm curious um do you have kind of a uh an assessment of of what kind of numbers they're looking at like how many folks they've actually got in the field on a regular basis yeah so the resistance committee is i don't know like 50 to 100 right now hoodswoods clan they have like maybe 20 to 30 of their guys in that group but then they also have other people um that join different units in the east so they were like

already military so they didn't have to go you know form a militia they just joined the military so there's like quite a strong hoods hoods clan um mortar group um and i know that so so one of the footage we included in our documentary where um a russian tank gets blown up like very close quarters he gets hit with a javelin he's like 100 feet away that was a hoods hoods clan attack that was one of their guys doing it you know yeah so yeah so there's they're all over the place um unfortunately due to various bureaucracy within the territorial defense i do think that the resistance committee might have to split up to actually get to the front you know what i mean like they're the resistance committee might have to split up to actually get to the front you know what i mean like they're they're probably gonna have to join other units

because there's some issues that the you know various people they're just not sending them out there it's not because they're anti-fascist or anything it's nothing to do with that it's it's because you know it's corruption man there is there's some corruption emerging some some commanders just want to sit sit around and not actually have to go to the front um whereas you know the fighters themselves are desperate because they're like you know our people are dying we want to avenge them and we want to stop it so you know right now hoods of planter essentially on their way they're doing a lot more training right now they've been given the go ahead yeah they're going to the east um and as far as i know they're kind of on route obviously stopping off doing training i think they have an r think they're going to be an RPG unit.

So they'll be at very close quarters. You know what I'm saying? So it's going to be gnarly for them. These guys, as you stated, all kind of started out as a friend group, right? Like they weren't, this isn't a political party. These aren't like, these guys didn't start as ideological comrades. They were like buddies who are into the same team and into the same kind of combat sports. And now they're going to be – some of them are going to be dying in front of the others, which is like a difficulty, I think. I'm interested in kind of how are they actually units kind of along the lines of the ukrainian military or have they have they kind of adopted different organizational styles in their their hoods hoods units as befits

sort of their unique kind of uh origins yeah that's a good question well i mean it's kind of tricky because essentially they're you know i guess they formed as a militia you know as soon as the war started they got guns but then you know anton was as the war started, they got guns. But then, you know, Anton was like, we have everything from the anti-fascist networks, everything we need apart from the weapons. So they had to sign up as a part of the territorial defense to get weapons. So they're under the territorial defense as are, you know, a hundred other different people that did the same thing. So luckily for towards clan, I think because they're so close friends, I mean, you can see it in the doc, you know, I, even the subtitle of our doc is like you know this is a film about friendship um violence and resistance because that's essentially what it is you know so they're very close friends so

commanders have recognized that but yeah this is a group that is disciplined as well a lot of them are straight edge which is actually a discipline in itself you know what i mean um so they're very well disciplined they're very good you know the training's very. You know what I mean? So they're very well disciplined. They're very good. You know, the training's very good. They know what they're doing. But they have like a commander that is from the territorial defence, if you like. He's not Hoodswood's clan.

He's never been assigned a commander sort of thing. So they're being taught just the same kind of tactics as anybody else. As they're an RPG unit, I think, you know, there'll be a lot of close quarters stuff.

But they're just doing a lot of um a lot of arms training there's you know Constantine and the doc one of them he's like I just want to get better faster they just they're very they're very focused on being like not an elite unit but they want to get it perfect they're not just like yeah let's go and kill they're like no we have to be good you know what I mean we have to go in there and have the same discipline and organization as we had in the streets when we were fighting. There was a reason that they were renowned as being a good street fighting football looking firm, despite being completely outnumbered. It's because they had good discipline. They're tough.

They trained. And also because they're good friends. They all have each other's back. It's not a hobby for them. It's a lifestyle, you know. Yeah, it's just a hobby for them it's a lifestyle you know um yeah it's just so much went into it you know hudson's clan started off the back of um anti-fascist punk uh punk hardcore in ukraine and then that itself was a scene and then the football hooliganism and then yeah and

now it's it's crazy really it's honestly one of the most fascinating stories i've covered now they're a fucking frontline unit you know it's it's sad man i hope to god nothing happens to any of them probably the nicest guys i've filmed with you know um and yeah it's it's it's it's a good question man and it's very tricky to know how it's going to happen for them once they're on the front i mean anton the main guy he has served before in in 2014 he joined a militia to fight in the donbass so they do have some experience you, you know. And it does seem like kind of their natural, the skills that they've been developing, because there's broadly speaking,

from my understanding, kind of two main types of combat going on in Ukraine. There's what you're seeing a lot in, you know, the Donbass, which is this kind of like meat grinder, like frontline shit. And then there's sort of the seek and destroy kind of stuff where you've got people sort of hunting convoys and doing ambushes.

And it does strike me like these guys' talents would lend themselves more to the ambushes than, I mean, there's not really any talent that helps you in the sitting in a trench meat grinder kind of shit. But obviously you don't have that choice when you're when you're serving under you know the the national military yeah yeah it's i think you're right like they would be much better um placed as like uh you know i guess like a kind of shoot and scoot kind of unit right exactly yeah and i think they will be because you know they're trained with rpg um some of their fighters already have javelins on the front um and and laws so yeah i think that's where it'll be if they just put them in some kind of meat grinder position which very much could happen you know i mean it's bad for anybody let's be realistic it's getting very bad in the donbass right it's a nightmare yeah yeah yeah um

i mean and that's one of the there's been posts and stuff from people talking about like a lot of the fuck-ups that are happening. Because Ukraine started this war with everyone being kind of overwhelmed by the competence of their military effort. And now that things in the Donbass have turned into this kind of ugly slog, there's been some – the you know units getting hit by their own artillery fire the kind of messy stuff that happens when you have a fight like this right like it is it is unavoidable um when you have like a a situation like has developed in the donbass but that doesn't make it any less unpleasant uh to endure as an actual soldier like it's just it's one of those i mean there's only so much that like competence and training can do if you wind up getting squeezed into that kind of position

yeah and and there's this is why a lot of people are even ukrainians actually had a conversation with a ukrainian friend yesterday that was saying like you know the situation is so bad in the east we really need to be honest about this because, you know, if people think it's going better than it is, okay, it's good for morale, but it's not good for the guys on the ground. Like they're not going to get what they need.

And the reality is that it's getting really bad and it's not anything to do with incompetence from the fighters. It's just the war. The level is getting so hot. And, you know, Russia has learned from its mistakes, unfortunately,

from the start where they completely fucked up. But you know things are getting a little bit hairy um ukrainians are doing like an incredible effort but again it's like yeah you're talking about decades and decades of of armor and you know um weapons that russia has and it's all very well us being like oh 20 20 percent of their armor is blah blah i doubt it you know i very much doubt that um it doesn't look like that certainly from when people i'm talking to in the east you know so i think again i when when you know ukrainians are like well we do need more weapons it's because they need more weapons you know what i mean they really do well this is like one of the this is is one of the things that's difficult to, I think, get across to people.

Because there is such a, you know, we are dealing with the legacy of decades of shipping weapons places and not having that help the conflict in a lot of ways. And decades of stories, like, you know, all the weapons that got sent to the Iraqi government and then wound up in ISIS's armory and shit, which creates kind of an easy narrative for folks who are like, well, you know, you're just trying to prolong the conflict and making it worse by shipping in weapons. But the reality is one side of this war has a substantial percentage of all of the artillery that exists on the planet. Yeah. And the other side does not. Yeah. i do understand that argument though like i totally get it yeah it's it's i lived through the early 2000s as well i understand it yeah it's like war isn't a template it's not like yeah because this happened

there this will happen there or whatever and it's like you have to weigh it up no matter what bad is going to come from this do you want the bad to be okay there's a problem with arms in eastern ukraine which the eastern europe which there already is and it gets worse or do you want the the bad problem to be russia's taken over the whole country massacred everybody and is unlike undoubtedly going to try and move into other countries yeah it's like do you want aids or do you want cancer i don't know you know what i mean do you want the do you want the lesson from this to be that if you're just willing to burn a couple of hundred thousand human lives uh as a state like russia or any other state you can

easily gain access to you know a a pile of wealth right In the shape of a country, which isn't a positive, it's not like a good lesson for anyone to take out of this. But like if Russia wins, that's the lesson, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, that's the reality. Like it's all very nice

having a 50 tweet Twitter thread about why this, that and the third should or shouldn't happen. But that's just completely removed from real life. I mean, real life is, it's going to be very bad, very nasty,

no matter what happens. And you just have to weigh it. Oh, I don't like NATO. Oh, I don't like this. Yeah, me neither. But I care about people that die for no reason. You know, like, I think that's the real issue. I think people need to stand with the people, you know?

And if that means, okay, use the tools that you have, okay. Like, oh, I don't like NATO. Well, yeah, but they're going to give them weapons. Do you think that Ukrainians like having Russian firearms? Probably not, but they also don't give a shit because they shoot. It's that simple, you know? Kind of coming back to the subject of your documentary, if weapons are going to be going over there, and by God, they are,

I would hope that as many of them as possible are going into the hands of people like uh the hoods hoods clan right yeah um yeah i mean that is that is a yeah a lot there's definitely this isn't from them telling me but it's just from research i've done there's definitely a discrepancy in terms of which groups get what weapons and it's not based on ideology but it's definitely based on some serious bureaucracy that needs to be sorted out you know i have some some western volunteers that i know that are on the front right now and they're saying like for some reason you know one unit that is not an rpg unit for example will have more um rockets than the rpg unit you know and it what? Like, and that's not because

they've used them all. It's, it's, it's supply lines. Uh, again, it's, it's not even corruption often. It's just supply lines are wrecked or whatever, but it has to be addressed. It has to be looked at. I mean, I'm no tactician. I don't know anything about that side of things. I'm just basing it on what people are telling me because, you know, I like to talk to them and hear what's happening. Yeah. Um, I think we should move into you know when i when i pull up your documentary on youtube yeah which is again for folks at home titled ukraine's anti-fascist football hooligans fighting the russian invasion the first thing that i see is this video may be inappropriate for some users right um yeah fascists yeah well and it's we've talked a lot

on our various shows on this network about all of the fascist propaganda that you can find, not even find on YouTube, that will be like spoon fed to you if you wind up like watching a video game review or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is something that you've been dealing with on popular front. Somebody seems to have like an ax to grind with you guys. I don't know. Maybe it's just the algorithm. I'll be honest.

I felt like it was just the algorithm until this recent one. Right. So, so yeah, like you said, if people want to fight, I mean, the doc's called frontline hooligan, but yeah, the SEO yeah. It's it's Ukraine's anti-fascist fight in Russian invasion. Yeah. But yeah, the second it was uploaded, it got age restricted. Now that to me is very odd. I don't get why there's no gore in it. Okay, yeah, there's violence, but there's a guideline where you can show violence if it's relative to reporting, which obviously it is because it's an anti-fascist

football-looking firm fighting Russia. So, of course, we're going to show what that looks like. But, yeah, there's no gore. It's just lads hanging out, talking about their lives now that have been tipped upside down and how they really dislike the far right. Now, to give you an idea of how messed up this is, there's a real parasite YouTuber. He's called Danny Mullen, and he has a video on YouTube where him and his friend, both of them scoundrels, go to the Mexican border. And the whole video is trying to get with, quote, like hot Ukrainian refugees. Now, it's the most disgusting thing you've ever seen. They're preying on young girls. Some of them are

very clearly underage. And that is monetized. That is monetized. And it is even on the algorithm. I found it because i was watching ukraine war stuff and it was put onto my recommended now these are the biggest parasites you've ever seen in your life and they have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of subscribers and they're making money from content like that that is not age restricted there is no censorship thing there is no message saying this might be offensive but a documentary which is 100 journalistic covering anti-fascists fighting one of the worst invasions we've seen in europe is suddenly deemed um inappropriate and is age restricted on youtube tell me what's going on there that doesn't seem right to me so basically youtube by doing that is saying we're actually

happy to make money off of people that exploit underage Ukrainian refugees, but we're not happy for people showing the world a different side to the war. That to me is madness. It doesn't make any sense to me. And it's nothing but soft censorship. Some people are telling me it's not censorship. Of course it is censorship. This is the way the world works now. Yeah, because I mean, a huge chunk of the success or the visibility of anything that you're putting on YouTube is whether or not the algorithm is going to like suggest it to people, even people who have watched your other like not not even talking about like suggesting it to somebody who's never heard of Popular Front, but like people who have watched multiple things that

you've done and are just on YouTube. The thing that would make sense is for when you put out a new thing, them to get like YouTube to be like, Hey, we know you've watched this shit, check out this, but that's not going to happen for a lot of folks because of this kind of thing, which is yeah. Fucked up. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it's like, it's not just me either. Like, I mean, it's other people it's happening to as well. And basically what it is, is if we wanted to make the doc somehow be allowed to be monetized or not even monetize, I don't even want the monetization the whole channel is demonetized i just want it to not be age restricted because that is an algorithm torpedo and you know it's like i would have to recut the whole documentary essentially censor myself my own journalism make it excuse me make make the

integrity of the doc weaker just to be able people to see it like this is war this is real life i just it's just really depressing you know and this is something i mean youtube twitter facebook have all been guilty of degrees of this but there's this of all of the things that don't that that are allowed to spread unchecked on those platforms they have this consistent maybe because it's it's easier to algorithmically go after but this this consistent pattern of going after war journalism. And like your, you know, what's happening to your documentary is a piece of this, but like the much scarier piece is a tremendous amount of documentation of war crimes in places like Syria have been deleted kind of automatically over the years, which means that like, again, evidence of crimes against humanity has been lost forever because of these kind of like purges of, of war content that,

um, I don't think are actually protecting anybody from anything, but are, are in, in perhaps even making things worse. Yeah, of course. And it,

and it allows, um, look, Russian propaganda or whatever, like people are going to seek that out and they're going to digest it whatever way they can. So then surely you should say, okay, take the brakes off. Let's, you know, if you care, which I mean, YouTube is a media platform.

You would think that they would say, okay, well, this is kind of our duty to balance it out, to allow all the free information. I'm not even saying, oh yeah, throttle Russian propaganda. I think people have a choice to see whatever they want to see, even if it is completely ridiculous. But the fact that they're censoring the stuff that you would think is okay to see, because for I know, you know, our content,

you won't find a lie in that documentary, you know. We're very honest, very frank with the situation. We're not whitewashing fascism in Ukraine. And we're certainly not putting out russian propaganda we're just telling a an interesting journalistic story so you would think as a media platform that would be like yeah right up their street but it's not really a media platform it's a money-making platform and right you know they just they just survive for adverts yep um and i think that is kind of where we're gonna we're gonna leave off for today. Unless you have, do you have anything else you wanted to get into on your documentary, Jake?

No, man. I just, I guess the last thing I would say is I want people to kind of know that there are many different factions out there. This isn't, you know, I saw someone comment being like, oh, you found the only fascist and anti-fascist in Ukraine. I was like, no, there's, there's, I've been documenting them. There's thousands. There's so many, you know, and not just like, oh, anti-fascists in ukraine it's like no there's there's literally i've been documenting them there's thousands there's so many you know and not just like oh anti-fascist yeah we this is what we believe like people form in units there's a whole pipeline of um anti-authoritarian um activists there's loads and generally like ukrainians um happy you know they'll take the help they can get it's not like ukrainians are, God damn those anti-fascists.

No, they love them. They love them the same way they love anybody that's defending the country. You know, it's just normal. And I think people should really, you know, if they want to watch our doc as well, like if they can share it, that would be great because it's just very, it's a struggle to get people to watch it now because of, because of it's been torpedoed on the algorithm.

So if they go to youtube.com slash popular front, they'll find it's the first stop there. But yeah, if people can share it, that'd be great. All right. Well, check it out. Again, the title is Ukraine's Anti-Fascist Football Hooligans Fighting the Russian Invasion

on the Popular Front YouTube channel. We're also going to have a link in the bio if you are someone who doesn't like to type things. Yeah. Thank you, Jake. All right, everybody. That's the episode. 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 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 podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head search for therapy gecko on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts it's the one with the green guy on it hey i'm jack peace thomas the host of a brand new black effect original series black lit the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me

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

and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game if you love hearing real conversations with your favorite latin celebrities artists and culture shifters this is the podcast for you

we're talking real conversations with our latin stars from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories struggles and successes you know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love each week we'll explore everything from music and pop Thank you. podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show that is currently taking place in the death of abortion rights in the u.s and yeah it's not good um with me to talk about this is shereen is sophie is garrison and is robert evans and okay so what one of the things that's been happening in the immediate wake of the Supreme Court decision that has destroyed Roe v. Wade is there's been a lot of discussion about the abortion rights movement in Mexico. And by discussion, I mean in sort of classical American fashion, people saw exactly one meme and reposted it, and that's now the sum of all American knowledge about the abortion struggle in Mexico. So to try to get a deeper understanding of what's been going on in Mexico and how the struggle for abortion was won there, we're talking to Erika Yamada, who's a feminist and human rights activist born and raised in Mexico. Erika, thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah, thank you. yeah thank you thank you so much chris shereen toffee garrison and robert uh i'm so honored and excited to be here and very grateful to be considered to share about the struggle for abortion rights in mexico so before starting this discussion i would like to share a little bit about myself and the organization i work in to have some background about the experiences and data I will be communicating in this space. I have been involved in many agendas for girls and women's rights for approximately eight years now. I am currently part of the Women Deliver 2020 class and I also work in the non-governmental organization, Gender Equality, Citizenship, Work, and Family, that has over 25 years of experience working for sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico, particularly for the access to legal and safe abortion.

for the access to legal and safe abortion. Our organization promotes and advocates for the sexual and reproductive health and rights of youth through DDC. DDC is the Network for Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Mexico that has presence in 12 states, and we focus mainly on marginalized communities. We support children, youth, women, and advocate for change at local, regional, and national level, and their access is contributing to decriminalize abortion, guaranteeing access to health services,

and generate a favorable public opinion about women's right to decide. We are also part of the National Co-Choice Alliance in Mexico, an effort of five organizations, Gender Equality, the Population Council, IPAS Central America, Catholics for the Right to Decide, and JIRE, each with different expertise regarding abortion. Together, we have worked on comprehensive strategies that include the legal, the social, religious, ethical, and investigation aspects of abortion. And I would like to start sharing some of the context and the legal situation of abortion in Mexico, if it's okay. Yes, please. if it's okay or yeah yes please in our country voluntary abortion uh during the 12 weeks of pregnancy is legalized only in certain states mexico city the capital was the only state in

the whole country that decriminalized abortion in 2007. Twelve years later, in 2019, the state of Oaxaca became the second state to ensure access to this health service. Afterwards, 2021 was historic. It was a very, very historic year to us. It was a very, very historic year to us. Four states, Hidalgo, Veracruz, Baja California, and Colima also decriminalized abortion. Then this year, 2022, three other states have been added to this list. Sinaloa, Guerrero, and Baja California Sur. This means nine out of 32 states have decriminalized abortion. In the other states of the Mexican Republic, abortion is only

allowed under certain grounds established by the law of each entity. For example, if it was a spontaneous abortion, if the pregnancy was due to non-consensual insemination, if the woman's life is in danger of death, if the product has serious genetic alterations, if the pregnancy causes health effects, among other reasons. It depends on each penal code of each state. And I also must add that pregnancy due to rape is the only indication that permits legal abortion in all states.

And now coming back to what Chris said, that there was like a meme. I think you referred to the meme of the public protest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of the black clad female protesters attacking. Is it a,

I couldn't tell if it's, I don't recall if it's a city hall or a police station or something. There's a building hall or a police station or something. There's a building they're going after. it is undeniable that among the most significant achievements is the agro-mobilization of feminists and women to eradicate violence and demand justice. Mexico has demonstrated the world this revolutionary progress with a mass feminist protest, and this image is from 2019. It was a huge feminist protest that condemned violence against women especially sexual and feminist violence, police brutality and the impunity that permeates the governmental system. We received a lot of international media attention, and it has been one of the recent highlights of the feminist movement in our country. But the struggle for abortion entails so much more.

And yes, it did have some influence. It did have some influence. For example, in 2020, feminists in two states, Quintana Roo and Puebla, took their local congresses and demanded the discussion of abortion initiatives. And they have put this agenda on the table. It is worth mentioning that the struggle for abortion, it goes back so many years. Feminists have been fighting for reproductive rights, including the access to legal abortion for decades now. The progress regarding this struggle has unfolded historically during these recent years for many other reasons. One thing I want to go back to a little bit to talk about is you were talking about the protests being pro-abortion protests, but also talking about anti-femicide and anti-violence

stuff. And I was wondering if you could talk about the anti-femicide campaigns too, because that's been a really big part of this that gets basically no coverage in the u.s yeah well in mexico 11 women are murdered every day we have a huge femicide problem that has been silenced by the government, even by the president who minimizes this horrible situation. So in 2019, there was a emblematic case where police officers raped and tortured a girl. And that's how this protest started.

And since August 2019, like most feminist protests have been regarding the violence against women. But I would also like to add about the struggle for abortion. I think that in the global south, the Marea Verde, the green tide, it played like the most fundamental role. This movement, which came from Argentina, is one of the main successes that strengthened the struggle for abortion rights and even the feminist movement in Mexico. It expanded in many countries, including Mexico. Here we have a national Green Tide and many local Green Tide groups in all of our states. And these collectives have played a large role demanding social and legal decriminalization of abortion across the country. And there is also an increase of networks that provide self-managed abortion information and accompaniment services,

which have contributed to fighting the stigma that still surrounds abortion. And the Green Tide and the feminist movement, it has become like, how do you say, it's been merged and like feminist movements and the Green Tide, fight for legal and safe abortion, but also to eradicate the violence against girls and women.

Yeah, that makes sense. And about the Green Tide, I have two questions about the Green Tide. One is, what kinds of tactics have green tide groups been doing and also how how uh linked have the international movements been like how how close how closely have uh these organizations been communicating across and working together across the different countries okay uh since the green tide came from Argentina, like the most, how do you say, the communication comes from regional countries in Latin America. And Mexico has been learning from these Latin American countries, their experiences. We have seen the feminist movements, the protests also more in the South. And the green handkerchief has this very, very powerful symbol of legal and safe abortion.

And this has also contributed to the social decriminalization of abortion. And wearing this green handkerchief in the protest also means demanding this health service. And one of our tactics is, of course, pressuring the government. In Mexico, political will primarily from the left leaning ruling party has been fundamental for the decriminalization. With the new government that arrived in 2018, headed by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. We have more allies and progressive legislators. So due to the majority that this political party has

in many local congresses, the feminists of each state have been able to pressure and work with these legislators and keep pushing this agenda that's awesome i think something that i'm still stuck on is that at the very least all the states agree that abortion is okay if it happened from rape. Is that what you said earlier? Like that's the one like... We have a federal law. It's the 046 official Mexican norm that states that abortion is legal

if the pregnancy is due to rape. And all the states, all the public officials have this obligation to ensure that this happens. But sometimes, like, we have so many prejudices that sometimes even doctors don't respect the law. But by law, it should be legal. And it's not that they all agree it's the it's the federal law yeah it's just so i mean it definitely has its flaws uh and people with their

own biases but like here usually the rapist will have more rights and protection than the person that got raped like there are the family is allowed to sue the person that got an abortion for example it's it's insane but so for then here a lot of it a lot of the bigotry comes from like christianity and religion is it the same like is that the baseline for the opposition there too yes because mexico is a predominantly Catholic country and abortion entails many controversies due to the different positions that come from this religious stances that ignore and deny the access to this service and deny it's a human rights issue. And religious anti-rights groups, or how do you say, anti-choice groups, have a powerful presence and are actively hindering law proposals regarding this topic. The prejudices and stigma are present even amongst health care providers. are present even amongst healthcare providers. And sometimes the religious people, they pressure these healthcare providers, the legislators.

For example, every time there is a law in a local Congress, there are so many religious groups outside the Congress. They are, how do you say like bothering the legislators they even get their personal numbers and they are harassing them yes harassing is the word they're harassing them So, yes, they have a lot of power, a lot of money. And this affects even the states where abortion is legal, because as I said before, sometimes doctors deny it even if it's requested under the legal indication. So, yes, it's a problem. I'm curious what you see as kind of the value of the street actions that were carried out as opposed to kind of the actual organization on the legislative side of things.

Like what degree do you think both contributed to to you know the successes that y'all have seen i think both were very very important to the recent successes uh the the public demonstrations help the feminist movements strengthen like it is like yes this recent protests have been the what do you say it has been where the most women have gone out to the streets taken the street and it has helped because the government has responded to some of our requests, but also it is extremely important to talk about the organization. is that in 2021, the Supreme Court of Justice in Mexico ruled favorably in four abortion-related cases, and this provided us with progressive jurisprudence and legal interpretations in favor of recognizing and increasing abortion rights. So this has, how do you say, this has served our movement and all the argumentation to push the decriminalization laws. And about the four cases, in the first case,

the Supreme Court declared that limitations to access legal abortion after rape must be removed. In the second case, it declared that the absolute criminalization of abortion with consent is unconstitutional. and in the third case it it declared that the protection of life from the moment of conception is unconstitutional and in the fourth case the court ruled that legislative reforms broadening the boundaries of conscientious objection in the federal health law are unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court is the highest court of justice in Mexico. And all judges should respect what they establish. And, well, unfortunately, it doesn't happen in all states and but it is like the most important precedent we we have right now and it is fundamental for

our argumentation in local congresses have has the national government done anything at all to try to force the states who are not following the rulings to accept the rulings? in this topic and he has spoken against feminist movements and he thinks that any protest means like uh conservators against his liberal government so no we we don't have this this support from the national government, although, as I mentioned before, we have a lot of allies in many instances that have helped to pressure state public officials to respect the law and to keep pushing this agenda. to respect the law and to keep pushing this agenda.

Is the president, I'm just curious, I'm ignorant, but is the president like, well, how is he received by the general public? Like what's people's like, is he neutral? Because I mean, he's a coward because he doesn't want to rock any boats, but what's the response for the public? He still has a lot of support from the majority. He is one of the first, how do you say, progressive presidents,

although we have been very disappointed by many of his actions, for instance, the increase of militarization and the criminalization of feminists, of human rights activists, of journalists. However, it is the first time in so many years that a president talks about poor indigenous people that send support to rural communities. So he still has a lot of support. One thing that, I don't know how much, I don't know how much you want to get into it, but...

We talked to some people... Oh god, I don't remember how many months ago now. But we talked to some people a while back who were... Doing trans rights organizing in Mexico. And they were talking a lot about how... They were talking about how, I guess, anti-choice conservative groups have been using organized transphobic groups as a way to divert attention away from the abortion struggle and the femicide struggle into stuff that doesn't like challenge the status quo and yeah and i was wondering if you wanted to talk about that a little bit yes thank you so much for talking about this uh transphobia in in the feminist movements is horrible. Like the transphobic feminists

have been getting to conservative public officials. They have been approaching religious groups and they have even affected the abortion agenda because some of our laws include people with the capacity to get pregnant so these

health services include trans men and non-binary people but these transphobic feminists have been how do you say, obstaculizing this struggle because of these prejudices. And it is very, very sad. And some of the main and most famous references in feminism have been citing this transphobic side. And yes, they are approaching to the ultra-right,

and they have been hindering not only trans people's rights, but now women's rights in general. Yeah, I think, was it, I'm trying to remember off off top of my head i think that there was there was a picture that was going around that was some of the organizers from one of the like transphobic feminist collectives i like taking pictures with felipe calderon yeah i think i think it was sleeping held around yeah but i don't know i haven't seen that but there was a forum some weeks ago it was a forum in the national autonomous university of mexico and it was a feminist uh discussion and most of the panelists were so so famous in all latin america started to say some

transphobic uh points so yes uh this anti-rights movement is very present in in feminism yeah um i guess the the other thing on that point that i was wondering is how have like pro-trans feminists been sort of fighting back against these people? Has that been happening a lot? Well, we've tried, but it has been very, very difficult because literally there are transphobic people everywhere. Everywhere. Literally, there are transphobic people everywhere, everywhere. I mean, government and non-governmental organizations and institutions. And the majority of the people are not, how do you say, socially conscious about trans rights. So transphobic people have so much more power, but sometimes we denounce it in social media.

We report it to international organizations. And like we have all the human rights narrative and argumentation in our favor but it is difficult because there are so many trans transphobes everywhere we have also contacted international organizations to to say that, for example, if you want to access a certain grant, you have to have an inclusive position. What other ways? We, like, the trans movement has strengthened so much since 2019 because in Mexico City, a law to recognize trans children and adolescents was pushed for the first time like via the administrative way so uh there has been how do you say a commission of of trans organizations collectives so i think that is the most noteworthy progress. Yeah, I guess there's been a lot of people

looking to the green tide and looking to the broader Latin American feminist movement for inspiration and also for tactical advice. And I was wondering, what advice would you give people in the US who are coming into this fight now? And where would you send people to learn more stuff about it? Some key points I consider relevant is, firstly, the visibility of the pro-choice agenda and the social decriminalization of abortion.

choice agenda and the social decriminalization of abortion. When we talk about legal abortion, we have to emphasize a lot also on the social decriminalization. It is very important to work on strategies to reduce stigma and demonstrate that abortion is a common reproductive event that must be approached using gender perspective and the human rights framework. We encourage public dissemination of the legal, medical, and social information with hard sustained data from international organizations that position abortion as a human right and an essential health service. And related to this first point, the narrative and the argumentation. and argumentation. We have to focus on the access to safe and legal abortion as a human rights issue, which means it's a governmental obligation to ensure access to this service. On our case, Mexico has national and international commitments regarding girls' and women's rights.

And I'm pretty sure the United States also has these commitments. So it's their obligation, it's the government's obligation to ensure. And also regarding their narrative, we have to work on naturalizing abortion and encourage people to stop using this word as a crime. Abortion is a human right and it is a reproductive event in the lives of women and people with the capacity to get pregnant, and it's a reproductive event that has always existed and will always exist, either naturally or induced. And some of the organizations that I know of here that can provide information are the pro-choice alliance organizations. Catholics for the Right to Decide,

they can give the religious and ethical arguments. My organization, Gender Equality, we have the social argumentations. We accompany and work with the girls and women. We are in 12 states and we are in the mobilizations. We are in the local congresses. Also, JIRE, JIRE in Spanish is Grupo de Información de Reproducción Elegida. de información de reproducción elegida.

They have all the legal expertise and they work these reforms and laws to decriminalize abortion. We have IPAS. IPAS is an international organization and they are medical experts and they provide all types of data and information regarding this part and the population council they they are the experts on monitoring and investigation have many research papers and well there are also like other pages that that can give information for example about uh what do you say self-induced abortion the the health organization has a protocol it's a public protocol for for self-induced abortion and it is completely

safe to do it at home well i really appreciate all the information uh i yeah thank you so much yeah thank you so much i think it's really helpful to hear um what other countries have done in the same struggle it's like so similar but different and to say at the same time because we've dealt with the same similar things like turfs and religious like opposition and everything so it's really helpful i think to see to realize like first of all it is a basic human right like it's not even it's like internationally an issue and then just to see how other people have organized is really important i think yes and now i i believe that we have like uh kind of a similar situation where there well it's a situation of legal discrimination in which only women who live or have the resources to travel to the states that have decriminalized abortion can

exercise their right for voluntary legal interruption of their pregnancy am i right because i like i i don't know much about the situation in the united states but i know that it is legal in some states right yeah yeah it is legal in some states and then like in contrast to that it's like illegal even in case of rape and like the people that have been raped can be sued. It's like a very up and down kind of balance. But yeah, there's definitely both that exist and I think that's where it becomes really hard to extinguish the bad side.

Yes, part of our struggle to decriminalize abortion in the other states is because women who live in poverty and marginalized conditions, who want to have an abortion but reside in other states where it's illegal, cannot do so under legal circumstances. So it's also a class problem. Yeah, definitely. And also in Mexico, there are some states that even criminalize a spontaneous abortion. It wasn't even induced. And instead of calling an ambulance, some people call the co-ops when a woman is dying because

of a spontaneous abortion. That's terrible. And this has caused also a public health problem affecting girls and women in more vulnerable situations who live in the in the most restrictive context rural and indigenous communities also migrants girls and and women victims of of sexual abuse women with disabilities among others and always always, always, always, the most vulnerable women

are more susceptible to getting unsafe, clandestine abortions, which can lead to infections, hemorrhaging, injury to internal organs, and even death. There are some places in communities where there is not even access to

internet or to basic health services. And girls and women are still dying due to unsafe abortions and they are like 100% preventable deaths yeah no totally yeah thank you you've been amazing

but it's interesting because that's true I think regardless of the country the most vulnerable are the most affected whether it's I mean it's a class issue it's, I mean it's a class issue, it's a race issue it's a disability issue it's like so all these things that, I mean rich people will get abortions either way

like privileged people will always have a route to take care of themselves so it's just I don't know, it's unfortunate just seeing how like humans have functioned regardless of the country that they build. It's sad.

And criminalizing abortion does not reduce its practice. They think that prohibiting it will end its practice and it only increases the probabilities of decent safe procedures and it's practiced and it only increases the probabilities of decent safe procedures

and it increases the the stigma and prejudices and it even strengthens this anti-rights and choice groups but when abortion is performed in a in a safe and important matter. It is even less risky than childbirth and non-gathering interventions. And for example, it is much safer for a girl to have an abortion than to, what do you say, than to continue with a pregnancy. Yeah, when the pregnancy is like threatening her life or yes yeah yes and well that's why we have to keep fighting for yeah thank you for lifting it back up i was really i

was getting down there yes and here in mexico like bills continue to be promoted in different states. We keep forming and strengthening alliances, and we have to strengthen these alliances with all types of sectors. And that's why the alliance work, for example, because there are the religious sectors. We work also with legislators, with doctors, healthcare providers, even in schools and with the public general. So it is a collective effort and a collective commitment. Yeah. Very true.

I have nothing to add that's better than that. So thank you so much for joining us. And I'm going to step away now. Thank you, Sheryl. Yeah, of course. And I guess one last thing. A, do you have anything else you want to say?

And then B, where can people find you on the internet? Like if they want to, and do you have other organizations and stuff that you want to promote? I'm like Erica Yamada in all my social media and the organization I work in, it's Equidad de Género Ci Ciudadanía, Trabajo y Familia.

But the National Network for Reproductive Rights, where we are in 12 states, it's called DEDESER. It's D-E-S-E-R. And you can find us in most of the states, and we can provide information regarding abortion if you write to us. after it's legalized, we must continue to ensure that these abortion services are, let me say, are implemented and that they can reach to all girls and women, that it must be guaranteed in paper and in practice. And yes, the emphasis in reaching the most underserved and vulnerable populations. All right. Well, I think that's probably going to do it for us today.

Erica, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah. It's a wealth of information. It's really valuable. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. valuable thank you thank you so much yeah and uh thank you all for listening that's your episode for the day

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison. With me today is Chris. And today we'll be talking about something that I was wanting to do for Pride Month, but time kind of got away from me. But we'll be talking with Noah Adams, who does research into the kind of crossover between autism and being trans. I know we've briefly briefly mentioned some like rhetoric around this on our War on Trans People series episodes. And Noah was kind enough to reach out to me to be willing to discuss this more in depth. Greetings. Hello. Thank you. Hi, it's it's always Pride Month somewhere in the summer. So that's true. That's true. So I guess let's, I first want to

kind of hear how you, how you personally kind of got into this field of research and then maybe kind of clarify what, what exactly your, your field of research is. Sure. Well, I guess, where do you start? I mean, I'm a, I'm a trans person and I'm also autistic, so it's sort of a natural crossover for me. I got started in trans research or trans activism doing suicidality work in such a long time ago now, but in I think 2006, myself and my best friend cycled across Canada to bring awareness for trans suicidality and in memorandum of a person, a friend who committed suicide. So, you know, we went to a lot of different communities in Canada, including Saskatoon, and did talks about, you know, did talks with local trans communities about suicide outage prevention stuff and met a lot of great people. And then I came back and I did my master of social work also on trans suicide outage research,

kind of looking at how there's a lot of different research out there and who knows, you know, there's a lot of different rates that are given all high and and where are we supposed to you know fall on that um and then i finished that and i was kind of tired of doing suicidality work yeah that seems to get a little bit a little bit exhausting um and kind of great i have a i have a much darker sense of humor than I used to. Yeah. So a friend, I was kind of drifting into autism work, and a friend, Jake Pine, who is a professor now at York University, suggested I kind of move into that area, and here I am. So with the kind of crossover between being trans and have, and, and, uh, I guess I'm, I'm not the best. I don't, I don't know.

I consciously don't kind of know all the, what the most appropriate language is. Would you say that you, would you prefer to say that you like have autism or you are artistic? I mean, I think it's pretty universal in the autism community to talk about identity first language. So yeah, exactly. Autism kind of leads and that's, yeah, I mean, I guess I'd say I'm autistic. Most people don't say person with autism. Yeah, yeah. So with that, how have you kind of, what initially got you to, you know,

because we see a lot of propaganda and stuff trying to almost like take away people's agency around both being trans and being autistic, right? There's a lot of propaganda there, especially from like the TERFs in the UK really started this out and really accelerated on this point. And I mean, we're not, there's a whole bunch of basically autism exterminationist groups out there

and a whole bunch of other kind of problems around this. How, when these kind of crossovers start happening where did you kind of what what kind of prompted you to see this and be like hey here's this thing that needs to be researched and here's how i'm going to go about it because you you see a lot of people talk about this thing but it's always generally to like attack trans people um or attack autistic people i mean you know there's a lot there. I mean, I would say, you know, my sort of seedling of interest is, is I just really don't like injustice. I really, I mean, that's such a broad thing to say, but I really, you know, injustice against people for

the sake of who they are really just kind of pisses me off. And, you know, I mean, when you pick a research topic, you've got to pick something that you're willing to spend hours and hours and hours in a library or, you know, a virtual library, what have you, just kind of plowing away at it. And it seemed like I was pissed off enough at the injustice of the way autistic people and the way trans people are treated, especially the way I think I think we're ignored by both spheres by both you know for for TERFs and trans exclusionary folks um I really feel like we're an easy target where you know autistic people or or for that matter people with developmental disabilities or people with with any kind of um and I'm using heavy finger quotes on this any kind of impairment based disability feel like a soft target for people that just want to attack trans folks and I'm using heavy finger quotes on this any kind of impairment-based disability feel like a soft target for people that just want to attack trans folks right like because they're

they're a group that are so it's incomprehensible to them that we would be able to speak for ourselves so so they're you know I mean I don't even think that they, I don't think they care about autistic people, but I don't think they even, it even occurs to them that autistic people might have and trans autistic folks might have something to say for themselves. So what's kind of the scope of your research been for however long you've been working on this for it it's it's for a phd program correct it is yeah well i started out doing uh i wrote a book on trans autistic folks it's sort of a series of interviews with folks um and you know i mean i just asked them like about their lives and what it was like to be trans and what it was like to be autistic and what it's like to you know try to transition as an autistic person and a lot of stuff came out of that around you know how difficult it can be for folks that are that are about to access trans health care and to sort of navigate their way in the world um and this is for my phd work it's sort

of an outgrowth of that so uh i'm looking specifically at how trans autistic community groups or grassroots group formations are forming and what their goals are. How do you like, how do you go about like ethical research into this topic? Because definitely, like, you know, there's a certain way to like, there's a certain way to be like, I'm researching autism and trans people to be like, huh, that's a little bit of a side eye, right? Because because of how some of because of how like the turf groups talk about it, obviously, you're trans and autistic, and that's completely different. But like, definitely. Yeah, I was definitely wondering, like, is there like, how, what types of like, ways does ethical research go about, so that you actually understand

people when you're, when you're talking to them? It's not, it's not about like, here, we need to, we need to like solve these problems because they're not problems to be solved, but it's, it's research into living people who are like having lives. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a great question. I'm sort of sorting through that myself right now, cause I'm just, you know, working through my ethical research proposal. But I think you just have to be really honest and open and really write all this stuff out. Like, how are you going to contact people and what are you going to talk to them about and showing other people what you're doing and being very open to that process, if that makes sense. and being very open to that process, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. In what types of ways do you see the crossover kind of between ableism and transphobia? And how have you seen that crossover be used to kind of hurt both trans people and people who are artistic and people who are both? You know, I mean, I think the most explicit way has been, you know, I see a lot of articles by The Guardian or The Daily Mail that bring up the specter of autistic people being overrepresented again in finger quotes among the trans population going to gender clinics, and there isn't ever any explanation after you say that. The scaremongering is just saying there's autistic people supposedly overrepresented among trans folks. Oh, no.

But as if it doesn't need saying, it's assumed that that's appalling. But I would like a little bit more explanation. There's a lot said by how they frame it and what they don't say. It's all framed as if this is, you know, something that everyone recognizes as like a problem. And countering that is really challenging because it is, yeah, because like, again,

you're doing research into this specific crossover. and what kinds of stuff have you kind of learned throughout your research about about this i mean it's interesting like it's that attitude is also represented in the academic literature like over the last oh i bet yeah i'd say over the last five years, the literature on the crossover of autism and trans folks has like skyrocketed. Like in I always say in 220 alone, something like 150 articles were published, whereas two years before that, maybe 20. OK. And and the vast majority of them are mentioning the the co-occurrence in passing. So they're saying, oh, well, we read these other things where autism and trans identity co-occurs. So thus, you should be very careful prior to providing trans health care because they might be autistic. Yeah, that's the thing I wanted to talk about was like the whole medical gatekeeping aspect.

And like, especially with like TERFs, you know, there's a lot and like you especially see with you see this with like turfs you know there's a lot of like infantilization with the turf rhetoric around this and then that kind of leads to this type of medical gatekeeping yeah i just think you know i see i see this i saw this in a book with the interviews i did and i see it in so many other places and especially conversation with folks is that, you know, the problem seems to be if you tell an unexpected narrative to the person in charge of gatekeeping you for transgender health care, you're going to make them nervous. And if you make them nervous, they're not necessarily going to say no, but they're going to say to themselves at least, oh, let's wait and see. And for autistic folks, waiting and seeing might mean forever, right? Like I talked to folks in the book that, you know, without mentioning

actual cities because of the, you know, the particular situation of this person. But let's, you know, let's say he lived in New Orleans and he wasn't able to access trans healthcare in New Orleans, because it just wasn't available to folks who were autistic. And so he ended up moving to Chicago, which, which shows, you know, he moved to Chicago specifically to get trans healthcare, which shows a level of capacity that they're implying in the context of trans healthcare in New Orleans that he's not capable of. But you know, he can uproot his whole life, move across the country, set himself up, find a doctor. And then he talked to the doctor in an informed health clinic in Chicago. And they were like, oh, yeah, we knew that you were from this city and we knew that you were autistic before you told us, because there's this whole pipeline of autistic trans folks making the migration to Chicago from this particular city because they can't get health care.

I mean, like, you know, I'm also thinking about, you know, like kids trying to come out as trans who have autism or have any other kind of, you know, quote unquote, developmental disability. And like, just all of the ways that that can be used to gaslight kids about their gender identity um i didn't know in your book you mentioned stuff around like self-discovery and coming out and issues with family um what kind of what kind of things have you heard about that in terms of how how that are figuring out gender stuff

while also having this whole other thing that people use to add on to their experience. I think one of the things I notice, especially in trans-autistic autobiographies, is that gender doesn't really make an inherent sort of sense to a lot of autistic folks i mean it doesn't make sense to me but i mean i have i have something going on in my brain i don't know what it is i don't think it's autism but yeah i gender's never made sense to me either and i think like where you for autistic people especially where you come across things that don't make an inherent sort of sense, it's difficult to accept them. Like so much in the world doesn't make inherent sense, but that can be a real sticking point for autistic folks. So, you know, what I seem to see a lot of

is that by the time folks come out of, well, first of all, it seems like, although, you know, I don't want to quote any particular kind of research on it because I think the jury's still out, but it seems like autistic people are more likely to identify as non-binary or to just not identify with gender at all. And it does seem like by the time folks come out as trans, whatever, you know, permutation of that there is for them, they've tried just about every other identity they can you know they can try out like especially you know i mean we're aware that there are social stigmas and and and social expectations around gender so i i think for for a lot of autistic folks they're going to try to fit that even though it doesn't make sense to them they're going to try to fit within that because they know it exists. And by the time

they come out as trans, or male or female or what have you, we pretty well know if that makes any kind of sense. Yeah, no. There's a lot of misconceptions people have about

both being trans and being autistic, let alone being both. Is there any, like, what sorts of common misconceptions about this on a broader level would you like to dispel? Sure, yeah I mean, I think a lot of people get told You know, you can't be autistic because you're too articulate Or, you know, you have too much of an opinion Autistic people can't have an opinion of themselves or their own life Yeah, that's gross I'm paraphrasing, but I think that's what it equates to Yeah, absolutely

And then, you know, trans folks get told It's not uncommon to get told Oh, well, you can't be autistic because you're trans. So you're sort of in this no-person's land. That's such a, that's such like an ontological attack on someone's being. It's so... It really is, yeah. Like that's, you know, already, like again, just being solely trans or autistic, you get some of that,

and then together it's like it's just attacking every kind of part of you that you're trying to figure out. Well, I mean in terms of attacking people rhetorically, it's sort of the perfect weapon because you can make autistic trans people into whatever you want to be convenient to you. What kinds of stuff do you think people should know about this to help kind of either you know to help either like counter some of like the rhetoric around this or just to gain better like personal understanding right if they have if they have you know people in their lives who are like this or maybe they suspect

that they're that they're trans and they're autistic? Like how, what kinds of stuff would you like people to be more aware of about this intersection? Well, I guess I remember a story someone from the book told me about how, you know, he was, he had, his best friend is trans and autistic as well, and has a number of physical disabilities. He was kind of, he's sort of the caretaker of physical disabilities and he was kind of he's sort of the caretaker for him um and he was kind of talking to him about how oh well i don't know if i'm trans and i don't know if i should you know if i should use that label or like you know maybe it's not the right thing to do or it's bad or something and his friend was like well

you know you're not you're not a hormonal vampire. Like, you're not going to, like, suck the hormones out of somebody else and hurt them by taking away their testosterone. Oh, I wish. I wish it worked like that. I would be a trans vampire. This is about you and what makes you comfortable. It's not about, like, you're not hurting anybody else being yourself. And I think, you know, autistic folks like anybody else, you know, worry about, I mean, we're, we're just as susceptible to, to the attacks on trans folks.

Yeah. As anybody else. Right. Like, and, and you worry that like, well, maybe this is the right thing to do, but like, what are you hurting by, by exploring it? That doesn't mean you have to be trans, or you have to transition or, or you can't change your mind, like, but it doesn't, it doesn't hurt anybody, let alone you to just be open to it. Even just like temporarily trying out different names or pronouns, right? It can be, like, such a big deal. And it can be very incidental. Like, it doesn't need to be so cataclysmic, right? That's something that you

can experiment with, and it's fine, right? You never... Yeah. You don't need to lock yourself into anything. But of course, you know, when it's about your personal sense of identity, of course, it feels much bigger. Well, I think people worry about what other folks, I mean, obviously people worry about what other folks will think of them and what that would mean for them.

I don't know. I mean, it seems like a strange comparison to make, but I don't know if you've seen Crimes of the Future. I've not yet. Oh, it's really good. It's the most recent david cronenberg movie and there's this great i i'm gonna give away the end of the movie so spoiler spoilers i know finally we're turning this into a movie podcast what i've always wanted there's this great scene at the end though where vigo mortizen is like in this he has this special like very david cronenberg bone chair that he has to to be in to move him around while he's eating. He finally is convinced by his partner to try the plastic chocolate bar that's supposed to be a whole digestive thing. I won't get into it.

There's this moment of realization. He's been avoiding this for the whole movie. He tries it and he's eating it. avoiding this for the whole the whole movie and he like tries it and he's eating it and and suddenly there's this this realization moment in his face where he's like oh this didn't have to be so difficult yeah like i society doesn't want me to do this and it's it's seen as a crime and it's seen as as terrible but actually when you cross that rubicon it it wasn't as bad as you thought yeah I mean especially if you're

even if you're not like coming out to everybody you know at the same time right you start off with a small group of people that you know are going to be with you and you try it out with them and if you like it then great that's a really good sign

if you start it and you're like this doesn't feel right then you don't need to commit. It's not a thing, right? That Rubicon can feel so big sometimes. Yeah. And it feels like you're jumping across a giant, like the Grand Canyon, but really all it is, is you're stepping across a small stream and you can step right back across there if you didn't like it. Yeah. So what kind of things would you like to see happen around like the medical gatekeeping so that it's less fucked up? I mean, I know a lot of, I'm actually at a, uh, conference in Belgium right now for trans health, sort of medical trans health stuff um and you know i mean i think one of the things i keep coming back to is you don't need to treat autistic people in the realm of trans

health care any differently than you do anywhere else like anyone else like especially in the gatekeeper model we have like either you have the capacity to consent or you don't like that that test is and i have lots of thoughts about that if that's for another day but you know whether you meet those tests or not it should not be any different just because you're autistic um would you like to i guess talk uh just briefly about uh your book um you know what's it like what what what the scope of it is where people can find it that sort of thing. Trans and Autistic Stories from Life at the Intersection by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. It was out in 2020, I think.

People can find it on Amazon or wherever you buy books. I'm sure Powell's Bookstore over there in Portland has it. Yeah, it's a series of interviews with folks who are trans and autistic. I sat down with folks and asked them about their life and what's going on and what that looks like. And then I sort of, you know, sort of transcribed that into a text, into a narrative form and put that in a book. And here we are. arm and put that in a book and here we are. That sounds wonderful. I see the listing on amazon.ca for our Canadian folks as well. Yeah, thank you so much for talking about this. Is there any other kind of random thoughts that you would like to mention that we haven't brought up yet? Sure. You know, I always like to plug Roop's Walsh's work,

which looks at, you know, they do a lot of work in trans autistic stuff too. And they kind of look at why more people may be trans and autistic. And one of the things they've found is that it may be that autistic people are both less capable of hiding the fact that they're trans and less less capable of caring or caring about hiding it yeah

yeah it may be more obvious that there is a concurrence there but not an actual overage of a concurrence let's say yeah yeah that mean that was definitely in the back of my mind yeah huh well again noah thank you so much uh for coming to talk with us yeah can i can i plug a couple things is that okay plug plug away this is still is still your time. Okay. So I'm leading a refugee sponsorship group for a group of five for a trans guy from the Middle East. And we're raising funds through the Metropolitan Community Church in Toronto. We got to raise a certain amount before we can put the application in. And I can give you that link, but it's at Canada helps.org. And the name is trans and proud.

Trans proud. Trans and proud. I can read out the whole URL, but it's kind of long. I will. I will put, if you send me that link, I will put it in the description for people to click on.

Awesome. And you can find me at Noah Adams on Twitter. Cause I got in early enough to get my name. Yeah, wow. March 2009. Just right on the cusp. Well, again, thank you so much for reaching out to talk about this intersection. Hopefully, if anyone was interested in what we were talking about, please check out Noah's book to just read a whole bunch of stories from people about this. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you.

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Oh, yeah! oh yeah sophie that's how we open the episode i didn't think anything could be more appalling than that other thing that you said that i won't oh what i was talking about brett kavanaugh and clarence thomas wrapped together so tightly that they can't tell who's where one person's skin begins and the other ends. You walked us right into this, Sophie. I did, it's my fault. I walked you right into it, just like Neil Gorsuch walked right into that and then decided, you know what, in for a pendy, in for a pound of.

This is It Could Happen Here, the podcast about serious problems, where we talk about them seriously and sometimes about the supreme court having a threesome like that uh like that like that cruise ship where there was the threesome and then a giant 60 person fight how's everybody doing today i think the opening will work better if we just bleep out and yeah yeah yes always bleep out cum, except for right there. So I feel like today we should chat about one of the many things that's a problem, which is a specific piece of disinformation that is spreading, not quite like wildfire. It's more spreading like in the background, like monkey pox on the internet. This is not like the number one piece of like conspiratorial nonsense that's getting around,

but it's getting around deeply and I'm seeing it on the left and the right. You have, if you spend any time at all on social media, which statistically you do, you've probably seen a bunch of stories and like freaked out posts about fires and arson at agricultural facilities and factories, food factories is often how it's phrased. I think the post I saw about it that

was sort of most emblematic was someone being like, hey, you know, you're probably not aware that some huge number of chickens died in this fire recently and a bunch of cows died in this field. But if you were, it's the only thing you'd be talking about. And the idea kind of that people are pushing when they catastrophize this is that there's this massive rash of attacks on American food infrastructure at a year when we're already due for a food crisis because of the Ukraine.

And it's going to be this big, like, looming disaster. And some, like, shady group is trying to starve everybody. And we brought in a friend to talk about this because it is all what, what people who are kind of catastrophizing are saying. Um, and I wanted to introduce Carl to the show. Carl, how are you doing buddy? You know,

live, live in life in a one party state. Yeah. Yay. Um, I don't know, man, there's a lot of parties these days,

like the one on that cruise ship. Uh, so, or the forward party, our, our favorite. We, this is a big yang gang podcast um now carl you and i have been buddies on the old twitter for a while you were the origin of one of the terms that uh that that we use a lot on this show um and uh yeah i wanted to i

wanted to talk to you because this is a pretty potent piece of weaponized unreality you have been tracking this for a while on kind of your own yeah well this is one of those ones that's it sits in between a lot of the other

conspiracies right so like you said it's kind of the background operating thing right now um and you know so when we think of the big conspiracies right now they kind of revolve around what they always did right depopulation weird nwo like secret society stuff the q the q brand of that however we want to look at it. This is a little bit different because this is more overtly political, right? So this is looking to not just dig the whole of, well, everyone's out to get us. Bill Gates is buying all the farmland,

you know, the crazy stuff we normally, I mean, you know, that's right in this, but it's not the center part. And, yeah, I've been looking at this for a few months now since I first saw it. And I first saw kind of traces of this right after the invasion of Ukraine started. So early March, things started to kind of shift and nothing, you know, posts here and there that are now missing stuff like that. The kind of classic, well, let's test the waters. Let's see how people accept the idea that maybe something else, you know, in the in the conspiratorial way is going on. Just asking questions type. Yeah, exactly.

It's the just asking questions. It's a just, well, maybe think about it kind of thing. And those, those pique my interest because those tend to be test balloons. And for this kind of thing, I had a weird, you know, there are weird feelings you kind of get when you watch some of this as much as we do. Yes. I know what you mean yeah yeah and you can kind of sense when the thing has enough ingredients to catch on exactly and especially when there's super kind of inflammatory

ingredients right you know the bill gates um buying all the farmland is a good example not quite as inflammatory but catches on because people, you know, it's the social paradelia thing. There's always like, there's always this, I mean, and this is something, again, that's a broader thing with conspiracies. There's always a germ of truth.

The germ of truth with that is that Bill Gates has bought a lot of farmland. Now, if you compare it to the total quantity of farmland, he has bought very, it's like, yeah, it's a fraction. 0.03% or something. I mean, it's an absolutely tiny amount of the total, right? Yeah, because this country is, I don't know if you've looked at a map recently, pretty sizable country, the United States of America. Kind of a big place when you actually look.

Yeah. And so the kernel of truth is there. There are fires, right? There are industrial accidents. There are weird stuff happens in big industrial situations we have a large industrial farming situation in this country so you see it and i think part of what makes the kind of the idea that oh this is suddenly happening and it's suddenly like a massive problem easier to sell to people is that most americans

know next to nothing about the food supply and how it works. Like if you have, because I grew up in and around farms. I've spent a lot of my life in agricultural areas. Yep. Farms and things related to farms catch on fire fucking constantly. Oh. You may not be, yeah. There are, I think they said there are 5,000 annual fires. 5,000 annually, about 15 a day. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's... It's giant fields of dried grain. It's fields of dried grain, and it's shit like silos full of flour and stuff, which is like...

Exactly. Silos burn. Yeah. Silos explode. Yes. Like, a silo full of grain is slightly less explosive than like a military missile or some shit. Like they detonate if you catch them at the right way. Well, exactly.

And like I know here in Minnesota a few years ago, and there's video of it floating around, you know, there was a corn silo split. Yeah. And the dust goes out and something, you know, a car engine, because it's hot, sparks it off and it's a fireball, you know? So these things happen. And I can remember there was one of the last things I saw and I went and covered in Texas before I moved was there's this little town called West, which is not in West Texas. It's in North Texas.

It's in between Dallas and Waco, which is in between Dallas and Austin because – Okay. No, Waco is not a destination. And they had this big – God, it was some sort of – what was the – I'm going to Google what the facility was. But it was this like – yeah, it was a fertilizer factory. And it caught on fire. There's a terrifying video of this guy with his daughter watching it. And it goes off like a fucking fuel air bomb.

Massive explosion. It killed the entire town's fire department. Like, all of them dead in a second. Oh, yeah. I mean, ANFO, right? Like, that's literally what that is. It was basically fucking ANFO. And because it happens, this is like 2013, I think, it never, it's just this big tragedy.

If it had happened a couple of years later, there would have been like a conspiracy attached to it. Oh, I'd be talking about it right now. Yeah, it was just slightly too early. Yeah. But like this shit happened. I mean, the point I'm making is that, and that we're making here is that like this shit happens all the time. and that we're making here is that like this shit happens all the time and to the the numbers we were quoting earlier there's no evidence whatsoever that there are a higher number of of these events this year than there ever are um basically one of the things that we've seen is as of like the

spring of this year a list has been compiled yeah um mainly on places like Gateway Pundit and Zero Hedge, where they've got like a hundred different events. And it looks very compelling when you just see this list of, and there's this fire, and this many chickens died here, and this many cows died, and there was this explosion. But again, if you actually look at the number of events that are expected in a year, there's nothing abnormal about this. No, in fact, it's pretty middle of the road for any year and like the bird the bird calls right like that's a great example of this being just

absolutely out of the park conspiracy land i mean there's a massive avian flu epidemic going on right now that's killed more birds you know than the last 10 years. Yeah. And so when you start talking about, you know, 300, you know, 300 million birds worldwide being called, whatever, massive numbers that funny how avian flu does that. And that's a response. But when you get into the zero hedge, who is really pushing this right now world, that's one of the top ones on the list.

And it also makes, you know, they have their little maps up right now with all the drop tabs that show where things are. Right, right. They love doing, and there's a, you see this in other conspiracies. I think one of the big ones that kind of was a little, I don't know, on the edge of getting mainstream recently

was like the conspiracy about people disappearing at national parks, where it's like mapped. 411 yes exactly it's supposed to be like conspiracy theories yeah going for it yeah and it's like yeah man um people there's 350 million people in the united states like and also people go missing while hiking and one of the like a bunch of stuff isn't on that list like the number of those people who are found again and whatnot exactly a lot of people just like on that list, like the number of those people who were found again and whatnot. Exactly. A lot of people just slip and fall and never a scene again

because they fall down a cliff. Yes. National parks are kind of dangerous, funny enough, once you're off the trail. Yeah, that's why they're fun. Yeah, exactly. There was a whole 411 documentary made a few years ago about this person who went missing, where they dropped into a secret underground government

bunker, where they abducted, they and like a year later they found his body at the bottom of a cliff yeah and you're like it doesn't you know it that doesn't talk about the horrible stuff done with um like especially in canada with all of the missing indigenous women um that is actually it is actually a big problem um but i mean to back to back to the fact back to like the farming thing i think what all of these you know stories show is just the innate horror of industrial farming is actually the it is scary yeah yeah it is absolutely scary um but it's also like normal scary like the thing that's scary is that the system of industrial farming is incredibly dangerous and like if you actually want to be properly horrified about something

relating to food production look at how many people die because they get sucked into bogs of pig shit exactly or yeah we're drowning grain silo we're drowning grain silos i mean people legit lots of people die whole families yeah i know one person will fall in the grain silo and they'll try to get him out the whole family's dead i know i i know people who have yeah who have died that way because i grew up in a very agricultural area yeah yeah a lot of this is just like people don't know the country but shireen yes um so industrial i mean like yeah for me for me someone that hasn't grown up in any agricultural area at all, this sounds like a movie to me.

Grain is like quicksand. It sucks you in, and it takes you to that bottom. If you don't spread out immediately, you're going down, and there's really no way to save somebody. Stay the fuck away from grain silos. Do not play around grain silos. Do not play around grain silos. Do not fuck around with a grain silo. It has killed entire families because people try to save each other,

then they get sucked down, and it's pretty fucked up. Yeah, it's bad. When you have livestock, livestock poop, and sometimes that poop is super useful. Chicken shit is one of the best fertilizers ever. You can make chicken shit very, very useful. Pig shit is one of the best fertilizers ever. You can make chicken shit. Very, very useful. Pig shit is like nasty. It's toxic.

It is very hard to do anything. It's a bioweapon. Once it's in the ground long enough, it's a bioweapon. Theoretically, if you were to like really care about it, you could make a use of it given enough time. But there's so many pigs because our hunger for bacon is insable, that you wind up with this massive toxic sludge. So there's the chunk of the country in which most of the pigs come from. There are these huge pig shit bogs that are like, there are countries smaller than bogs of pig shit that we have in the United States.

And people die in them all the time. They get sucked down into the pig shit. Yep. Or you suffocate because you get one of them burst. I mean, there's so many weird things because it's a meth they're methane and hydrogen sulfide sinks so it's just like bad things around farms all the time and that's just that's just farming and and what we're ultimately what we are seeing here if you want to like actually analyze the thing that is happening

um with all of these conspiracies it's it's what's called the frequency illusion, which is the idea that if you've ever, I don't know, when somebody teaches, you learn a new word, right? Or you hear about a historic event, and then you keep seeing it referenced a bunch. You're going to see it everywhere. The fnords, there they are. This is something that an author that Garrison and I quite like,

Robert Anton Wilson, played with a lot. It's why 23s, one thing you'll notice in like hollywood movies and tv shows if you look out for 23s they're fucking everywhere because a whole bunch of people who got into hollywood are fans of this same guy and there's this conspiracy with the number 23 people stick it it's all over the fucking wire it's in a bunch of shit um and it's it's yeah at the base of things like right humans are paradelium machines right so we're looking for patterns and static that's what we do it's like in my mind it's part of our like ancestral uh you know deep in the past protection mechanism right that's how we construct meaning yeah right well it's that and it's how you look for monsters in the woods you

know it's like when we're looking for eyes in the dark, that's part of it. And so we tend to find meaning in points and then try and connect them because that's how we work. And so this is a great example of this. Because it hasn't gone full Q level yet where it's just absurd to be absurd to shield itself. Like you can see where people are trying to pick together points that normally are just industrial accidents. And, you know, some of the stuff I saw early on before, like the cow death posts and the stuff related to climate change, what you really were seeing was people trying to make order out of what is just chaotic accidents yeah and now and now with exactly what i was yeah yeah go ahead sorry no it's it's

it's something you rarely actually see in the cascade of a you know conspiracy theory like this so overtly and it's been really interesting for me watching that because, you know, as someone who's far too into watching people melt their brains, this kind of lays out some of the ways that this works for all of us. And I think it also offers a roadmap in certain ways to, like, see past it and be able to correct it for yourself so you don't get into the same oh there are a thousand points of light here let's follow all of them yeah it's um one of the

things that's interesting so like we just called it the uh the uh the recency uh bias or the frequency illusion there's also the the recency illusion which is like the belief that things that you have like noticed only recently are recent phenomena rather than things that go back a long time. These are kind of interrelated. But this sort of phenomena that we're seeing is often called the Bader-Meinhof phenomena. Absolutely, yep. And that's – so the Bader – yeah, the Bader-Meinhof Group was a, it's also called the German Red Army. It was a, yeah, it was a West German terrorist organization from like 70 fucking years ago.

Like this is not a recent thing. But there was an article about them in like a Minnesota St. Paul newspaper in 1994 that happened to be one of the first newspapers with an online comment page. do this very well oh no well yeah no so this is like you'll always hear it referred to as the bottom line of phenomena it has nothing to do with this terrorist group other than the fact that one commenter on there saw an article about them um within a couple of hours of someone else in their life telling them about the group and so they named it in the common section, the bottom mine off phenomenon, because like it's, which is an example of the phenomenon.

Yeah. But like, that's, it is, it is, it's a thing that people do for again, good reason. Like,

like you've said, like if you're a fucking hunter gatherer and you notice that like, Oh, after a rainstorm is when the big cats come out and hunt. And like, if somebody, if one of your friends gets eaten by like a tiger, it's probably after a rainstorm. You associate after the rainstorm

with danger, which is like good, right? Like if you want to not get eaten by tigers. The more we live inside urban environments, usually less this becomes useful as relating to more of our like instinctual practices. Learning to recognize this like first step of delusion is really important yeah um i don't think decisions in the future right but i think it's much more similar than we realize to like how people think of religion because even religion people are trying that's literally what

i was just about to say. Order out of disorder. Yeah. Like what you were saying is like, there's so much chaos. People can't make sense of the world. And just like religion, you're trying to make order out of disorder. And you look for signs, you look for patterns.

It's like an element of magical thinking where you look for reasons that this has meaning. So I understand where they're coming from. Oh, absolutely. And so the problem, again, the problem is not with your brain, because this is not like a bad thing your brain is doing. It's just a thing your brain is doing.

The problem is that this is one of the easiest ways that bad faith actors can take advantage of you and other people. And so in terms of protecting yourself and others from it, and again, one of the problems with this and one of the things that makes it so much more difficult, 20 years ago, the Bader Meinhardt, obviously, the Bader Meinhardt phenomenon was as much of a thing as that dude in the fucking comments page that Minnesota paper proves. But there was less shit coming at you. shit coming at you. So you kind of had, even if you might get caught for a little bit in the like, oh, is there something weird going on with this German terrorist group? You kind of had the space in your head and the space in your media diet to like actually parse that out and calm down. But today it all comes with you with a flood. There's like three new fucked up Supreme Court decisions. Oh, and now all of the food factories are on fire and all of the chickens are dead.

And this war in Ukraine is actually elevating the food prices and it all compounds on itself. If you when you start seeing something new like this come into your media diet, that seems scary. One of the first things you should do is just try to get a handle on the raw numbers. Exactly. Is this? Well, this is a complexity issue. Yeah. You know, this is a complexity issue. That's how I like to look at it. And that's exactly one of the great ways to kind of disrupt the complex nature of this and the amount of it you're taking in is just to start breaking it down. Numbers are great, right? Like if you can look and see there are 18,000 instances of industrial accidents leading to X, Y, or Z and 5,000 fires, you start to really get

yourself into a better position to understand what's being thrown at you. Yeah. But I don't think most people can actually understand what those numbers mean. Like they're just like, they're large numbers, but I don't think people understand like that means a lot of that stuff is happening versus just like one or two things you hear about and you don't realize probability wise that it's like insignificant because i don't think those numbers make sense i mean even to me sometimes i can't i can't picture so many things so i think it's i don't know maybe it's just like a deficit in how our brains work. You may not be able to understand why the numbers exist, but you can try to compare them to previous years, right? Exactly. You can expand what you're relating to, right?

If you're looking from, here's everything from March of 2022 to June of 2022, you're like, whoa, this is a lot of stuff just in these few months. But if you compare that to every preceding year for the past five years, you're like, oh, this actually isn't a regular. This is still fucked up, but it's actually kind of normalized. And it's not an abnormal phenomenon right now. And so even if you can't understand what the numbers are, you can still compare them to previous things. But yeah, I mean, that does require more work than just like looking at a meme, right?

And the reason why this stuff works is because people know how to exploit this part of our brains really well. Not that this part of this brain is useless, right? It has uses. You can play with it. But it also is exploiting this pathway and then choosing how you want to maybe circumvent some of those mental effects. brain hacking. And it's something we're just all kind of getting up to right now and understanding, and we still don't fully understand some of this. But a lot of the stuff I kind of initially worked off of for the concept of weaponized unreality kind of talks about social engineering in the way that like freaking was done and hacking back in the day was done. And this is so similar to

that in certain ways that it's kind of shocking, right? Like it's a conspiracy, but it's also a management tool and it's a, it's a memory management and, and you know, ultimately a reality management tool and giving it numbers, looking at context like that does take time.

But some of these are like going to, going to be hard and fast rules probably going forward to like interact with the digital world because this is going to be how it is for a long while. There's a book that was – is kind of considered to be like the foundational text of – or at least strategic document of the Islamic State called The Management of Savagery. And the title gives away what you're doing, right? You're carrying out, you're engaging in acts of savagery, terrorist attacks that kill innocent people that exist to disrupt the state that you're in, in order to, and you're attempting to like, you're attempting to build kind of a milieu of savagery, which then provides you the opportunity to take and exert power. And what we're seeing here is like the management of cognitive biases, right? Exactly.

The management of like these weird little evolutionary holdovers in your brain that don't quite work in the modern world. But if you understand what's happening, you can take advantage of them and you can trick people into thinking things are happening that aren't. It's the same. You know, you can see this, the right does this very effectively in a lot of the anti-trans stuff they've been doing. Absolutely.

Yes. Obviously, with gay, you know, if you look at the population of trans and of gay people, some number of people in that community are going to do things that are bad, right, because it's a population of human beings. And because the country is large enough, if you get people hyper-focused on here's a story, here's another story, here's two, here's three stories. Now, is that – does that mean that there's any kind of actual systemic problem? No. That community is no more likely to do things that are bad than any other community. But if you get people focused on each of those stories in their head, they feel like there's an epidemic and like, well, we have to get a handle.

It's the same thing that gets done with like Islamic terrorism, right? Where it's like, yes, since 9-11, actually not that many acts of Islamic terrorism in the United States. Extremely fucking uncommon, much less common than right wing terrorism, like homegrown terrorism. But the media doesn't really cover one of those kinds of terrorism and loves to cover the other. So you get people periodically tricked into thinking that they're under direct threat from the Islamic State or whatever the fuck. Right. Well, and I think it's, you know, I think going to that point, right, like it's almost a I mean, it's a reality filter, right? So like it's

a way to selectively filter out things that would counter the narrative that you're trying to overall push. And I think that that's something that's what's interesting me about this in a lot of ways is that we're seeing a filter being set up that only allows people into one lane of this thought. And we've seen what the end result of that is with radicalization and things that come along with these kind of conspiracies but it's really it's been very wild to watch since the you know the 19th 20th of april till now where we're seeing it you know sernovich is doing it ever any one of the guys you can think of crow Steven Crowder was doing it. Yep, exactly. Tucker ran a couple things on this and kind of interspersed it with his white male virility shit. We're in a weird place where these are starting to be able to be played with and on each other. onboarded from a conspiracy into, you know, what we're seeing now is kind of the white nationalist, Christian nationalist movement that's become that thing. And, you know, for me,

that's where my interest stems from, because of this idea of weaponizing unreality, seeing what happened in Russia when that happened, and seeing this kind of thing, which is so similar to that filtering and that narrative shift and building that goes on in that world. It's been, you know, staring into a void feels bad sometimes. This is just one where it's like, oh, this is terrible. And it's just the beginning of it. Every once in a while, the void stares back and you're like, oh, boy. Oh, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, that's the problem is sometimes it just stares back and you're like oh boy oh yeah no and that exactly i mean that's uh

that's the problem is sometimes it just stares you right in the eyes and tells you yeah i'm here and that's a bad feeling yeah well i think that's more or less what we needed to talk about that that would be like no like one of the one of the ways to combat this if you can is honestly creating your own memetic graphs is really useful because these things spread so fast when they're in images. Yep, exactly. Images of dates and instances spread like wildfire. So if you can make your own, which compares it to previous years, say, hey, this actually isn't a new pattern. This is just what happens in industrial farming.

pattern this is something that's but this is this is just what happens in industrial farming i think spreading it via memetic images uh is one of the if there is a way to combat it that's probably one of the core ways to go about it yes just because of how fast those things spread absolutely again you can see i've seen some useful people have been trying to push back against you know this idea that there's been this massive crime surge in San Francisco and stuff. And it uses the same tactics, right? Yep. Absolutely. You have a couple of videos of people shoplifting or something, and then you make a, and is

there, is that kind of crime actually up? Well, no, it really isn't. But it doesn't matter because, or is it any higher there than it is in some place like Duluth where no videos are coming out? No, it's not. But it's – you have to be aware – the first thing you have to be aware of is the phenomena, is like the way in which they're taking advantage of you. Exactly. Yeah.

Then you have to kind of deter and you have to use the tactics they're using against them. And one of the things that is effective is these these graphs with kind of like numbers and dates and shit on them people love to feel like they're looking at research yes yeah but yeah at the same time though not to not to be like i don't know negative about this at all but in my mind this is like a modern day version of someone starting a religion and make people like making the sheep of this like uh following and then having them turn into like whatever it is whether it's christian nationalism or whatever but just like in religion if people are presented with science they don't fucking care you know what i mean you'll present them with like i don't know there's

some people that i think are beyond saving it's it's not science it's about everyone wants to have access to special secret secret knowledge yeah right everyone wants to have access to special secret secret knowledge yeah right everyone wants to have esoteric knowledge that no one else has yep so these graphs are so compelling in the first place because they're like oh no one else knows all of these things no one else has laid it out in this manner so if you can present your information in that same style say hey right no one knows that this is actually part of this overall thing that's been going on for years. And it's about industrial farming. Then you hope that that will spread.

Yeah, then that spreads because it infects the same point in someone's brain, right? Exactly. We want to feel smart. We want to feel unique. We want to have like esoteric knowledge. So if you can frame it to fit that same mold, then it's not science. It's just playing with the same tactics that got them convinced of this in the first place. Exactly.

Yeah. That's different for sure. Yeah. I think, I think, Shireen, like, it's true that, like, if somebody is a committed believer in whatever, like somebody like Mike Cernovich or something, you're not convincing them. Absolutely not. The danger, the thing that they're doing that's dangerous is they're quote unquote pilling a lot of like

random people into believing that there's a problem that scares those people and when those people get scared, they're willing to accept shit they wouldn't otherwise scare.

And I think those people, you can push, get to step down from the ledge because one thing we do want, this is also a problem, but like think about like climate change, right? And how much of the denial of climate change is not based around getting

people to reject the idea entirely, but getting like when people bring up a specific problem, being like, well, but look at this weird new piece of technology that some kid developed and like this is going to fix it. And then you get to not worry about it, right? So if somebody suddenly starts freaking out about agricultural fires for the first time and you're like, actually, they're lower than they are in normal years. This isn't a problem. Then maybe their brain – maybe you can get their brain to go like, okay, then I won't worry about that because I don't want more things to worry about. I just have been given them. That's my hope.

We're targeting the ledge people. Yeah, we're targeting the ledge people. Yeah. you're not getting to true believer you're not getting to true believers at this point of any of this stuff for the most part you know that takes a wholly different level of work i mean that's that's in the ballpark in my mind of de-radicalization right like you're you're in a wholly different ballpark and if you can target the people who are thinking about jumping into the pool, too, they tend to, if you do change their mind, they become some of the biggest proponents of trying to get other people off the ledge that they might know. And that's something I've seen.

It's like ex-psychologists or something. Well, it's something I've seen. People that leave a cult or something. Yeah, exactly. It's very similar. And it's something I've seen even in my friend circles, you know, talking to people who five years ago were fully, you know, in the all let's do Donald Trump for the lulz thing. You know, now those are the same people who are telling their friends, oh, shit, we have a Christian nationalist movement that's a huge help um to everyone right you want more people saying the truth to people who might not hear it from someone like us um and can internalize it and we got to infiltrate there's you know the truth takes a lot more work than fiction unfortunately

but once it starts to work it's a compound thing. And the truth tends to really set people free as corny as that is. If people find out they've been lied to, they get they want to know why it worked. And that works in our favor and the truth's favor. the thing we, you know, we gotta protect this at all costs because we're getting tidal waved by unreality. And that's a problem for all of us for different reasons. That's a more uplifting note, I think, than a couple minutes ago. Yeah. Alright, well there we go. Go

I don't know. Fix it. Yeah. Go fix things. Yeah. Go fix things. Don't go swimming in grain silos. And, uh, yeah.

Yeah, avoid grain silos. Always avoid grain silos. 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. Inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

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