It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 51

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

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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. Oh boy, it's 9-11, but a day after. It's 9-12. You will be listening to this on 9-12 after you have finished whatever it is that you do on 9-11. Either be sad or tell jokes or nothing at all. It's all fine. There's no wrong thing to do when you're thinking about a day where a really fucked

up thing happened, but that's actually untrue. There is one wrong thing to do. And we're going to talk about the wrong thing, uh, today because most people, I think, think back to the day after nine 11 as, Oh, everybody was like out of their minds with like grief and fear and saying some really fucked up shit and generating a kind of fury that acted as propulsion and justification for a lot of very very bad things um and is not in general a time that we should look back on with particular pride uh or or uh certainly what's the word i'm looking for here? Nostalgia. Everyone that is, except for Glenn Beck.

Now, James, we've got James Stout here. Chris, hey Chris. What do y'all know about Glenn Beck? Because James, you are, this is controversial to say, but I think we should rip the mandate off, British. Chris, you're very

young, so I'm wondering how much do you know about mr beck he was like my memory of him he was kind of like the well i don't know er is not quite the right word but he was like he was like like the guy in sort of like right wing shithead like punditry for a while my memory of him he was like he was like a slightly more put together Alex Jones like he had like the weird pin boards and shit and like is this the right guy

yeah he's Alex Jones with a budget in terms of kind of the space he fills James did you catch much of him not really so my engagement with Glenn Beck is mostly through teaching American history classes and trying to explain the explosion in lies and bullshit and hate that immediately follows 9-11. Yeah.

No, I've never really heard his stuff. Yeah. Glenn Beck, he's doing radio shit and stuff before nine 11. By the time he actually comes on the scene, it's a few years after nine 11 and he gets a show on Fox news. Um, and Glenn is, you know,

I watched him every night. My parents always watched him. My dad considered him to be like a really good historian, um, which is bleak, um, a lot, but he was, he was, he was a unique sounding figure. a really good historian, which is bleak. But he was a unique-sounding figure.

So when Glenn Beck comes onto the stage, the biggest dude in right-wing media is still Rush Limbaugh, but Rush has kind of taken a backseat in the last couple of years, especially right after 9-11, to guys like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. And they are kind of like, they are powerhouses in right-wing media. And then you've got, well, those guys are on TV. You've got this cast of people who are like bargain basement discount brush limbaughs on the radio

that are all kind of waiting in the wings for their chance to be the next big TV hero. And those guys include people like, like Glenn Beck and also folks like Michael Savage. There's a lot of maniacs that you probably have not heard of that we don't need to dredge up. But Glenn Beck kind of sails out of the fever swamps

of the right-wing media and gets a fucking TV show on Fox News. And in very short order, he is the biggest fucking thing on the network. Fox News is the most popular network in the country. And Glenn Beck is their number one host. In 2009, he's pulling in something like 3 million viewers a night. And yeah, he's very, very influential.

And this is the point in time in 2009 by the way the other thing that's happened that's big in right-wing media circles is barack obama has been elected president yeah yeah now yeah you've got birtherism happening but in general i think one good way to think about it is that 9-11 supercharges the right but in a very like populist way in a because there's this expectation like we talked about in the last episode this expectation that people are coming back to god because there's been a big disaster we're going to war and war always benefits you know the conservatives and the and the you know the party like we're going to win this war and that's going to be huge for us um and you also have like just this, this sense, cause Bush becomes the

most popular president anyone can remember having that the, the tight of history is with conservatism, you know, in the immediate wake of nine 11. And then that all goes to shit because conservatives have terrible ideas for everything. And they launched two disastrous wars. And by 2009, there's not a lot of people who are going to like admit in public. No, I think we have both those wars were good ideas that were handled well. Right. Even the people who were, who were real bullish about that stuff are like, well, you know, they, they didn't do this right or that right. Or it's impossible to win in that part of the world. And, you know, it was, that's the, I heard different versions of that from, from different family members and stuff but there's this this real sense of aggrievement and in the wake of uh bush like it's it's kind of taken for granted because

about how disastrous his his presidency had been that um he was not you know it was not going to be a republican who won that election um but the fact that it is barack obama a black guy they lose their goddamn minds. I think they'd been ready for, I think even they would have been fine with Hillary Clinton. Obviously they would have like gone nuts on her like they did on Bill, but like, I think they would have, I don't think that would have caused them to go crazy the way that Obama did. It is, it is not wrong to compare the impact to 9-11 in a lot of ways, because it's this massive shock that shakes the center of their world, that they view as an attack, as an assault on like white,

middle-class Americans. And the shockwaves of that, I mean, we're still dealing with them. But one of the things that's happening here is that after 9-11, they had this sense that history is with us, momentum is with us. And after Obama gets elected, you see the conservative movement get much more insular and much more conspiratorial and much more focused on like grievance and anger and revenge because they know nothing's going to bring back the people.

So there's kind of nothing but vengeance. And Beck is the guy who's going to tap most effectively into this feeling, this feeling of fear and this need to feel like you were right after 9-11, when it felt like everything was surging forward in the right's direction. And so in 2009, he launches what he calls the We Surround Them campaign. Now, the we in this, I think, is supposed to be conservatives and them is the government. But I think you can assume other, you know, if you think about the urban-rural divide in this country, there's another meaning to that sort of thing. Now, this is a series of segments and specials on Beck's show that grew very popular.

So popular, in fact, that a lot of local right-wing organizations start hosting viewing parties. And this becomes like the earliest stirrings of the tea party movement, right? All of these right-wing radio stations and stuff, these local talk radio stations and other organizations are holding viewing parties for, uh, to watch Glenn Beck talk about, you know, his, do his we surround them act. And I'm going to play a clip for you now from one of these viewing parties. We're going to play a couple of clips. This is from one filmed by a talk radio station in Fort Wayne, Georgia.

And yeah, it's, it's, it's something else. All right. So I want to, I want to play this for you. I think it's a fascinating artifact and how the radio host chooses to introduce the event is noteworthy, as is the man's appearance. Yeah. With 600 sick freaks watching Glenn Beck on Fox News for 9-12 Project. It's amazing. So.

What? What? It's interesting to me. I think it's kind of worth going over a couple of things there. Because that doesn't seem like a lot. But the fact that he describes the people in there as sick freaks, and then like, we're sick freaks, but like kind of taking pride in that. That's what he assumes liberals would call them for watching Glenn Beck. You can see a shade in this of a lot of liberals, because they're dumb, were taken by surprise when like Hillary Clinton called Trump trump supporters a basket of deplorables and they immediately adopted that name for themselves

no again that's you see the stirrings of it here right like this is this is what the movement's turned into um you're taking pride in the fact that you're outnumbered and and despised also the 912 project i'm i'm intrigued oh yes that's yes. That is coming. We're building to that. Cool. So anyway, we get some rockin' guitar licks, just some of the best preloaded rights-free guitar music I've ever heard. And then we pan into this very full conference room. There's like 600 fucking people in this thing.

And they are, as far as I can tell, all white. It is certain that the only people they talk to when they do like, because, you know, the camera goes around to like get people's statements on the event. The only people who are featured on camera are white, like 100% of them. And I'm going to play a clip from that now. Steve Carey from Fort Wayne. I'm glad you're doing this. I'd like to get our constitution back.

I love you for doing it. We're all behind you. Thank you. Hi, Glenn. We are Jackie and Bill Betker. We're from Angle, Indiana. And we would like to thank you that you're helping us, we the people, to take back our America. Thanks.

You're the man, Glenn. What you're doing is great for America. You're an encouragement to all of us who are fed up with the federal government. Now, it's impossible. I know. I have not seen since I was a child. James might die. Yeah, there are a couple of extinct kinds of white guy in that video. The very last of them died to COVID when they cut a hole in the middle of their mask and went to a Luby's.

It's Mr. Now, here's the thing. I want to acknowledge something that is impossible to deny, which is that the fact that we are laughing at them in this way is part of why they got so angry and put Trump in office, right? Part of why liberal tears is a thing. Part of why there's so much focus on this desire of hurting the enemy. But also they just all look like impossibly American. Like, like,

like these are the people I used to see in Barcelona from a hundred yards away. People would be like, how do you know an American? And like, my friends would be like, first of all, you've come dressed

as a fucking tree. Secondly, like, look at yourself. Yeah. And this, look, these are some of the people

who raised me are, are not, you know, I grew up around these people. I grew up around these people. I grew up with these people. I am of these people. I think I wear better shirts.

I've not seen you dressed as a tree. But it is like you see in this these people who feel like, and that's kind of the thing they're communicating, something has gone wrong with the country. And the thing that's gone wrong is they are looking out and people don't look like them. And in fact, people are looking at them like they look weird. And people are making fun of their ways and their customs. And this has taken them by surprise. And they're extremely angry about it. And seeing a black man as president, which is the least anyone could look like them, right?

Barack Obama, many flaws. 2009, there was not many cooler looking dudes than Barack Obama. Like, and that is, yeah. You have to understand, like, the bar is so low here that, like, a reasonably well-dressed person is, like,

dropping a nuclear weapon on, like, six cavemen. Yeah. It is chaotic. So so the show ends with beck because they're watching glenn beck on a fucking projector and it ends with him near tears he would cry on his show constantly telling everybody there that they were all going to meet back together in six months to find some ways in which they'd managed to to add some 912 energy to their lives. And we'll get to this more, but the thing he's saying is that the day after 9-11,

we were the best version of ourselves as a country. Everyone was so godly and so loving and so united, and that's the thing that we need to get to deal with the horror of Barack Obama being the president. And obviously the other thing happening, I don't want to be unfair here, it's not just that they're scared about Barack Obama. This is 2009. The economy has just completely shat a fucking brick. The housing market is through the goddamn floor.

Some actually scary things are happening, too. It's just that they're kind of grafting all of them onto the specter that is Obama, you know? Anyway, yeah. So after this, we pan out to widespread applause in this very full room, and then we cut to interviews. This time, I know everyone's going to be really excited here. There's a baby. Oh. It's a pretty cute baby.

The youngest Glenn Beck fan. Look at that. What? Oh, geez. This child has my reaction to this. It's so funny. It's so funny it's so funny look at this let's get this baby's statement just shine it blind it with a light until it weeps yeah uh that's that's the good stuff okay so this this video has paused on a freeze frame of a guy in a suit that they talk to this guy they call him the best i'll just

play it i will i will just play i wasn't planning to play this but i will play it sir you're the best dress uh guy here did we have a good time today what did you think of the presentation i thought it was nice it was nice to get together with a lot of people and it's great turnout and i know that so many people still care no that guy okay that that that exact kind of person was like the political class of like the town i grew up in like these are the people who were like like this is the guy yeah yeah like the thing the things they get up to were like like there was a guy who was taking money from the sheriff's department to try to abolish the police so that he could install the sheriff's department to try to abolish the police so that he could install the sheriff's department

as the only law enforcement division in this town while he tried to sell... Oh, God. That is the kind of person I intimately am familiar with. He has strong Republican city comptroller energy. Yeah. For a town of 13,000 people. Yeah, he's dressed much like Rickyicky gervais dressed in the like original office yeah dump dumpy i mean he is literally the guy ricky

gervais is making fun of yes yeah he is so beck paired his message of government accountability as he framed it with and this is what we're talking about the 912 project which follows we surround them with nine principles and 12 values which if followed would help bring your heart back to the mythical 912 this moment in which america was was beautiful this this we've gone from the 50s like there's this there's this 20 year 15 20 year golden era to like we had one great day and if we could just get back to that everything will be fine um So here's the nine principles. Sorry, it's nine principles and 12 values. I want you to hold me accountable if I

fuck this up in the future. The nine principles are, number one, America is good. Number two, I believe in God and he is the center of my life. Number three, I must always try to be a more honest person than i was yesterday number four the family is sacred my spouse and i are the ultimate authority not the government and i say this a lot but in the roman empire the the father of the family used to be able to execute his wife and children and you're a fool if you think that's not what these people want things to be like um well and they're slaves too that's also in a very important yeah and the slaves are a critical aspect of this yes uh number five if you

break the law you pay the penalty justice is blind and no one is above it this is by the way confusingly a reference to all the people who lost their homes in the housing crash um that's what he's talking about that they didn't they didn't you know you can't like bail people out um number six i have a right to life liberty in the pursuit of happiness but there is no guarantee of equal results number seven i work hard for what i have and i will share it with who i want to government cannot force me to be charitable number eight it is not un-american for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion. And number nine, the government works for me.

I do not answer to them. They answer to me. Now, that's fun. There's some interesting things there, including the government can't force me to be charitable. You know, I will, which like the side of that that is something that actually happened on 9-12 is a bunch of people showed up and volunteered to like at great personal cost because many of them got sick and died to help pull bodies out of the rubble and try to save people right and that the government literally did not need to tell people to do that because a bunch of cops actually refused to go do anything at all yeah

and and the like the the government the government knew about like like, when the government did do something, they put a bunch of firefighters inside of the range where the dust was toxic and then just fucking got them killed. Yeah. Which, you know. And then spent the next 50, like, we had to have John fucking Stewart fight for them to get some kind of recompense from the federal government, which, credit where it's due, is a legitimately cool thing that he helped do but like why did it fall upon the the daily show guy to ensure that the guy

who's doing transphobic bits at the same time yeah yeah like it's none of it didn't ted cruz vote against health care benefits for these people oh yeah yeah absolutely which again it's very funny that like the government can't force me to to to to be charitable it's like well what that actually ends with is people actually volunteering and risking their lives and then the government the conservatives in the government callously voting to let them die in agony because like well why should i have to pay all you did was rescue people during our country's darkest hour why Why should I have to pay? Like, it's this, it's amazing shit. Now, I'm sure you're curious about those 12 values.

They're really boring. Like, it's like Boy Scout shit. It's like honesty, reverence, thrift, courage. Like, it's not worth focusing on. The thing I, this entire time, I think I've been thinking about, this is the exact naming scheme that, like, if you just walked up to someone on the street and like asked what what what are what are the nine principles and 12 values like this this sounds exactly like like this sounds exactly like what like a like a a a a mid-level like a mid-level chinese bureaucrat

would name their campaign to like make sure that water restoration is done properly like it is the exact naming scheme of like like campaign style stuff and like fucking like post uh post maoist china yeah there's a lot to say about that and about glenn beck but um you know so i got that list of 12 principles from glennbeck.com what i find interesting is that the principles as are up on his website right now because this is a thing he still gets into every now and again are somewhat different from the ones that he debuted on the episode of his show in which he introduced the 912 project and i found the the way he worded 0.8.8 is it's not un-american for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion i found the way he actually worded that in the show very interesting

and i want to play that for you now because it's it's quite a bit different do you agree with this it's not un-american for anyone to disagree with my opinion but my opinion or others opinions may be anti-american anti-american rhetoric would be anything that's destructive to the Constitution and our country as the founders understood it, unless you want to change that. There it is. Yeah, there we go. There we go. That's the real good

grievance. Yeah, I respect your right to say anything, unless you're disrespecting the founders, of course. In which case, SWAT teams will commence immediately etc etc we were we are readying the lynch mobs now after introducing those principles he asks his audience to mail him personal photographs so he can put them together into a big we surround them graphic which you can find if you really want to um it's yeah it's

if you want to get an idea of like the people who were listening to Glenn Beck, that'll give it to you. Now here's what happens immediately after he gives the email address for people to send this to. Calm. All right. The climate change people are pulling a page from Nazis.

What are your kids learning at school? What are your kids learning at school? Are we really surrounded? What a perfect moment in American television. Yeah. It's really incredible, right? It's also things like, you couldn't do this anymore, not actually because you can't say that about climate change,

but because if you tried to say that about the Hitler youth, people would get mad at you. Oh, yeah. No get in trouble oh yeah the hitler youth defenders will be uh they were very very pro-environment i can hear tucker carlson saying that yeah it's it's i just want to share with everyone that uh man by number five by bob the builder hit the uk number one spot on septemberth, 2001. Wow. What? Yeah. You know what, James?

Never forget. God. And the queen was still alive then. She must have loved Mambo number five. I imagine she had. I bet there was a little bit of Monica by her side. A little bit of Bob the Builder and the queen. A little bit of Rita is all she needed.

Did he get it? Died. Very sad. above the builder and the queen a little bit of Rita's all she needed um okay get it died very sad so the the 912 project as it kind of grew out of the we surround them campaign if you kind of I don't know I found it written online I can't exactly confirm this but it seems like it kind of started um when Beck took a call on his talk radio show and this is a little bit a couple of years earlier from a guy named Ed in New Haven, Connecticut, who expressed feeling outnumbered as a conservative on the American political stage. Right. And that's that's really like what the the all of this kind of grew out of is this response to feeling like outnumbered. um and i think that's an important thing to understand if you're trying to get to like the thing that the thing that they want to go back to when they talk about wanting to go back

to 912 isn't anything to do with the actual terrorist attack it's the fact that everyone was so frightened that they unthinkingly uh that they unthinkingly submitted to the right wing that was in power at the time right yeah like that's that's what 912 is to them yeah like it was it was the last time conservatives were able to like effectively cancel like mass cult like they like the only time cancel culture has ever been real was like the dixie chicks and they could just do that like if you if you didn't start all of your concerts like if like my reason miley cyrus didn't go on stage and like say something about the troops at the beginning of a concert like they would just destroy you and you would never be heard from again. Yeah, yeah, it was it was like legitimately scary to not be unthinkingly pro-America and like wildly so. And and that's what they want to get back to.

Right. Is the fear of actually questioning conservative hegemony. So I want to play a clip from the episode in which Glenn Beck first introduces his 9-12 project to his audience of millions on March 15th, 2009. Here's how this introduction goes. Two, one, back. Hello, America. They're waiting. I'm backstage right now at Fox. I'm getting ready to show you that you are not alone.

This is your country. You're still in control, but it seems today like nobody gets it. Now, that is a fascinatingly blatant statement of white conservative supremacy, right? You're in charge, but nobody gets it. They don't understand that you're supposed to be running things right um it's it's incredible how blatant it is but it also like you do have to understand he's speaking to this real frustration this is like where we get trump is these millions of people are like why don't they understand that we're supposed to be in charge um there's there's an incredibly i don't know if you're going to get to this like later there's the next video on the fucking youtube thing is from vice

and it's glenn beck is a conservative in exile after trump oh yeah we can chat a little bit about that at the end i'll do a whole glenn beck episode of behind the bastards but i really i want to keep digging into this so i I'm going to press play again here. You know, you've lived your life in a responsible way. You didn't take out a loan that didn't require any kind of proof of income. Yet now you're being forced to bail those people out. You've been concerned about this country through the last administration and this administration. If you're like most people, both administrations. It's not about politics.

You actually believe in something. And you thought for a while there your politicians did as well, and now you kind of realize, well, maybe they don't. When you come home after a hard day at work, all you want to do is put your feet up. All you want to do is just relax and just watch a little television, catch up with what's happening in the world. But every time you turn that television on, it just seems like the whole world is spinning out of control war islamic extremism europe on the brink even pirates now

closer to home mexico isn't safe for vacations or our kids anymore six thousand were killed or beheaded on our border just last year and ph And Phoenix now has the second highest rate of kidnapping in the world. So, there's a lot going on there, but I think the thing that is most fascinating to me is that, like, the way he just blatantly is like, cartel violence, it's a problem because it's not safe for our kids to vacation in Mexico anymore. Mexico only exists for spring break. Yes. God. All problems are at their root about Americans right like that's what's going on here

well the other thing that's interesting to me is like he throws in the like Europe under siege thing which was like one of like the big like fascist things in like that period like word for word Europe under siege like fortress Europe shit yeah this is when

andy andy no started his like no ghost zone yeah exactly i think so right around here maybe a little bit later members of my family who are extremely caucasian live in in some of those no-go zones like i lived in europe in this period it's just so ridiculous yeah and it's it's incoherent like if you look at the specifics of everything because the he's yelling about the financial crash because he has to be angry with it because half of his market is terrified and losing money or has have lost jobs and stuff as a result of the crash um but you can't you can't portray it as a problem of like corporations rapaciously destroying and hollowing out the middle class so instead the problem is

that like foreign there's a line in there about how like foreign corporations are just treating americans like a market which is like well how do americans treat everything like of course they treat them like a market it's capitalism um it's not very coherent but like what is coherent is this sense of grievance right that we have been we as as Americans have been specifically wronged. We're not, and we as, when he says Americans, obviously, he's only referring to a specific kind of American. But yeah, I'm going to press play again here. The forgotten man is you.

The voice that no one seems to hear just quietly saying, enforce the law. Take responsibility for yourself. You can't have it all. And anybody who promised you that was a liar. Current economic downturn. Worst economic crisis. Worst month of job loss. But something is happening in America. Paradigm is about to change. Your friends and neighbors, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, they're all beginning to wake up and wonder how did this happen to us so yeah the the word september 10th 2001 just hit the screen as soon as he finishes that but i mean what you're seeing in that is like the stirrings of what becomes trumpism you know it's yeah very

clear i know yeah and there's just uh like photos of white people up on the left and right of what becomes Trumpism, you know? It's very clear in retrospect. And there's just photos of white people up on the left and right. One of the most hideous two columns I've ever seen in a video. It's one and a half of each. It's not done well.

Their graphic design was... Science had simply not advanced to that level yet like i need people to understand this there are supposed to be three lines of pictures scrolling across the screen the middle line is cut in yeah the middle line is cut in half there was half of one person's face on each side of of the screen yeah it's a crime and what they're what's being done here what beck is doing here is he's trying to take the anger and like that people still felt about 9-11 and turn it kind of towards in a different direction right because what had actually happened on 9-11 was that a group of

terrorists had attacked the literal center of american capitalism um and of the american military industrial complex, right? Those targets were picked specifically because of what they were. The Twin Towers contained one-tenth of all office space in Manhattan. Their largest tenant was Morgan Stanley, which lost over 80% of its market value in the 2008 crash.

Worst yet, in Beck's eyes, the victims of the attacks are all New Yorkers. Now, if you're not in the conservative media bubble, you may not get it, but New Yorkers, that was like a slur. They literally like a slur to call somebody a New Yorker. New York values, right?

Exactly. So, Beck can't focus on the actual victims of 9-11 because they are people that it is in his best interest to train his audience to despise. So instead, he focuses on how 9-11 was basically an act of disrespect against this forgotten man, right, who's now kind of surging up. Like, that's what he's doing here, right? That's what you have to do if you're Glenn Beck, because again, you can't actually focus on the real victims of this,

which is why it's not incoherent ideologically for conservatives to talk the way they do about 9-12 and then vote not to help people who were first responders and had their fucking lungs filled with poison. Yeah, it's good stuff. So obviously, because Beck has to thread this needle, he focuses instead on how the attack hit American prestige and confidence. I remember how picture perfect the day was. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and America seemed invincible. And yet, in the blink of an eye, that airplane appeared to hit a little bit down the building around the 50th or 60th floor. Again, it struck flush. The skies were filled with black clouds and our hearts were full of terror and fear. Absolute disaster. We realized for the first time how fragile we really were.

Then, something happened. So now it's September 12th, and the first image we see after disaster and destruction is a group of firefighters holding a gigantic American flag with roughly the footprint of a school bus. Right. And this is, this is good, right?

This is, and also it's, it's interesting that this is what he chooses. It's like the image of America, like rebounding from this great defeat, as opposed to like, I don't know, firefighters pulling people out of the rubble and saving their lives.

Like, no, they got a big flag. That's how, you know, we're going to be okay. It makes sense saving their lives. Like, no, they got a big flag. That's how, you know, we're going to be okay. Yeah. It makes sense though.

Right? Like, like the, the, the actual lives are unimportant. The thing that's important to save is the image of the image of America. Yeah. It's just the flag.

Yeah. The center is also on the ground. So yeah. Well, look, my flag code. Yeah. Flag code is for the,

not us. I'm going to continue here. Yeah. We promised ourselves for thee, not us. I'm going to continue here. A.I. We promised ourselves that we would never forget. On September 12th, and for a short time after that, we really promised ourselves that we would focus on the things that were important. Our family, our friends, the eternal principles that allowed America to become the world's beacon of freedom. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you.

And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. Now, I want to point out here, the choice of that clip, it's both because that was a very famous speech that Bush gave that really made his presidency, or at least the early part of it in a lot of ways. You could argue that a significant amount of the kind of the political capital that he expended invading Iraq came from this particular speech and generally how he handled the days after the attacks. But it's interesting that they picked this because it really is, it's very much in line with this feeling and talking about the forgotten man, talking about they're not listening to us. They don't know that we're in trouble. What Bush is saying here is literal words are, I hear you and the people who knock these

towers down are going to hear you, right? You, your, your anger will have a reaction in the world, right? It will be met with fire and fury, right? Like that is, that is the promise being made. And it's this, this undercurrent and everything Beck's doing here of the thing that he is working with, the clay that he is molding is the fact that these people don't feel listened to and like, and that they deserve to be listened to and that the when they're angry at something it should be hurt right like that's that's the undercurrent he's talking about family and togetherness but like that's what he's actually

promising people i'm really interested in this like uh like i don't this is probably like 9 12 or whenever he's giving this speech um i think i always come back it's weird given where conservatism has gone right and like he's taken this in very much a clash of civilizations direction but like bush was giving like islam is the fabric of america speeches that week he was speaking in mosques and to muslims and being like that like this is not a clash of civilizations yeah now obviously fucking he went and fucking like killed millions of muslims right most of them innocent civilians who had nothing to do with nearly all of them right uh but yeah it's just interesting that like here's bush who was giving this like this isn't a clash of civilizations thing and it's become a clash of

civilizations thing like eight years later yeah yeah and it's become but in a very different way right because one of the things that i think is happening here is the problems that americans regular americans are facing in 2009 are this massive economic strife caused by predatory lending outright fraudulent business practices by major banks the fact that the legal system had been changed in order to allow this massive con to go on. And then it had been followed by this massive crony capitalist bailout that ignored regular working people. Glenn doesn't want his viewers to focus on all of that, right? Because those are his backers, right?

But so instead, what he's doing is he's taking, they feel disrespected and vulnerable because they have been, right? Now, there's unreasonable aspects to that, but they have been disrespected and vulnerable because they have been right now. There's unreasonable aspects to that, but they have been disrespected by the people who are stealing like all of the money in the country and fucking them over too, and leaving their homes hollowed out pill addicted wastelands. Um, but you can't focus on that. Uh, the cure is the cure that Beck offers them is not materially improving anyone's conditions. It's not altering the systems that people cannot prey upon others that way.

It's by striking someone else. It's by striking back at that sense of agreement, right? It's by, this is what's going to turn into owning the libs, right? Just hurting the left. Conservatism now is purely about harming groups of people they view as opposed to them. That's part of why trans people are so focused on by the right right now is that it's the symbol of liberalism to them. And they want to hurt that symbol. Right.

This is this is the answer Beck is offering. And it's going to be adopted by the thought leaders of conservatism. We don't need to focus on doing anything. Nothing can be done. Right. Nothing can be done. The grift is running out. Collapse is coming. All

that we can do is redirect the anger they feel at being fucked by us towards hurting other people. That's the magic that Beck is pulling off here. It's pretty cool. It's interesting, too, I think. Pretty well. It's interesting to compare this, I think, to

both Reagan and Nixon because this is very, very similar to Nixon talking about the silent majority and the stuff Reagan's doing. But it's like, those people have an actual political project. Reagan is trying to completely annihilate the welfare state, and they have stuff they're trying to do. state and like you know dude like they have stuff they're trying to do but like post bush was like bush was the time they tried to like do stuff and it's like like bush is so hated by this point that like like even glenn beck at the beginning of this is being like well we had concerns about the last administration too and i was like well yeah because he like yeah just by every conceivable metric just completely like annihilated the United States.

But, yeah, it's, like, it's this interesting thing that, like, yeah, like, this is the first time they've talked like this. But the level of nihilism is just, like, so much, like, the politics has been emptied of content to, like, such a greater extent. a greater extent and i i think i think part of it too also what's happening here is that like there's like the like the only thing left like for sort of like the capitalists who are backing back like the only thing left for them that they could possibly win is getting rid of social security and they kind of like oh and obama gave them the chance to do it and they kind of like blew it but like they they don't like this is like the 80s like they actually have like there's like there's there's tax racism like there's not actually anything for them really to do but they still have to sort of like maintain this constant vigilance against anyone even remotely trying to make the world better by taking away some of their power and i think that's like

another angle of why all of this is just sort of like this like incredibly empty nihilism because that's like that that's the only politics you can have to defend your people who've won yep yeah well that's a good note to end on um i hope you've all enjoyed getting to meet glenn beck uh in the 912 project i know i've enjoyed it. Uh, goodbye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

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the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k?

Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year,

but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now

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

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. So I'm here today with Aria and Ann. Aria, she lives at the Eden House over there in Kenya. Ann is the chair of the management board at Trans Rescue and has over 40 years of trans rights activism. And they're going to explain today a little bit of what Trans Rescue is, what Eden House is, and the threats and attacks that they've been facing in the last couple of days here. So perhaps, Anne, you could explain what Eden House is. And I think I really liked in your website where you explained the difference between like a hidey hole and a haven.

So if you could get into that, that would be wonderful. Sure. hole and a haven. So if you could get into that, that'd be wonderful. Sure. Eden House is a trans haven in Kenya. Our primary mission is that we help trans people escape from dangerous places. That implies that we help them go somewhere because, course they have to have a safe place to go to which means we often end up renting an apartment short term or doing something like that while they get established in their new place the problem and of course that that was getting expensive in kenya where we can move a lot of people because some areas of Kenya are quite dangerous, but the major cities are not quite so dangerous. And so we move people

into the major cities, but we were trying to be efficient and save money. And we thought about making a kind of temporary DOS house or a place with bunk beds to the ceiling and whatever. But we realized that would still cost us money and it wouldn't be a very positive experience or affirming experience for the folks living in it. And we realized that we could instead do a trans haven. That is a place where a person could come. And if they chose, never leave. Live there the rest of their life if they want. So when someone comes to Eden House, they can expect to receive help to find some income producing activity. And as time goes on,

they'll eventually be expected to contribute to the running of the house. Our plan is, we just started a month ago, but our plan is by about the end of the year to have the house no longer be requiring funds from us. And then we can do it again. We have space for eight people. When we get up to eight and it doesn't look like it's going to bleed us dry, we end up with something that I think many trans people in any country would love to have, because that's, you know, that's something as long as I've been around, there have been many discussions of building such places. Yeah, it's a very admirable project. And I know Garen and I just visited the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch. I've been before, and it's really powerful to see how empowering those spaces are and how they can help people. So I can see that you set up in Kenya. Was there a reason that you picked Kenya? Was there a very large trans community there or something that led you to...

Frankly, in such places places people often have um uh there is the old um queer uh i know somebody who knows somebody a lot uh system and people have kind of webs of trust and as a result where we get people uh coming from to ask us to move them is very irregular. There are some countries we never hear from, and we certainly know there are queer people there. We know the conditions are bad and we'd be happy to move people, but we don't have a lot of penetration. In others like Kenya, we're in the network and people are giving each other our contact info. Also, we have some capabilities.

We had built up kind of a center there. So we decided to focus on Kenya. Kenya is relatively easy to get into as far as visas and so on. And so it's a place we can send people when we might have trouble getting them into, say, Europe or the United States. We can with. And so we're perfectly happy to end up with lots of folks. We'd like to make the place attractive enough that it's also a place that we even have people coming who aren't particularly in immediate danger. We're working from a philosophy of abundance that we want to grow. working from a philosophy of abundance that we want to grow.

And we have a rule of we don't want to make a place that we wouldn't want to live ourselves. And honestly, Eden House is a nice place. It was the personal home of a rather wealthy family. It looks nice. Aria, would you maybe like to describe for us your experience at the house, what it's like, and how places like this are important so that people can understand? Maybe if you could start with how you became aware of the Eden House

and that this was an option that was available to you. Okay. So I met, we got in touch with Anne early this year. Yes, early this year, around February, January, if I'm not wrong. So that was before AIDIN was formed. So we really had a long discussion on us moving from where we were. We were at the coast and things were really, really brutal at the coast side of Kenya. Like we were going, a lot of of stress even lost one of our friend and um yeah it wasn't really good

it was really bad so yeah we had a discussion about moving to um to eden house and it was a work in progress so uh we took some time working on that. So eventually it happened. And so we came to Eden House and it's a very beautiful place. I would agree with that. Yeah. And yeah, Anne also flew all the way to here because we were new here and there were some things that we needed done. And yeah, we are three of us currently in Eden House. I got in touch with Anne and the rest of the team.

There was Doris on board. Actually, she's the person who was, like, you know, responsible for the Malindi team. And, yeah, the two sisters that I have, like, okay, they're my sisters because we've been through a lot of hell together. So, yeah. We come all the way from Malindi also. We are here together. And so far, when we got here, the place is very beautiful, but just needed a little, you know, here and there decoration and, you know, clarifications and modifying and, you know,

precautions whereby, you know, putting on security lights and the security wires. Yeah, still some things need to be upgraded, but, you know, we still need to resource for a lot so that we can have some things being done. But so far, so good. Everything is good. I'd interject that we're trying to foster a spirit of self-sufficiency.

And so we've been, we got everybody to make the furniture. Most of the furniture in the house has been made by the residents. And we're starting some various sort of fundraising, you know, or income activities. We've made a chicken coop and we're in the process of getting chickens and uh and uh sewing machine and um uh one of our residents is a talented artist we're going to set her up to have a place to sell her artwork that's the kind of things we're doing thank you um aria i'm really, kind of on a day-to-day basis, what are the things that you and the other people who are at the Eden House do in order to protect yourself? Like when you're going about town, when you're doing errands, is there a degree of operational security that you have to keep in mind? Yeah, actually, we have a rule whereby we don't go anywhere without letting each other know, especially if we are going to a long distance.

Putting in mind, we are very new into this area, so we don't know a lot of places. So currently, we are just in the house trying to get to understand a few things. Actually, we've been doing the repairing the repairing we have uh we have a chicken coop at the park it's kind of a small um a small place whereby we needed to fix some things so we've been working on that so that we have the place ready for the chicken when they are ready to come in and also for me I've been um going around to see at least locate some few places whereby, you know, we can feel safe.

Like the hospitals, I've been trying to get in touch with people like around here. I haven't been easy, but at least now I can say I can go to a hospital that at least it's kind of familiar with me. Yeah, we also have a place where we buy, what are these things? The house supplies and all that stuff. We are really trying as much as possible to like minimize our moving around from places to places to draw attention. So we're just trying to go with time and see how people will accept us existing to this community. So we don't want to bring any attentions whereby people will start asking questions like, you know, what's happening there? What's not happening there? Yeah. Yeah. I noticed as well that the

house used to belong to a politician. Is that right? So it has some measures of sort of external physical security as well. Yeah. Which is good. Maybe we can talk about i know kenya's a big country and it differs vastly depending on where you are and who you're with uh how is the climate towards trans folks uh i haven't been in kenya for probably 10 15 years uh how is the climate towards trans people have things have it become like a big topic like a culture war thing recently uh or is it sort of can you explain i guess what it's like you were saying it seems like it can be a risk just to go outside which is pretty sad yeah um yeah it is a risk to go outside you know um here in kenya um in different sites of Kenya, like at the coast, okay, taking example at the coast

side from where I come from, it's really bad for the trans community because now there, they are very transphobic and homophobic people like most of the transphobic and homophobic people come at the coast side because these are people that tend to keep

their culture and religious like, you know know more of a more of a key thing in uh in someone's life more of like they use they use the quran and the bible to crisis to christatize the trans people and the gay community so being in that area it's very very bad and very very risky for trans community uh comparing to the other side of kenya i wouldn't say it's not risky but um their level of understanding of the trans community and the gay community it's um it's more of an it's more of a way that they are kind of confused not sure where to understand but it depends with also the area that you are. You might

find you end up, for example, now where Indian House is, like for the few, for the month that we've been here, the feedback that I can say I have from the community around here is they're like more of people that are calm and more of people who are you um are more of um used to their own personal things they don't like you know put their nose into that to the things that they're not involved with if you get what i mean um in other towns um having new people people who like you know want to know why they are there and you know all that stuff But in this town that we have, we are in Eden House, it's kind of safe in a way that people are not putting their nose into us, like more of wanting to know about us, rather than they are welcoming us more of, you know,

the landlord is kind of friendly, I would say that. The kibanda, kibanda, it's more of a small grocery shops. So the kibandas around here, the small grocery shop, they are the people who are selling the groceries and all that stuff. They are friendly. I haven't, I haven't incurred or engaged or seen any transphobic or homophobic reaction

towards the man that have been here. Most of the people here are much of welcoming, like I would say that. And yeah, it's really different from where I come from. Trust me, from the town that I come from, you can't walk with makeup or with anything that makes you look girlish or anything that makes you look resembled to a transgender or maybe gay or something. It will be a bad thing for you in the day. Yeah.

to a transgender or maybe gay or something, it will be a bad thing for you in the day. Yeah. A little bit of the geography of Kenya. Remember that on Kenya's coast, up in the north is the border with Somalia. And so the culture naturally mixes over the border. And this is also an area where lots of folks are coming over because of the political instability in Somalia. And it's an area of al-Shabaab terrorist activity.

So that makes particularly the north part of the coast a rather dangerous place. makes particularly the north part of the coast a rather dangerous place yeah just if people are interested i know like the state department sort of has a do not travel uh like north of pretty much uh so like people can see it on the map but yeah there are certainly areas where risk would be higher and fortunately talking of that like it it hasn't, there have been some attacks, threats against Eden House in the last couple of days. So if either of you would like to explain exactly what happened as far as you're comfortable, I think that would be great. Yeah, let me explain because I think I'm the right person to explain that. So, um, they're there. Okay. This happened when Anne was around here, actually, we had an attack and, uh, one of the windows, um, uh, people, uh, people break into the house, not inside the house, but inside the compound.

And, um, they tried getting in the house, but yeah, thank God the place has secured doors and windows. But they took off one of the glass from the window and they tried to like, they had a stick that was holding a magnet on the end. holding um yeah a magnet on the end so they were trying to use the stick with the magnets to pull out the keys so that they can have an unclear entrance into the house but thank god we had removed the keys to where we used we normally used to put and kept it somewhere else so the keys that were where they were targeting they were only the keys to the meter box and the fridge targeting, there were only the keys to the meter box and the fridge. So they took those. And yeah, I presume they later realized that they wouldn't go through with those because they were not the right keys.

So the next thing we wake up in the morning, the magnet was down on the floor and we noticed that the window had a piece of glass missing. So that was the first incident that happened. So we reported that was the first incident that happened so we reported that to um to the to the landlord and um uh previous day before uh that happened there was a neighbor who came by and um they said that um someone tried to break into their apartment and uh they were kind of curious because they never knew if people moved into this house, so they just wanted to check in what was going on. And we kind of get into, like, you know, know each other,

and they kind of gave us a warning, and that's why we removed the key. And the day when they came, they couldn't get in. So, yeah, after Anne left, now this is a recent incident that happened. Then the next night they came back back and we found a couple of broken windows in the morning, like they'd tried to pry some windows out and ended up breaking the glass and gave up. But, yeah,

that's, so at the time, I think we all just thought of this as ordinary theft activity. But this latest incident, it's pretty unclear unclear but this may be a more targeted attack yeah and perhaps it's silly of me to even ask this but could you speak a bit on what kind of help you can expect from law enforcement if any um i would say if any i would say like you see uh the place where we are staying

from the law enforcement i would expect that they put some like you know the they have a name that they put that um that they're the lights that normally the government's supposed to supply like you know the what's that what do they call they're these lights that they normally have to support from street lights yes street lights so the place that you are staying there's no street lights so if if if if if a police was to ask me or um you know any security measures that were to be put like i would say that they put the street lights those would help at least there'll be more lights for like you know that should scare people away even if those people are thieves or anything you see so yeah that was that's what i would say

okay yeah and i know two people were hurt in the most recent and sort of active aggression right yes yes this was the day before yesterday. Okay. Are they doing okay? Yeah, they're fine. Actually, I'm one of them. I have my arm injured, but not really deep. The other one is asleep. She had a really bad injured back, stabbed, and the arm also cut. So, yeah, eight stitches at the back, really bad. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's not good at all.

Okay, so that's not great. Have you, since the attack, is there like an ongoing aggression against you? And it seems like someone's targeting the Eden House, right? If you ask me, I would say it's more of targeting the Eden house right um if you ask me I would say it's more of targeting the Eden house because um um I don't understand why we would only be the only person like the only people experiencing the same the same incident over and over like the next the next houses they don't complain in such incident like you know like this guy literally if um i'm just picturing the fact that we had to go out and you know turn on

the machine and we saw this guy and he just bumped into us with a knife and cutting us off so i'm just picturing if this guy was waiting for like i'm just seeing it if he was waiting for more people to come so that they can attack coming inside the house why was even standing there in the first place because we found him there and he was like he came through me because i was the one who was in the front so i just keep asking myself like why was he standing there what was he waiting for yeah yeah that's terrible. Yeah, and I'd point out that to get there, to get there, he had to climb a high stone wall topped with razor wire and get into position without triggering the motion detectors.

Yeah. Which is, you know, not impossible to do, but they keep coming back. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, you know, not impossible to do, but it was, but they keep coming back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure people listening will be upset by this. Is there a way that people can like express a solidarity or support you financially? Yes.

We need funds to keep running the house. And in fact, the guy escaped through a hole that was left only because we ran out of razor wire. We need funds to keep the project going. We need funds to also to support our primary work. We're continuing to get people out of places like Saudi Arabia. We have people who are kind of who are in mid-travel right now. And we have other people in hidey holes in dangerous countries. And we want to move all those people. And we'd like to start that right now. We're not even taking new folks on because we just have such a backlog. I'd very much like to fix that situation. So for all these reasons, I, you know, we're doing,

we're happy with what we're doing, but, but we do need funds at the moment. Yeah. Let's get into that a little bit. You're the, the we here is trans rescue right yeah yes trans rescue is a non-profit and you're based in europe and you move trans people out of dangerous situations that's correct we're based in um we're based in the netherlands uh we're a uh a shtickingicking which is the in the US that would be a 501c3 we're an ANBI qualified schticking which basically is a 501c3 okay and you were telling us before we started the call that you think it costs you about 2500 euros to move each person is? Yeah, that's the average. The average is probably slightly

going down because, of course, to move somebody into Eden House from the coast might be as cheap as 80 bucks to send them a ticket and then a few hundred dollars of settling them in Eden House. On the other hand, getting people out of Saudi oftentimes means not only flying them, but sometimes flying our own personnel in and out on often kind of crazy routes. So a person might find themselves a long way from either Saudi or where they're finally going to end up. And as a result, and then, so yeah, we end up having to spend a lot on plane tickets. And then we also, sometimes this takes months, we play paperwork games. Sometimes this takes months. We play paperwork games.

We are not people smugglers, but we certainly are helping people get to a country where they can actually claim asylum for the most part, which means, you know, and successfully claim asylum. And that often means manipulating edge cases in the international travel system. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can see why that would be expensive and complicated. Yeah. So it's great that people can donate to you there. Is there anything like I noticed you were asking before for some mutual aid help with your PR? Is that something you still need?

Like are there things people can do if maybe they don't have the means to donate? Yes. We're a small organization. We're not very large. And we actually are just cranking up our PR operation. We could use a press list. We could also use amplification from organizations with more kind of online cloud. We're basically a little group of people. And for two years, we operated as an informal group of activists.

We realized that was probably not ideal for this very serious work we're doing. And so last December, we reorganized as a proper shtick team. But yeah, help with boosting our signal at the moment would be very useful. Anyone who can, you know, can spread the word of what's happened at Eden House, we would be very much appreciative. Yeah. Well, we can definitely do that. Yeah. Hopefully other folks can too.

It's just so people can find you. It's trans underscore rescue on Twitter. It's trans underscore rescue on Twitter. It's transrescue.org on the web. I will share that fundraiser link when when this comes out. Aria, how have things been for you the last couple of days? It must be pretty rough. I imagine not feeling safe at the house.

Yeah. Actually, the advice that we got from the landlord and the neighbor, there's a neighbor here, a lady, she came by and I have a number. I called her the day we had the incident and she came in the morning when we had a talk so she suggested that we shouldn't be going out late nights and uh by 10 we make sure that all the doors are locked and yes and stay safe inside in case of anything she asked me to call her and also the landlord asked me if in case of anything if i hear any movement or any suspicious thing happening outside the gates i just give them a call it's good it's good that people are

sticking up for you in your community it's really good to hear yeah really good yeah yeah yeah we appreciate that and on their behalf what y'all are doing is very important and we're you know sorry that you're encountering this kind of resistance, but we hope we can help at least get the message out about what you were doing at Eden House. Yeah, much appreciated. Thank you. It's much appreciated. I regret that we spent most of the time on security. I'm more, I'm excited about many of the positive things we're doing. We're trying to set up a place where trans people

can live their lives and thrive and have normal lives. Yeah. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about how many people do you have at the eden house right now if you're comfortable sharing that uh sure we just opened so we've got three people we've got one more person who um went back to settle kind of settle his affairs and we'll be moving in um and we have um and we've got space for eight at the moment um we've had

a couple other people inquire but but haven't like aren't there yet we're kind of excited by the space we've got because there's actually room around us to grow. So we're expecting to get bigger. Yeah, I hope you do. And how many people has Trans Rescue been able to help as an organization overall? One way or the other, we've moved about two dozen people. Of that, roughly half have been the serious kind of get people out of Saudi Arabia type moves. The others have been folks that we helped in sort of less dramatic ways. Okay.

Yeah, that's a very meaningful contribution to a lot of people's lives. That's great. Yeah, I get, you know, it's great. I get, you know, it's great. At least one person lives locally and it's great to kind of occasionally have him over for dinner or, you know, and know that we got him out. Yeah. That must be really nice. And I think, yeah, it's important not to just center like hatred, but also about success. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I love that that and it's cool that like you have

plans to grow i've seen that you have agricultural areas around so you're thinking of like growing some food around the house and actually we have brought some foods we have some uh vegetables like spinach cabbage tomatoes green paper oh nice yes did they um did the uh garden survive the flood uh we had actually i was about to tell you that actually when the water was coming in the all all the spinach went and lied down and we were kind of worried but when um it stopped when the water stopped flowing down, the sun came out, they kind of started going straight. So I wasn't much worried about that, but it's kind of freaking out because they all went down and were like, they're dead.

We have a drainage problem in front of the house. And recently there was torrential rain. Thankfully, spinach is hard to kill. Things I did not know about Kenya. It hails there. Oh, yeah. I did not expect I did not like sort of imagine hail, but but it hailed several times while I was there. And everybody was cold while I was walking around in the t shirt.

Yeah, I can add some robust weather in Kenya for sure. And yeah, I'm looking at these pictures. It's great to see you guys are making your own furniture and doing all these things and really enjoying your time there as well as obviously, we don't want to just focus on the threat. So hopefully, you can go back to that. Hopefully people can support you. Aria, is there anywhere online people can find you? Do you have a Instagram or Twitter or anything like that?

Yeah, I do have a Twitter account. My Twitter handle is at rams-aria. Can you spell that out for us? R-A-M-S. Okay. Hyphen. With a hyphen, lower hyphen. Underscore.

Yeah. Underscore Aria. Then Aria, yes. Okay, great. Yeah. And for yourself, Anne, is it just Trans Rescue? Is there a personal one? Anything else you'd like to plug?

My email, if someone wants to contact me, is Annie, A-N-N-I-E, at transrescue.org. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully. And we have a contact form on the website as well, if people are interested in talking with us. Yeah. Okay, great. Is there anything else you'd like to get to before we finish up here?

Yes. Great. Is there anything else you'd like to get to before we finish up here? Yes. On Fridays, we have office hours. So if you're in a country like the UK or the US and you would just like some advice or to explore your options, that's another service we offer as well. We're happy to talk with you on video about that when would those be? they're at 6pm central

European summer time which I think works out to midday in the US some parts of the US people can look that up and are you offering fingers primarily in English? Those are primarily in English.

If you speak Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, contact us. We can arrange to have somebody who speaks those languages talk with you. We maintain a telegram group, TransRescue. And if you get on there, you can use machine translation and talk with us as well. Oh, very cool. And we have Arabic speakers that monitor that. Amazing. Yeah, hopefully people can take advantage of that if they need it. Thank you so much for your time. Our platform is here for you. If you want to share anything else, if anything else happens, please let us know. And we really

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as part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

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This is going to be a part of the world that probably fairly few Americans spend much time thinking about. It's certainly a conflict that's kind of been lost in everything that's happening in Ukraine right now. But Armenia and Azerbaijan, their neighbor, have been at a state of more or less regular war since 2020. Since longer than that, but this kind of latest wave of it started in 2020. It was over a breakaway, well, what's often referred to as a breakaway region that both countries claimed and that stayed kind of independent for a very long time until a 2020 invasion by the Azeris in this area, which is majority Armenian. And it was kind of a military disaster for the Armenian side. The war went very badly. A lot of troops were killed. A lot of territory was taken. And ever since, the Azeri military has been carrying out border strikes in and around

areas that are kind of near their shared border with Armenia. Over the last 10 hours, as I record this, and I'm talking to you all on Monday, the 13th of September, over the last about 10 hours, the Azeri military has launched a fairly unprecedented set of strikes within Armenian territory. So not just kind of hitting border areas and not just hitting military targets, but hitting cities, hitting civilian areas, trying to move troops across the border. There's video evidence of this. To talk about what's happening, what's been happening in the past over the last couple of years and what's happening now, I'd like to welcome on Joe Kasabian. Joe, you will know from his podcast Lions Led by Donkeys, from his book

The Hooligans of Kandahar and a number of other books that I think we'll talk about a little bit at the end here, from his appearances on The behind the bastard joe you are an american citizen but you're also armenian and you're currently in armenia yeah um i moved here a couple months ago permanently um citizenship is we kind of have like our own repatriation laws but i'm still waiting on that um and so to to go off a couple things that you said we've been at a state of war effectively since the nineties when we first gained independence from the Soviet union, um, without going into the incredibly complicated history of Nagano Karabakh or Artsakh. Um, Artsakh still exists.

Uh, they did not take all of it in 2020. Um, but 2020 was a military disaster for Armeniamenia unequivocally so uh we lost over 4 000 people um huge swaths of territory where uh their population became the victims of a regional genocide um there are no armenians uh that have been confirmed to still be alive within that territory um there's endless videos of azeri troops beheading old men and women and destroying homes and cemeteries and churches. And ever since the war ended in 2020, a month has not gone by where either Artsakh or Armenia itself has not been attacked.

We've probably lost over 100 soldiers since then. These are kids. They're conscripts. We have military mandatory service here. So these are 18, 19-year-old kids doing their two years of service, on top of the civilians that are currently being bombed. We don't know how many people are dead at the moment.

And it's truly aggravating. I mean, Armenians live with this all the time. It's a sword hanging over our heads when this is going to happen. 2020 happened with unprecedented international support. And not only support, but willingly ignoring it um i mean nato powers helped azerbaijan do this um turkey and and israel israel israeli drone designers literally test flew a suicide drone into armenian soldiers to sell it um i mean it's uh it's it's honestly kind of i i don't know what to say about it other than it should be another thing that the world should be united against and they never will.

No, I mean, it's so frustrating. It's so frustrating. One of the things that I have had a lot of issue with, because obviously I, as you are, I'm supportive of Ukrainian people's attempts to, so far quite successful attempts, to stop Russia from taking over their homes. But one of the things that's happened alongside this is a kind of lionization of a specific kind of Turkish drone, the Bayraktar, which was particularly effective in the opening stages of the war. And military equipment wonks can argue as to whether that was due to Russian kind of

tactical failures and operational failures or whether it was due to new realities about how drones function. But one of the things that was ignored in all of this kind of fetishization of this drone and people raising money to buy more of them is that the drones were really combat tested for the first time, massacring Armenians. Yeah. Yeah, and it's... I try not to get too mad when I see stuff like that

because I understand why the Ukrainians are happy. Of course, of course. I should point out unequivocally I support Ukraine's fight for independence just like I wish people supported ours. And the wars effectively have the same kind of propaganda angle. Obviously, before Russia invaded Ukraine, they were talking about denazification or demilitarization.

When you look at their speeches and the rhetoric, it's that they believe that Ukraine does not have the right to exist and that ukrainians are either are russian or they also should not exist and that's effectively what we're looking at too um this is why armenians constantly compare what is happening now to 1915 um as baijan continuously says they want artsakh or nagano karabakh they they want it back or Nagorno-Karabakh. They want it back, but that's not what they're attacking right now. If you look at the rhetoric of Aliyev and his government going all the way back to the 90s when his dad was in charge and a few other people, their ideology is that Armenia is not a real state. They have claims over our capital Yerevan.

They have claims over the south where they're invading right now. And everywhere those soldiers go, they wipe out the local population of Armenians. There are no Armenian survivors in Hadrut or Shushi or any of these other places they took in 2020. They do not exist. or Shushi, or any of these other places they took in 2020, they do not exist. And ever since then, they've been purposely going through and destroying any evidence that Armenians ever live there, which is ridiculous. Armenians have been living in these places since before Rome was fucking established. Yeah.

I mean, and this is obviously, we're talking about the Armenian Genocide, which occurred during kind of the, and concurrent to the kind of late stages of World War I, and was unrecognized by the United States until, what was that now, two years ago, Joe? Yeah, something like that. Finally became the first president, first US president to recognize it. And this is because, we've mentioned Turkey a couple of times. There's a couple of reasons for this, but most of them boil down to not wanting to piss off the Turkish government. The Turkish government has strong attitudes that essentially everybody in Anatolia is Turkish in all this aspect, right? There were no Greeks, there were no Kurds, there were no Armenians. And this has led to, I mean, it's led to ethnic cleansings and genocides against the Armenians and against the Kurds. One of the things that was being done in Rojava that I found so compelling was an attempt to educate, an attempt by the Kurds there to educate people who were joining the YPG about Kurdish complicity in the genocide against Armenia, because they recognized themselves as victims of the same thing, you know, starting, I think, you know, all of the, it's hard to say

starting in, right, because we're trying to talk about concurrent conflicts, but they all go back, everything's going back quite a while. You mentioned Aliyev a little bit ago, and I don't want to talk about him. We're talking about Ilham Aliyev, who's the current president of Azerbaijan, the fourth, and of course, the son of the former leader, which is always a recipe for a good functional democracy. Also, his wife is vice president. Yeah, and his wife is vice president, which is nice. It's just like House of Cards. Yeah, he's the Kevin Spacey.

His attitude and rhetoric towards Armeniansians uh in general is eliminationists at best yeah um like he's i mean the the countries put out stamps that show armenia being fumigated uh like dirt went during the height of the pandemic which like as a genocide scholar you know generally when i see a picture of a place being gassed i get suspicious um uh they've taught they've talked about uh how it was a good thing that in the 90s armenians were driven from baku and the baku programs and a few other places um i mean weren't there like literally like some of those trophies at arms shows and stuff, like pieces of captured equipment with blood on it and stuff? Yeah, and they also had, honestly, one of the weirdest, like, it's incredibly offensive and racist, these caricatures of Armenian soldiers who, like, at the same time, they're racist towards towards Armenians but also vaguely anti-semitic like they looked like uh a character of a Jewish person that come out of their sturmur um with like yeah you know and I understand how stereotypically people think uh

Armenians look in like these racist art where we have you know big hooked noses and big eyebrows and things like that uh which admittedly i know i meet both of those personally but that's besides the point of like if you look at the pictures and they were taken down because like even like israel was like oh that's a bit much and like they helped that happen um but like also to talk you can't talk about azure by john without talking about turkey because they have this ideology that's like two people one state they they do believe in like pan-Turanism uh especially Erdogan um I mean he's been ever ever since he's gone like full fascist that's something he's been hammering the drum on and like this is an extension of that he's effectively a neo-Ottomanist he wants to

reunite the Ottoman Empire which is fucking insane but also has real life things you know but also to bring us you know to the conflict that Americans are more focusing on as we've talked about before this is another similarity between what Russia's doing in Ukraine and what Azerbaijan and Turkey are doing in Armenia they're both these kind of um redemptionist dreams of people who want to bring back some sort of lost imperial splendor, especially as their economy shits itself from mismanagement. And I think for Azerbaijan, it's the other way around. In the 90s, when we fought the first Karabakh War, Armenia won. I mean, it wasn't from being militarily superior or having more money. It had to do with two largely unorganized forces in the fallout of

the soviet union and armenia ended up winning um and ever since then that loss has been something of uh like uh national it's kind of like the national mythos of azerbaijan because before then azerbaijan as a national identity simply didn't exist it's relatively new um and that loss in that war became the defining moment that's where um the loss to armenia was internalized and like it became school curriculum that armenians were the were at fault for everything we're subhuman we've been compared to cockroaches like for instance if you have say my last name you cannot legally enter the country of Azerbaijan. You cannot enter that country with an Armenian last name. Racism and fascism is state doctrine there. So when their oil production kicked back up from after the war damages and after the fallout of the Soviet Union, on top of military reforms that have been lasting for 30 years, they the ones on the upswing now not turkey in my opinion and it also helps they're fighting

someone like armenia which you know armenians that we have military history and everything but we have no fucking money we have no natural resources we have no allies we have no one's gonna airdrop a pallet of fucking high mars and yerevan. Like nobody's coming to help us. We have a case that fought in the first war. We have BMP ones that have probably seen more combat than most people who are still alive. That's an armored personnel carrier. Essentially we, we have nothing.

I'm not going to speak about the capabilities of the Armenian military, but like you can imagine what a small landlocked country with a small population, not a lot of money can feel. It's not a lot. Yeah, it's not a lot. And this kind of gets us to another topic that has to be broached with us, which is kind of talking about the relationship of Russia to all this, because one of the things that's very frustrating about this conflict is that. Americans particularly tend to want things very simply.

So you hear you've got a Russian client state, which is how, it's not what Armenia is, I'm not saying that, Joe, obviously, but is how it's easy to kind of, especially like kind of in the boil out, sort of break things out as, it's like, okay, you've got this state backed by Russia, and then you've got this other state fighting it that's backed by Turkey.

Well, Turkey's part of NATO, they're part of the fight against Russia, so they must be the good guys. And none of that's accurate. Absolutely not. But I think it's important to explain why. So, I mean, it's really hard to explain Armenian-Russia's relationship other than imperialism.

Obviously, Armenia has been conquered by countless countries throughout our fucking long history, but the most recent one being the Soviet Union, which we did not join willingly. And then after the fall the soviet union the russian federation um we're solidly within russia's sphere of influence and by no active choice of ours we're members of the ctso we're members of the eurasian economic union and neither of those were by choice we were strong-armed into it because there's nothing else. There's no other option. And as far as it goes, it's this brotherly relationship or this client state. It would be exactly like someone blaming Ukraine for what happened in Maidan or blaming Ukraine for what happened in 2014 or what happened now because they're trying to get away from that.

I mean, we can't. We don't have the resources to do it. Just for an example of how Armenia plays tightropes this shit, never once have we voted in favor of Russia during this war. Our representatives to the UN, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, our prime minister is solidly neutral because that's the best he can do um right you know he's either voted against uh he's voted uh he's abstained he's never voted for to support russia during this war at all um now obviously back in 2014 there was a different armenia um we had a pro-EU movement here that was quite strong. This is before I lived

here, of course, that voted to declare our intentions to want to join the EU. I believe this is under President Serg Sargsyan. And it passed overwhelmingly in the popular vote, because unlike the people invading us, we are a free and fair democracy with the freedom of speech and expression and everything else that people like to claim they want to defend, but they don't. And after a five-minute meeting with Putin, it was gone. There was no more referendum, and we decided not to join the EU anymore. By we, I mean the president. After that, we had our Velvet Revolution in 2018, which got rid of him and distanced ourselves from Russia as much as we realistically could. So in 2014, I believe, for instance, Armenia kind of slightly supported

Russia when it came to annexing Crimea. And now you can kind of see why the president was a fucking stooge. That's not the case anymore. We now have a parliamentary system. I'm not the biggest fan of Prime Minister Pashinyan. He's not that guy. That's not... 2014 to 2020 in Armenia is a different fucking world. Like you said, people really like to simplify these things.

They want this to be a team sport. They want this to be NATO versus Russia and people like Belarus or whoever else. There's a pretty big fucking difference here. We have not actively supported this war. There has been

anti-war protests outside my fucking window since the war has started. Ukrainians have flooded here by the thousands and they have met nothing but Armenians who have welcomed them with open arms. Russians have come to, and we're not the biggest fans of them, but what can you do about it?

Um, you know, like, yeah, we're, we're solidly neutral in this. And it's one of the things that fucking, and I mean,

granted neutral government wise, people wise, absolutely. We're not neutral. Um, and I, one of the things that pisses me off the most is that people can see the realities of the war in ukraine where they can see right through russian propaganda when

it's like demilitarization denazification whatever and they can see on its face that's complete and utter bullshit but like when because you know, Ukraine is fighting for their sovereignty, their independence and the right to exist that we all have. And when it comes to us, we don't get that. Like, oh, well, we're calling for both sides to deescalate and maybe Armenia shouldn't have fucking started this. We haven't done anything. It was fucking midnight last night and the South started being bombed. What the fuck is there to be deescalated? You can't deescalate self-defense.

So you have what is a really uncomfortable situation and one that a lot of people don't like talking about the reality of, because essentially when you have a country like Azerbaijan that is insisting on repeatedly violating the territory of its neighbor, and that has proven not just a willingness but an eagerness to engage in acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, you have two options for dealing with that other than let them do it, right? Option one is send in peacekeepers to stop the aggression. Now, Russia has troops that were called peacekeepers in the area. You know, you could debate prior to the invasion of Ukraine how good they were at that job, but they certainly are not capable of doing it now. So then the question is, okay, who else's peacekeepers are going to come in, right? And if that's not a realistic solution, and you don't want to let Azerbaijan just do a a genocide then what you do is you give them weapons armenia weapons not azerbaijan oh they're people are already doing that part unfortunately the u.s

and nato yes yeah indeed um and again there's this we're all kind of in terms of like the discourse around this in the united states living in the shadow of the war on terror, in which an irresponsible quantity of weapons were handed out to an irresponsible variety of groups, and many of them went to bad ends and bad places. The reality is that, you know, we're sitting on a fucking stockpile of weapons here in the United States as tall as the sky, and handing over a tiny percent of that when people talk about like, we're giving this much aid to Ukraine, we're not spending that much cash straight on aid to Ukraine. We're picking up shit we have in mothballs and we're handing it to them because we've spent all of our treasure on a pile of guns larger than you can conceive of in terms of

its actual size and weight. And I don't know, when when i think about what is to be fucking done here realistically um i would like for armenia to have access to javelins and and some fucking stingers even one of the things that pisses me off is like like you said there's two options here you do nothing and you're complicit in a genocide that's what this is like it's it's like being silent in you know uh in 1945 it's being silent in 1915 it's being silent rwanda we were silent during most of those things and we saw how they all sure were like there's only one way this fucking ends if we don't get guns and that's with a lot of dead arians. By supporting Azerbaijan or sitting out, that is what you explicitly support, is thousands and thousands of dead civilians. Like, that's the only way this ends.

back to Ukraine, but it's relevant because it's the conflict that people are actually focusing on. The people who are counter on anti-side providing weapons to the Ukrainian military make claims about corruption, which they could also make about the Armenian government. Sure. And claims about, you know, arms trafficking and all that stuff. But so far, and Ukraine, by the way, is a country with a deeper history of corruption than the Armenian government even. For all of its faults, the Armenian government is less corrupt than Ukraine's. Yeah. Yeah. You haven't seen a ton of that happening.

What you have seen is the weapons that have been handed to them blowing up invaders' tanks and aircraft. And the sheer quantity that has been destroyed is evidence that that weaponry has been used pretty responsibly. And when you are talking about a group of people facing annihilation, I'm simply not worried that they're going to sell their stingers to fucking ISIS or wherever.

Right. Who the fuck are we going to sell them to? We have Turkey on one side and Azerbaijan on the other. Are we going to sell them to Georgia? That's actually fine. Like, you know, and that's... I them to Georgia. That's actually fine. Like, you know, and that's,

I don't know. I, I think people are fucking gutless. Um, you saw this happen in February before or in January before the war in Ukraine started when people like, Oh, weapons are only going to make it worse.

No, they're fucking not. You know, what's worse than an, than an armed population defending itself is an unarmed one being murdered anyway. And in case nobody paid attention, because they probably didn't, you can go back and look at the video footage of what happens to unarmed Armenians in 2020. And it's the same fucking shit ISIS did to Yazidis. It's the same fucking shit they did to Kurds.

And it's the same fucking shit that will happen again if we do not get what we need to defend ourselves. And I don't give a fuck if you don't like Russia. I don't fucking like Russia either. But it's the reality that we live in. If you are fucking intelligent enough to realize the diplomacy and geopolitics of how Ukraine ended up in the war that they're in now, you should understand why we are in the situation that we are in too. Now you should understand why we are in the situation that we are into. You cannot realistically believe we deserve what is happening unless you also believe Ukraine deserves what's happening to them. It's impossible. I don't know.

This is obviously. How could this not be like emotional? And it is just feeling like I can't. And it must be so much worse obviously just being there but like this this feeling of a fucking train coming at you and um people aren't gonna do shit because there's this fucking problem with optic and it's more complicated when we talk about i'm talking about when i talk about optics i guess we're talking about discourse when it comes about like why politically the united states is unlikely to do anything like what we've

suggested it's more complicated than that and a decent amount of it comes down to the fact that we have what is it 13 nuclear weapons stationed in turkey right now yep and insurlick which is land stolen from armenians from the genocide yep great stuff america well done we really knocked it out of the park what is it that people can do to help outside of you know trying to become informed about the conflict which i think we can talk about some sources at the end of this are there places you know red cross style things that people can donate to to help to the extent that that kind of thing is helpful yeah um i I mean, generally, crowdfunding for weapons systems is illegal

unless you're Ukraine nowadays. Yeah, I'm thinking more about medical aid. The Armenian Red Cross is always a good option. They helped a lot in 2020. They still help now. We still have a ton of internally displaced people. There's also the Hindramin Fund, which directly funds wounded servicemen because we really

don't have a va exactly here um there's uh quite a few other ones but the the armenian red cross is of course uh the most reliable and easy to donate if you're in the west for sure you don't have to navigate any confusing armenian language websites because it's it's hard and armenia isn't great at the internet so like most of them don't have translations um yeah but you know it's yeah i understand i'm a little bit more emotional than most people probably hear me on podcasts but like um i'm mad how could you not i'm mad i'm fucking frustrated. I don't know how much longer people can let this kind of thing happen. I hope the EU's gas this winter is fucking worth it, because this is what you got.

This is what that deal got us. So I hope you're nice and warm in the fucking winter, because we probably won't have power, or we'll have more dead or whatever. But I'm real glad you pivoted away from Russian gas and signed a deal with fucking Azerbaijan, you spineless fucks. And it's, I mean, the spinelessness is deeper than that, right? Because the reason why the fucking gas crunch

that led to that deal happened in the first place was among a number of things, years of seeding to Russian government aggression in places like Georgia and in places like Ukraine. And, and you've got that, you know, here you have the invasion by Azerbaijan almost like two years ago now.

And then there's another one in 2016 before that. And, and no pushback, right? And when you, zero, this, this is, the thing is, And then there's another one in 2016 before that. And no pushback, right? None, zero. The thing is, and this is not a popular kind of thing to go to talk about on the left, but it's true. If you want to pay attention to why that whole World War II situation got so goddamn bad, a big part of it is there not being any kind of effective rules-based international order to stop bigger countries or at least more aggressive ones from fucking with their neighbors and one of the things

we were supposed to have learned from that war is that you don't let people do that it's bad yeah and then we did a hard to explain to people that when a motherfucker shows up yeah yeah like it shouldn't be that hard tix i don't care what your politics is i mean everybody knows that we're both very left wing but when someone comes and continuously fucks with you the only way to make them stop is by hitting them in the goddamn face until they realize it's not a good idea like and this i don't care like diplomacy doesn't work when one side only wants you dead you can't debate my right to live or my neighbor's right to live or these kids right to live wherever they're fucking schools bombed right now you there's no debate to be had you have to hit them until they fucking stop there's like i'm sorry there's not going to be any

de-escalation of fucking genocide like that's not how this works people tend to get this in the immediate sense when you're talking about you know some fucking bigot in front of you. Everybody loves cheering on a video of some guy dropping a racial slur and getting knocked to the ground. Obviously, those are a lot of fun. Right, those are great. is that if you let assholes, the actual moral of like why it's important to punch Nazis in the face when they're doing Nazi shit, is that if you just let them do Nazi shit and you try to like appease them and calm them down, you'll often calm them down here and there and they'll like back off, but they'll have gotten a little bit more. They'll have gotten a little bit of what they want.

They'll have gotten a little bit further and they just keep making shit worse until somebody actually does fucking drop them. And it's the same with, you know, and again, I, we just talked about what the great lesson of World War II should have been. And the thing that actually happened is the generation that took power in the United States and in a lot of other Western countries after that, not exclusively the West, but I think we're talking about our people here, immediately went and fucked around and carried out acts of aggression all over the world. But that doesn't mean the basic lesson is bad.

The lesson is don't let people, we should not have been allowed to do that, but we shouldn't, like, that should not be a thing that the world accepts. Like, you can't just sit back and be like oh well that country's gonna go do a genocide now but it's far away so there's nothing to be done um other than continue to buy the oil of the people doing the genocide and thereby fund the genocide right like it's it's fucking unconscionable man like and even if you want to look at this as like the west also fucked around during the cold war which like yeah yeah, you know, everybody did. You know, it stopped them around.

They didn't fuck around so much in Southeast Asia after the US got punched in the fucking face in Vietnam, did they? That's right. Yeah. Like it was a lot less fucking. It shouldn't be this fucking complicated. I don't I don't care what political ideology you subscribe to. Like it's self-defense. Like it's collective defense, mutual self-defense like it's collective defense mutual

self-defense when we need help you give us fucking help like yeah it shouldn't be that fucking hard i mean to be fair for some people will never truly matter um because they don't see countries like armenia or countries like azerbaijan as having agency to do their own things and want their own things. And if that is you, I hope to see your house on CNN one day. But like, you know, that does there should be like that sounds like like an old Russian curse, like your house be on CNN. I believe it's from the Balkans. Yeah. Yeah. But I can imagine. Yeah. Some little old lady saying that to you. We we have the right to freedom as much as anyone else. And not only that, we've achieved it.

Armenia is a moderately progressive place. I mean, we're still working on some things. We have the freest democracy in the region. We have great standard of living for most people. And it is only getting better. This is a place that has freer and fairer elections and virtually anyone else over here to include russia to include fucking ukraine to include turkey to include all these places that people insist are worth defending

i'm just curious why we're not like why are like why are armenians less than what did we ever fucking do to deserve this it's it's incredibly depressing um and maybe we're not the right shade of white i don't i don't fucking know anymore man like it's yeah it's it's really weird to me um even like internationally uh geopolitically you know the secretary, Blinken, urged both sides to de-escalate. Suck my fucking dick. Like, what are we de-escalating?

They're invading us. I would like to ask Al-Qaeda, I would like to ask the U.S. How do you de-escalate that? I would really like to ask the city of New York

to de-escalate when planes flew into the World Trade Center. Like, get the fuck out of here. Like, how do you de-escalate this? They're bombing cities. Like's it's maddening um and it's not gonna end it's not gonna end until

someone fucking ends it we can't we we just had a generationally destroying war two years ago that we've not recovered from we have an entire society that's dealing with various different forms of ptsd um we don't have the the institutions to take care of all of the victims from two years ago um we didn't get any help then either and we're not gonna get any help now i uh yeah i you know i i think again there's this there's this tendency towards isolationism in the left brought on by the Iraq War. But none of this – if nothing is done, if there's no international response to this, and if the Azeris aren't stopped by autocathonic resistance, then it won't stop with Armenia, because violence of this sort never does. There's a book, I'm interested in your thoughts on it actually, Joe, but I found it quite illuminating a number of years ago, An Inconvenient Genocide by Adam Hochschild, which is about the Armenian genocide and its influence on Hitler, making the point that even though hitler never was anywhere close to armenia

neither were any fucking german troops for that matter particularly close oh they sure were uh imperial german troops uh were oh well yeah we're very much in charge of a lot of different death squads uh so it's it's a weird story hitler's hit. Yeah, of course. I apologize. I meant the Wehrmacht. To be fair, they tried. Yeah. But the point that Hochschild was making was that Hitler was not engaged in the Armenian genocide, but he paid attention to it. away with it yeah um and and got to take that like take land that as you pointed out is currently occupied by some u.s nuclear warheads um was was part of what emboldened him to do not just the holocaust but everything he did in europe and there was a line specifically in reference to the holocaust from hitler i believe it was during his table talk that was like essentially he was

saying well of course we'll get away with it nobody remembers armenians anymore yeah it's literally on the wall of our genocide museum here. Did anyone do anything to Turkey? Yeah, exactly. And that's the fucking thing. It goes back to 2020, right? Everybody was saying, because I understand the politics behind Artsakh are messy for people who are not from this region,

and I don't have enough time to go into them. The majority Armenian population that was given to Azerbaijan by the Soviet Union with absolutely no process. And they attempted to vote to join Armenia while we were still in the Soviet Union, which is well within the rights, according to the Soviet Union's constitution, if such rights functionally existed, which they did not. And that's what started the first war but in 2020 every war has been about that ever since effectively at least politically on its surface because internationally is recognized as part of azerbaijan um because they go off old soviet maps for fucking reasons i don't know i mean we could talk about sykes pico yeah exactly um but like you know in 2020 people were saying that like oh if this will all end if armenia simply gives up artsakh which

we don't claim artsakh nobody i mean some some people do the government does not um we don't recognize it as an independent country either, which they themselves have declared themselves. It's messy, I understand. But it's not within the Republic of Armenia to negotiate the non-existence of the Republic of Artsakh. That is their right to self-determination. That is politically what the government believes. Now, they were saying, well, now that these areas have been taken over by Azerbaijan,

we can finally move towards peace. There was fucking peace talks a week ago. Prime Minister Pashinyan met with Aliyev, I believe in Belgium. I'm not entirely sure. They literally met a week ago. Maybe it was two weeks ago. It was very recent. But the thing is, is every time this peace process starts again, this happens.

Because it's not about Arsakh. It's not about Nagorno- again, this happens because it's not about Arsah. It's not about Nagano Karabakh. It's not about any of these. It's about our right, our fundamental right to exist. They do not believe in it. Like, it's not just like it wasn't about Jews being involved in business. It wasn't about Jews marrying Germans. It was about their fundamental right to exist.

Like, it's all it is. The same could be said for Palestinians. This isn't about Palestinians. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, fucking Israelis are just placing Armenians in Palestine as well. Like, it's not about these small little nibbles that they're taking.

It's not about the freedom of movement. It's not about your right to date someone, which came up recently. They made some Israeli law against that. You have to declare your romantic intentions before you go into the West Bank or whatever. It's not about those things. Those are means to men.

Maybe that'll make it easier to get the American leftists on this one. Right. No, no, guys, Israel's the bad guys here. We can do this. Fuck, even Noam Chomsky wouldn't deny this genocide. Yeah. Actually, that's not entirely true. He probably would.

But the thing is, is it's not about these small nibbles. It's not about your right to do X or your right to do Y. It's not about Art Socks' right to freedom. They don't believe you should exist. And they will take and take and take and take until you're fucking powerless and they can wipe you out that is their goal i mean you can see that in palestine you can see that in arsakh you can see that increasingly in armenia you can see that's what russia's goal was in ukraine it was russia's goal in georgia it's how imperialism fucking works it doesn't

have to have an american flag or a british flag over it for that to be what it's called it's genocidal imperialism and like if you're too dumb to fucking see that i don't know what else to tell you like i don't know how else these do you need me to draw in fucking crayon like yeah and i i think we're both getting angry here primarily at groups of people who i don't believe are the the primary listeners that will have on this not necessarily no but i but i but i get it like no it's it's this constant fucking thing you have whenever there's a war anywhere and you are like well what is the solution well the people who are the victims need to have access to weapons.

Right. Yeah. And if you're saying, which I agree with, sending in U.S. or whatever troops to X country usually doesn't work out, then what is the option? Give them fucking weapons. Yeah. And honestly, like, what would make the situation worse if we had American soldiers here?

Yeah, I mean, I just don't think that's a thing that logistically the U.S. military can do. Well, it would never happen. There's not even a base here. There's some situations where, yes, military assistance could make a situation worse. Bad things will happen. You cannot deploy large amounts of weapons or soldiers to a specific area without there being some kind of negative effects however you have to realistically weigh the good and the bad yeah the the the world military the allies bombed germany flat but they stopped the

fucking holocaust yeah yeah we blew up a fair amount of people in the 90s we stopped the genocide like we blew up the shit out of isis and there was also some civilian casualties which fucking suck quite a few you stopped the aziti genocide with the assistance of the pkk and the ypg and the ypj like you cannot unleash military power without the acceptance that innocent people are going to die. The way that you weigh that is more fucking people are going to die if you don't. That's, I think, the key of it. And probably the point to close on is that it's not a decision. Do we do we bring violence to this situation or not?

The situation, the question is is how how lopsided will the violence be right the violence be uh one state armed by its allies massacring uh an under you know equipped military and then civilians until there's no one left of the people who inhabited that area um or will those people have the equipment to defend themselves? Like, that's the question. There's no, there's no, the only way for the situation to not be violent is for Azerbaijan to not do what they're doing right now. Right.

And hey, if some sort of fucking diplomatic pressure works, I will be unbelievably psyched to eat both of our words in this if the if fucking blinken manages to i don't i don't yeah i have no idea like how how you actually have an impact here but that would be lovely i just don't think it's likely yeah there's i mean don't get me wrong there's a time for diplomacy and that time ends when troops attempt to cross the border or they start cluster bombing our cities. There's a time for diplomacy and you can do two things at once. And to be completely

clear, I'm not calling for the 101st to fucking land in Yurovan or whatever. I don't want the American military to come here. We'll take care of ourselves, but we need the tools to do so. And the fact remains is you can be vehemently against war i know i am i fought them they fucking suck i do not want war to happen to anybody but when they when it comes

talking's over or at least it hits the back burner like there's negotiations going on in ukraine and russia that we don't hear about but at the same time ukraine knows they have to continue doing violence in the meantime like you can't you can't just like whoa guys let's just hit the brakes and let's like have a fucking peace conference in belgium or whatever like suny is being bombed goris is being bought like armenians are dying like there's no words that will fix that but we'll fix it as fucking artillery systems, high Mars, GPS guided weapons, fucking body armor.

We don't even have first aid kits. Like there's, there's things that we need that can happen. Uh, in addition to political pressure, because political pressure is great if we ever have it, but there needs to be something in the meantime, like,

um, the director of doctors without borders one time said, um, something that was incredibly controversial when he said it because he's a doctor and he runs you know a charity he said you can't stop a genocide with doctors and he meant that you need to give people fucking weapons because you know there's like like we already said and then i'll promise i'll stop talking um there's two ways that this ends. We defend ourselves and we survive, or you sit by and you do nothing,

and there's thousands of more graves full of Armenians by the end of this. That's it. I mean, once upon a time, the world said never again, and that shit has had a big fucking asterisk next to it ever since. And people need to prove themselves, need to fucking prove

that words actually mean things. If you want to defend democracies and shit like you do in Ukraine, I have a fucking democracy for you to defend. And we need weapons. Yeah, I think that's as good a note as any to end on. Joe Kasabian, host of Lions Led by Donkeys, author of The Hooligans of Kandahar. You've got a bunch of other books that have come out now. Yeah, I have the Victory of Death series out if you enjoy military sci-fi.

And I have another one coming out in October called The Frontier Corps. You can pre-order it now. If you look on my Twitter, you can find a link to pre-order it. It's free if you have Kindle Unlimited. So, you know, for the e-book. So, yeah.

Also, if you don't feel like giving me money, that's great. To donate to the Armenian Red Cross. They need it more than I do. Yeah. All right, everybody. That's the episode. Bye. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network.

Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden.

We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k?

Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

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

and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together.

And this is another Andrew episode. Hello, hello. Yes, greetings. We have Chris, we have James, we have myself, and we have Andrew, obviously, who I'm going to hand the reins off to. Awesome. So, hello again to another episode of me talking about different stuff. And quite fittingly, considering today is the day that Queen Elizabeth has passed into the pits of hell. We are deeply, as a citizen under the Commonwealth, we are deeply saddened by the loss of Queen Elizabeth.

Former colleagues have reached out to me today and I am okay, guys. That is so funny today we will be discussing a current member of the commonwealth um one of quite a few twin island nations in the Caribbean that being Antigua and Barbuda and more specifically Barbuda. Barbuda is an example of African resilience. It's an example of a society in touch with this environment. It's an example of the capability of the commons as an institution.

And it's an example of sticking it to the crown, to be quite honest with you. Nice. I mean, I'm excited to learn more about that. How have... Yes, so I don't think many people know about Barbuda and its history.

I doubt most people could place it on a map. But it's... It represents quite the interesting story so to begin I should probably explain what what is a Barbuda Barbuda is an island located in the eastern Caribbean forming part of the sovereign state of Antigua and Barbuda it's located north of the island of Antigua and is part of the leeward islands of the west Indies. It comprises of about 62 square miles. So it is about 62 square miles which is 160 kilometers and it's one of the flattest islands in the Caribbean. Its soils are very shallow and infertile. It is a very arid island with very little rainfall and very frequent droughts. Its scrub wilderness is

roamed by deer and pigs and descendants of the animals that early European traders and settlers would have imported. It also has a pre-settlement evergreen woodland that consists of white cedar turpentine and white wood alongside columnar cactus and thorny shrubs and grassy glades and soils that have been and other species that have grown up in soils that have been degraded by the clearance of charcoal burning and grazing and just general human activity. Most Barbudans, I would say, engage in shifting cultivation, but none of them are full-time farmers. The countryside is mostly uninhabited because the law required that all Barbudans lived in or near the island's

one village, which is Codrington. And according to the 2011 census, there were roughly 1,634 people on the island. Of course, that has changed in recent times, and we'll get into that shortly. that shortly. Barbuda is yet another example of a distinctive community emerging out of the colonial era that swept through the Caribbean. I've mentioned the Maroons before, the different Maroon communities that have existed on the different Caribbean islands and in Guyana and Suriname. islands and in Guyana and Suriname but I think Bob Yuda and their story represents really the diversity of how colonialism manifested in the region. Bob Yuda's people have a sense of identity and attachment to locality that is, I think, very distinctive and very

unique among people of the Caribbean. Not to say that the rest of us don't have a sense of identity or an attachment to locality, Their story and their tradition reaches back over two centuries of near independence and quite significant levels of autonomy, which was unheard of in most of the Caribbean due to the legacy of slavery. Representing a very close-knit and traditional community, Pabudan's approach to using and stewarding the resources reflects that long legacy of isolation, of ecological constraint being on such a small island,

of familial closeness having such a small population, and of social interdependence, considering the series of administrators that they had dealt with and how each of those administrators neglected or ignored them. Barbudans, both home and abroad, are still very much attached to their island because they have long held it in common. So we'll be diving into a brief history of exactly how they reached this point, what institutions they've developed for common ownership and communal land use,

how emigration has played a role in that, and unfortunately, how the combination of Hurricane Irma and the shock doctrine have contributed to their current situation. So for more than 200 years from the late 17th century, Barbuda was leased by the crown to one family, the Codringtons. Hence the name of the village being Codrington. The original Lisey was a guy named Christopher Codrington. He was the governor of the Leeward Islands and his heirs lived in England so they pretty much neglected it after he had died. Barbuda would have supplemented the lucrative sugar estates that Codrington had in Antigua with timber and ground provisions and fish and livestock and draft animals. Barbuda being surrounded by coral reefs often had ships wreck near the island and so they also salvaged resources from those ships.

ships wreck near the island and so they also salvaged resources from those ships and so as late as in the 1850s the codringtons were getting four thousand pounds a year from barbuda and stock and 300 pounds a year from salvaging operations on the island that's just over 643 000 pounds today per year and it just demonstrates of course that even though they were more independent than most other enslaved people because the island wasn't as profitable they were still being exploited initially the island was only worked by a few indentured whites but then when enslaved people were brought in from africa the enslaved population began to rise and they began to establish that sort of culture and community that we see to this day because they were neglected because the island was very little inhabited they housed and they fed

themselves through their own efforts and were basically spared of the rigors of the plantation regiment because of how unprofitable the island was because its soils were so sandy and arid and unfertile. So between 1800 and 1832, being free in many respects, Barbuda's population was able to rise from 300 to 500 and they built a cohesive creole community whose solidarity was able to thwart the efforts of local overseers and absentee proprietors to try to get them to labor on Antiguan estates

or to get them to be more, quote-unquote, productive for their overseers. Because they had such a several hundred strong community on that island that had established itself for generations, no overseer, no manager could just pull up in there and just say, try and coerce them into doing what he wanted them to do. This is in stark contrast to a lot of the other Caribbean islands where managers and overseers had a lot more presence

and a lot more power to destroy families, to split up communities, to foment divisions because the island just, they basically neglected it. And in that neglect, they took advantage of that neglect, of the material conditions that created that neglect to strengthen their community bonds and to strengthen their autonomy. As emancipation came around, Codrington himself even was like, good for them pretty much because almost all of them were like to quote him directly one united family so attached to Barbuda that force alone or extreme drought can alone take them from that island in other words as an expla as a displaced indigenous African people, they reforged a connection to the new land that they inhabited and rooted themselves in that land.

One particular tradition they have is the burial of one's umbilical cord on the island itself. And so that's been going on for generations, where a new child is born and the umbilical cord is buried on the island. And so even when Wabudans move abroad, they still have that strong tie to the island itself. So after emancipation rolled around in 1834, Wabudan life didn't change that much. The transition from slavery to being free was not as abrupt or as consequential as it was in other parts of the Caribbean. They didn't become landowners. They didn't necessarily get any political power automatically because Barbuda was still being assigned to crown leases,

which had certain agreements and contracts in place with the crown, that kind of thing. But they were still being exploited but things were a bit easier for them to transition compared to other places an 1835 agreement had secured barbudan's employment on codrington emperors enterprises at specific rates of p but after the contract had lapsed it really reverted to a sort of a relationship of of coercion they wouldn't pay them they wouldn't pay them their wages they would take quote-unquote recalcitrant barbudans and transport them to Antiguan jails or plantations

and they would continue to just siphon off of the island one of the only exports really on the island at the time was cattle mostly for quadrington's estates in antigua cattle sheep and firewood and the people themselves were engaged in cultivating provisions, yams, potatoes, corn, and supplying their own farm industry, their own clothing, their necessities. So, Wapirans would continue with their different occupations, their hunting and their fishing, their provision, tending, their cutting wood and burning charcoal and salvaging wrecks. Sometimes they would be employed by proprietors or governments, but most times they either disregarded these authorities

or acted in open defiance. And so agents of the state would often complain about Barbudans and their disregard for the crown's property and the estate's property. They would often be accused of poaching Codrington's cattle and so they were there was one attempt in particular to seize all their guns and send them off of the island and so when the government did step in and condemned the Barbudans for you know taking cattle when they wanted to take cattle barbudans basically pull an uno reverse card and demanded redress against interference with their livelihoods

they basically were like i'll quote one petition that was written by barbudans in 1869 we are deprived of the use of our firearms whereby most of us live in shooting any large fish, turtle, or wild birds. We are told to take out licenses, yet if we are seen with a gun, not even shooting, we are taken before the magistrate of Antigua and severely punished for it. Our little gardens are gone to waste, and if such as are still in a little cultivation was to be injured by weather and we by sickness are not able to have the fences repaired directly it is taken and ruined saying our intention is only to catch the wild beasts of mr codrington's

eventually i guess the codrington's got tired of having to not profit as well as they could have, of having to deal with these independent people. They relinquished on their lease in 1870. They took all their horses and cattle off the island, leaving only the deer and sheep because you can't really round up deer and sheep as effectively at that point.

And they basically, they left. And I always find it interesting when Europeans bring like a bunch of European animals wherever they go. It's like, let me just go and set up an estate here in the middle of nowhere and introduce a bunch of deer and sheep and rabbits and stuff. I mean, I think it happened in Australia as well. They just let a bunch of rabbits just go loose just for hunting. It's like, oh, let me like get a hobby that's not shooting animals. But anyway.

So because Barbuda was seen as unprofitable, each leasee that, you know, got their lease from the crown, gutted its resources as much as they could and neglected its inhabitants. William and Robert Dugal of William and Robert Dugal's Barbuda Island Company neglected its inhabitants william and robert dugall of william and robert dugall's barbuda island company never invested the annual 1.5 or 1 500 pounds required by their lease only 700 pounds rather than their promised 6 000 worth of stock were introduced with barely with barely a score barbudans employed as cruziers. And even though they allegedly attempted to plant certain coffee, cola, cocoa, and other fruits, they neglected that too.

And eventually, in 1898, a derelict Barbuda was forfeited to the crown for a non-payment of rent. When a government official visited the island, he found the deer were almost exterminated, the satinwood and logwood were depleted, the cattle were famished, the fences were in disrepair, they had four men to round up about 100 horses, 80 cattle, and a bunch of cows, and the two paddocks that existed on the island had long since become filthy and variously overgrown not only with bush but dense thickets Dr. Dugall's gunners also apparently had a really bad sense of aim because a lot of the fences

were just riddled with bullets and so because the island and the people were starved and degraded by the Dugalls the colonial office had revoked their lease and basically excused the few villagers who had taken some of the cattle for themselves Barbudans had also protested the fact that whenever these leases would pull up on their island

they would always be taking their stock closing their provision grounds threatening to evict them basically doing everything they could to be hostile towards people on the island and so only their own traditional hunting and farming and and stuff enabled barbutans to survive of course government being the government didn't really care about the people that much so even though the leaseholders were gone they didn't really get much out of it the people that is so then after the termination of the lease the colonial government uh the leeward islands colonial government in antigua basically took over the island and they established a government stock farm in 1901 some cotton plots in 1903

um they gave some grants to pay for fencing and cutting wood and cotton experiments and cattle purchases and mule breeding and the the Bobbeidons took the government grazing lands for their own purposes and basically enclosed a portion of that land and left it for the government stock and left the rest of the pasture, the richest parts of the pasture, for their own horses and cattle and donkeys.

So while the government had to deal with this small portion of land with some very weak, insufficient meadow, the rest of the community was able to flourish with a nice rich pasture for their cattle. And still, despite that, that the stock farm the government stock farm still flourished with 161 horses 108 cattle and five mules by 1905 and then cotton surprisingly also became profitable on the island um a crop that really didn't flourish there at all during slavery

was now starting to pick up in the beginning of the early 20th century. They began shipping cotton out and employing a bunch of Barbudans and now Barbuda was being seen as a super profitable place. However, because of that cotton boom, Barbudans were able to buy passage overseas, they were able to raise their standard of living, and it ended up causing a labor shortage that led to conflict.

After a shipwreck off the island in 1915, the island manager went to check out what was going on with the salvaging and he caught a bunch of barbudans salvaging but salvaging for their own profit instead of his profits and so in retaliation in retaliation for him trying to stop them from salvaging for themselves the barbudans burnt his boat and his wagon and so in retaliation for that the governor of antigua started to impose these previously unenforced rents on cultivated plots so like he wanted to charge like five shillings per acre per year. And he also doubled animal head taxes. And so by introducing these taxes, introducing these rents,

the government was basically trying to get, not just to punish the people for, you know, daring to be free, but also trying to force them to work on their cotton plantation. Of course, Barbudans, having lived so freely for so long didn't want to work on these cotton plantations especially not after slavery um and so the people petitioned the crown against this kind of semi-intentioned servitude that the governor was trying to introduce and it seems that mother nature was on their side because they won their case due to drought all the crops were basically ruined by drought cutting on cotton profits um cutting on cattle profits cutting on

crop on corn profits and all this happened in 1916 and then in 1922 babida was hit by a hurricane more severe than they'd ever seen before and so that brief period where barbuda was seen as striking gold for the government came to an end and barbudans continued to cling on to their customary modes of subsistence of self-reliance of survival of their plots and their livestock and their fishing grounds, of continuing to be their own masters, because 250 years of experience had taught them how unreliable and exploitative all these other alternatives that bosses or non-natives that government was trying to introduce were to them. And they learned that only ownership in common

would guarantee their access and guarantee the protection of their island from environmental exploitation. And so that's where we get to the interesting part. Because they'd already long thought of themselves as owners of the island, as possessing the island for themselves, even though on paper, it wasn't the case.

Even though on paper, they were being handled between the crown and different leaseholders that the crown would introduce. Barbuda, to Barbudans being so small being so homogenous having such meager soils having such strong and tight

connections and bonds they saw it as all of theirs collectively it wasn't like and when I say strong connections, family bonds, I don't mean it in the sense that

some of the other lands in the Caribbean were sort of parceled out. Because in the Caribbean, there are lands that are held by certain families and it passes down the family and it's going on for generations. But it wasn't this idea that all these particular families owned the land.

It was that all of them together owned the land. Serious, real, communal land ownership. They'd use the land for generations to raise ground provisions to hunt deer and wild pigs to keep goats and sheep to keep cattle to cut firewood to fish and so on they had no documents that said that they had these collective rights on the island and yet they all insisted with one voice that rabuda was theirs alone no outsiders could tell them otherwise and furthermore they had proven again and again and again that outside proprietors were powerless in the face of their attempts to run the island for themselves.

Because they would continue to graze their cattle wherever they wanted to graze their cattle. They would continue to fish wherever they wanted to fish, salvage whatever they wanted to salvage, cultivate wherever they wanted to cultivate. Who's going to stop them? Clearly nobody. Outsiders couldn't even get...

Outsiders couldn't even get like a rent out of Bob Uduns. So by 1920, Bob Uduns had gotten legal entitlement to roughly half of the island. And by 1983, they controlled virtually all of its resources, basically de facto.

Unfortunately, against their will, honestly, Antigua and Barbuda were joined together by colonial administrators. So Antigua and Barbuda is the country that exists today. But one of the primary concerns of Barbudans were that they be able to maintain sole ownership, sole control, sole communal control over the lands of Barbuda.

Land ownership has been an issue that Barbudans have had with Antigua for a very, very long time now, for decades now. And really all Barbudans want is to maintain their common ownership for themselves alone. council defending the land and declaring that no land in barbuda can be sold or developed without the permission of the barbudan council and so now to explain basically how common land use works in barbuda there are two distinctive and useful modes of land use shifting cultivation for provision grounds and open range prostrate for livestock because the soil is so weak shifting cultivation is a necessity and so after one or two years of planting exhaust the soil they move

their fencing they move their grounds of between half an acre to two or three acres and plants their sweet potatoes yams maize beans pigeon peas squash peanuts etc elsewhere so the old land could you know regenerate but this constant cultivation is something that grants really no permanent rights to any one individual. You do have use rights, it's the principle of use of fruct, over the area you're cultivating, but you don't have permanent ownership over that piece of land that you're cultivating. And they have that system in place because they recognize, living on the island for all these generations,

that Barbuda's ecology is extremely fragile, extremely limited. Its resources are limited. And so they have to safeguard their sustenance for generations to come. Yeah, that's fascinating, actually. I didn't know anything about that. Yeah, it really is.

Similarly, with the slashing bloom cultivation, they also had the management of open-range livestock being very much unrestricted. They're actually feral cattle that exist on the island in addition to the more teamed and penned animals. And so how they basically, they allow all their animals to mix and mingle of different families or different individuals

would have their specific cattle or horses or sheep or whatever earmarked or branded. But for the most part, they've maintained this sort of open range husbandry because it helps to sustain their unity. It helps to maintain and strengthen their social bonds and their community solidarity to basically ensure that everyone is taken care of

in a place that is so scant of resources. And lastly, one of the ways to maintain the balance of the island is through emigration. The population has basically stayed at that level because they've stayed within the limits of the resources they have on the island. And so young Barbudans have had to leave the island

while still maintaining their communal use rights to the land and then eventually they would make remittances of money or resources and periodic returns that would help to introduce you know health care resources and housing resources and education resources to the island. So it's not that they're completely isolated from the outside world, living in this sort of bubble. They do still have that exchange going on. Most of the immigrants live in three primary communities. St. John's Antigua, of course, seeing as it's their neighbor.

A lot of them are in New York City. I mean, a lot of Caribbean people in general are in New York City but Barbudans are in New York City and a lot of them also live in Britain in Leicester as part of the West Indian exodus that took place all the way back in the late 1950s

yeah so to sort of wrap things up here their communal ties and their solidarity

have allowed them to cope with a harsh environment and to successfully navigate a succession of

misinformed aloof sometimes actively hostile, and mostly incompetent proprietors, managers, and administrators. Being so unified and holding themselves in solidarity, they have managed to maintain their traditional resource ownership, their communal land tenure, and their fragile ecology.

and their fragile ecology. Completely and totally rejecting the assertions that the economist Garrett Harden made about the tragedy of the commons. It has not been a tragedy for Bob Udans. It has been a triumph. Until recently. A triumph. Until recently. Unfortunately, in September 2017,

Hurricane Irma damaged and destroyed up to 95% of the island's buildings and infrastructure. And as a result, all of the island's inhabitants had to evacuate Antigua, leaving Wabuda empty for the first time in hundreds of years. Wow. I mean, two years later, by February 2019, most of the residents have returned to the island. However, the Prime Minister of Antigua,

Gaston Alfonso Brown, he's been leader since 2014, has been making moves essentially to privatize Barbuda. His background before entering politics was being a banker and a businessman. And he seems to be employing the shock doctrine tactic of using environmental catastrophe and social displacement to accelerate capitalism, essentially. After Hurricane Emma swept through and postal residents became homeless. Communication systems went down. Antigua and Barbuda got relief. 120,000 pounds of relief for Barbuda.

That's not very much. Not very much at all. Yeah. but it would take over 100 million dollars to rebuild the homes and the infrastructure in Barbuda all the critical infrastructure

that existed the food supply the medicine the shelter electricity water communications waste management

and as one person said um the director of Antiguan Barbuda's national office of disaster services Phil McMullen he said in my 25 years of disaster management I've never seen something like this it is optimistic to think anything like this could be rebuilt in six months they have to rebuild entirely all of their public utilities um and so essentially what prime minister gaston alfonso brown is trying to do is revoke communal land ownership allow the residents to buy some land and use the rest to basically introduce

resorts and hotels and other tourist attractions to help fund the rebuilding efforts. But of course, we know where that money is actually going to go.

And that's as far as I know about the situation. Unfortunately, I don't have any connections in Antiguan Barbuda yet. But unfortunately, that is what has been going on. Another example, basically, of disaster capitalism, trying to seize and accumulate through violence and through exploitation, as usual. I hope that we've seen and been inspired by Babira's efforts.

And I hope that, um, Babira's able to continue to prove themselves resilient in the face of this disaster. That's fascinating. And do you know, like I'm interested in these like diasporic communities, like you said,

there's one in Leicester and stuff. Um, it like, do they still have like a very strong community coherence? Like when they, when they go elsewhere and to like, did, like you said,

they tend to gather in like certain spots. I'd be interested in like how those folks, I guess, dealt with a very different life in like New York or Leicester or wherever. Right. Well, um, I guess dealt with a very different life in like New York or Leicester or wherever right well um like other Caribbean people who have emigrated we do tend to concentrate in certain places where we already have family connections I think most Caribbean people have at least a relative living abroad. An uncle, a great uncle, second cousin, a cousin, whatever. And so it sort of builds from there. And so you try and basically create like a piece of home and sort of settle and concentrate in those areas and

live in those areas and support each other in those areas yeah and that i would say helps with the adjustment yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah um so you can find me on youtube.com slash andrewism on patreon.com slash stdrew and on twitter.com slash underscore stdrew if you are a barbudan please don't hesitate to reach out to me i would love to learn more about the situation going on and wish you all the best solidarity forever peace Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's

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

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for therapy gecko on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Who's dying today. It's the queen. It's the queen.

Well, correction. She's not dying. She's, she's dead that lady's dead yeah uh very sad obviously um yeah very sad grieving podcast today uh brought to you by it could happen here it's all of us it's me it's gare it's chris it's robert and it's the ghost of the queen we're talking about the queen. She's dead. What's up with that? Yeah, she's real dead.

I haven't seen, you know what I haven't seen that I'm disappointed of is a new version of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch involving her corpse and it's in its fancy casket. But there's still time. There's still time. We can change that. Now, my question is is james is that legal in the uk now absolutely not no well you will get so arrested yeah not even arrested this is the worst part people have just like i don't understand what the fuck is wrong with people but they have

become volunteer cops to like defend a guy who's been credibly accused of pedophilia and i i'm disappointed in us uh do not be policing your fellow people for exercising some of the very few rights that the conservative well the conservative party has taken away from them actually but uh yeah you've only let yourself down i'm disappointed yeah they they they uh really really hate anyone who is not thrilled about the monarchy. Yeah, arresting people for having not my king signs. I see that Jedward is taking it to the fascist state, which is great to see. So we're going to be talking about the queen or former queen. I do want to note that, you note that the day the Queen died,

a big wave of condolences came in, including from Domino's Pizza UK. Wow. Which, if you don't understand, the Queen had a very deep relationship with Domino's, so this does mean a lot. They were lovers. Among those who posted their condolences

was Hamilton West End. Nice. The RMT, which is like the British Railway Union, stopped their strike, which I think is the most pissant, coward thing I've ever seen a union do. British Cycling suggested that people not go out for a bike ride during the time of the Queen's funeral.

Are you fucking serious? My God. They're literally closing food banks. She was 96. Deal with it. They're closing food banks. I think the funniest one was Les Miserables posted, everyone at Les Miserables is deeply saddened

by the passing of Her Majesty the Queen, and we offer our sincere condolences to the royal family. We joined together with the people of the United kingdom and all around the world and mourning her loss, which they then, which they then deleted an hour later. If there's one thing that Ms. Arab is about,

it's about people all over the world, mourning the loss of monarchy. It's the main thing about it. So yeah, most of on twitter was definitely it was definitely split between these companies posting how they're so sad but also a lot of people uh pretty pretty thrilled that the queen died because it's kind of funny because we were all shocked by the 95 96 year old woman yeah um who died she was causes. She was so young. I know.

Yeah, look, look. She was at an age that if you reversed her age and told me she had died, I still wouldn't have been surprised. Like, she was at an age where, like, even if you flip the numbers, she's still old. Yes, she's still old, yeah. It is great to see The Telegraph today running a headline, five-mile queue to view Elizabeth II's coffin

will see horrible stories of suffering. What? This is a country where people will not be able to heat their homes this winter. It's a country we've seen an explosion in food insecurity and this is what we're doing. Yeah. It's like the British, like, okay,

so the crown did not call directly for a blood sacrifice the british people are just bound and determined to have people die like they're like they're like they're lining up in the streets to sacrifice themselves for the dead it's wild it is a i mean magical thing don't do us all that way there's some people showing up with not my king signs and getting assaulted by mobs of molecules. And for the record, those people are awesome. Not just police, but like regular ass people. Yeah, yeah.

Most people are not that concerned. Most people are not like, it's just like the TERFs in Britain. There are like a small minority of people who do nothing but tweet and write for the Guardian who misrepresent the opinions of most British people who are not that tweet and write for the guardian who misrepresent the opinions of most british people who are not that concerned but like a lot of these british people do show up in person and like shut down like yes it's certainly it is not it is not the

case that like there isn't widespread support for this kind of shit it's just that it's it's not uniform yeah that's the people who do speak the people who do speak up also tend to get arrested which is like it's sort of amazing it's like okay britain got industrial capitalism before like any other country on earth right the bourgeoisie has one job one job their one job is to destroy feudalism and they could even the british couldn't do it they had they had the largest head start of any country on earth and they couldn't do it. It's incredible. It's miraculous. They were co-opted into these feudal elites through things like the Great Reform Act, which used property as a proxy for land or capital as a proxy for land. And it's worked

remarkably well. And now we just do false consciousness shit like this. How good is your false consciousness game when people who can't heat their homes are sleeping on the street to say goodbye to presumably a billionaire who never cared about them yeah it's like miraculous yeah who absolutely who was not equipped emotionally to have ever cared about them who's like soul would never have allowed her to care about them yeah i mean let's let's like you know as as lots of people were romanticizing the the monarchy and the queen and doing their like performative mornings uh obviously there was a wave of other people being like hey you know the royal family is kind of kind of fucked up uh

you know they've stolen billions of dollars in jewels from countries like India and across South Africa. They're continuing to benefit from Britain's history of colonialism. old Kenyan revolutionary fighter used the occasion to call for an explanation from the queen for why she hasn't been compensated after being tortured with axes by British troops.

People should look at the way Britain treated the Mao Mao. Oh my god. I have stuff on this later for this episode actually. We're going to be talking about that. A 2017 estimate found that the royal family is estimated to be worth 88 billion dollars um yeah and a lot of that's obviously not in straight up cash which is one of the ways like people are talking about oh charles inherited half a billion no charles inherited tens of billions of dollars yes like they own a lot of land yes

they own a huge amount of land. Yeah. Um, Charles has his own real estate empire that he like created while he was waiting for his mom to fucking croak. Um, and they also have like a fortune and a really actually uncountable, like you have to think about their wealth, like the Vatican, like there's no actual way,

like it's functionally limitless money because so much of what they own is like priceless antiquities many of which were stolen from other people yeah and it's hard to put a tangible number on their sort of their value and their sort of whatever you want to call it a celebrity status yeah yes yeah what is that fucking diamond in the goddamn crown worth right like there's no real way to appraise that yeah well and i want to point this out. Like, if they tried to sell the diamond, almost certainly what would happen is, like, the British people would give her $3 billion

and they'd give her the diamond back. Yeah, they'd crowdfund it. Yeah, they'd stop doing the subsidies for heating that they've just started doing and buy the diamond back. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the heating thing briefly because I think an anchor on BBC

was discussing how news of the Queen's passing basically interrupted all other news in the UK, including statements being given on the 80% price increase in energy bills and the rising cost of living. Stating that those topics, the topics of cost of living and the rising energy

bills was quote insignificant now due to the gravity of this situation um we can we can insert this clip here i have i have it saved for danil because it just it's wild doctors in scotland were concerned about the queen's health coming um as liz trust was making a rather important statement concerning um the future of energy bills um that of course insignificant now given the gravity of the situation we seem to be experiencing with her majesty an old lady died she was not a very nice old lady i've known old ladies who were nice that died and i was sad i've known old ladies who were not not nice that died and i didn't really care in any case like it's it's not it's not a big deal because old people like that's what human beings do when they reach 96 is they die a lot of the time and it's it's okay

like it's okay queen outside of everything about her it It's fine. Queen Elizabeth was the longest reigning monarch in the history of Britain. Yeah, probably close to the longest. And like maybe Ramses the fucking second is up there. Like 69 years. You don't run into a lot of competition in terms of length of reign. 70 years. 70 years. She ascended the throne in 1952.

Yeah. It's worth noting that a lot of old ladies are going to die in Britain this winter because of this energy processing, and no one will care. And it's also worth noting that the queen tried to use a bunch of state poverty money that was emerged for schools, hospitals, and low-income families to pay Buckingham Palace's

heating bill. Oh, wow. Huh. Yeah. That's wild. That's great. great well you wouldn't want an old woman like that to be out of out in the rain ah because i believe the crown estates and i'll have to check this real quickly i believe the crown estates did evict people during the covid 19 pandemic talking of all folks being kicked out into the rain so wow and for for around two weeks after the queen's death basically all of britain kind of grinds to a halt um which which would i mean honestly one of the base parts about this is that this does potentially cost the uk economy

billions of dollars because they just shut down for two weeks um so this is like the equivalent of the boat getting stuck in the canal just the queen dying i do want to i do want to make a quick note for everybody the longest reigning verifiable monarch uh according to this wikipedia page that i just skimmed is sobhuza the second of swaziland which was a British protectorate until 1968 he reigned from 1899 to August of 1982 82 years so you know what Elizabeth not

that impressive I am a Sobhuza the second Stan now absolute Chad shit the fact that he just snuffed it before he got to see Apartheid and very sad that is that is a bummer um yeah yeah wow yeah it's just uh yeah just looking at some of the evictions the crown estates have done over the years you can look those up it's pretty heartbreaking shit and well

luckily uh the queen actually did not die in buckingham palace she died in a castle in in in scotland that's great because buckingham palace is She died in a castle in Scotland. That's great, because Buckingham Palace is a hideous monument of trash. The castle she died in looks pretty cool. A lot of the... Balmoral is nice. One thing you're supposed to get with

a monarchy is really rad-looking castles. It is neat. The castles are cool, except for Buckingham Palace, which looks like fucking tenements for buckingham palace which looks like fucking tenements yeah so buckingham palace is a building that dares you to go steal back all of the wealth that they stole from you to build it yeah so the the plan for if the queen died in this scottish castle was called operation unicorn which is wild no No one can guess. What is the unicorn? A 96-year-old woman dying is not a unicorn situation.

Operation Squirrel or something. How is this giving a couple their third? I don't get it. I know. So the plan for this type of thing is, so the queen died on last Thursday afternoon. It was announced the Friday, following Friday morning.

After the queen dies, they call Operation Unicorn. They then call, they send like emergency alerts to all the British leaders. You know, the new prime minister, who is incredibly funny. And, you know,

all of all these people are notified. And then press gets notified that next morning, as they did. So staff members in the castles and palaces all got sent home. All parliamentary business gets postponed. Everything shuts down. Which means all of the stuff they were working on on energy bills gets shut down like they were working on trying to figure out what the fuck they're going to do for this 80 cost increase all that gets shut down until late september um so that's that's cool um but no this is actually kind of a unique thing because because of how long Elizabeth reigned, the last death of a monarch was in the 50s.

So it's it's been a while since this has happened. So everyone's kind of rusty. Like, no, we aren't as prepared for this. If it's OK. My my hope is that we get a couple of we get people get a lot of experience with dead British monarchs in the next decade. I'm hoping we get a bunch. King Charles the third third i don't think we'll be around for too long yeah i've seen that man's hands and it's and i mean here's the thing right every every time a monarch dies it's kind of it's like a top-down rolling general strike so if we get enough of

them in a row we can start doing serious damage to brit capital. By the way, quick note about the Chad Sobouza II of Swaziland. Died with a thousand grandchildren. Oh, my God. Jesus Christ. Jesus. Wow. Man, and always pictured shirtless. Elizabeth cannot compete.

No, I'm fine with that not being the case, actually. I don't want to see any competition there. Yeah, and he probably wasn't racist to any of their partners. No, actually. We can say about the real family. Here's a neat thing. He took control of all Swazi land and mineral rights from non-Swazi interests that had gained control during colonialism and indigenized all of that,

which is dope. So there you go. Subusa the motherfucking second. Yeah. That's what we call a God King. I have to go and get injected with a small dose of a disease. Well, cut everything,

but injected in that Chris. Hey, Daniel's back. So let's take an ad break. And we'll be back to learn more about the queen. You know what else will give you a small dose of a disease? Daniel's back. Let's take an ad break and we'll be back to learn more about the Queen. You know what else will give you a small dose of a disease? That's right. That's right. Yes, these products and services.

I was going to say the Queen of England. Yeah, that's also true, isn't it? And we're back. So, yeah, been a while since a monarch died. Last time this happened in the 50s, mourners wore black armbands to show respect for King George.

That's the one who was like a big fan of Nazis, right? I don't think we're going to see... I don't think that tradition is going to continue. I doubt we're going to see a wave of black armbands. If anyone was going to do it, it would probably be the anglos

yeah i i suppose so um yeah it's uh oh yeah it was edward edward the eighth who abdicated um and and then was replaced by the guy who you were talking about okay that's the guy who like nazis edward the eighth so all all all the uk flags are going to be flown at half mast until the day of the funeral and then the day of the funeral is going to be a bank holiday as well so that's pretty exciting um great i hope that the poor get to eat sweet meats or something provided by the crown no no again they're just they're just closing down almost all business almost all businesses almost all businesses almost all businesses in the uk will close the stock exchange is going to close um like on on following

president uh princess diana's death in the late 90s uh britain business owners in britain quote felt that they were quote uh forced to close their shops or cancel sporting sporting events the day of the funeral lest they feel the rage of the tear-stained hordes outside unquote yeah that's an incredible that is an incredibly funny way to talk about monarchists though like thank you thank thank you the guardian for that amazing quote it's unbelievable i mean and at least with diana it was actually sad. Like she was a nice person who was badly treated in her life by the royal family and died tragically and young, as opposed to somebody who got everything they want from the day they were born and died at 96. So then currently they are assembling the, quote, Asc, uh, to formally declare, uh, Prince Charles,

uh, the King, which he's, he's, he's already known as King Charles, but you know, there's the whole separate formal process. Yeah.

Cause he could pick another name still. He says he's not, he says he's, oh, he's, he's confirmed that good. Cause King's King's Charles have a good history in the UK. They don't often get executed.

So the, good history in the uk they don't often get executed so the council will make the proclamation of ascension to be uh to be read on proclamation day will be to be soon after uh the death um and that'll be somewhere somewhere in uh in uh in london how do they still have all this shit like there's so many weird rituals that they still do. Both houses of parliament are suspended until after the official state funeral. And all politicians have to wear new allegiance to

the newly ascended monarch. This is really, like, genuinely the world's most pathetic ruling class. Like, oh my God. Jesus Christ. It's pretty funny. You are the bourgeoisie. You have one job.

Well, but also like back in the day, before we had monarchs and capitalism, whenever you had a new coronation, whenever there was something big that happened with the monarchy, the thing they would do is make sure everybody had a shitload of food and nice stuff. The king would give it away. It's all over the world. Cultures would do this. Even the Tsar did this.

Yeah, it's what you do when you come to power, because they were at least that scared of the people, where it's like, alright, I gotta, like, do something to ring in this reign good, so they don't start to wonder, why do we have a king now? So I'm gonna give them a bunch of fucking food. And then they'll be like,

Oh, the King, he's the guy who gives us food every now and then that's dope. It's amazing now that in the UK, it's just like, all right, we've got a new Monarch and the old one died. So you guys,

a lot of you don't get to eat for a while. So King Charlie, uh, 73 is the oldest person in British history to become King. Uh, which is, I think a great sign. Very unso booze of a second of him. 73 is the oldest person in British history to become king, which is, I think, a great sign. Very un-So-Booza II of him. And then we're also getting a new queen, technically.

Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, which, again, all this sounds made up, is now the queen consort. So that's exciting. That's thrilling. I'm thrilled for Queen Camilla. It is the Duchess of Cornwall? Are you kidding me?

Uh-huh. And Queen Elizabeth's coffin is being prepared to lie in state, meaning it'll be presented for the public to view so they can cry on the coffin, which is pretty cool. Oh, or cry near the coffin. They don't want the poors to get too close. Meanwhile, Sobuza II turned Swaziland

into a major asbestos exporter, which Queen Elizabeth also never did. Wait, so when the the queen dies do they like from like do they like preserve her formaldehyde or whatever or do they yeah they've got some fancy they are they have some fancy ass shit because they were probably embalming her while she was alive yeah just as her limbs stopped working squirting some in the queen's body will lie in state until the day of the funeral, which will then become a public holiday.

There's at least a 10-day mourning period starting the day after her death. And then she'll be transported to Westminster Abbey by gun carriage for the state funeral. And then after the funeral, she'll be buried in the King George VI

Memorial Chapel. I believe her... she'll be buried in the King George the sixth Memorial chapel. Uh, and, uh, I believe her, the body of her late husband, Prince Philip, who died last year will be moved from the vault that he's currently at to beneath the chapel to join here.

So that's pretty funny. Yeah. Um, I don't know nothing to say about that other than it's funny that they've just got that dude in a fucking freezer. It's really funny. And the new coronation will cost billions of pounds.

Oh, good. That's a good thing because England's doing great right now. They've got plenty of money for all the necessities. Everything's been going well. Cost of living's great. Cost of living's really down. It's a good idea to spend billions of dollars making a little death cult about this elderly woman that's good just like the last like big

royal wedding cost between 1.2 billion and 6 billion pounds which is quite quite the quite the spectrum there 1.2 to 6 billion that's like huh i mean i feel like at that point all money's fake like the cost of the coronation is expected to be similar if not a little bit higher so great yeah you gotta you gotta spend a lot of money on a coronation for fucking charles uh so that you can because that's what real countries do in 2022 that's very real country shit speaking of money uh new currency is already being printed and in fact oh that'll that'll be cheap though and in fact uh uh portraits of charles have already been made on currency there's like a reserve of money depicting the next king it's like it's being stored to like move it in for when for when the queen died it's like

they already had lots of this money saved just like how funny it would being stored to like move it in for when for when the queen died. It's like they already had lots of this money saved. Just like how funny it would have been if like six months before this happened. His 72 year old ass had a heart attack. I have to like burn all that money. Yeah, they've got to burn all the Charles bucks. He's not going to be around long. I will say that's funny. Christ that Britain no longer has the world's reserve currency.

Yeah. Can you imagine? No, we took. Oh, I on on this network, on our various shows, we spend a lot of time digging into ugly aspects of American history and American culture. But let's all celebrate one thing that I'm legitimately proud of, which is that a long time ago, people here were like, that seems stupid to let that family run everything. Why are we doing that? Let's get those fuckers out of here.

At least we did that. Although now a bunch of Americans are being fucking bootlickers too. In Oregon and a bunch of other states, we're putting in the flags that have staff, which like, do you not know why this country exists? This is the one base thing we did yeah like even the u.s which like probably has the most murderous bourgeoisie in human history at least

we did our bourgeois revolution damn it like at least we destroyed feudalism so now we're going to move on to the next segment of the show entitled an incomplete list of politicians warmongers generals and otherwise bastards who Queen Elizabeth II bestowed awards. So I have quite the collection of people here. Let's start with Palestine. So

Shimon Peres served as both President and Prime Minister of Israel. He got a Nobel Peace Prize in the 90s for an interim peace deal that failed in the long run to turn into an actual treaty. Pretty sure he got assassinated.

No, I don't think. That was Rabin. I think Rabin was the one. Rabin was the one who you could argue might have deserved an award. But Perez is kind of known as more of a peaceable leader he's like compared to some of his like colleagues um you know is specifically with like the various ethnic

cleansings that they do in palestine prez is kind of seen as like the good the good guy um and then in the mid 90s he was facing a major right-wing backlash in his home over the peace deal with the Palestinians and in the middle of an election campaign, which he was kind of losing. So during this time, he unleashed Operation Grapes of Wrath, which caused 400,000 Lebanese to flee their homes with almost 800 of them fleeing into a United Nations base in Kwanzaa, I believe it's called, in South Lebanon. And he didn't really stop there in order to kind of appease the right. And Al Jazeera calls it in an attempt to shore up his military credentials before a general election, which he then lost to Benjamin Netanyahu. He ordered the army to strike this UN shelter, killing 102 civilians, mostly women and children. At the time of the attack, Perez said that, in my opinion, everything was done according to clear logic and in a responsible way. I am at peace perez said that the compound had been hit due to an incorrect

targeting based on erroneous data but the united nations investigations found it unlikely that the shelling uh was unintentional uh because they were surveying the area heavily beforehand so he did he did he did this massacre killed like a hundred a hundred people to boost his polls for the right-wingers in this election. In November 2008, Queen Elizabeth awarded him with an honorary knighthood. He was knighted in the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. And during his knighthood, that day, Perez spoke to the queen about the escalating Israeli-Palestine conflict, saying that, quote, the British learned from the Bible and we learned from the British democracy. Earlier that year, IDF launched Operation Hot Winter, a military campaign

targeting the Gaza Strip in response to a series of Hamas rockets that killed one 47-year-old Israeli student, which that attack was in response to the IDF killing eight Hamas members earlier that month. But during the IDF's Operation Hot Winter, 110 Palestinians were killed, 54 of them were children. And then a month, just one month after Perez was knighted, the 2008 Gaza War broke out, also known as the Gaza Massacre. And that was started by the IDF, who called it Operation Cast Lead, a three-week large-scale military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The massacre resulted in like 1,400 Palestinian deaths and 13 Israeli deaths, four from friendly fire. So it's just a massacre.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that was like a few weeks after Queen Elizabeth knighted the then president of Israel, who previously served as the prime minister, which is more of like a real role. Um, anyway, moving on to more fun people,

uh, 1989, Queen Elizabeth awarded Ronald Reagan with an honorary knighthood. Um, that's good. Now, thankfully the way honorary knight knighthoods work is you don't become a sir,

uh, because sir is a title reserved for people from Britain. If I'm not mistaken, you can't hold office in the United States if you are a knight. Oh, I wouldn't. I think it's an old rule we have. Yeah, I see. I didn't know that.

I recall reading something about that. Yeah, yeah. No, it's not in the Constitution, but there's something about. Yeah. Yeah. But even though, you know, you can't become a sir because you're not from britain um you okay here we go no title of nobility this is article one section nine

clause eight of the constitution oh it is no constitution yeah no title of nobility shall be granted by the united states and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall without the consent of the congress except of any present emolument office or title of any kind whatsoever from any King Prince or foreign state. Fascinating. Yeah. So like, again,

the people who made this country for all of their flaws looked at the British monarchy and we're like, that's fucking nuts. Well, because, because, because Reagan was, uh,

was night, uh, was was received honorary knighthood. The one benefit he does get is that at dinner parties, Reagan was able to sit closer to the queen than the unknighted former presidents. That's good. I'm glad that we have to like, honestly, look again. I hate that. Like I'm coming across as like America flex shit, but I feel like any president of the US should be able to pull up Riker style, flip a chair around, sit down next to her and say, look, we've been pulling your ass out of the fire for the last century. Like, you don't get to fucking make me sit somewhere. I'm the president of the United States and you're a doddering old queen of a fucking third rate power.

I hate that I just went like full fucking whatever there but honestly that's fucking ridiculous yeah it's like like maybe maybe the only country ever that the u.s gets moral superiority yes like it exists it's like it's the british empire like don't you don't like what seriously lady um unbelievable the one other president who was knighted uh was george hw bush who was knighted into the grand cross of the order of the bath well he did look like he could use one a lot of the time a rare a rarely awarded top order of knighthoods that's good i'm glad he got that british officials said that the knighthood marked the close relationship between the republican president and britain's conservative government particularly during the gulf war great yeah that was a real moment of of of trial and tragedy for the British royal family.

Yeah, they had to sit there and watch while people burned conscripts alive. Yeah, they were really at risk there. I'm going to quote from the book Royal Babylon by English poet and activist Heathcote Williams. each U.S. president's record, without exception, would earn them seats on the dock at Nuremberg or at the International Criminal Court on genocide charges doesn't deter the royal family from honoring them. For by an

ironic twist, each U.S. president morphs into George III, against whom their forebearers fought. Which is a nice little quote by this English writer in the pretty good book royal babylon if you want to if you want to learn about how fucked up the monarchy is uh

this is a pretty a pretty fun book um let's see who else who else should be uh who else should be let's let's talk about norman schwartzenkopf schw Schwarzkopf. Norman Schwarzkopf. He was the head of the, he was the guy who actually, like, ran the Desert Storm campaign. Yes. He said that the dead Iraqis, quote, weren't worth counting among, like, casualties of war,

and that, quote, I want every Iraqi soldier bleeding from every orifice. Yeah. It's, I mean, you know schwarzkopf was a guy who fought in vietnam and took the loss hard and i think he a big part of why big part of what was going on with desert storm was a desire to quote unquote reclaim like our military pride by beating the shit out of a smaller country um which is not to say that like i i don't believe there was like iraq had invaded a neighbor and occupied it that's bad something should have been done

but the whole the whole like masturbatory i want all of their fucking conscript soldiers these like teenage kids to die is is is is like sick lunacy as was the masturbation over the anyway whatever we don't need to talk about the gulf war here he was anyway he was uh he also received a knighthood after all of that stuff which is fun uh also elizabeth gave a knighthood to colin powell um who facilitated covered up and justified many u.s war crimes in vietnam hey hey garrison facilitated cover-ups. Yes. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, most famously My Lai. Yes.

The My Lai Massacre is the biggest thing that he was involved in. But there were others. There were others. He's that guy. I think he's like, the thing I think is important, he is probably the one person on Earth in the Bush administration who could have stopped the

iraq war if he wanted to and he didn't like he he knew that it was all bullshit and he was like nah fuck it let's do this war quote i'm gonna go lie to the un quoting powell we burned down the thatched huts starting the blaze with ronson and zippo lighters why were we torching houses and destroying crops ho chi ming said that his people were like the sea in which gorillas swarm we tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable in the hard logic of war what difference does it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death so anyway night night night, night, Colin Powell. So true. So true, buddy. Probably the least problematic person among this list. In 1995, the queen approved an honorary knighthood to a former U.S.

secretary of state. Henry Kissinger. Yeah, he was he was just kind of a functionary. Very not not a big deal. We should probably just skip over that. I think that's how it's pronounced. He was appointed and honored Knight Commander in the

most distinguished order of Saint Michael and Saint George. Jesus Christ. Here's the thing. It's so funny. We must applaud the British for honoring the most popular american in china it's a very progressive decision for her yes kissinger uh i think uh a few of kissinger's assistants also got knighted uh brent scrawlcroft scowcroft scowcroft. Scowcroft. Scowcroft.

He got knighted. People from the Iran-Contra drugs and arms affairs stuff got knighted. There was a lot of war criminal dudes got knighted in this late 90s period. I wonder what was

going on there. Also, J. Edgar was was knighted um which is pretty funny and then uh the uh the an economic uh uh financier who endorsed uh uh really bad derivatives to make the housing bubble kind of blow up. Uh, Alan Greenspan, uh, another American. Oh, he also green, green span. Like he,

he got, we could, we could do like horrible person that, that man, that man has killed more people than most generals. Like he has, Oh boy. Yeah,

he is. He is pretty bad. Um, I think, I think we can do an ad break and then James is going to join us again, uh, to finish up by talking about uh ireland and kenya um because this there's a lot of stuff in in ireland and kenya so anyway uh do you know who won't receive a knighthood by queen elizabeth that

these products and services because i was gonna say queen elizabeth because she's too dead to tap anybody on the fucking shoulder that's a joke she can't give them a night because she's dead that's anyway here's the ads very funny uh we're back and you know i i need to keep the audience informed about important network business for cool zone so i want to let you all know that as he was coming back from getting his shot james texted us all okay i'll be on in one sex and there's a lot of jokes that we could make about that uh as a network and i'm not going to make them but i'm going to urge you to make them yourself in your own heart and head and then tweet them to james james is that james is at i write OK on Twitter. That's right. That's my Twitter handle, I Write OK.

You can see a picture of me there. Anyway, so we're now going to talk about mainly two places where British colonialism and imperialism had devastating effects under Queen Elizabeth and a few pretty evil people that Elizabeth then also knighted who were directly doing this British colonialism. Let's talk about Kenya a little bit. So during the 1950s,

British tried to get control of lands in Kenya that they had violently. They were trying to keep control of land that they had previously stolen. Native Kenyans fought back in the Mau Mau uprising. Now, historians have documented widespread torture by British forces, including the crushing of testicles with pliers, the internment of up to 320,000 people in concentration camps, of up to 320,000 people in concentration camps, where they then endured slavery, starvation, murder, and rape, rape with blunt objects. Meanwhile, 1.5 million Kenyans were confined to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages, as documented by a historian,

Caroline Elkins, in her Pulitzer-wise winning britain's gulag so this this this was all overseen by the queen as the head of state and by the way she was 31 at this point you you don't you don't get to say well she just come and you know was just listening to her advisors at 31 years old you are young but you are old enough to not be complicit in a genocide yeah especially when you're the head of state like come on yes as the queen of england she had some leverage she is not like oh you came you worked you were a tax collector in fucking south fucking shire england and you happen to be in doing that job when the mao mao were being suppressed no no no she was the head of state she she she knew about stuff was going on was heavily involved because

she was giving out like she was working with people who were doing pretty uh like egregious things um according to kenya's biggest newspaper the daily nation a british policeman named ian henderson was known in kenya as the torturer-in-chief and was the guy behind preparing a whole bunch of bogus evidence in the 1953 trial where six leading Mao Mao uprising figures were convicted, including the future first president of independent Kenya. Now, Queen Elizabeth II honored Ian Henderson,erson again the torturer-in-chief with the george medal a britain's highest civilian award in september of 1954 for his work in kenya

so this is important like he wasn't military he was just a policeman which is why he gets a civilian award um but it's like she knew what was going on was giving out individual police officers awards for their roles in crushing the in crushing these uh independent uprisings you know who never would have done that is subusa the second absolute clown i i i do not know enough about subusa the second i don't know how he acquired 1 000 grandchildren i'm not gonna make any claims look to be fair there's probably some shady shit in so booze of the seconds uh rain but the main thing he was known for was taking back control of swaziland's indigenous industries being a good neighbor

to the other african countries once they gain their independence and of course exporting a shitload of asbestos so So any other notes on Kenya? Yeah, so just before, I do want to just briefly raise that Elkins, that was a very unconventional and a very good book for a young academic. And she deserves a lot of credit for writing it in the process of writing that book

and then trying to write her second book. Obviously, she dealt with a lot of backlash from writing her first book. She uncovered that Britain had hidden, classified, destroyed, and refused to disclose a mountain of records about its colonial crimes in Kenya. And this is like an ongoing issue that goes on into the 20 teens that there are public records court cases about this um it's it's so like we can see this like it's wrong to say that this is like a just a relic of another era right britain is has continued into this era like the ideology of the government from then to now is virtually indistinguishable right it's neoliberal conservatives. They have continued to hide rather than face justice for these crimes, right?

Rather than say sorry, rather than say what we did was wrong, they've tried to cover up this shit. And we need to remember that when we talk about, like, this is not a crime of the past. These are ongoing acts of genocide and genocide denial that we keep doing. Yeah, and I should mention,

so I think we were talking about this operation Legacy. There are a bunch of different instances of the British government destroying other records. One of the other fun things they seem to have been covering up, we don't know exactly what was in those records because again, they were destroyed. But one of the

other things that was in those records is about a second time that the UK put a bunch of people in concentration camps while Queen Elizabeth was president, which was they also did this in Malaysia. They put a million people. They did this in a lot of places. While she was

clown president, which is to say Queen. We're going to actually be talking about Malaysia in just a sec. Good. That was an emergency not a war it's important to him yeah so so uh uh ian henderson the the torturer in chief who received this award obviously had to leave kenya uh shortly after the 50s because things happened um and then he he got he got moved to Bahrain.

And during a wave of pro-independence revolts in Bahrain in 1968, Henderson was appointed the head of the secret police and served as so until 1998. And over the course of his tenure, he became known as the butcher of Bahrain. Quoting The Guardian, quote, during his time, his men allegedly detained and tortured thousands of anti-government activists.

Their activities are said to have included the ransacking of villages, sadistic sexual abuse, and using power drills to maim prisoners. On many occasions, they are said to detain children without informing their parents, only to return them months later in

body bags, unquote. Yeah, and the Bahrain stuff, it's also worth mentioning, like, that never stopped. Like, no, it stopped being him in charge, but like, it only stopped him being in charge in 1998. Yeah, yeah, and in 2011,

there was another revolution against the Bahraini monarchy. And I mean, it ended essentially when the Saudis rolled tanks across the border. But one of the things that happened was that the British helped the Bahraini government

hunt down dissidents. I just bust out my lecture on this Hanslope Park stuff if you want to talk more about it. There were 15 miles of files that they found that had been hidden. I mean, that was also the case in Ireland, which we're going to talk a about there were 15 miles of files that they found that have been hidden i mean this that was that was also the case in ireland which we're going to talk a bit about later the odd file i i lose emails all the time that's similar to 15 miles of paperwork so in

1984 uh ian henderson was awarded by queen elizabeth with a CBE for services to British interests in Bahrain. And he also received a knighthood in the most excellent order of the British empire. So this, this was after he was already known as the butcher of Bahrain. This, this is, this is 1984. He's well into his tenure. He is torturing children, killing them, kidnapping them, He's torturing children, killing them, kidnapping them, maiming people. And that's when he gets knighthooded for his services to the British interests in Bahrain. So yeah, that's Ian Henderson. Now, during Henderson's time in Kenya, he was just a part of the small team that was developing a new form of counterinsurgency pseudo-gangster tactics, kind of weaponizing gang warfare for British interests.

The other person who was kind of running this operation was an Englishman named Frank Kitson. So he was also serving in Kenya. And then on New Year's in 1955, Kitson was awarded the British Military Cross in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Kenya. And three years later, he gained a bar to that medal for his work in the Malaysian emergency, quote unquote. So during Britain role brutal war in malaysia um he he played he played a part in the uh concentration camps which chris mentioned uh

the process was known as vigilization uh as they forced people into these concentration camps all over the course of a famine and they were invading malaysia to fund britain's kind of post-war reconstruction uh so he he was in kenya malaysia he also went to bahrain just like henderson did he went to yemen aden and cyprus all places where the british state is uh known for doing the widespread use of torture. And then he went to Northern Ireland in a not shocking turn of events. He then was the professional head of the British army during the Iraq war, described Kitson as, quote, the sun around which the planets revolved, that quote he very much set the tone for

the operational style in belfast um the buddy buddy oh no the notorious uh military reaction force the mrf uh which was uh accused of being behind a string of illegal shootings of Catholic teenagers in the early 70s was based at Kitson's headquarters outside Belfast. And one of the units under his command was nicknamed Kitson's Private Army. Its official name was One Para. And these were the people that did Bloody Sunday. So in 1972 in Derry, 15,000 people gathered outside to protest against detention without trial. At 10 past four,

British paratroopers opened fire. 28 people were shot, some in the back as they fled. 14 people were killed, seven of whom were teenagers. And it was Kitson's private army who fired all 108 shots in Derry

during winter of 1972. One of the victims, the first teenager named Kevin, 17 years old, he was shot from behind while trying to crawl to safety. Yeah. The Batten-Murphy massacre

was at the same time as well like it's worth people like these are very well documented things that people that people can read about that we don't need to describe in detail but so they're not nice england england bad elizabeth queen in 1972 frank kidson was knighted again same same year as the massacre was knighted by the queen for galliant and distinguished service in northern ireland and was promoted to commander of the order of the british empire a few years later he became a major general and the quote knight commander of the order of the bath again what is what the fuck is going on it is nice that he and former head of the cia george hw bush got to hang out in their fancy

club though these people are so fucked up um it's great so later later kitson served as commander in chief for the uk land forces from 1982 to 1985 and was the aid was the aid de camp general to queen elizabeth direct directly to queen elizabeth from 1983 to 1985 so yeah that's uh that's fun um it's worth noting that the order of the bath is like a uh i believe that some of those other honors that queen's honors that you've talked about are like selected by a committee or perhaps by government. I'm not quite sure. The Order of the Bath is supposed to be like the personal gift. The Queen's specific selection, yeah. Yeah, and the Sovereign is head of the Order of the Bath.

It's the big diamond-shaped medal that you'll see lots of princes wearing. You all tortured so dreadfully well. I'd love to give you this fancy award for jamming screwdrivers into children and turning them on. Hootily-doo. Off to go breed another corgi. That's the ghost of the queen you were promised

at the start of the episode. Mm-hmm. So throughout the 2000s, Kinson remained a key advisor on US military strategy during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is much that the US has done, which is also war crimes and torture in those wars. Yeah, and we should also mention,

okay, there's a thing you'll get from insurgency nerds who are talking about the MyLi, like, emergency, quote-unquote, is like the one successful counterinsurgency. And that's just not true. Like, the insurgency started again after they stopped. And second, you can tell how well this went by the fact that that guy also was helping the one successful counterinsurgency and that's just not true like the insurgency started again after they stopped and second uh you can tell how well this went by the fact that that guy also was helping the u.s do a rock in afghanistan and the only thing he's ever managed

to accomplish is killing an enormous number of people he doesn't yeah i mean he was just a sea of dubs there yeah he worked out in all those countries he was heavily involved in Aden and Yemen, which led to 200,000 deaths between 1962 and 1970. And, and today British armies still continue the same, the same process of, of overseeing the bombing of Yemen. Yeah. So this isn't like,

there's no one that us is innocent of just to, Oh no, we're the ones arming uh yeah yeah we need to saudi coalition whatever you want to call it that's murdering people in yemen but i think the brain doesn't have the capacity to to make as many bombs as the u.s is sending to yemen i would doubt but but all of these processes and all of these people are still continuing the same colonialism and the same. Yes. All of the same oppression.

Like this isn't like this isn't like, quote unquote, the past. It's an ongoing thing that the monarchy awards and perpetuates. They've had to downsize it a little bit because, you know, it just doesn't work as well as it used to. And so the thing they decided to do to downsize it was stop paying off the populace um and just start policing them harder and but but the money has kept flowing to the royals yes yeah so anyway in the malay emergency that britain did pioneer the use of asian orange so that's another gift that we've given to the people of the united states ah well thank you james for that yeah you're welcome. Anytime it's that it's tea cozies with the queen on its stuff. Corgis, you know, I want to suggest if you are looking for a way to properly mourn Queen Elizabeth, maybe check out the film Churchill.

The Hollywood years, a truly exceptional movie. If you just type it into Google and look around on YouTube, you can find a full copy of it. It features Christian Slater as Winston Churchill and Neve Campbell as the recently deceased queen. to google and look around on youtube you can find a full copy of it um it features christian slater as winston churchill and nev campbell as the recently deceased queen um and i don't know who it is that they got to play her father the former king but he's he's basically portrayed as like a drunk and also like every time there's a big fancy party he's just constantly staring at everyone's drinks because he's angry that they're drinking his champagne because he's a big fucking spin thrift. Very funny.

Very good send up of the royal family. Also, Heinrich Himmler conducts a satanic wedding and by replacing a crucifix with a chicken. It's a good movie. Watch that in real life. Just like in real life. I'll also recommend you check out the book Royal Babylon. I was able to get it a free copy online through great methods. So anyway, yeah, if you want a nice like poetic history

of how the queen is fucked up and the monarchy sucks, Royal Babylon's a nice easy read. Did you get into the Bowles Lion Sisters as well? Did you do that? No. These two people who were disabled disabled they are the queen's cousins they the royal family basically announced they were dead but they weren't dead and they lived in uh an institutional home for uh i think it was well it was called the royal earlswood

institution for mental defectives and great they lived there more or less anonymously completely disowned by the family on a very small stipend until they died and that is not a nice way to treat your cousins well this only cements my opinion that the monarchy is bad something about Foucault

and boomerangs and colonialism abolish the monarchy it's always okay to celebrate the death of a king or queen um doesn't matter who they are doesn't matter how it happens um it's bad for the concept of monarchy is the only thing more toxic than the concept of inherited wealth um and both are deeply tied to each other uh fuck the queen and fuck all of her relatives except for the ones who give up their their positions in power those people are are cool yeah uh don't turn police people whose parents were killed by colonial regimes on the

internet either yeah yeah and overthrow the government of Britain. Yeah. Look, we always, this podcast from the beginning has been directly in favor of an insurrection against the crown. The one thing that you do have to hand it to the queen for is seeing Liz Truss as prime minister and immediately dying, which is an appropriate response. Yeah, me too. Committing ritual suicide with a corgi. And you know, again, King Sabuto II did destroy democracy in Swaziland,

but then he replaced it with something that kind of sounds like democracy, and that's more than Queen Elizabeth did. Yeah, we just started at point B with something that kind of sounds like democracy. So I know what king I'm going to stan in the future. All right, Robert. Well, that's a t-shirt I'll be getting you for Christmas. Thank you. New tattoo, too.

Short-lived King Charles III. 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, cool zone media.com or check us out on the I heart radio app,

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