It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 43

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

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The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that for the first time ever is being recorded on an earth that I no longer have to share with that fascist rat bastard Shinzo Abe.

And with me to celebrate this occasion is Garrison Davis. Oh, hi. I said hello. And James, have we actually, have we like introduced you, introduced you yet? I don't think so, no. I just pop up talking about 3D printed guns and people who hate butterflies. Yeah, yeah.

This is truly a dark day for democracy. I'm saddened by the horrible loss of a great leader, a hero to feminism and women, and I guess a hero to those who defend war crimes so i guess uh before hurting before before we thought we get into one of the funniest things that has happened in maybe 20 years um james do you want to like talk about who you are because you are now one of us and i'm very excited about it. Yeah, I'm now a podcaster. So who I am?

I am a journalist, I guess, and a historian. And I wrote a book about the first week of the Spanish Civil War. And my PhD is in the history of international anti-fascism, building international anti-fascist alliances through physical culture um which is very nerdy uh but yeah i love that stuff uh what else i'm british if that had not been made abundantly clear by my accent um and i live in southern california which means this is a now uh this episode is is a majority commonwealth episode yeah that's right. Really exciting. Oh no. We made it.

Yeah, we'll be doing the national anthem in a minute here and we'll all just stand up. So, ex-Prime Minister, kind of he's not around anymore, is he? No, he is dead as fuck. So, I guess we should explain who shinzo abe is

yeah um okay if you want a really really long account of what the japanese liberal democratic party is because they are some of the worst people who've ever existed uh go listen to my democratic yeah how how does how can this be so the the the very short version of this is that the liberal democratic party is a party that was founded by nobusuke kishi who is one of history's worst war criminals uh like personally responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of people in china uh he's the guy who basically he's the guy who was in charge of the economy of the fascist war machine uh like like in japan during world war ii he was the guy who uh ran like the the the sort of fascist puppet state called manchukuo that was uh run by japan after they conquered it uh real war criminal also just like personally raped a like extremely large number of people i think that like i was almost never

discussed when people talk about him yeah real piece of shit almost like like a shockingly high like number yeah like of sex crimes it's wild yeah and he's also i mean he's involved with uh the japanese military sex slave program which you will hear referred to as comfort women and i fuck i were fucking refused to call the comfort women. Because that is a fucking horrifying euphemism. For again a program of military sex slavery. He also was one of the people who signed off on unit 731. Which was Japan's chemical weapons testing unit. Where they fucking like purposely infested.

Infected and tested chemical weapons on prisoners. Yeah he's one of the worst people ever and then he got a bunch of cia backing and some backing from the yakuza because the cia is working with the yakuza in early uh 1950s japan and he's able basically to force all of the other uh conservative like people to join his party and the sort of the merger of the of the liberal party liberal party and the democratic party is now the liberal democratic party this is kishi's party he founded it uh he drags everyone else into it he does an immense amount of corruption he tries to bring fascism back he narrowly fails uh shinzo abe is his grandson uh the ldp liberal democratic party

yeah has yeah it sucks it's like like nothing when they're families the way that i've been thinking about like how do you explain this to people who don't who don't have like a background in like japanese like war crime stuff is like imagine if like one of hitler's generals had like survived world war ii and then the cia made him they made him the fucking prime minister of germany and then and also he got more fascist because people were saying mean things about his grandpa he's like oh i don't like that they're calling him bad names i'm gonna got more fascist because people were saying mean things about his grandpa. He's like, oh, I don't like that they're calling him bad names. I'm going to get full fascist power of the police uh abe has been doing a whole bunch of shift of centralizing power in the executive and expanding the police's power to just arrest whoever the fuck they want um uh so one of the other things about japan is that like legally in their constitution they can't go to war and like both kishi and abe like this is like their big fucking thing is that they want they want to fully rearm japan they want japan to be able to go to war because they want to do the fucking empire again and you know so

this is like yeah abe's been doing that um he also the the thing he's probably most famous for in terms of like the reasons people think he's bad because he is he's like just actually a monster is he's just like a like unfathomable degree of war crimes denial like he he pulled so japan in in the 90s had admitted that they fucking kidnapped and enslaved like an enormous number of people from japan of people from korea people from china i think they also did they did in the philippines and indonesia too although there's less sort of coverage of that and like turned them into military sex slaves, did things to them that are, like, fucking unspeakable. And so the Japanese government in the 90s had admitted they did this and apologized for it. And Abe was like, no, fuck that.

That's wrong. He's also a part of this group called Nippon Kagai, which is like a fascist group. And OK, so this is this is this is according to a U.S. congressional report, what they believe, quote, Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers. That the 1946 1948 Tokyo war crimes tribunals were illegitimate and that the killings by Japanese troops through the 1937 Nanjing massacre were exaggerated or fabricated. Oh, boy. They also openly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They also. So they're not denialist. by japanese troops through the 1937 nanjing massacre were exaggerated or fabricated oh boy uh they also openly yeah yeah yeah they also so they're nudging denialists they're uh they're they're sex slave denialists uh they openly call for the restoration of the monarchy and the institution of shinto as a state religion um abe like abe like has continually said that uh uh the sex slaves like did it were sex slaves were there voluntarily.

There's another thing. But Hillary Clinton just tweeted that Prime Minister Abe was a champion of democracy and a firm believer that no economy, society, or country can achieve its full potential if you leave women behind. Well, you know. She tweeted that! Look, look, to be fair, to be fair tweeted to be fair to be fair to be fair all right both abe and uh nobu sikakishi did in fact believe in using women to fuel the economy just not in that way yeah um he also there's there's another thing that so probably the most like famous most controversial thing was so there's the shrine called the um yasukuni shrine which is it's the shrine that's dedicated to soldiers who like died

serving the japanese emperor and in in this so there's this thing called the book of souls that has like lists of names right of just like the other people who died and 1068 of the people who were of the people in that book are people who were convicted of war crimes and there are also 14 class a war criminals who either died or were executed who are convicted of war crimes and there are also uh 14 class a war criminals who either died or were executed who are considered martyrs there and uh abe fucking like visited there and like prayed and shit and this pissed off everyone this is like there are lots of people who have gotten mad at me already for celebrating abe's death and uh my my my official line on this is if abe didn't want me to celebrate fucking death, maybe he shouldn't have celebrated the lives of the people who killed my fucking family.

So fuck them. Yeah. So he's not a great dude. He's real bad. Problematic dude. The other thing we should mention, too, before we go into sort of like the details of the shooting is that there is an election actually but but by the time this episode drops i think the election will have happened um where there is a real chance that the liberal democratic party is going to sort of like just fucking sweep it because liberal democratic party immediately starts blaming the

left for this uh there's a whole bunch of i mean just absolutely horrifying stuff where they're blaming uh korean people who live in uh live in Japan, which if you know anything about Japanese history, when that stuff starts happening, like in 1923 after the Kanto earthquake, a bunch of people just started blaming Koreans for the whole thing. And they fucking literally exterminated almost the entire Korean population in several major Japanese cities. And so this stuff is very scary. korean population in several major japanese cities and so this stuff is very scary uh it's possible this is going to set off a like a an incredible right-wing lyrics japanese politics and there's a chance that this this this could be the actual thing that like full-on triggers japan like we are being and you know going back into sort of just being a pure fascist empire so this is not yeah that that part

is really bad the motivation for the assassination is still at least at time of recording still slightly unclear very unclear according according to some politicians and news media we do know the suspect is hideo kojima so that you can you can infer a little bit based on so yeah there's like French politicians and a Greek news channel who are using pictures of video game developer Hideo Kojima and passing them off as the shooting

suspect which is really funny it is actually funny pictures of Kojima like inside like a Russian like communist hat fucking thing pictures of kojima like inside like a russian like communist hat fucking thing pictures of him wearing a joker shirt and standing in front of a che cavarra picture and they're using this as proof that it's by a left-wing terrorist and it's actually video game developer hideo kojima it's yeah so in terms of like I guess what we know about the actual shooter

um we don't know that much is a 42 year old guy who was a a former veteran of the uh of the the Japanese self-defense force he was he was a navy guy which I guess partially explains why he can shoot a gun um but yeah the details are really murky what we've got at time of recording is the japanese police saying that it wasn't because of a political thing and that it was because of a group that he was that abe was a member of who the fuck knows what that means that can mean any number of things i i'm not going to speculate live on here because i i don't know uh yeah but also it was extremely funny and we should we should talk about the weapon that was yeah this is why this is one of the reasons why it's extremely funny and we should probably gonna hand this over to james because james is a bit a bit more of an expert in

this type of uh diy weaponry so what great what the fuck is going on with this homemade gun yeah this shit yeah this shit is fucking this shit this is crazy um so funny yeah it's extremely funny it's extremely funny that all these people with 50 000 followers on twitter who quote and quote do osin like immediately uh label this a 3d printed gun which it's not uh it does not look this gun no this gun is being held together with duct tape like that is that that is the kind of weapon that we are dealing with here this is this is a homemade gun like held together with fucking duct tape. It is extremely...

He got blown up by an electric blunderbuss. It is... There could very well be 3D printed parts around it, but it's not looking... It's not like an FGC9 or anything. It's a weird

electronic pipe duct taped or anything. No. It's a weird, like, electronic pipe duct-taped together shotgun. Yeah, it's... I think perhaps if people don't understand, we should, like, break down how firearms work broadly and then how this one works specifically. Sure. Right? So, like, there's no reason why you should be familiar with this,

but, like, you need something to explode, something to make it explode, and something to go at the end, and a way to make sure it only goes in one direction right uh so what this character has done is seemingly it's yeah it's like a blunderbuss or a musket in that it seems to be like muzzle loaded from the front uh and uh yeah i'm looking at it now and it really is just covered in duct tape uh i tweeted a picture of it it's again yeah this shit is uh it's very old-fashioned he seems to have made his own powder too like it was very very smoky which you can do i'm not gonna tell you how to do it but uh

it's a thing that that is possible and so essentially from what i'm seeing here it looks like it's like a piezoelectric ignition, which then ignites this homemade powder that he had. And then he's put something in. A shotgun means it doesn't have rifling, right? So it doesn't impart spin on the projectile. So he's basically got two pipes, a piezoelectric igniter, some homemade powder. And then he could have put nails in there.

He could have put a cast lead ball uh anything bolts and this wasn't the only homemade weapon he had when police raided his house he had a whole bunch of stuff that is that look it looks out of like it looks like it's out of like fallout or something it is like there was one like blunderbuss that had nine different barrels all duct taped together it's like exposed wiring exposed circuit boards like it's it's like it's extremely janky yeah it's like i'm not entirely sure that the uh the nine barrel one the central barrel isn't touched by the by the structural duct tape and i'm not sure that the uh the nine barrel one the central barrel isn't touched by the by the structural duct tape and i'm not sure that it wouldn't have moved in one direction or the other when he fired it it's really incredible yeah i think there's a there's like a yoga i can't see what he's put something on the he's made a butt stock with that one so like he can shoulder it i guess and i don't

know if that's like a piece of tire or what, but yeah. Yeah. This is not a precision weapon. Wooden boards. There's like some type of like reflect. It looks almost like a smartphone's attached to some of the wiring. I wonder if that's what it is. There's some like reflective screen that looks like it's like, like an electronic control box, which could just be like an old smartphone or something.

Yeah. I wondered if he could, because that's what you use for for an improvised explosive device right it's a uh it's a cell phone to actuate it so it could be that maybe he had a plan to just put it near where rba was going to be and then call it and then have it go off that would be well i mean no this this is a much better this is a much better assassination it has the stock so i'm guessing i'm guessing he would he would be planning to hold it. Because otherwise, there's no reason to put the buttstock there.

But who knows? This guy's operating on a different level. We have no way to know what he was thinking. At least not at the moment. What he was thinking was, I want to kill Shinzo Abe with my pipes and planks. And he did it!

He's exactly... whatever you think of him this man did successfully kill shinzo abe with a gun held together by duct tape it's yeah pretty impressive like i i think the other thing about this is kind of impressive is a he so it so he there were there were two barrels on it that each fired and he he managed to hit him from like a pretty good distance away like we don't have have, there's no video that directly, well, at least not that's out yet, that like directly shows the shooter. We have a lot of video because Abe is giving a speech, right? And so we have a bunch of video of like filming Abe.

And because of where it is coming from off screen, like that was a pretty good distance. And as best I can tell, he only hit Abe. I don't think, I haven't seen any reports of anyone else getting hit. So I, remarkably impressive. That is actually kind of slightly surprising. Yeah. There was no one else hit. It's like, he just got the guy he was reacting to.

Yeah, it's like that, that is genuinely pretty rare in assassinations. For like, basically like a homemade blunderbust cannon. Yeah. Is like surprisingly, surprisingly controlled and accurate yeah i've just found a picture of it with the uh cyberpunk 27 2077 logo underneath it which is pretty great oh that rules yeah this does rule uh yeah he he did manage to cause it could have just put like a large massive lead ball in it i guess um yeah whatever because i don't think it i i don't think it was one thing so the one the the the one thing i could say about the the that

we guess we know about the ammo is that like there there were like a bunch of like they're one of the a bunch of the reports about the injuries that he suffered we're talking about like he got hit in the back but there were also holes in his neck so okay my my guess is that there was from there was a lot of there's a lot of blood from a lot of different places yeah my guess is it wasn't one thing then but i don't know it the everything that's kind of interesting about this is like the extent to which well okay so like he was like abby was like very clearly dead like people people had like reported him at the scene as having no vitals. And they were like,

yeah, his heart stopped. And they, they helicoptered him to like what? Tokyo. Yeah. I told him Tokyo, but the Japanese government did a very good job of making sure the

press had like no information. And so there was just like, it was like many, many, many hours where they were like pretending that he wasn't dead and like, wouldn't confirm that he was dead. And he's like,

this, this man is clearly dead as shit. Like he, he has gotten blown up by a blunderbuss like in the back his neck's gone his like i mean he's not gone like his neck his neck's been shot his heart has stopped and they just sort of like keep it there for for a a pretty impressively long amount of time and that's the other thing yeah we we know very little about what happened and why um the the press has been keeping the government's been keeping a very tight lid on information about the shooting so far yeah i guess we want to pivot into the gun control side of this sure um i guess okay so the the i mean like there was a mayor shot a few years ago yeah 2007 uh yeah a yakuza

guy shot the mayor of nagasaki so like and like there's a there's been a lot of people like journalists people who are like supposedly japan experts who are like oh this is really rare in japanese culture it's like no it's not people get assassinated like like the japan has a very low rate of gun violence but of that gun violence the the the number of politicians get assassinated is like unbelievably high and you know i mean like there have been there have been a lot of i mean like abe's like grandfather nozuki kishi like got stabbed right after he left office like and he only didn't die because the the the guy who stabbed him claimed that he wasn't trying to kill him he was just stabbing him which is one of the weirdest things i've ever heard which i don't know i i i suspect some yakuza bullshit was going on there but yeah like i japan has assassinations um it there's there's this weird thing where people

think japan is this place that's like like no violence happens like it's a completely orderly society it's like all this all this like weird stuff famously pacifist in japan yeah it's like like this this is a country like this this is a country where people like like even in like the 70s and like through the 80s people would charge like army convoys with sticks and like fight them like this is a country that like like people they they have a sort of apeshit switch that just like Yeah, they have their fair share of like

cults that do acts of violence like this. They have their fair share of political extremists that do acts of violence like this. And like everywhere else in the world stuff just happens sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is

interesting that like um japan has extremely strict gun control right like uh licenses tests background checks uh prohibitions on most people owning and carrying but like it's kind of interesting that this is more of a uh like a like a first amendment question i guess in american terms right like if if you're on the internet enough i'm sure it looks like this person has just googled how to make gun and uh like this is what came up and so i think it's kind of fascinating that that uh that this person has been like aside from their possible connections to any criminal networks but like i know the yakuza

were selling guns to people in myanmar pretty recently so they have access to this yeah yeah and like and the the the mayor who got whacked by yakuza guy like if the yakuza is gonna do like i don't know if yakuza is gonna do a killing like they they like they they have access to weapons they would use a real gun they would use a duct tape together okay so like probably but also like i wouldn't completely rule it out because i wouldn't rule out duct tape together okay so like probably but also like i wouldn't completely rule it out because i wouldn't rule out them just finding some guy and doing this thing the fbi does and it's like hey you're gonna go do an attack now like it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if if they did that as like a plausible and ideal thing but like we don't know um i still don't

think we can rule out that hideo kojima is the mastermind behind this um and it's all i mean it's convoluted enough to be a kojima i know right it is it's just a to plug his next game um just have to add a few like nonsense names to all the people involved like blunderbustman and then it's just it's it's easy easy but yeah it's fascinating that this person was seemingly like maybe had other plans or had tried several other like craft firearms and settled on this one but yeah they have access to a lot of pipes that's for sure did you guys see the yakuza guy who was uh arms dealing to myanmar no no oh for fucking wild uh so he he was like extensively stung by the feds so this guy uh he was yakuza he was part of a like a ongoing sting operation for like several years where he was selling like basically um like trading guns for

drugs and trading guns to buy drugs so he was selling to a couple of groups in myanmar he was selling, like basically, like trading guns for drugs, trading guns to buy drugs. So he was selling to a couple of groups in Myanmar. He was to groups in like the Tamil region and a couple of other people. And he was at least one of the people he thought was a buyer was actually a Fed. And they've captured all of these amazing conversations

where they call the guns like cake and ice cream and like one of the uh one of the things in the uh in the criminal complaint it's a picture of him just with like a um a law like an anti-tank weapon and he's just like giving it like the v sign and he's wearing these yellow aviators and a leather jacket. The way they arrested him was at a steakhouse, I think either in New York or New Jersey, but they lured him into a steakhouse meeting and then he got busted by the feds. But yeah, these guys were trafficking serious stuff,

like surface-to-air missiles and things. They have access to some pretty heavy equipment yeah that's a that's a pretty old like the the yakuza has been sort of like i don't know how you describe it like a kind of like para arm of the japanese state in a lot of ways for a very very long time like there are there have been like yakuza people with basically special forces training um they at they at one point like kidnapped and killed the empress of korea as part of like a thing to like justify starting a war so they are they're very well hooked up i i i don't know it's still unclear to me because like that's the obviously everything again like they're the the ldp has a lot of yakuza connections because kind of okay partially kind of everything is yakuza connections but partially also because the yakuza were like a sort of founding

like political block of the ldp in the first place so who knows like ldp people have gotten like attacked by yakuza people before it could be that it could be something else we sort of just don't know yet um yeah yeah there's nothing identifying this guy like i'm just looking at a picture of him and there's nothing particularly sort of identifying his clothing or anything like that yeah i guess i guess that's the death of shinzo habe yeah extremely funny rest in peace critical support to hideo kojima and all of the other uh freedom fighters oh i guess i guess we can talk a little bit about the international response to this yeah because people have no idea what's

ethnic yeah i mean like so like all the americans are sort of like are doing all american liberals are sort of doing like, are doing, all American liberals are sort of doing, like, oh my god, he was a good guy. It's like, no, he wasn't. This guy was a monster. Okay, I will say this. Both the Chinese and the Korean embassies are being surprisingly diplomatic about it. As in, no one, they haven't, no one has actively insulted him yet. Social media-wise, like... I social media wise politically that's a good move for like inter-country relations yeah but like i okay like i try japanese relationships with korea with south korea or no and north korea are really bad and a lot of the reason why they're really bad

is specifically because of shanzuabe and because of all of his bullshit yeah so they're obviously happy but they're not gonna like rub it well i mean it's it's not clear to me that they wouldn't have done this if this had happened in like the 2010s like it's like these guys really hate each other um yeah i there's been some sort of like people i don't know people are trying to do a taiwan angle on this because abe is like a taiwan supporter but i i i I don't I don't think there's actually that much people want this to have much more geopolitical like significance that it probably actually

will yeah yeah well it's meantime yeah fascist is dead that's always funny it happened it did in fact happen here. Well, it happened over there,

but you know what I mean. It could happen here. Statistically, we are about to do. Yeah, to be fair. Yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't need to resort to the duct tape model in America. No, with the amount of firearms here,

it is sometimes a little surprising how little stuff like this actually happens. There's obviously a lot of work that goes into preventing it, but still, sometimes it's kind of shocking. Yeah, I think if you look at the last 20 years, I think more Japanese politicians have been assassinated than American

politicians. I'm trying to think of an American politician... It's weird, because there's a lot more american politicians and a lot of guns they they they killed they killed uh when they went after gabby giffords they killed someone i think but yeah i don't i'm trying to think of anyone else other than that um not in recent memory the guy who shot reagan is now touring uh yeah but he didn't even kill him that's not even assassination that's just an assassination attempt like yes a very botched one yeah yeah crossover between john hinkley and hideo kojima it's possible that will be the game

i'm just gonna keep referring to the suspect as hideo kojima it's worth noting that uh like he did have armed guards there were uh armed guards present like you can see their guns in their holsters as they take down the the person who shot him uh but they uh they were not on their a game that day yeah that you can see in the video there's like one of the guys is i think trying to like get a bulletproof day yeah that you can see in the video there's like one of the guys is i think trying to like get a bulletproof briefcase in between abe and the guy and just doesn't work he just it just doesn't it just fails completely they had one job they didn't yeah like they operation meat shield they weren't just on they weren't just not on their a-game they completely failed at their own oh yeah it's not like the guy even tried to run away he just like stood there and got arrested

yeah yeah he did not really put much of a did not put up much of a fight yeah yeah he no he didn't i think yeah he uh he went down pretty fast i guess he went with like this small again maybe to conceal it because it looks like he was pretty close yeah that is that is very likely well a very dark day for democracy um dark day for feminism um as hillary clinton said uh anyway yeah luckily they have rahm emanuel as ambassador to japan to comfort them in this difficult time the the ldp are the only people on earth who does who actually deserve rahm emanuel so look if you if you didn't want to have to deal with rahm emanuel you should have taken all that cia money this is this is this is now their curse well i'm sure we'll talk more about

these types of homemade weapons and all that kind of stuff in the future, because it is it is interesting. And, you know, places where places where like actual firearms are hard are harder to get. We're seeing more and more shit like this popping up. Yeah. Yeah. And that will definitely be worth be worth getting into along with 3D printed weapons. All right. Yeah.

Anything else to add? Does that does that do it? Yeah, I think that's a wrap. All right. Yeah. Anything else to add? Or does that do it? Yeah, I think that's a wrap. All right. Well, follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZone Media. See you next time. And critical support to Hideo Kojima. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that just happened here. All right, that's my part done. Chris, what are we talking about today? I have brought you all here today to discuss one of the most sacred and venerable of our political institutions, an institution whose words echo through history and carve the political legal and economic framework of our world i am referring of course to the bread riot hey there we go i love a good bread riot i i do too this is this is a good a non-zero part of why i wrote this episode how how is this how is

this relatable the grain supply seems really stable right now. It's always what everyone says about the grain supply. No one has thrown a Molotov through a bank window in 200 years. I was reliably informed by several Marxist historians that bread riots were over. I'm going to Google Ukrainian wheat harvest as I do every exactly five years the moment just now came up where where I check it every five years let me just oh oh oh uh is that oh dear oh dear is there a problem well let me go eat my fifth wonder bread slice of the day and not think about it uh good stuff all right so yeah let's talk bread

riots yeah we're talking bed right so bread riots are an ancient institution um you can i mean you can find them like very easily as far back as the roman republic yeah it is 80 percent of roman republican politics yeah and like like bread like okay if you wanted to like go further back than that i have no doubt you could like spend probably 10 minutes and find bread rioting in, like, Sumeria or something. I didn't do this, and the reason I didn't do this, even though I'm talking about the history of the bread riot, is that the sort of – the structure of the bread riot is shaped inexorably by the sort of political and economic conditions around it. And the political and economic conditions of ancient Romeome are somewhat similar to us but not really so instead of doing that we're starting in the late 1700s where there are a lot of bread riots but particularly there's a lot of very well-documented bread riots in the uk and france and i guess before we actually like talk about these specific riots we should

we should talk about what a bread right actually is because okay so i mean on a very superficial level a bread riot is when people don't have bread and they riot but the actual response to that and what the riots look like are interesting and sort of complicated um i'm gonna quote now from the book free markets and food riots and this is talking about specifically the 1700s riots but yeah uh food riots took several forms a the blockader entrave that prevented the export of grain from an area in which shortages existed b the price riot or taxation populare in which food was seized by protesters a just price set and the lot sold c agrarian demonstrations in which farmers destroyed

their own produce as a dramatic protest and d theian demonstrations in which farmers destroyed their own produce is a dramatic protest and d the market right in which the crowd took retributive action against commercial agents bakers millers local magistrates in the form of looting or tumultuous assembly to force dealers and local authorities to reduce prices so okay there's a lot of different things going on here uh we're going to get back to the farmers protest stuff like a lot later because the specific kind of like rural like versions of this kind of fade into the background for a couple of centuries um what's happening the urban centers though is really interesting in a lot of ways and it gets at the core of what's going on in these sort of like late 1700s riots um notably the crowds who are doing the rioting are just like they're not

just like seizing the bread and eating it which is a thing that like you would assume they would be doing if they were – it's a bunch of people who are starving and there's bread and they take it, right? But that's actually not what they're doing. What they're doing is essentially negotiating over price. You see this in the sort of price riot thing, right? The thing that they actually do is they seize a bunch of grain and then they sell it off at what at what they sort of like and what they deem a fair price is and you know what this is attempting to do basically is it's it's a it's a very very direct way of trying to get bakers to lower their prices and the other thing that's about these riots is that they are they're very politically sophisticated and they're they're very targeted um there's a thing you hear

a lot and if you've ever read anything about any modern riot uh you will hear just people ranting about how people are destroying blindly destroying their own neighborhoods and it's just like not true riots tend to have sort of a just riots tend to have a sort of political specific political focus on attacking specific targets which is why like you know the first things that go up in a riot are pawn shops liquor stores police stations and uh now stores that think they're employed please badly they literally have specific targets yeah yeah like it it's you know it's it's it's very like all all of all of the stuff that's happening is stuff that has like it's the result of political grievances that people have sort of been accumulating for a long time. And this is also true of these early bread riots too, going back to the book Free Markets and Food Riots.

Protesters did not rampage indiscriminately but focused their wrath on particular individuals and institutions whom the crowd held responsible for unjust practices. Typically, it was not the producers or retailers of food, but the middlemen who were seen as responsible for shortages and price raises, the grain dealers, wholesalers, speculators, and mills. Grain shipments by wagon, ship, and canal bars were seized and distributed among participants or sold at a just price. Warehouses were raided with similar results. Textile workers in 1770 Reams, quote, seized the town's markets, proceeded to sell all the grain in the market at three-quarters of the current price. They then turned their attention to the warehouse and to the granaries of numerous religious houses, which they treated in a similar fashion. degree of political sophistication right they're not targeting sort of farmers or bakers and especially not targeting people who are like well-known and liked in the community they're targeting people who they can directly tie it to grand price speculation and this is a you know in

some sense like this is a demonstration of the kind of like basic contradiction of the market right on the one hand you have bread as this like physical thing that you need to survive and the other hand you have bread as this market commodity and the mark you know as a market commodity it's a sort of speculative asset which people are like buying and selling and hoarding like stocks because not because they actually need to eat it but because they're interested in this sort of market value and the marxists will call this uh the difference between use value or like the value you get from eating a piece of bread and the exchange value which is like the the bread is a commodity that can be traded for the commodities. And,

you know, like this is, this isn't sometimes like this is behind a lot of like the housing crisis right now. You have a bunch of people who buy houses and apartment buildings that, you know, not because they need to live in them, but as an asset that will appreciate over time,

you know, like appreciate and value over time, like stocks do. But this means that people who like need houses to like live in them, like don't get a house because they're being held by people who are trying to get their value to appreciate and the goal of these riots is basically to prevent bread from becoming an exchange value that is to sort of like market commodity user speculation and turn them back into use values but even again here this is interesting

right because it's not like these people are like like-market, anti-capitalist, right? They tend not to sort of just seize the bread outright. What they're doing is they're insisting on buying it at a specific quote-unquote just price. place um the obvious explanation like okay the people are rioting because the price of bread is increasing but that's that's not actually like an explanation right it's just it's a precondition but there's a lot of places where bread price is rising you're never going to riot so a lot of of people have studied this and try to figure out what is happening uh the the the second explanation that historians come up with is something called the moral economy um and and in this model people aren't just reacting to like a price increase what they're actually reacting to is what becomes known as the entitlement gap which is this gap between people what people think they're entitled to based on like the morality and how hard they work etc etc and like what they actually get and so you know in less academic language it's people going like i'm getting

price gouged. This is bullshit. Bring the prices down to what they're supposed to be. And that's part of it. There's another theory that argues that food riots are driven by these really complicated sort of like webs of horizontal social relations and things like networks of wives and political organizations and sort of like alliances that happen inside of villages stuff like that and that uh you know and these groups sort of like react to price increases by banding together and forcing people to lower prices um now notably i one of the like the things i listed in those that like web of things right his wife's networks as the sort of like first community web release the food riots um and this is this this is, turns out to be

important. Women are often like the leaders and initiator of bread riots and the sort of theory behind it is that they're actually the ones like buying the bread and so they're sort of, they're more in tune with disturbances of food prices, etc. And, you know, food price increases are a threat to what academics

call social reproduction or in essence like taking care of yourself, your family and your household, like making sure you can sort of support and raise your children. So there's – well, so the good version of it is you're taking care of the people around you. The cynical version of it is it's social reproduction because you're creating another generation of workers for capital. But because women end up doing an enormously disproportionate amount of that work, they wind up in the streets first because they're the people who are most acutely sort of sensitive to this stuff happening. Yeah, and what's – and the other thing that's sort of worth noting here is that riots are – these kind of bread riots are usually urban affairs and they're sort of they're the product of people who live in cities right it's you're sort of artisans you're industrial workers there's this like fighting corps of teenagers who seem to show up in all these bread riots and uh thankfully that that

that never happens today we do not have a bunch of teenagers who show up every time to fight the cops when something bad happens no experience with this yeah i've certainly never seen anything like that happen do these other countries have the feds put piles of bricks out on the street well you know this is why we haven't they haven't gotten to that level of entrapment yet they're not powerful enough this is before the development of the police state. Yeah, they didn't have an FBI to burn down the third precinct. Yeah, they haven't invented the agent provocateur yet. Yeah, a cunning false flag.

So what's interesting about the 18th century riots, though, is I've been talking a lot about how these are led by women. And that's true. But specifically, the 1700s ones tend to be more gender balanced than later riots, and I'm going to read this from the historian Lynn Taylor because it's one of the funniest things I've ever read in my life, and I love it. Cynthia Bolton's study of the French Flower War of 1775 makes clear the mixed nature of traditional food riots. Indeed, the number of men involved had increased significantly in the flower wars due to the changing male economic, social, including familial,

and political status during the Ancien Regime. Theirs was a life of precarious and declining social-economic position, disequilibrium in the family structure and political alienation, one that left them in positions similar to those of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. The men who rioted had, in crucial ways, been feminized. Oh, boy. They are rioting because they've been forced to. This is a thing that literally happened in Myanmar during the uprising. There are kind of local local cultural sort of attitudes there that make it that have made it for a long time, like essentially considered like shameful to touch women's clothing or particular like there's certain things that like you don't wear and that you're not supposed to look at if you see someone dressed that way that are like traditional women's clothing. And so a bunch of male protesters would dress that way and form up and like ranks at the protests because it made the police like uncomfortable and sometimes like back off.

That's extremely cool. Yeah, there's like some literal examples of that in very recent riots. that's sort of happening it's happening in this period too which is that like one of the kinds of things that generates these bread riots is this kind of is is this instability in gender roles and is this sort of instability in in what the role of a person in society is going to be and that i don't know it has a lot of interesting effects and when those effects are riots the stuff the stuff that happens is really cool because you get a lot of sort of like gender roles getting messed up you get a lot of like social ties being broken i guess so the other thing that's going on in this period um that is is important because i because it sort of like foreshadows a lot of what the sort of later bread riots are going to be

about is that and this is this is like the fourth theory of bread riots if the sort of later bread riots are going to be about is that this is this is like the fourth theory of bread riots if you sort of like go through your economic historians of this stuff um they're talking about basically the the late 1700s are are one of the sort of key moments in like the formation of of the modern state and what what this means in terms of food is that control the food supply is moved from from this sort of like parentalistic feudal state thing where on a local level you have guaranteed prices and access to food. And this has shifted to laissez-faire capitalism in which there are no price controls. There's no guarantee you can get food. And subsequent to this also at the same time is the centralization of the military bureaucracy, and the centralization of the military bureaucracy means that they're taking more control of the food supply. Here's from Free Markets and Food Riots again.

Older parentalistic models operating at the local level and assuring a plentiful supply of necessaries at a low price were undermined by new national policies aimed at greater efficiency and market regulation. by new national policies aimed at greater efficiency and market regulation. Spanning a century and more, the policies included such varied activities as enclosure, land concentration, capital intensification of farming, proletarianization, grain exports, taxes, tariffs, and other government efforts to regulate the food supply. Price riots were simply one expression of popular grievances stemming from this broader change. And this is something that's very common uh bread riots are like deeply and intimately linked in the with the ways that food food product the food production

process is changing and specifically linked the link to the ways the food production process is changing because of the state and markets but we're sort of leading into the late 1700s and at this point something happened that no one expected. A bread riot went completely the other direction and irrevocably changed the state and the market itself. And I am talking about history's maybe most famous bread riot. That's right. It's the French Revolution, baby. Liberty, egalité, fraternity, hon-hon.

And this is like – Now, you mean to tell me that the french had a revolution i mean it's kind of it's kind of marginal admittedly the fame that doesn't sound like the french that i know that's true the the the the the modern french have replaced revolution with racism unfortunately but you know look look we're we're in the 1700s. Things are different. Yeah, and so in a second, we're going to talk about the bread riot that changed the history of bread riots in the course of world history forever. But first, do you know who doesn't love bread riots? Mary Antoinette?

Yeah. Yep, who is the primary sponsor of this show. She realized the whole cake thing didn't work out great, so now she's saying, let them have podcasts. Let them cast pods. We're back, and our primary sponsor has been executed by a mob. So, if you are

a member of European nobility, maybe you're a Habsburg, you know, hit us up and uh offer us a sponsorship yeah uh well okay we're going to rewind a little bit before they kill mary antoinette to get to uh how that happened so what one of the things if you read the sort of literature on bread rights one of the things bread right people will talk about over and over again is bread rights being apolitical and they kind of like stretch this to a point what because i mean okay so like like there's a couple levels which doesn't make any sense right like

okay if if you think that bread is being sold at too high a price because people are are gouging you that is political right and then you go out and make them not do that yeah that's politics i people love to say things aren't political when they don't align with like a simple political party like if it if it doesn't line up directly with the kind of approved debate topics between the political parties that dominate things they like to say shit is apolitical but you know starving because of the tax decisions or whatnot is is an inherently political thing yeah and and and deciding that you're not going to starve and taking bread from people is an incredibly political thing yeah that's the politics yeah you have done a politics yeah you've done you've done a lot of politics and you know but but one of the things that that

and the other thing this leads to is if if a if a thing that involves bread suddenly like turns into capital p politics and suddenly you have people doing things that are like well understood as like conventional political gestures immediately everyone stops calling it a bread riot and if but like if you look at what's actually happening it's here's a bunch of people who are mad about the price of bread. They went to change the price of bread. It kind of didn't work. And so instead they overthrew the government.

And this point the french revolution is like well underway um they've stormed the bastille there's a bunch of people in a parliament writing a constitution but like in october of 1789 it's still unclear like how radical any of this is going to be right um at this point it still seems likely that there's going to be a king and not only is there going to be a king the king is still going to be pretty strong and then yeah on october 5th 1789 uh maybe history's most famous bread riot breaks out so 7 000 women who are like incredibly pissed off at the high price of bread in paris march on versailles which is where the royal family of france had been like governing france from for like 100 years and these women are really really

angry and they they they basically forced the royal family to come back with him to paris and i guess it's important to note here that paris and versailles are like 12 miles apart so this isn't like a multi-day journey they just like get mad one day and they wake up and they walk to the next city over and this radically changes the entire direction of the french revolution because once well if the royal family is in versailles right like the the parisian mob doesn't have direct access to them but once that once they're in paris and once once once this bread riot like brings the king to paris suddenly the entire like the entire concentrated political power of the french system is now centered in paris and

is now in a place where subsequent bread riots can actually do stuff and this directly leads to the kings being executed this leads to our sponsors getting guillotined and it it basically it's it's it completely cements uh bread as sort of like the central part of of like one of the central aspects of what the revolution is about like by by the end of the revolution that the the the slogan of the essential aspects of what the French Revolution is about. By the end of the Revolution, the slogan of the revolutionary French working class is bred in the Constitution of 1793. So, you know, you can look at the priorities there and look at

all of this in a sort of extended rolling bread riot. Unfortunately for us, and spoilers to everyone who has not caught up on the end of the French Revolution. The revolution loses and Napoleon takes power. And this is where we enter the era of what's known as the bourgeois revolution.

This is the modern era. And if you've read your like Arab Cobb Swamp, you're sort of very conventional. Like Marxist historians, you're conventional sort cobswam you're like you're sort of very conventional like marx historians you're conventional sort of liberal historians i they will all tell you that the bread riot sort of dies in the early 1800s and that's replaced by like strikes and political protests organized by unions and parties because like the the rural class has been like displaced at the center of history by the industrial working class and that's just like not true um and it's not true in in two senses one it's in the sense that like we have bread riots now but it's also not true because there's another wave of bread riots that are that are very very conventional and very much sort of in in the

classic 1700s mode uh here is uh here's lynn taylor again it is true that the proactive form of protest became common even predomin predominant, by the early 20th century. However, scattered through the periodical literature are accounts of 20th century food riots which look surprisingly like those of the 18th and early 19th century, something not expected in modern industrialized nation-states.

Food riots occurred in northern France in 1911, in Britain during the winter of 1960-1917, in New York in 1917, in Toronto in both 1911, in Britain during the winter of 1960-1917, in New York in 1917, in Toronto in both 1924-1923, in Barcelona in 1918, in Vichy France in 1942, and in northern France throughout the German occupation. The form of protest was remarkably consistent in each, and reminiscent of traditional food riots of earlier centuries. these are these are these are very conventional sort of 18th century bread riots they're led by women they refuse they're led by women who are refusing

to pay higher prices for food and in some sense they kind of are apolitical in that there are various attempts in like basically all of these protests by like organized political organizations to take them over and basically every single, the women who are involved are like, no, absolutely not. There's a very funny one where, I think this is the British one in 1916, 1917, where a bunch of men show up, and the women are like, no, go home.

You can't riot with us. This is our riot. Now, yeah, the British case in particular is also interesting, because this is the middle of World War yeah the the british case in particular is also interesting because this is the middle of world war one and so you know this is the sort of giant presence looming over these these these uh bread riots and you know the government sort of like the government in response to this response to widespread hunger like decrees these price controls on food but farmers are just refusing to obey them. And so women in Mayport organized, and the

result was, quote, when one farmer said he did not care what the government said about price controls, there was bedlam. The women rushed the farmer's cart, and the street was, quote, filled with hooting, yelling women and young people, while potatoes, cabbages, and turnips were flying through the air. The example of Mayport soon spread to other parts of the country. These riots were led by housewives, who had filled the front lines and did soon spread to other parts of the country these riots were led by housewives who had filled the front lines and did much of the fighting although the miners of cumberland were also active in supporting their wives efforts both as at added bodies strengthening the crowds but also through the miners association of the working class institutions so a i i don't

know i i had to include this specifically because the image of a bunch of people throwing cabbages at farmers is extremely funny to me. But the other thing I think is interesting here is you can start to see the shifts from the sort of 18th century riots to these ones on a social level where – in the 1800s, you're dealing with sort of like town and sort of peasant cultural groupings who are supporting the protest. But by the 1900s, bread riots are being backed by like organized political institutions. There's another one in New York in 1917, which is remarkable for being, it's self-organized by like, it's remarkable because it's self-organized by women, even though this is like the part of New York they're in

is a socialist party stronghold. But the socialist party aren't the people who do it. It's the women who are like married in a lot of cases to the socialist party or to some extent are in it but are sort of operating autonomously. And they do this thing where they sort of like they start setting and forcing these boycotts of like shops that are deemed to be like press gouging levels, and they fight the cops, and they do a bunch of stuff. shops that are deemed to be at press gouging levels, and they fight the cops, and they do a bunch of stuff. And the ones I mentioned in Toronto earlier are interesting, because those ones actually do have an organization in the beginning, but in keeping with the tradition of the bread right, the organization was the Jewish Women's Labor League. And these are remarkably effective political movements. They win their demands really quickly um i'm gonna read one more account because it just rules uh lester golden and tema

caplan have both examined food riots in barcelona in 1918 part of a wave of riots which occurred between june 1917 and march 1919 throughout spain as in previous cases these riots erupted because of devastating price inflation a thing we know nothing about now this time resulting from the post-war collapse of the economy the participants were all women they forbade men's participation and the actions were led first by radical republicans and then by a small group of female anarcho-syndicalists the women's demands were simple and straightforward they demanded lower prices for foods they attacked bread shops and coal wag as it took over a ship laden with fish when police and civil guard attempted to break

out the women crowds of women on the street the woman turned on them stripping some of the officers of their pants spanking or thrashing them and sending them home yes yes it rules so much. That's, that's, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. It's so good. Perfect. Perfect. This is the energy we need in every century that human beings have ever inhabited. It's amazing. The historian's parenthetical note after that is, quote, rather undermining their authority in the process, which, yes. I would imagine so, yes.

their authority in the process which yes i would imagine so yes if you are if you are being spanked by a crowd you have lost control of that crowd that that that is that is fair to say and so they they it takes about three weeks and they they win and prices drop 30 percent so good good for them yeah that's a pretty solid look hey i think i think most of the people listening would do some hardcore spanking if they could get a 30 cut on their grocery bill yeah it's it's a look i'm just saying it is much harder to pull down a modern cop's trousers because they're wearing like so much weird shit on top of it but belt technology has improved tremendously since then yeah however comma where there is a will there's a way yep if i learned one thing from high school it's that anyone can be pantsed

just you just you just have to you just have to you just have to want it hard enough you have to want it more than the person wants to be wearing their pants that's right that's right you have to believe so there's one more of these bread riots that's worth talking about which also is not conventionally framed as a bread riot but is entirely keeping with everything i've said here uh the february revolution in russia um so the february revolution is the revolution that actually overthrows the czar uh there's another revolution which is the october revolution which is the one where the bolsheviks come to power but that's that's that's a separate one.

They're fighting a completely different group of people. The February Revolution has all of the sort of key factors of a bread riot, right? There's these massive bread lines. Women are pissed off by lack of food. The revolution itself is led by women whose, like, male comrades had literally told them don't, like, don't go out and do a protest on that day because this is International Women's Day. had literally told him don't like don't go out and do a protest on that day because this is international women's day but the like all all of the men who are like doing this are are convinced that like the conditions aren't right for revolution so they try to get everyone to stay home and everyone's just like no and you know like the the sort of key difference between

the like this bread riot and the other bread riots we're talking about is that you know the the demands of the of the the march on international women's day 1917 are overtly political like they are chanting down with the czar and they are trying to overthrow the government and this you know this is another thing that has this sort of like incredible impact on on how the bolshevik revolution is is sort of working right like lenin winds up using peace bread and land as one of the sort of like central like bolshevik slogans because part of because a huge part of what the revolution is is just a bread riot and that that's where we're that's that's where we're going to leave it today with the world uh just completely and utterly transformed by another bread riot. And next episode, we're going to get to the

modern bread riots, because those are also interesting. And yeah, we're going to once again prove everyone who insists that bread riots don't happen anymore wrong. A thing that I didn't know existed until I started reading this and am now incredibly mad about. Yeah, so go out

there and have a bread riot. Yeah, pants a cop. Or some other kind of riot, you know? A guacamole riot. A mate riot. You could have some kind of corn riot. You could have a riot over Ortolan. That would be a unique kind of riot. Don't think anyone's ever rioted over that, that bird that, that's such a beautiful songbird

that eating it is a sin. So you have to like hide your shame underneath a sheet. So God doesn't see you eat it. Have a riot over one of those, you know? Yeah. Do that. Yep. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. i love how often the holocaust has been trending over the last year that's good sign that's a thing you want to see trending in 2022 um it's it could happen here all right chris continue with your bread riots yeah we're back there's more riots uh now last episode we talked about historians declaring the end of the bread death of the bread riot and like in the 60s and early 70s like i i think that this this is one of the the ways you can tell that period people genuinely thought the world was going to get better was that like they genuinely believed that like the centralized state and like capitalism can always provide foods. You want to bread riots anymore.

You get March. I mean, you if you were born in that period, you like grew up and people were fleeing from Deinonychus in the street and like getting getting eaten by woolly mammoths. And then by the time you're 40, you've got the telegraph. So I get it right. I get why people think that progress was really good back in those eras. Because they wiped out the Deinonychuses. Yeah, I mean, you have seen Howard Taft

building the pyramids. Right, exactly, exactly, exactly. You have seen the future rise up literally in front of you. Yeah, you went from eating mud to Hershey's chocolate. It's an incredibly impressive sort of sort of period of modern historical evolution and you know and one of

the things you see like like you'll see like marxist calling bread rise primitive rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced by proper marxist class politics and then like every single one of these people was like the most wrong anyone like basically from that period until until the moment uh the the the end of history guy starts writing they are the most wrong people like on the planet well it's also funny to hear that idea that like there there was something primitive about these people's class analysis because you look at like the brothers gracky in ancient republican rome a lot of the shit they're saying is not at all primitive class analysis like it's pretty developed yeah and i mean like the the marxist will do some long argument about how

like oh they have they have false consciousness they're not trying to abolish the class system or whatever and it's like well i mean like i look at the martin the marxist didn't abolish the class system either, so like you know but like, yeah, like, these are very, and this is something we're going to be coming back to a lot this episode, is that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors, and

the sort of modern version of this is, in the 1970s not only did bread riots not end, there's a new kind of bread riot, and these riots are collectively known as the IMF riots. Panama, Tunisia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary, Venezuela, Jordan, the Ivory Coast, Niger, Iran, Albania, India, and Nepal. Were you just doing like the wacko Warner song? That's literally all the – I found the chart that has all of them.

It's like there's just so many. They just keep happening. Again, that's only until 1992 like they're they're still happening and and the other thing i should mention is those are just the ones that are called the imf riots there's a bunch of other riots some of which are bread riots that aren't called the imf riots because they're not really sort of like directly involved with the imf and and that this raises the question of what the fuck is an IMF riot? And the answer is that, unfortunately to, to understand why people are throwing molotovs through bank windows,

we have to talk about banking a little bit. I, I have talked, I guess at length. Yeah, I apologize, but we will, we will get back to the riots. Damn it.

I promise we just have to do a little bit of banking. So yeah, I've talked to him extensively on the show about the crisis of the seventies. And you know, it back to the riots damn it i promise we just have to do a little bit of banking so yeah i've talked up extensively on this show about the crisis of the 70s and you know the short version is that uh in a thing that is completely unrecognizable today the global economy collapses inflation skyrockets uh countries across the global south start taking out these adjustable rate well they've been taking out these adjustable rate loans and then suddenly their interest rates spike and they start defaulting on these loans. Here's free markets and food riots talking about it.

Although the causes of the crisis run deeper, by the 1970s, many smaller nations began to feel the strains of insolvency as a result of a worldwide recession, successive oil price shocks, declining world commodity prices, and accelerating debt service obligations. Accelerating debt service obligations. So basically, like, if you're a small country, right, the price of everything you need to buy, like oil, is going up. And the price of what you can sell, which is like commodities like copper or tin, is collapsing. And these lead to what are like these massive, what are called balance of payments crises. And so we should talk about what a balance of payments crisis is. And this winds up being really important here. There's this story about Che Guevara, like literally right after the Cuban revolution.

He goes to the US and he's in this meeting with a bunch of bankers. And he's trying basically to get Cuba's gold reserves and Cuba's sort of like foreign exchange reserves out of the US. The US doesn't steal it. And what's funny about it is all the bankers who are talking to him like all of them report afterwards like well wow this guy talks like a banker not a communist

and the specifically the reason they were like oh hey this guy talks like a banker is that he knew what balance of payments was um the short answer is that a balance of payments crisis is when there's more money flowing out of the country than there's is coming into it and the result of this is that you run out of money uh and particularly the thing you run out of is american dollars which is the thing that you need to like buy oil so you get these countries that are massively in debt and they run out of money and the only thing they could do is turn to like it's turned to the international monetary fund or the imf who like the only description of the imf that i have is that like they're they're they're

basically like if the cartoon bank of evil from Despicable Me like ran the entire world economy. They – so the IMF shows up to these countries and is like lol, la mau, eat shit. And they force these countries to implement – in order to get loans, they force them to implement what are called stabilization programs because of the quote conditionality of the loans. They have all these like this really technical, boring boring like neoliberal like legal language for it i the like the the this is this is all sort of banker speak for if you wanted other loans you can buy food you're gonna have to rob every single person you know and hand them and hand us all your money uh this eventually becomes known as structural adjustment programs this is all of this sort of technical language disguise what's going. But what's actually going on is that in order to pay off – in order to pay the bankers for these loans, they are taking food for the mouths of children. Yeah, here's a more technical, I guess, explanation of what's happening here.

Austerity programs include stern measures or shock treatments that trigger market mechanisms to stimulate export production and increase government foreign exchange reserves. So, according to the theory, currency devaluation makes third world exports more competitive in the international market. Reduced public spending curbs inflation and saves money for debt repayment. Privatization of state-owned corporations generate more productive investment and reduce public payrolls. Elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign investment lures more efficient export firms. Cuts in public subsidies for food and basic necessities help to get prices right. Benefiting domestic producers, wage restraints, and higher interest rates reduce inflation and enhance competitiveness, and import can serve for exchange for debt servicing.

So this has winners and losers. And the losers are like everyone in the country that's happening to. And this is pretty cross cross class, like these policies, they hurt workers, they hurt peasants, they hurt small shopkeepers. The middle class is annihilated, just like people who are consumers who buy goods and even the sort of like the local capitalists just get screwed by this because what the imf is doing is forcing everyone to have lower wages taking massive benefit cuts and massively spiking the price of food and you know i i i i once again remind everyone that uh this this is explicitly what the federal reserve is trying to do to us right now.

Like, this is the kind of stuff that they're talking about in order to curb inflation, is to just pay everyone less, make everyone take benefits cuts, and then increase the price of shit. So the winners of this are, like, six bureaucrats, international investors, and, like, a class of, like like absolutely horrific large agricultural landowners and this this has about the effect that you would expect it to um between 1976 and late 1992 some 146 incidents of protest occurred reaching a peak from 1983 to 1985 and continuing to the present without attenuation now the authors who are writing this, right.

They're writing this in 1994. So when they say they continue to the present without attenuation, they mean that's 94. But the thing is the last one of those riots ended like a week ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're still,

they're still going. So, and these, these, these riots are slightly different than the sort of like classical bread riots, right? Because they are about the increasing price of food. They're also about the increasing price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or cuts to services, stuff like that. Here's a quote about like what these things actually look like. Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible for the depredations marches and protesting crowds converge on major thoroughfares and government buildings such as the treasury or the national

bank or the legislature the presidential palace looters attack supermarkets and clothing stores where fuel and transportation subsidies are part of the austerity package, buses and gasoline stations are burned. The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks on travel agencies, foreign automobiles, luxury hotels, and international travel agencies. Well, not that too, but also international agency offices. And this is going to sound familiar from last episode. It turns out that just like the 18th century people, the attacks of these things are very targeted. The sort of forms of resistance have changed over time because we do have modern political organizations, right?

We get general strikes. Sometimes you get just noble bread riots. Sometimes you get these things that are like large protests, and then they turn into riots. And what's interesting about them is that these are very sort of cross-class movements, right? You have your sort of classical sectors of the urban poor. You have like particularly in the global south, you have your shanty dwellers. You have unemployed youth.

You have small street vendors who are like a crucial sort of element of these things. You have like just your guy selling cigarettes on the street um you get you also get like parts of the industrial working class you get sometimes you get unions uh a lot of times you get students uh you get like public employees sometimes you get professional groups one of the interesting things i was reading about this i've read like a few books in this era who were talking specifically and this this is in like the 90s right we're specifically talking about professional groups in sudan and it's like it's like okay it's it's 1994 people are talking about professional groups in sudan backing rioters against the government it's 2019 people are talking about professional groups backing protests against

the government it's like it's i don't know like there's this extent to which all of these things, the IMF riots have just been happening over and over and over again for about 50 years. And a lot of the elements are incredibly similar. One of the other things that's going on here is that these protests are driven by mass urbanization. Typically, austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price hikes resulting from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services, I just know that a lot. began a pattern of violence peru remained a hotbed of austerity protests with students and workers

demonstrating against increased food prices in 1997 followed by followed in 1978 by a march of public employees over state layoffs this protest though cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding office buildings was dispersed by police tear gas so like that that's that's a very sort of yeah yeah like we i mean this... I mean, this was happening in Peru, like, last year, right? Actually, was it last year or was it earlier this year? I don't know. Time is fake. And that's actually...

Like, the other thing that's sort of startling about this is, like, the places that riot are still the places that are rioting in, like, an enormous number of cases. It's the same places. Sometimes it's the same places sometimes it's the same people um i think probably the the most famous protest of the sort of era is it's called the caracazo i'm pronouncing that extremely badly but my apologies uh in venezuela which is a reaction to a 1989 like 50 to 100 increase in train and bus fares and there are these are like these are massive riots um at least a hundred and probably like a couple of thousand people are like gunned down by the army and three years later a relatively unknown colonel named hugo chavez tried to overthrow the government that had carried out the price increases. Chavez is better known for his other works, but he's the sort of tie between the IMF riots and the sort of next phase of political resistance to this stuff, which is known as the anti-globalization movement in sort of the 90s and early 2000s and the thing that's interesting about these things is that i don't know the imf rights don't go very well like either they lose or at

best what they were able to get was like temporarily stall some of these reforms and i say like reforms quote-unquote like the sort of neoliberal like slashing benefits if they were able to pause them a bit and then they would sort of get restarted after people left the street but in the late 90s and early 2000s people start winning um argentina is sort of famously forced to like tell the imf to fuck off and they default on their loans after this like enormous autonomous uprising in 2001 that like very nearly overthrows the government and forces out like five heads of state there's the whole sort of pink tide in latin america the imf gets like driven out of a bunch of countries in east asia and then 2008 uh the entire world economy collapses which it turns out is bad for everyone

and this does this does two things for our story uh the first is that like countries are suddenly going broke again and because they're like just completely broke, the IMF is just back and is able to sort of enforce programs on places like Greece and Spain. And the second thing it did was set off an enormous wave of bread riots and uprisings. And I think, like, most people, if you tell them that 2008 set off, like, an enormous wave of, like, protests, they're immediately going to go, oh, you mean the Arab Spring? And I am talking about that, but that's actually not specifically what I'm talking about here. There were like immediately in 2007, 2008, immediately after there was another massive wave of bread riots that just everyone has completely forgotten unless the thing that you do specifically is study bread riots. Here's from a's from the a piece called a political economy of the food riot in 2007 and 2008 the world witnessed a return of one

of the oldest forms of collective action the food riot countries where protests occurred ranged from italy where pasta protests in september 2007 were directed at a fail at the failure of the government to prevent a 30 rise in the price of pasta, to Haiti, where protesters railed against President Préval's impassive response to the doubling of the price of rice over the course of a single week. Other countries in which riots were reported included Uzbekistan, Morocco, Guyana, Mauritania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, and Argentina. And some commentators have estimated that 30 countries experienced some sort of food pressure over the period.

Now, we've been talking a lot about food consumers in this because that's mostly the people who are involved in bread riots but you know as was happening in 1700 with the sort of original stuff like this whole time this is going on there's this sort of massive shift in the global food economy happening where and this has been happening for a long time now but it's it's sort of it's been accelerating the last about half a century which is that the number of people who are like peasants and who produce food for themselves has been massively declining and people are getting forced into cities and this means that there's you know there's there's been a number of other things that have gone along with this uh there's been this massive increase in like cattle production for example you get all these monocultures um and another thing i think i've mentioned before is the world trade organizations like

agreement on agriculture like outlaws agricultural subsidies for the global south but you know the u.s is still allowed to have like farm subsidies which means that you know if when you're when you enter these free trade agreements you get all of this like enormously cheap food from the u.s dumped into all these other countries and you know if you're a mexican farmer suddenly you can't compete with all of this food from the u.s because the food from the u.s is cheap because the american government subsidizing it but the mexican government can't and this just like absolutely annihilates any attempt by a country to maintain food security by like producing food for themselves and this this sort of class of like self-sufficient peasant farmers who'd been you

know they support themselves by producing their own food and selling to the market these people just get annihilated and they get forced into what's called sort of casualized labor that they you know that they the later version of this is like uber right but they're forced into gig work they're kicked out of sort of the normal economy and you know because they don't have sort of fixed contracts or you know a lot of people are working with no contracts at all. They're enormously insecure. And once these people are forced into the labor market, changes in the global economy can make them almost immediately unable to afford food. the the less sort of economically secure you are the the more the more you're affected by price increases which is obvious but it's worth saying because it dictates a lot of like who does

bread riots and yes so governments are not entirely like blind to this and their concern is that they're going to get overthrown and so you see a bunch of governments trying to respond with sort of price stabilization stuff i think the most famous example of this is that like the Egyptian army like literally controls like an enormous number of Egypt's bakeries and they like directly run them and they directly run them so they can control the price of bread to try to like stop revolutions from happening. they just kind of stopped working. Here's the political economy of the food riot again. Over the year between 2007 and 2008, the 130% increase in the global price of maize and the 75%

increase in the price of rice, with similar price increases in soybeans and other major food commodities. Yes, there are these massive food price increases, and this does the thing that massive food price increases does, right? There's's immediately enormous riots and there's this cycle that happens where the protesters you know the protesters immediately blame the government for

the crisis and then the government is like well it's actually not our fault because uh you know it's happening because of things outside of our control and the protesters are like oh it doesn't matter who we elect uh they do the same things and like they're and the protesters are like oh it doesn't matter who we elect i they do the same things and like they're both kind of right like the government is just like fucking these people but it's also true that the sort of like the whole food system is designed to take like the means of food production out of the hands of like the workers who need the food and putting them in the hands of like you know enormous corporations and as people in places like sri lanka which we're going to talk more about later, continually emphasize, like, this food sovereignty issue is as much of a political issue, like, it's an incredibly political issue.

And it's as much, like, what's at stake in these bread riots as the sort of IMF and austerity stuff. Okay, this is probably a good place for an ad break, but I can't think of a transition. This is probably a good place for an ad break, but I can't think of a transition. Yeah, you know who isn't allowed to eat is the products and services that support this podcast, all actively starving to death. So get these deals now while you still can. And we're back. So. All right, now we're going to talk a little bit about the Arab Spring.

We're not going to talk an enormous amount about it because that's a whole thing um but if if you've been following like the stuff people have written about the arab spring i there's an enormous number of people who spend like a lot of their time arguing about whether or not it was actually sparked by food prices and you know you'll get a lot of analysts who argue that like food prices in tunisia where the air spring starts like weren't really higher than normal and what you're seeing instead is like well it's not actually food prices it's just that there's a generation of people who've been farmers but like can't support themselves anymore who've been forced into like fighting non-existent wage labor in cities

and like that that is part of what's happening but i think there's a sort of like fundamental misunderstanding of what causes a bread riot right like you know as you talked about in like in the first episode one of the things that causes bread riots is it's not actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them right what says what sets off bread riots is people is people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve now obviously like if the price of bread increases by 200% you're gonna get a lot of people going like fuck this I worked my ass off

and now I can't feed my family we deserve better than this it's time to riot but sometimes even if bread prices are stable you can get a thing where everyone like you know the amount of bread is bad everything is expensive and one day someone wakes up and just goes, fuck this.

I deserve better, and they do a bread riot. And this is the case – and when that kind of thing is happening, right? When you're dealing with moral economy stuff, when you're dealing with this gap between what people think their life should be versus the fact that their lives are just absolutely terrible even if you like decrease the price of bread that's not actually necessarily going to like stop people from rioting and if you look at like occupy for example too like you know that's also happening in this period like what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly the price of food it's the sense that like yeah i've been screwed by and i've been screwed by the ruling class and i deserve better than this and and this is this is what you see in tunisia and one of the things what you see in sort of tunisia and syria is that like a lot of the uprisings like they have

this huge sort of rural core with with this population of this huge population of people who've been kicked out of the agricultural sector and you know and like that that is a bread riot right and it's a bread right in the sort of double sense of it's the people who used to be involved in grain production and now can't be, and then also that people have hit this sort of expectation gap thing. And what I think is sort of interesting about this is that these bread riots, these rural bread riots, they're the closest thing we have to the classical 20th century revolution. That's the thing that causes the 20th century revolutions are the first generation of people who are

the first two or three generations of people who come from the countryside into the factories are the people who do revolutions. But the thing is, this is the 21st century, not the 20th century. If you get kicked out of your farm, there's no job in a factory like you're just unemployed and you know and this changes the dynamics of sort of everything and and i think okay like what people like broadly know the course of like the arab spring in the 2011-2014 wave of uprisings

they happen they get crushed largely but there was another wave of these sort of riots protests and uprisings that started in haiti in like in mid-2018 over this massive fuel price hike and here is a partial list of places that like people have like rioted in in in large numbers since 2018 haiti sudan algeria honduras chile iraq hong kong iran like four times lebanon like three times colombia like three times uh a couple of things happened in france there was puerto rico there was papua there's a there was indonesia we're in our second ecuador one now there's catalonia like people ride it in the u.s there were massive indigenous roadblocks like in canada a ukimedia compa went up. There was stuff in Socotra.

Like, there were two different ways of protests in India. There was, like, Belarus. There was Kazakhstan. There was Kyrgyzstan. There was Uzbekistan. There was Mali. There was stuff in Nigeria. There was stuff in Libya.

Like, there was stuff in Sri Lanka we're about to get to. This whole thing has been happening, like, everywhere. And it's been intensifying in the last sort of, like, three or four years. We're now basically in, like like year four of this cycle. And obviously like every single one of these protests has their own like local political conditions. And like a lot of these aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread. They're just about sort of other stuff that's happening. But like of the uprisings that I mentioned, like something like 15 of them are directly about the price of food or the price of like transitive fuel.

And we're going to talk a little bit about sort of two or the price of like transitive fuel and we're going to talk a little bit about sort of two of the most recent like protest waves um we're going to talk about ecuador we're going to talk about sri lanka because they're they're two very different kinds of protests even though they're both kind of bread riots or at least they're i mean they're both very much the modern equivalents of it. But they look very different. And there's just, I think, I don't know, I think there's like interesting reasons why. Yeah, so we're going to start with like with Sri Lanka. On a very basic level, Sri Lanka has a giant balance of payments crisis.

This is, you know, this is a sort of like large scale political version of famines, right? Like there's plenty of food and fuel in the world but the government of sri lanka does not have dollars to buy it with now the reason the government doesn't have dollars to like buy fuel with is because the government is basically like an incredibly corrupt dictatorship that keeps like importing luxury goods it didn't need and they did a bunch of like tax breaks on rich people and suddenly the government was broke. And everyone was like, wow, how did that happen? It must have just been the pandemic. And it was like, no, you gave all the money to rich people.

And then as the crisis sort of went on, the government decided to ban fertilizer imports. And so this just meant that people couldn't get fertilizer so it's like farmers just didn't plant food because yeah that's a curious decision yeah it's like it's one of those things you look at it it's just like like who thought this was a good idea yeah what was the positive end of that game plan here i mean it like i like it okay so like i i think what they were thinking is that like fertilizer costs dollars right we're running out of dollars so we're going to stop people from spending their dollars like on buying this stuff so we can keep more dollars in the economy

but like what what are you what is your long-term plan here if you don't have like anything to get dollars with or and you also don't have food so this uh to the surprise of exactly zero people except i guess the government of sri lanka causes a food crisis and a food shortage um and this is a kind of classic like this is the kind of classic like situation in which the imf would intervene in the 70s and they're intervening now and you know this is a classic like struggle against this starting right you have the ruling class blowing up the entire economy by like fueling debt money into pointless infrastructure projects and now they're doing these like massive austerity measures trying to get loans to the imf this is you know this is this is this is this is this is

this is stuff we understand and we've seen before um but this is also this is also a food sovereignty problem right the sri lanka government has just completely screwed their farmers, which means they have to import even more food. And the result of this is months and months and months of very impressive sort of cross-class protests with basically every social sector in the streets. And that's both a good thing and also a thing that is kind of a mess because you know like there was civil war the civil war ended like less than a decade and a half ago right so you have people in the streets from sectors who like do not like each other at all and i don't know you know you get the thing that happens here right you get these moments of like incredible solidarity and then moments of incredible like what the fuck are you guys doing and you know like one of the

things that happens a lot in these protests like in all all protests like this is like okay the protests are like pretty tame for literally months right like it's just people doing protesting and then i cops and people like allied with the government start attacking the protesters at which point people like burn down the house of the ruling family they start throwing people i think people probably saw the videos people like throwing cars of like government ministers into rivers which was a good time and like yeah like that that stuff was you know a direct reaction to sort of like the government's violence right um you know okay i can't give like a full like detailed political history here because like, dear God, it is incredibly complicated and I don't understand it very well because, you know, I don't study Sri Lanka. If you want a good account of this, Rohini Hensman's political dimensions of the crisis in Sri Lanka is a really good sort of like short like look at what's going on here.

And this is sort of like this is, you you know this is a broader trend in like all these protests right uh like as like every single bread right takes place in its own unique context like sri lanka for example like sri lanka used to have the world's best and largest like mass trotskyite party like they were the trotskyites is like the only place on earth the trotskyites had like a real like mass political party and they were like a part of the real political process and then they like sold out the working class and entered a bunch of governments that like did terrible stuff and you know okay that that's like a local context doesn't happen anywhere else but you know every single one of these states right is is embedded in global capitalism and

that means that every state is affected by the sort of like broader economic trends and sort of bureaucratic structures to hold everything together they're affected by the imf the world trade organization the world bank and the thing that this means is that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize with each other in reaction to sort of broader like economic forces and the product of this is weight is these sort of like periodic waves of uprisings and so to close this out we're going to talk about the most recent of these well it might actually not about the most recent of these well it might actually not be the most recent of these by the time this goes up uh but yeah yeah we're going to talk about ecuador um the situation ecuador is very different from what's happening in sri lanka

uh the the biggest difference i guess is that instead of sort of like waiting for conditions to get bad enough that like an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously which is kind of what happened in 2019 in ecuador there's a very huge protest there um but they were largely spontaneous but instead of like waiting for it people were just like wait what if we just called one of these and by by people here i specifically mean the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador or CONAE. And, you know, okay, okay, as we've seen through this whole sort of thing, right, like bread riots, like adapt to the political organizations around them. And in Ecuador, we're dealing with a quintessentially modern form of political organization, which is the Indigenous Confederation. which is the indigenous confederation and i i guess i should sort of like preface this a bit with like the the the specific form of indigenous confederation in in latin america that emerges in

this period is like a different thing than older ones because there have been indigenous confederation for a long time this is like a this is this is a very specific like political thing that emerged across latin america in in sort of the 70s and the 80s really really started showing up in the 80s as a result of like a lot of things one of which was like how shitty the old like marxist latinist vanguard groups like were on indigenous issues and one of the one of the groups that forms in this period is kanai and kanai is one of the world's most militant like indigenous uh federations and since their founding in 1986 they've called half a dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments and i think they knocked off like three presidents

which is a a pretty impressive track record and on july 13th 2022 faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods and a like really shitty like far-right government they staged another one um and and this is another sort of i don't know like the the thing that's interesting about this is that it's it's part general strike like part street protest part riot and part just like mass march for the from the sort of periphery of ecuador to the core and by periphery and core i mean in the sort of metaphorical sense. Like, it's a bunch of indigenous to peasant groups from all over the country just, like, marching on, descending on the capital, Quito. And this is a complicated process. Like, you know, okay, like, the left everywhere has, like, political divides,

and mostly they're kind of nonsense in a lot of ways. Like, okay, like, there's ideological divides, and there's personal divides, and whatever. But, like, Ecuador's has has real political divides and these aren't these aren't like sort of petty ideological like personal stuff like they're like they were caught under the sort of previous like old like leftist pink tie governments of rafael carrera like there are like soldiers and cops who are beating the shit out of indigenous ecological protesters and you know this means that like yeah you know okay so so carrera is like parties running for president again or is carrera is not running but carrera's party is

like running in an election right and you know this means like yeah okay like maybe you're both leftist right but you know there's a lot of people who are like oh fuck no like i'm not voting for these guys these are the guys who like sent the army i guess or anti-mining protests and so you know the the thing the thing that's interesting here is that like like these protests don't even pull together the entire ecuadorian left um there's like other stuff going on here too like there there's some of the unions that went on strike in 2019 like don't go on strike this time because of some political stuff that's happening but the thing the thing about kai that's really impressive is that they're still organized enough and they still like they're organized enough that they're able to take control

of parts of cities and they have a lot of allies and supporters amongst their students and workers and keto and this means that when the government makes this enormous mistake and arrests Konai's, like, kind of newish leader. Okay, this guy's name, this guy's name, I guess in Spanish, it's like Leonidas Aiza. This guy's name is Leonidas. He's the head of the, um, he's the head of Konai's

Distributions Federation. And he's been a protest leader, he was a protest leader in 2019, that's how he got elected to like head this organization and they arrest him on day two of the protest and this is a catastrophic mistake the protest just like explode and you know by by by by like a week in i think that the government's claiming they were doing 50 million dollars of damage a day which i'm not actually sure i believe that because governments and corporations do this too when they're talking about like losses from like strikes they tend to over emphasize how much damage is done because it makes them like look better in the press and makes the protesters look worse but they they they

they they they're able to damage like significant parts of the economy and by june 30th like they kind of win basically the government's forced to negotiate with them and they don't get all of their demands but they get price decreases for like fuel and gasoline which is like a huge part of why this project happened in the first place they get bans on mining and drilling in indigenous protected areas they get like strength and price controls they get like rural loan forgiveness like interest rate decreases they get subsidies for farmers they get subsidies for farmers to get subsidies for families to get they they manage to get the government to like declare a state

of emergency health emergency over covid it's like this is this is impressive stuff and you know and the other part of this is that they're like okay the agreement is that we will stop protesting if you do this and if you don't do this we're going to do this again cool so yeah i guess i guess my to sort of wrap this up i there's there's an american proverb that is really common among sort of like american china watchers which is that i so supposedly the chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters danger and opportunity and it's like not true as like linguistic and anthropological analysis of China, that's not what the characters mean. But everyone in the US, like political establishment, like believes this, right? And, you know, but like as an analysis of China, it is completely useless.

As an analysis of the US, of the American psyche, it's incredibly valuable, right? Because this is the way the American ruling class thinks. It's, every single crisis is both a danger and an opportunity. And that's something that we, in some sense, also have to do because that's, you know, these are the sort of situations that we're in, right?

Red riots are a thing that just, they happen, right? They will continue to happen, they have been happening for thousands of years, like presumably they will happen for thousands of more years and there's no use sort of like either pretending that they don't happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments like for or against them because they just happen and the the question that we're that we're faced with is what are we actually going to do about it right are we going to sit them out are we going to side with the state and repressing them in the name of sort of like stamping out color revolutions or like providing order of stability or like protecting small businesses? Or are we going to take to the streets and fight alongside them to sort of break the system that creates them?

The second question from here is if we're going to do this, how? And what we've seen from Ecuador in the past month or so is that if you take the fight to them and you are sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the question now, as our food prices continue to increase, as food prices are only going to continue to increase, what are we gonna do and yeah that's all I got I have a single question yep what are we going to do well I'm kind of bummed

we never brought up our good friend Pete Butt buddha judge in his uh bread his bread price fixing ordeals yeah i mean that that's kind of a sign of just like how kind of like i guess you could say masculinized like our culture has been that like people didn't riot over that because like that is a thing like if if if if you said pete budaj back to like a late 1700s frets village and he tries to do this thing like he he does a systematic like bread bread price fixing right like all of these people would have been getting so yeah do that again uh yeah do that again wow just bear and just brazen incitement yeah yeah it's great well that is it for us today we love to incite things folks until next time go incite

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Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that's increasingly about things that are actually kind of already happening. And today it's going to be one of those. We're talking about the uptick in rhetoric around queer exterminationism that's happened most of the stuff is what this is is discussions and legislative proposal and rhetoric that was

really kicked off last month uh during pride month specifically because of the roe v wade ruling that really opened the door on a few not good possibilities. But because we're going to be talking about some more grim stuff today, we're going to open with something slightly more funny. And that's friend of the pod, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Now, with me today is Chris and James. Greetings. Hi. So, Peterson,

he got really mad at Elliot Page, and now does not really have a Twitter account, and it's pretty funny. And a few days after he was banned for continuing to misgender Elliot Page, he released a video that can only be described as a supervillain monologue, as a part of his new partnership with Daily Wire Plus, the hit new streaming service.

And just because I think it's funny, we're just going to play a few clips of this evil supervillain monologue because it's really funny. And then it'll circle back to kind of our topic towards the end. So speaking of Friend of the Pod Peterson, here's one of the clips that you've probably already heard if you're terminally online. But it's incredibly funny. probably already heard if you're if you're terminally online but it's incredibly funny if i'm required to acknowledge that my tweet violated the twitter rules what rules you sons of bitches ah good old good old peterson you know the the thing i've always been sort of like

that clip in particular it's like i i don't know if i was trying I don't know if I could emulate just it sounding like you've edited together 16 clips of yourself I know right my tweet violated the twitter rules his speech pattern is so bizarre

and also like the video was like 9 minutes long like preceding that line he explained what rule he broke around misgendering and harassment so like he he explained the exact rule uh but we always get more peterson if you ask for it up yours woke moralists we'll see who cancels who oh extremely funny he's actually sneering as well if you watch the video like oh yeah just yeah he's he is he's he is going all in on the bit he's doing like ozymandias but hammed up it's it's frankly impressive this is this one's also also a decent one i am employing this awkward

and impossible naming style because it is now apparently mandatory and probably doing it wrong nonetheless as you're doing it wrong is the whole point of what has been made mandatory but also i'm trying to make a point i've essentially been banned from Twitter as a consequence. I say banned, although technically I have been suspended. But the suspension will not be lifted unless I delete the hateful tweet in question. And I would rather die than do that. They would rather die than do that that means that you have a healthy relationship to the platform of twitter um there's also this this great clip of him talking about like i'm actually happy how my twitter account is gone now twitter is insignificant in the final analysis and you're like what the fuck does that

mean what what what final analysis are you talking about what do you what do you mean the final analysis of what like what is oh oh it's it's pretty funny there's there's two more clips from this rant that i want to do which kind of are going to get more to the heart of our issue today. Great. They're not great. They actually are kind of, they kind of suck. So without further ado, here's our good doctor friend. And finally, with regard to the final phrase, criminal physician, I must say that I've had some post-coital, so to speak, regrets about that phrase. It is clearly the case that the surgical operation performed by the butchers who butchered Elliot slash Ellen was legal.

So was it criminal or not? Were the operations undertaken by the fascist physicians who carried out the Nazi medical experiments legal? Yes, under the laws of the time. But were they criminal? I'll leave that question up to you to answer. So that's pretty gross for a lot of reasons. so that's pretty gross for a lot of reasons um one the kind of historical context of using nazis to compare to your own uh transphobia is a little dicey when you consider how what the nazis did to trans people and to like queer books like yeah he's advocating for the Nazi position here. Yeah. Yeah. Great stuff.

There's been so many bans on queer books. Just in the past two years, the Library Association tracked almost 1,600 books that were challenged in 2021, the highest number since the organization began tracking book bans in the past 20 years. So talking about like the nazi scientists they're like you like you have his his historical context of obviously is incredibly lacking or he's just a or he's just a grifter i think honestly he's just kind of i think he's

just kind of lost it i i think i don't even think he's fully a grifter i think he's just kind of lost it. I don't even think he's fully a grifter. I think he's just kind of not understanding what's going on anymore. Because you can watch interviews and stuff where people can try to use reasoning and logic with him, and you can watch his brain start to process it, but it's just like otherwise, he just doesn't

think in any sort of logical manner or put his words or his stream of consciousness into any historical context he just says what he wants and he's used to people just taking that as a fact um he's used to like regurgitating bad joseph campbell and people being like oh yeah you sound smart would no he's actually not he's um but man it's it's yeah the the whole germany nazi scientist experimentation thing is incredibly incredibly frustrating um i i don't even know what else to like say about a say about that because i mean even that that line you could focus on for a while. Compare how the history of medical documentation of transness and the Nazis,

how that's such a big thing, is that the Nazis destroyed so much medical research on gender transitions, losing decades and decades of research that we're only now starting to regain. we're only now starting to regain incredibly gross but there's this one one one last one last clip i wanted to play of of our of our good doctor and are we degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner i think the answer to that may well be yes so that's not great he really is like just advocating for the naughtyi position at every turn like yes he's just continuing to advocate for fascistic reasoning of fascistic views of decadence and degeneracy in so much as it is a threat to civilization and a threat to western society and then he goes on in this clip to justify russia's invasion of ukraine

because the u.s is helping ukraine which makes ukraine degenerate by proxy so russia is doing a war on degeneracy and that's like that's his argument it's like that's his level of logical reasoning yeah which is funny because it's like if you ever heard any of the like radio because every once in a while there'll be radio clips of just like Ukrainian and Russian soldiers yelling at each other and it's just both of them calling each other gay over and over again. It's just like, really? No one side is woke. Bring back that level of discourse to America. of discourse to America. Well,

we're going to take a quick break and then we will come back to talk about our other really close friend of the pod, Matthew Walsh. So stay tuned for that. Okay, I have one question for everyone here. What?

How woman? What? What? How? How, woman? What? What is? What is that? Featherless biped. Okay.

Great. Behold! A woman! So, we're talking about Matt Walsh. Obviously, last month, he released a pretty poorly made transphobic documentary that was basically just clips of him getting owned by like actual doctors for not understanding like basic ontology and medical reasoning um the documentary was just uh other friend of the pod jk rowling just expressed support for the documentary so if that's

if that's not an indicator that like turfism is just like a direct preamble to open fascism i don't know what is because i mean matt matt walsh jokingly describes himself as a fascist but that's because his his beliefs actually are fascistic like he said it's one of those jokes that only is funny because everyone agrees on the central premise like it's that it he said it's one of those jokes that only is funny because everyone agrees on the central premise like it's it's that it's that it's that type of humor um so like jk rowling just endorsing an open fascist so i'm not going to talk about the documentary in depth here because it's not that good and it doesn't really make any points that need to be refuted it talks about how like it talks about. It talks about how puberty blockers are sterilization drugs, which is not the case long term.

When you're on them, yes, you cannot do that because it's obviously inhibiting your hormones. But once you go off puberty blockers you can procreate again um which which also i i just i just want to take a second here to look at this position which is that okay so puberty blockers are sterilization things right are like okay so this is their argument sterilization right who are you giving puberty blockers to children why the fuck do you care well i mean like children it's like well yeah i mean they're arguing it's like it'll make them it'll make them permanently sterilized it's like it's basically like really you're castrating these kids by giving them puberty blockers which no that's not how that works you're you're just arguing in bad faith it doesn't matter but anyway i don't want to talk

about the documentary in in length because it's not interesting enough to talk about uh but is this a documentary real quick is this the one where he like goes to like quote unquote the country of africa and like asks people yeah and then poorly translates extremely racist um yeah yeah great to see jk rowling like known uh non-racist lining up yeah like behind these essentialist tropes of african creator the creator of kingsley shacklebolt and joe chang joe chang yeah just the most cringe uh yeah that's what we call a rich white woman moment um yes all right so but we are going to talk about some other things matt waltz has been, specifically how he has increased exterminationist rhetoric

into his discussions around trans people. So we're going to open by talking about detransitioners. So the vast majority of real detransitions, which are very rare, like there's very few of them, especially considering there's already very few numbers of trans people. Isn't it like sub-1% or something? Yeah, it's very, very few. But the vast majority of people who do make the choice

to detransition are usually due to experiencing aggressive transphobia. And the idea of the detransitioner has been inflated and used as a straw man to attack the trans community just by and large with many documented cases of TERFs or far-right activists

creating fake sock puppet accounts pretending to be detransitioners to write horrifying but fictional stories. That happens a lot there's a really famous case on Reddit of an alleged detransitioner who has found out to just be like an alt-right troll and

this all really sucks because the people who do detransition because they realize it's just not for them are generally pretty rad people who continue to be very much pro-trans because they do understand the fluid nature of gender and gender expression through this entire process. But anyways, when quote tweeting an alleged detransitioner

expressing regret of medical decisions that they made, Matt Walsh said this, quote, we can't just oppose the transition of children. Yes, that's particularly evil, but it's also evil to do it to anyone of any age. This young woman was 19, a legal adult, when she was mutilated. Does that make it okay? Obviously not. Put it another way, it should be illegal for doctors to do this to anyone of any age. It should be illegal for anyone of any age to transition, period.

anyone of any age to transition, period. So this demonstrates the jump from the rhetoric of no one should transition until they're an adult to no one should be allowed to transition at all. And it came just as quickly as the trans community was telling you it would. This jump is not a big one. It is very easy to say no hormones until you're 18 to saying no hormones at all. And that's what we're entering into. Walsh's rhetoric is increasingly exterminationist and eliminationist, just saying that all of his preferred policies would result in the total prohibition of trans identity and the criminalization of any gender-affirming care. These people are fundamentally opposed to having any agency of your own body, whether that's hormones, whether that's abortion, right? All of these people get mad just when they see someone with colored hair. They don't like someone's ability to have bodily autonomy. That's one of their

core politics. And you see this a lot, especially when it comes to trans men, because there's this notion that their bodies exist in service of cis straight men. And anything that gets in the way of that is an attack on cis men in general

and all of patriarchal society. It's very much like regular misogyny, but with an added bonus of transphobia. Conservative activist Christopher Ruffo made a tweet a few days ago with a picture of Elliot Page pre-transition with a caption that says, this is what they took from you, right? It's like this notion that their bodies belong to you, a cis man, and by them choosing to change their bodies as they see fit, that's an attack on their body's access to you. It redoes a whole bunch of misogyny, it does a whole bunch of really bad transphobia. really bad transphobia um it's a really gross package but it it it hits on a lot of points of like this type of patriarchal conservative brain and i think this this even carries out into like hatred of trans women as you know as trans women are seen as predators so they hate trans women

to protect cis women right like right? It's all of this possession, right? It's this possession of the body of a female, so you need to protect it against the creepy trans women, right? It's all of this idea of owning women's bodies is central to a lot of these ideas of transphobia. So we're going to see a lot more stuff about how it's going to change from no hormones, no transition until you're 18, to no hormones, no transition until you're 25, to no hormones and no transition at all. This past year, we've seen many proposed felony health care bans for trans youth. Said bills have passed in multiple states like Alabama, which means that it's going to forcibly detransition teens across the state.

In Missouri, there's a similar bill in the works titled the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act, which currently applies to individuals younger than 18. But Missouri physicians and health care providers under the bill would be prevented from recommending gender-affirming care to patients who are under 18. And there has already been discussion in legislative sessions to extend the bill past the age of 18. While debating the bill seeking to restrict access to gender-affirming care, some lawmakers suggested that the medical interventions like hormones be withheld from transgender and non-binary individuals until they're 25 years old. And during a public hearing for the House Bill 2649, a psychologist, Lori Hayes, testified that she believes young adults under the age of 25

are unable to fully comprehend the dramatic and drastic and irreparable quote-unquote changes to their bodies that they will undergo if they receive gender-affirming medical treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapies. Also testifying hayes uh the psychologist said that she supported conversion therapy so that's surprising to nobody um or it shouldn't be it also takes those people to the point where they're not necessarily eligible for their parents health care right so like i think 26 is the time when

you can when you're too old you age out yeah so it's it's again like it's a backdoor like prohibition on transitioning for a lot of people yeah yes it's it's just trying to stop it at all it's you can't you can't take their word for it they just yeah they just don't want you around that's it like they want you to to kill yourself they or they want you just to go away or not be trans like that's that's that's what they want it's obviously i'm gonna do a few just a journal of american medical associations found that gender affirming health care include including puberty blockers and hormones, between the ages of 13 and 20 was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality.

Another study published last year by the Trevor Project found that among transgender and non-binary minors, hormone therapy associated with nearly 40% lower odds of recent depression and suicide attempts. So they just want to ban the things that make you more likely to live right they they just don't want you around that's the actual message so back back to just kind of speaking of just not wanting you around um we're going to do some updates on protect Texas Kids the extremely transphobic, openly

Christian fascist, their words not mine group based in Texas who organized a lot of events to harass either drag shows or harass pride events last month its leader Kelly Needert

that's how I'm going to say it, tweeted a few weeks ago, quote, let's start rounding up people who participate in Pride events. Huh. I wonder what she means by that. I wonder what that

means. Surely it doesn't mean she just wants to kill all gay people. Oh, it does? Okay. And another tweet from the main Protect Texas Kids account was, today's protest went well. No children seemed to be in the drag show, but there were a bunch of adults wearing mouse ears and watching the men dressed up as Disney princesses dance around. Totally normal and not weird, right? So, it's obviously not about protecting kids, right?

Like, that's not the focus. That's not the focus of their tweet. That's not the focus of what they want, right? Protecting kids, quote-unquote, is a cheap excuse just to want to hate gay people and want gay people to go away. That's all it is. We've been, like, it's. We're kind of retreading the same ground here. But man, it is still frustrating how many people fall for the bit. It's not about

protecting kids. It's not about saving kids from groomers. You can look at all of the sexual abuse in evangelical churches, Catholic churches, Christian summer camps, whatever. It's not about protecting kids. They don't give a single fuck. It's about wanting gay people to go away. Now, both Kelly Neidert's and Protect Texas Kids accounts, which they used to organize their Christian fascist events, both of those got banned in mid-June. Kelly has got banned for saying, let's start rounding up people who participate in pride events. But this extends beyond Texas. This extends beyond twitter.com, right? Obviously, these people were just using Twitter to organize, so they're already extended out into the real world. But it's not just Texas either. See, I think it's a congressional candidate, Mark Burns,

who's a pro-Trump pastor, was running for South Carolina House District. He called for the execution of LGBTQ and trans people by using grooming rhetoric, and then he laid out exactly how executions could legally be done. So this type of like state-enforced genocide. Let's play a clip. The LGBT transgender grooming our children's minds is a national security threat because it is ultimately designed to destabilize the republic we call the United States of America. That's why when I'm elected, I don't want to just vote. I want to start holding people accountable for treason to the constitution i am going to push to reenact who whack who whack is the house of un-american activities committee

it was a real committee that was formulated back in the 50s and is a committee that we should reenact that starts holding these people accountable for treason we need to hold people for treason start having some public hearings and start executing people who are found guilty for their treasonous acts against the constitution of the united states of america just like they did back in 1776 you know what south carolina this is our guy no so that was an amazing uh the way he misspoke and called it the house of un-american activities it sounds like a fun place so that's not ideal is it of that kind of sucks bad yeah that was really out there he's uh genocide advocating. It's just, they're trying to mainstream the political ability to advocate genocide, right? And some of them, it's not fully catching on yet, right?

We're on the on-ramp to this. The South Carolina pastor was defeated by the incumbent representative, William Timmons, in the GOP primary for the state's fourth congressional district. But Pastor Mark Burns still received 24% of the vote. So that's still a lot of people voting for that. And that number, I don't think it's going to shrink. Yeah, and it's also worth noting that like everyone loses it is so unbelievably

hard to beat an incumbent in primary like it just it's yeah so like like even if he was just a normal guy with like regular politics he would have lost that election so still yeah yeah so it's not actually a referendum on his popularity

like the popularity of what he's saying. It's 24% of the vote. Yeah. It's worth noting that like even here in Southern California, right, where we're supposedly like very liberal, we had a candidate for sheriff's office who was a deputy city attorney and was endorsed by the Union Tribune

just openly spewing like transphobic groomer stuff uh yeah at public meetings and getting endorsed by the local newspaper they rescinded their endorsement later but this isn't just like a a red state thing if people think that that is that no that's obviously that'd be a lot more common than people who run for sheriff who generally tend to be more conservative because they're running for sheriff um true all right well let's let's have an ad break and then we'll come back to talk about wait talk about roe v wade and and the attack on future rights including the ability to have same-sex relationships oh wow what a fun time we have today all All right, we are back. So after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, there was an immediate push for anti-gay and anti-trans legal challenges using the same

legal logic against the right to privacy based off of the traditions deeply rooted in our nation's history, quote unquote. So this was like undoubtedly going to happen, right? We've been proposing that this was a possibility for a while, but it was definitely made worse by Justice Clarence Thomas, friend of the pod, who argued in a concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should, quote, reconsider its past rulings codifying rights such as the right to use contraception, the right to have a same-sex relationship and same-sex marriage, invoking Griswold, Lawrence, and Oberfeld. Three cases having to do with Americans' fundamental right to privacy, due process, and equal protection. Thomas wrote, quote, we have a duty to correct the error regarding these established in those precedents,

which pretty grim, pretty grim framing there, because that's a bad sign. And we are already seeing stuff like this in effect, actually. We don't need to wait for the Supreme Court to make rulings. States are starting to do this exact thing. In an ongoing Alabama lawsuit that cites Dobbs overturning Roe v. Wade about medically detransitioning all trans teenagers, there is this deeply threatening turn of phrase, quote,

No one, adult or child, has the right to transitioning treatments not deeply rooted in our nation's history and tradition. Ha! Ha! Interesting how they put adult or child there. Isn't that, isn't that intriguing? Yeah, and it's also fun how the, the deeply rooted in our nation's history thing is now just

sort of like, here, here is the word that you say to let you do fascism. It's like, oh, hey, do you know what is deeply rooted in our, in our nation's, uh, uh, uh, tradition and history? Shooting congressmen. This is a thing that has been done many times. Like, I mean, again, like, like this, it's like, like, this is, this is the thing that has been done many times like again like like this it's like like this is this is the whole like this whole thing it's just like

it's it's so the whole thing is it's so incredibly sort of nakedly transparent and cynical and like this is you know it's it's a standard fascist thing right we're like we're going to create some sort of mythical past and then we're going to like resurrect whatever fucking things existed back then it's like oh hey what actually existed back then yeah i don't know people tried to kill the government all the time like they're really they're really playing from like the lower keys t traditionalist framework here um they're they're doing all the bits we thought they would do it's not great uh late last month during the end of pride tex Texas Republican Party unveiled its updated official position on LGBTQ issues, defining homosexuality as, quote, an abnormal lifestyle choice, unquote, and also opposing, quote, all efforts to validate transgender identity. The party's new official stance on LGBTQ issues was unveiled during Pride Month, and as advocates fight against a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in states across the country this year, more than 340 bills, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBTQial convention in Houston in mid-June to agree to the party's platform on a range of issues,

including the rejection of the 2020 election results and a call to repeal the 1965 Voting Rights Act. No! Which was enacted to prevent discrimination against black voters. Ah, this is... I would say this is a mask off moment but they've never had the mask on in the first place people people like that's that's like that specific one that is a thing like like half of the republican party's platform has been people suing about the

voting rights act exactly exactly years it's not actually mask off it's just that they're doing it louder than they were doing it before yeah Yeah. The section titled homosexuality and gender issues, um, had the party stating that LGBTQ people should have no legal protection from discrimination. And in fact, suggested intent to ensure people's ability to do hate speech and hate crimes. Part of the 40 page resolution reads,

homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin. And we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values. Ha. Ouch.

I just want to put it on the record here that a number of my friends who have been attacked in the last three months is... It's a lot. I got called a faggot for the first time in the streets of Portland

a few months ago it's accelerating it's going it's going but yeah I mean specifically I think a lot of the last part of that resolution there about opposing any civil penalties

against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith I think that's probably definitely referencing steadfast baptist church the church that just opens that openly advocates the genocide of queer people uh which we've talked about in our in our last uh city of hate episode yeah i think i think they're also trying to go back to like the whole like cake bullshit thing oh yeah obviously like stuff like that it's like it's we honestly we are so past the cake problem now because now they just want to just yeah now they just want to murder they just want to do like they just want to do mass genocide like i'm so over cakes like and in the trend of increasing the age barrier of gender-affirming healthcare into adulthood, the Texas Republicans called for the ban of gender-affirming healthcare, including the distribution of puberty blockers or hormone-suppressing therapies, and the performance of gender-affirming surgeries to anyone under the age of 21.

So that is the new Texas Republican official position, is that these things should be banned for under the age of 21. And that's not a hard cap. They're going to keep raising that cap as often as they can. And as proof, I will offer up the past 35 minutes of episode. Like, everything we've said in the past 35 minutes is supporting the opinion that that cap, they want it to go up. opinion that that cap they want it to go up yeah i'm sure they also simultaneously advocate for like heterosexual relationship age of consent to just drop oh yeah like 12 12 years old yeah um speaking of speaking of texas near the end of june uh texas attorney general ken paxton uh who sent his office home in the celebration of theurning of Roe v. Wade, said that he will defend Texas's anti-sodomy law if the Supreme Court revisits Lawrence v. Texas.

I'm going to play an extremely frustrating clip here. Here's a fun time. I'm sure you read Justice Thomas's concurrence where he said that there were a number of other of these issues, Griswold, Lawrence and Oglethal, that he felt needs to be looked at again. Obviously, the Lawrence case came from Texas. That was what outlawed sodomy. Do you, as attorney general, be comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed sodomy, that questioned Lawrence again, or Griswold, or gay marriage that came from the state legislature to put to the test what Justice Thomas said? Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of issues here. But certainly the Supreme Court has stepped into issues that I don't think there was any constitutional provision dealing with. They were legislative issues.

And this is one of those issues, and there may be more. So it would depend on the issue and depending on what state law says at the time and what was overruled. Just for the sake of time here, you wouldn't rule out that if the state legislature passed the exact same law that Lawrence overturned on sodomy, you wouldn't have any problem then defending that and taking that case back to the Supreme Court? Yeah, look, my job is to defend state law and I'll continue to do that. That is my job under the Constitution and I'm certainly willing.

Would you support them? So first of all, in this clip of Ken Paxton, he looks like a zombie. of Ken Paxton, he looks like a zombie. His... His... I don't know what's going on with his face, but his eye... His eye keeps twitching in a way that looks really uncanny.

He looks like... Look at this man's face. What is going on? That's an unfortunate pause. No! He looks like that in motion too! It's not an unfortunate pause no he looks like that in motion too it's not an unfortunate pause he just looks there is something going wrong with ken paxton we need to get to the bottom of this but also all of that stuff about make uh enforcing laws against uh sodomy making gay sex illegal they they don't want gay people to fuck, is what

they're actually saying. And if you do, they want to send you to jail. So that's something that Ken Paxton wants to do. Wrapped in very flowery language about defending the laws on record,

laws that you are enforcing, therefore you're making the laws in effect. Um, ha. So one, one aspect of this that I want to touch on again, before we close out in our, in our city of hate episodes about the Christian fascists in Dallas, attacking drag shows and steadfast Baptist church. Church. And even in some of the stuff that we've gone over in this episode, right, there's a lot of talk about, like, government-approved extermination, whether that be, like, for treason, for un-American acts, executions based off biblical law,

rounding up people for degenerate or deviant behavior, arresting doctors for performing gender-affirming surgeries. There's a lot of, around the government's ability to legally genocide people. But the other aspect of this is the vigilante justice angle of people wanting to just do physical violence themselves. And there's a way that these two things can intersect in a really interesting way. I'm going to play one last clip here. You know, some teachers pushing sex values on your third grader.

Why don't you go in there and thrash the teacher? You talk to a normal person's kids about sex in kindergarten, you get beaten up. You should be beaten up, please. If I was a parent and my fifth grade daughter had to sleep and shower in some kind of cabin at some summer camp that I paid money to send my child to, and there was a man calling himself a woman sleeping in her cabin, my husband would have beat him into the ground. Where are the men actually standing up against these men who think they are women that are

trying to compete in these female sports? Shouldn't put up with it anymore. You need to intervene. You need to show up to the sporting event. This is not happening, actually. There is almost nothing that can be done that is over the line to stop this. It's disgusting. There was a time in this country of just a little more decency, where if someone even voiced the idea of taking your kid to a drag show, they'd be arrested. They are underqualified to have children. They should have their children taken away from them because it's child abuse. So, that's a lot of stuff, but, you know, it fluctuates between talking about people taking this into their own hands, in a very, like, obviously, like, misogynistic and transphobic way.

Again, it's about, like, the like the access to you know protecting access to the feminine body um and then a lot of other stuff around you know the government arresting people and such right it's about it's a mix between like doing stuff yourself you know in a form of like vigilantism um or you know eventually advocating for the for the government's ability to do this. Now, we've covered a number of incidents of violence or of things that were escalating to the point of that right before it stopped across the Dallas area. We talked about stuff in Boise, Idaho with Patriot Front. We talked about the Proud Boys who stormed the library outside of

San Francisco. I think I talked about most of those across a few City of Hate episodes. Then we have there is other incidents outside of just those cities. In Atlanta,

a youth justice group was forced to cancel their rally in support of trans rights after an organizer received a specific, quote, vulgar death threat. In Kalama, Washington, a school was put on lockdown after an anti-trans student threatened a mass shooting following a broad student walkout in support of a trans classmate who had been assaulted. of a trans classmate who had been assaulted. People graffitied Perv's work here on an elementary school in Ventura County, California, following a local right-wing paper's story about a third-grade teacher who affirmed a trans student's name and pronouns.

In the lead-up to Pride Month, an anti-LGBTQ activist named Ethan Schmidt Crockett vowed to hunt gay people and trans people and their allies at Target stores. Following the store's decision to celebrate pride, he made the same threat a month before. In June, he attended the counter-protest of a pro-gun control March for Our Lives demonstration carrying an AR-15. In Keele, Wisconsin, schools were forced to shut down and go virtual after bomb threats were made in response to the district's investigation of anti-trans harassment by three students. Something I've been thinking

about a lot the past few weeks is that even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, multiple states enacted laws for like vigilante bounty hunters to do the work of the state that the state wasn't legally allowed to do yet, like directly, right? And they were getting just regular people to combat and intimidate providers into not doing abortion procedures. And we're already seeing an increase in physical attacks targeting queer people. And I think many more regular people are waiting for the state government's permission to do the same thing. We don't need to wait for the Supreme Court to say gay sex can be made illegal, right? States can already start doing this stuff now, and there's already people waiting in the wings, and as soon as they get the go-ahead, they will jump at this opportunity.

I'm going to play one final clip that is pretty grim. one final clip that is pretty, pretty grim. I just had a man in public. He just... He can't wait until he can legally hunt us down. This is not okay. This is not okay. So that was a queer person who lives in Oklahoma talking about something that happened to them last month.

And I try to, when I make these episodes, I try to not just lay out a whole bunch of bad things. Be like, here's a problem. All right, bye everybody. Like, cause that sucks. But also I don't know what the solution here is because this sucks um the california house and senate just passed bill uh sb 107 this bill would provide many protections for families fleeing states like texas and alabama

it would protect them from extradition from out--of-state investigations, and from out-of-state custody judgments based on providing gender-affirming health care. The bill is currently in review by the California Committee on Appropriations, and then it would need to be signed by the governor. If your state doesn't have a trans sanctuary law on the docket, maybe it's time to ask your representative about that. Um, preferably maybe when they're like out at dinner or at church. Um, but also like even getting to the point where we're making plans to flee to other States, when trans people are forced to make plans to flee out of country, when you're investigating what kind of citizenship you

can get based on your ancestral family history once we're at that point it's really hard like it's it's and in my in discussions with queer friends the past few like the past few weeks we've been having more and more conversations about that. More and more plans about when things really do fully break down, where do we go? What do we do? And it sucks because there's so many people who live in states like Oklahoma, like Texas, right? That's people's homes. That's where these queer people are living.

And they shouldn't be forced to leave. That shouldn't happen. And we have great folks like the elm fork john brown gun club which i think are providing a really good example of how queer people can work together to start doing community defense in your own areas uh to say no this is our home too and we're gonna fucking walk around with rifles to defend it if we have to um obviously not everyone mentally is able to do that right but there's there's there's other ways to get inter, to get more connected to your local community to strengthen like queer areas inside, you know, states where these things are happening. is that fighting the state, right?

Fighting these types of big homophobic institutions who want to kill us, that's hard and scary. We feel so powerless. We want to feel like we have any agency. We want to feel like we have any power at all because there's so many people with power who are hurting us. And it's hard to actually fight back against those. But we feel powerless. We want to feel like we're able.

So instead, we turn on other people who are within our own communities because it's easier to attack people who are like us it's it's easier to to do to do that right it still gives you a sense of having agency but they're trying to murder us all like personal like disagreements on politics or whatever aside, it would be really nice if we stop just doing nonsense, fighting with each other, and doing dumb click drama, dumb discourse. They're trying to kill us. Can we not? Can we not do that? I know you want to find some way to push back on something so you feel like you have an ability to do anything. And doing it against the police, doing it against your state government, doing it against the Supreme Court, that's much harder, right? It's easier to do it against, you know, a friend of

yours or someone who you used to be friends with. That's so much easier. But that's not helping in their attempt to just do genocide. So I think making plans to get out of where you are, if you have to, making plans is necessary sometimes. I've thought of this, even me in the Pacific Northwest have had many thoughts about that. It's also very important to start strengthening your relationships with other queer people in your communities and starting to put together ways to work with them

to make a show of force and say, hey, we're here. We're not going to, we're here to stay right now. You can't, you can't scare us out right now Because there needs to be some way to combat it. Because these people, they're trying to be regressive, right? We are already at a point that we progressed far enough that they are scared of how much progress has happened, so they're trying to turn the clock back. Our challenge is to keep the change coming and push back against these people who are trying to hold on to the dead 20th century, right? The fear of change and the fear of the future

is driving their return to the past. We don't need to just run away because we should be winning this fight in some ways because we already hold the ground that they want to take away from us. we already hold the ground that they want to take away from us. So yeah, bad stuff is coming. But just because bad things happened in history doesn't mean they need to happen again. There is ways to intervene to stop this. Should you keep your passports renewed? Yes, you obviously should.

But we don't just need to run away because we actually have ground to stand on here. So, yeah. And I think I think one thing is also important to remember is that the people who got us here were facing way, way worse odds than we are. Yeah, the people who had to do this. Yeah. And so, like, like the job that we have is incredibly intimidating. It is also easier than the stuff that has already been done.

Right. And we already, we already got to this point facing extremely harsh conditions and we already got there. Um, I don't know. It's just, it's always struggling to try to find ways to think about this. That gives you a little bit of like, know it's just like it's so easy to be a doomer it's so easy just to say we're all fucked we all need to move away that's the simple solution but there's most simple things are also usually incomplete and wrong so just

trying to find other ways to think about this problem because we don't need to tell queer people to run away um and you don't need to tell them they have to fight either. You know, queer people can make their own decisions and offer their own resources and start operating in a network that helps the survival of all of us in increasingly challenging times. and i should also say like non-queer people like look the the defining characteristics of this moment is that there is a silent majority that supports queer rights yeah and if if the the the only way that we actually lose this is if is if that majority does nothing but if that if that majority moves if the cis people who actually believe in this stuff and if the non-queer people who actually believe that we should have rights and we should be able to live our lives do stuff we will fucking crush these people they will be remembered as a fucking grain of dust

in the sand that was crushed by the tide of history and we can do that we can destroy them we can we can we can we can make it for we can make this moment in history a incredibly brief blip where people are like oh oh, hey, wasn't it weird when homophobia came back for like three years and then it was just gone again? That is in our power. We just have to do it. Yep.

All right, well. Strengthen community relations. Stop doing nonsense infighting for no good reason because you want to feel powerful put that effort into actually fighting the people that are trying to hurt you or put that effort into making friends um that does it for us today that was my episode on the increase in queer exterminationism um yeah see you on the other side welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Sh as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast hey i'm jack peace thomas the host of a brand new black effect original series black lit the podcast for

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sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture Thank you. Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists

to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things that could happen or in today's case are about to happen. I want to talk to you today about the Friendship Park, which exists between San Diego and Tijuana. If you haven't spent time at the border, it's difficult to understand how. Despite getting bigger and uglier every year, it feels at once omnipresent and non-existent. Friendship Park was always one of the places where the border loomed, but it never quite managed to beat out the tremendous feelings of goodwill you could experience there on

a Saturday morning, on a piece of sand next to a steel fence that demarcates the end of the United States. Borders exist to control us, not to protect us, and this is never more apparent than it was at Friendship Park, where you could watch grandparents meeting grandkids and dreamers checking in with their parents. At Friendship Park, a half-century-old institution that allowed families divided by the border to meet across the French, the border certainly didn't make anyone feel safer. But over time, people who had never set foot on the two miles of sand in Imperial Beach that many families walked across weekly to be together

made laws that would make it even harder for those families to be together. For decades, the park was the only place these mixed immigration status families could come together. People flew from across the US to meet relatives who were trying to make the crossing north to join their friends and loved ones. It was an emotional place, but most of the time it was a happy place. You could see kids having parties on the Mexican side, and sometimes concerts would take place with the band split between two countries playing one tune. On the Tijuana side, the fence is covered in murals. At moments, it felt like a small victory over the pointless

cruelty that happens here on a daily basis. The park itself was opened by Pat Nixon in 1951. At the time, she said, I hope there won't be a fence here too long. Since then, the US government has built a secure fence in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, then a supposedly more secure fence following 9-11. Then it built a secondary wall in 2009. In 2012, a gate was installed to allow people to enter at certain times and weekends and meet their families separated by just one barrier. Now, there are plans to replace that secondary wall by building a 30-foot wall under the pretense that the current structure is unsound. This new wall, made to the Trump design

but built under Biden's instruction, will not have a gate, and the last place in the country that families could touch and heal will be gone forever. Customs and Border Protection blocked access to Friendship Park in February 2020. Heavy rains that year forced state officials to temporarily close Borderfield State Park, the larger park in which Friendship Park is nestled. Since then, Border Patrol has not opened

the gate that lets people unite briefly with their families. Their claim an influx of migrants has prevented them from having the staffing required to open the park. But on weekends, agents are posted up right by where the park gate is anyway, in case people try and make the crossing without permission, in order to see the families that many of them have been separated from for over two years. Throughout those two years, I've crossed to Tijuana to report on the growing number of people

come from around the world, from Haiti, from Central and South America and Ethiopia, and recently Ukraine, to name but a few countries. Despite the heartbreaking stories of danger, fear, and loss, and separation from the people they love, they haven't been able to file asylum claims due to the Trump administration's spurious use of public health laws to severely and illegally limit asylum. I don't have time here to explain the entirety of the migrant protection protocol in Title 42, and I don't really want to either because the justification behind them isn't what's important. The cruelty

they manifest is what's important. Joe Biden, who came to office promising a kinder approach, has defended some of these policies in court with the Department of Justice. And a particular cruelty of Title 42, which allowed authorities to expel migrants who arrived at US land borders, has persisted despite Biden's recent change of heart because several states managed to sue successfully to keep it in place. In the midst of all this, more and more people have been separated by the border. Now, the Biden administration is looking to permanently close the wonderful island of hope that remained on a beach at the end of America.

Obviously, a park with a massive fence doesn't solve a broken system, or make the cruelty any less cruel. But it was a place for healing, and kindness, and love and families. And now that place too is under threat. I caught up with Robert Vivard, a friend of Friendship Park, to talk about the park, the threats to it, and what you can do to help. and what you can do to help. Robert, would you like to start off just by introducing yourself and explaining sort of where you fit in the Friendship Park world and in the world of the border more generally?

Absolutely, James. My name is Robert Bivar, and I'm part of the Friendship Park core leadership group. And, you know, the reason I'm so involved with Friendship Park and why Friendship Park is so important to me is because I was actually one of those family members that at one point in my life I was deported. of my family was through the border wall there at Friendship Park. In particular, my son, who is active duty military, and because of his military status, you know, was not able to come across the border, or it was very difficult for him to secure authorization from his command to be able to cross the border. And therefore, the only type of visit that I could have with my son and my granddaughters was through that border wall.

So firsthand, I understood very well the importance of allowing on the weekends at least for you know a few hours on the weekend that opportunity for families to uh to be able to uh to meet there at friendship park yeah so perhaps we should explain for people who aren't here in san diego what the uh what friendship park is right Friendship Park is, right? Or perhaps what it was in say 2019 before it was shut. Absolutely. Back prior to COVID, Friendship Park is a bi-national park separated by a border wall, actually by two border walls on the southwestern tip of the united states bordering mexico it's a border between imperial beach and tijuana beach and uh the friendship park is actually uh a strip of land inside porterfield state park uh and that strip of land is in between two border walls, border fences, if you may say so. And that part is considered to us Friendship Park, which is the area where

persons, families, mixed status families from both sides of the border would meet. But it wasn't only a place for families to meet. It's also a place for people of good nature of the United States and Mexico to be able to meet and also extend their friendship between the two countries and the two communities. extend their friendship between the two countries and the two communities. You know, back almost 51 years ago, this is the area that then First Lady Pat Nixon actually inaugurated as International Friendship Park and actually went as far as cutting a barbed wire or having the Secret Service cut the barbed wire there at the park.

So she could reach across to the Mexico side and hug the people of Mexico because of the, you know, the sentiment, the feeling of that friendship between the two countries and, you know, her very famous words that she wished that there would no longer be a fence here to separate these two great countries. And of course, we know that 51 years later, almost 51 years later, that has taken an opposite course of direction where we now have two border walls. Plans are to erect two even higher, uglier gate walls to divide our two great countries. Yeah. So perhaps, again, I think people have a very... The way that people see the border when they don't live on the border

is very different to the way we see the border when we live on the border right um and i think part of that is in this understanding of walls and fences and barriers and uh the various things which we have already along the border right so um maybe you could give us a little sort of potted history of the different uh i think you're right, they're secure fences, right, that were built through the Friendship Park and across the sort of San Diego, Tijuana area. Right. Well, again, for the longest time, the only fence that used to separate the two countries was that strand of barbed wire. the two countries was that strand of barbed wire. However, after Operation Gatekeeper 9-11, it was decided to build a sturdier fence. Then in 2011, the secondary fence was erected. And at that time, the threat of the park being closed again because of the advocacy of Friends of Friendship Park, it was negotiated with Border Patrol

that the park would continue to remain open with a limited access of, at that time, 25 persons at a time on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 o'clock in the morning to 2 o'clock in the afternoon. That second wall was erected when the federal government claimed eminent domain from the state of California and acquired that piece of land, which is now considered the enforcement area and to us is the area that we better known as Friendship Park. Right. And so there's a threat to the park now

right there's a there's a new threat and i think people uh again like might not have realized that uh we're continuing to build border wall border barrier border dike it's sometimes called uh depending on which part of the country you're in. But can you explain how, despite Joe Biden having signed this executive order saying, what he claims saying, not one more mile of wall, how are we still having this threat of building a bigger, uglier wall? Right. And, you know, I think that's precisely the question that Friends of Friendship Park are asking, that why is it that if President Biden has stated that he would not build one more inch of Trump's border wall, all of a sudden now

has decided to finish the construction of Trump's border wall. It's a question that we all ask. And as part of the petition that we have reached out to Border Patrol as to the inclusion of the public and in those plans on continuing the replacement of that wall with 30-foot bollard fencing. Yeah, and that 30-foot bollard fencing, that's what people will be familiar with as the Trump wall, right? That is correct. Something that, you know, the fencing that exists right now, you know, it's there. And I guess even though we may not like what it is and what it represents, you know, but it is there. and further desecrate our park with two 30-foot baller style uh fences uh just completely uh obstructs the the aesthetics of of the park uh desecrates our park yeah and so yeah with this

sort of further threat to the park looming you you touched on it earlier but i'd like to go back to like what the park means uh especially to families who are separated by the border right and can't cross to see each other oh absolutely uh you know on on uh when the park was open on on a weekly uh on a weekend basis uh you know we families, for example, grandmothers that had never met their grandchildren, meet their grandchildren for the first time right across that border wall. Mothers

that hadn't seen their kids in 20, 25, 30 years. The joy of being able to at least see them across that border wall and just you know a couple inches away from them and even though you know nothing could pass through through that barrier um the only thing that was able to to pass through the um the orifice there on the wall

or the fencing uh was the tip of your finger, which is why we kind of created what we call the pinky kiss, because that's the only thing that would reach across and that's the only way we would be able to hug and kiss our loved ones on the other side of the border. Very significant. And, you know, something that we hope more people would understand is that, you know, by having the park open and families allowed to be able to visit across that fence, it would allow people, even though it's not the best scenario, but at least it would give people it would give families the opportunity

to remain being a family to have a little bit of contact with their loved ones something very important we keep hearing about uh reasons for you know border walls and more uh tech uh uh tech and security and so forth is because incursions. Well, to us, this is one of the reasons why, you know, we have more incursions because people get desperate from losing contact with their loved ones, that they're willing to risk their own life to be able to reach their loved ones.

That's why you have increase in people trying to swim across the border well. That's why you have people reaching out to further points in the desert trying to reach their loved ones. That's why you have people climbing some of these 30-foot walls and falling and, you know, bravely injuring themselves because you get to the point that your family is everything in your life and you're willing to risk your life to reach that family. When Friendship Park was open, we had a lot of conversations with a lot of people that came to the park to visit their families. And in speaking to them, they would tell you that being able to see their families, their

loved ones, and sharing those moments together was very comforting and very energizing and motivating to continue to fight to search for a legal opportunity to be able to reunite with their loved ones. Yeah and I think we should point out that like since 2020 since the park has been closed it's not just the park being closed which has created like a hostile environment for people seeking asylum or seeking to reunite with their families in the united states right we've had the migrant protection protocol uh which is better known as remain in mexico right and we've had title 42 uh sometimes called catch and release both of which do the same things that you say which is for increase the amount of people who cross in high risk areas and increase the danger to migrants chiefly and so there's this there's this perception i think that things changed in january 2021 but they didn't i think for most people certainly

people i've met trying to come to the united states to be safe um they still can't and as you say they they still can't see their families and perhaps we should also mention that like sometimes we talk about um friendship park being binational but it's more than that right like it's not just uh people from mexico who come to meet their families at friendship park it's a it's there's people from all around the world who are unable to come to the united states but are in tijuana right right absolutely it and uh you know it's not just uh you know families that gather there uh it's uh friendships it's an opportunity um for people from any part of the world uh to be able to make a connection, make a friend right across that

border wall without actually having to cross the border if for whatever reason it may be, they cannot come across to the Mexico side. You know, the park is all about friendship. That's why to First Lady Pat Nixon was so important the designation of the park in consideration of the great friendship that existed and has always existed. And you know what? No matter what happens, that is going to

continue because in particular, San Diego and Tijuana, we're really one community. There's a tremendous population in San Diego that have relatives in Tijuana and vice versa. And it's not only, you know, the family, but commerce. You know, we're one community. And one way or another, you know, people are going to stay connected. Always figure out different ways to be able to remain connected and have that friendship. And I think part of the reason for that is because, you know, a lot of people see that border fence and they see a barrier,

but we see that much more than that barrier is the barrier in our heart. And with, you know, the people of of our community that barrier doesn't exist the only barrier to us is that uh that fence uh the barrier in our heart does not exist because uh we have respect for each other and and we consider ourselves uh friends and one community on both sides of that border wall. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's, yeah, the border exists a lot more sort of on the ground than it does in the community here. And I think so many thousands of people cross every day, it's really odd to have it presented as this hard, impenetrable thing.

And then it's also just an annoyance and a reason that we sit in our cars for hours trying to cross north. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about because there's a friendship park and then there's the southern side right Parque de la Amistad. What's the official sort of set up in Mexico with regards to the park? It's a little different from the US right? Yeah well you know the big difference on the mexico side is uh like our pastor john fannister says uh on the mexico side is one big party you know one one big uh uh friendly uh happy atmosphere just like what you would expect to find in any park where families gather on the weekend and now during summer vacation, even during the week. A bustling beach city with a

magnificent, friendly park, family-oriented, family-friendly park where people go to enjoy a beautiful park. Unfortunately, our friends on the U.S. side cannot enjoy the park as much as our friends on the Mexico side do because of these limitations on the park. Yeah, it's a shame. Like you said, it's very contrasting. Like the US side is kind of difficult to get to and it's only open certain hours. Well, it's not open at all post. We should explain that, right?

So it was closed in 2020 for COVID. And then if I understand right following that it remained closed because border patrol were understaffed they claim right that is what we have been told at Friends of Friendship Park originally that it was closed because of COVID and the understanding was that when the COVID situation was over then that their plan was to reopen Friendship Park. However, now we're being told that because of a lack of personnel, that they're not able to staff it accordingly to be able to open it. You know, you touched a little bit earlier on the MPP program. You know, if there has been increasing incursions into the U.S., a lot of it has to do with the asylum process

that has been halted for so many years, for the last couple of years, forces people in desperation to take their life at risk and try to gain entry into the US. It's not that difficult to understand if you're living in a country where crime and violence is widespread and you have a choice whether you leave your country and travel three, four thousand miles to reach some kind of safety to protect the life of your loved ones, of your family. You know, you're going to, you're going to, if you risk that, you're going to risk, you know, your life trying to get across it and protect your family. And if the only way you can do it is by jumping over that fence or swimming around that ocean, you know, that's what we've seen happening. and a lot of that has got to do with the asylum process that is being shut down and continues to be shut down.

People are going to continue to try to save their life and the life of their family. That's why we're hoping that the asylum process can be reinstated as international law requires calls for it. And that would, would definitely show a decrease in in incursions. Again, you know, a lot of these incursions are people trying to reach safety for themselves and their loved ones. Yeah, and it's been a very difficult situation in Tijuana for a lot of people, a lot of people who've arrived since MPP started. For a while, people were camping at the border crossing, right? But in town, like at Pedwest. That is correct. Yeah, it's also sort of forcing all these shelters and non-profits in Tijuana to saddle the burden, which they do a very good job with, largely. But we're this massive, richest country on Earth, and we're just sort of shutting the door at the minute and saying, like, you're not welcome.

Right, that is absolutely correct. So I know that you've been doing some events at the Friendship Park, right? You've got a concert coming up. Could you tell us about that? Yes, absolutely. We have a concert coming up for our 51st anniversary. 51st anniversary and the headliner for the concert is a gentleman known as the father of Mexican rock and roll which began here, I'm saying here, which began in Tijuana, Mexico, Javier Batiste. And you know what is really neat is that Javier Batiste was actually the mentor of Carlos Santana. And, you know, we all love the music of Carlos Santana, an incredible performer. Well, he had his start with Javier Batiste at one point here in Tijuana, Mexico.

I keep saying here I'm in San Diego here in Tijuana, Mexico. I keep saying here I'm in San Diego in Tijuana, Mexico. And, you know, Javier is an icon of rock and roll music and of Tijuana. And, you know, what I think is really special about this concert uh in speaking to javier um you know his ideals are very much along the ideals of uh what friendship park is all about and you know friendship puts a smile on people's face and that was something that Javier told me personally. I love to play my music because my music puts a smile on people's face and I like to make people happy. That's great. And, you know, that's the whole idea behind Friendship Park. To make people happy, to have people enjoy a beautiful park, enjoy their families, enjoy the friendship across the border that we have

yeah exactly and i think it's very sad the whole sort of canard is very sad right like the idea that um we don't have it we have enough money to build a giant steel barrier but not enough money to open this place up for you know a few hours a week for people to see their families and enjoy themselves enjoy that time together. It just seems almost, uh, but pointlessly cruel, I guess. Um, which I don't know, sometimes a lot of the immigration system seems pointlessly cruel to me. Yes.

Yes, absolutely. Um, then you separate a mother from a child, that is cruel. When you won't allow a mother and a child to even be able to gather for a couple hours a week, separate from a barrier, that's very cruel. When you don't allow people of good nature, of goodwill, to visit, even though it is across a barrier that is not good yeah i think it's important that people across the country like obviously like it can be really difficult to care about everything right like it's it's a pretty difficult time with the supreme court decisions and seemingly sort of non-stop mass shootings it's a difficult time for everyone i think but like

um i think it's important that people realize that the border is where a lot of these policies get tried for the first time right these these things which uh like if we look at the way that like privacy of people living on the border has been eroded for a very long time and that's happening to other people happened in 2020 right it was a border patrol drone that was flying over minneapolis during the protests and so if people want to push back and to show solidarity and support how can they support the park and how maybe can they support the people who are stuck in in tijuana and want to cross but aren't allowed to cross because of MPP or Title 42 or restrictive asylum legislation? the Southern California area. Rain or shine, we go ahead and continue having events at Friendship Park on the US side, like our bike rides, our native flora workshops, our border church on

Sundays at 1.30 in the afternoon. We invite people to come and join us. Come and join us on a bike ride. Come and join us on Border Church and show your support for the need to continue the work that had been done for so many years at Friendship Park in support of our binational families and our binational community. Also very important, contact your congressman, contact your senator. And if you're in California, of course, your California senators, assembly persons, we need to urge them to advocate for us before Homeland Security, before the Secretary of Homeland Security, so they may understand the importance that Friendship Park offers, not only to the families, but to our communities.

not only to the families but to our communities. You can secure a border a lot better through friendship than through border walls that at a given moment can be breached as we have seen they have occurred. The strongest security that anybody can ever have is a good, strong relationship on both sides of the border. Yeah, I think that's very well said. So if people want to come to Friendship Park, can you just explain how they would get to one of these events and where they have to go? Absolutely.

What I would recommend is follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram accounts, Friendship Park, and also our website, friendshippark.org, where we have information on all the different events on our border church. And this way you can join us on the U.S. side or if you want to come to the Mexico side, it's wide open. You can go directly right to the monument area where you can enjoy this great, beautiful monument to commemorate the demarcation of the two countries. You know, you can enjoy it either way, but we do like and we stress people to come out and join us on the U.S. side so that, you know, we're not forgotten, so that this beautiful piece of land, Borderfield State Park, known as Friendship Park,

is not forgotten. And not only that, you know, enjoy the beauty of the park. We have a beautiful park there, Borderfield State Park, adjacent to Friendship Park. Something that very few people have been taking advantage of lately. We've had quite a few more visitors out there, horseback riding, bicycling, a few families out taking a dip in the ocean. But this is a beautiful beach that we have there on the U.S. side.

And welcome, you know, our community, our our community, uh, where, uh, San Diego, the community to come and enjoy it as well. And, uh, you know, as you come and enjoy it, uh, you support our efforts, uh, to demonstrate the need to, uh, keep our park open. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a very, uh, yeah, it's, it's not hard for people to help. Uh, and I hope they will. How long do we have, do you think, I think that's a very, yeah, it's not hard for people to help. And I hope they will. How long do we have? Do you think? How long do we have before they break ground on this new wall? Right? We're not sure how long we have. We were told that it was a matter of weeks. Does that mean two weeks, three weeks? It's hard to say, but we know that it could happen at any time.

And lately we've observed several crews out there doing surveys and such of the area. So we know that at any moment there should be breaking ground. And we hope that before that ground breaks, that they will consider our request. And call for public support for public input as to what the park should look like. You know, give that look like uh you know give that consideration uh to um you know if you're gonna you're going to replace walls to make sure that uh you know the that gates

are allotted uh so that um these visits can continue because as we understand, there's no provision at this point for any kind of gate for person access, for people access into the area. That, of course, tells you that there's no intention of continuing at one point to open the park for the visits. And of course, that's extremely concerning. Yeah especially for people separated by the border. Okay so just to finish up can you give us those social medias and web addresses again where people can find you and help? Sure absolutely. Our website is www.friendshippark.org.

Website is www.friendshippart.org. The Facebook, you can find us under Friendship Part. You can also find information under Order Church. Great. All right. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk. I know it's a busy time for you.

You're very welcome. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today. Thank you. 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.

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