It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 81

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

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

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Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Ah, it's It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And today, I'm happy that we're recording this right now, James and Garrison, because we all just got a historic example of something falling apart. Elon Musk's big silly rocket.

We're recording this about a day or so after it exploded in midair over the Gulf Coast, showering a turtle sanctuary with toxic waste. It's such a fun news item. That's comically perfect. It is really. It is pretty cool. Comically perfect. Yeah. Unless it crash landed in a kitten farm, that couldn't really be much more perfect. No. I mean, what's nice is that it's given me,

it's made me feel young again, because when I was a wee lad, I was attending a speech debate rally in Cooper, Texas, when the last space shuttle to explode exploded directly over us, blowing out a bunch of the windows in the building,

and raining. Yeah, yeah. It was, yeah. So whenever a space shuttle explodes over, of some sort explodes over Texas, I get powerful nostalgia. Well, they slipped the surly buns of earth to blow out the windows in a high school in Cooper, Texas. Yeah, that's how the line goes.

It makes me think of all the other things I was doing that day, which was namely playing Lord of the Rings Risk in a high school gym, as we were wont to do. Great game. One of the better Risk covers. What are we talking

about today? Friendos? Buddies? Well. Chuckle pals? Yeah, we're talking about... Well, we're talking about one man having a fun time on discord.com i guess yeah doing the human equivalent of being a spaceship that explodes in the sky yes um i i suppose discord's not really a.com it's it's more it's more of that it's more of a more of an application now but yes it is uh what yeah discord an app that i am permanently banned from uh wait what yeah

what did you do what did you do to discord james you know who's on discord right like literally the worst fucking people on earth all of the worst people yeah, we tried to start a Discord for the fundraising live show, and I tried with several emails, and every time it came back with ban evasion. Wow. That is extremely funny, James. Yeah, I posted a video of my chickens, and it has never forgiven me. Wow. Well, I mean, you know, those chickens didn't consent,

and they were technically naked, so I think it does count as revenge porn. My chickens are always close, man. They were little chicken pens. didn't consent and they were technically naked so i think it does count as revenge porn my chickens are always close man they were little chicken pants oh yeah you you're one of the pansies the there's a big conflict in chicken owners and james has taken a side so we're talking this week about the discord leaks and this is one of those things we came into this kind of debating how much detail to go into but when we brought this up like this is something that Gare, James and I is like a major thing in our bubble for the last like week. So we've all been following it. But when we brought this up in the work chat, Daniel had no idea that this had gone on. So we're going to start with a pretty basic overview of

what what people are calling the largest leak of top secret U.S. military and defense data since, you know, Snowden. So we're going to go over all of that right now. I think I want to start by talking about an MMORPG called War Thunder. Can you break down MMORPG for those of us? It's like World of Warcraft. It's a big video game that you play online with a bunch of strangers. It's a free game.

You use modern military weapons to fight other players. And it's kind of well known for having extremely realistic renderings and sort of depictions of the functionality of modern tanks and armored transports and fighter planes and naval vessels, right? So, and it's like, it's a game for war nerds, right? Like there's, you utilize like radar in a way that's broadly realistic. Like if you shoot, you know, if one tank shoots at another, the tank's weaponry works the

way it's supposed to in the real world. The armor is vulnerable where it's vulnerable in the real world. And this is like the appeal to the kind of nerds who play this game. each other with modern military vehicles a significant number of these dudes are members of various different like defense departments right uh or at least are employed in some degree of various different national military forces uh several different as a result like when arguments happen you know with any mmorpg if you're playing like world of warcraft right and like something gets nerfed or something isn't working as well as it's supposed to, you'll get these like massive threads in the forums where people are like

arguing about how something needs to be changed or changed back or how there's a glitch or whatever. And because War Thunder is so based in realism, when you have these arguments online, it's often like, well, you know, the F-15 shouldn't work this way. It should work this way. And people will get into arguments about that. And then someone will, as happened like a couple of weeks ago, I think, someone will post sensitive information about the F-15 strike eagle in order to like prove that it would function the way that they are arguing it should function in this forum debate.

That happened earlier this year. And I think with the F-15, it wasn't technically top secret information. It was information that U.S. citizens were allowed to have, but not allowed to post online because that's a violation of something called ITAR, which is a thing that governs the export, essentially, of military information and technology. But on another situation, I think like a year or so ago, information about, I believe, the F-22 was posted that was extremely sensitive, that was like top secret. And these are, again, like some dude who's got some sort of military job and has a clearance and thinks that the right way to use it is arguing about the video game War Thunder. These are not just Americans. I want to be clear about that. In July of 2021,

there was a player arguing about a Challenger 2 tank who claimed to have been a former tank commander with the British Army. And he shared information from the Army Equipment Support Publication. The information had been labeled unclassified, but it was actually classified. And other leaks have been a little more galling. A French Army soldier leaked information on the Leclerc main battle tank that was top secret, on the clerk main battle tank uh that was top secret and a chinese user leaked capabilities of the chinese army's dtc 10 125 millimeter anti-tank round that should not have been leaked so this neat shit keeps happening in war thunder it's like a joke um like the war thunder account when these discord leaks happened a week or so ago like joked about it um like the thing that

the game is known for yeah is these like different people in different national defense apparatus can't stop themselves from like leaking top secret info about vehicles it's very funny i guess the only reason i know why war thunder exists i think it's the only reason why we know a decent amount of what like what by we here at meaning like i guess uh like western militaries know which of course we are all members of uh know about like russian main battle tanks it's from war thunder leaks it's very funny yeah and you have to assume i would be surprised if no one had tried just like having you know an agent from a national security agency in uh oh for sure trying to like be like trying to

like provoke arguments about chinese tanks or whatever i'd be shocked if that hasn't happened yeah um like the overlap between like people who might play war thunder anyway and people who might work for a national security agency like those venn diagrams are a circle yeah exactly um so it's one of those things where this happens a bunch on war thunder but it's just kind of something people joke about because these leaks like they're meaningful i guess to like militaries care about them but like you sitting at home you hear like oh hey details of like the couple of construction of a of the new abams like model has leaked. That's not like the same as, I don't know, Chelsea Manning leaking information about like war crimes by the U.S. military in Iraq or Edward Snowden leaking info about like the NSA.

Like it's a little less relevant to most people. we started seeing a couple of weeks ago is documents, top secret label documents, like actual pictures of straight up unredacted top secret U.S. Defense Department documents, just kind of filtering out over various discords. And they were kind of appearing in random little bits. You'd see one that was like an update on the war in Ukraine that was kind of showing concerns that the U.S. military had about the ability of the Ukrainian military to carry out the counteroffensive that everybody's expecting in the near future. You have like casualty estimates from the U.S. military. Another document that was leaked had like a bunch of information inside the Russian general staff. So these are, number one, very serious leaks, right? You're talking

about, especially with the leaks from inside Putin's kind of inner circle, you're talking about leaks that could potentially expose a major US source inside the Russian government. And you're also talking about leaks that just kind of reveal the degree to which the CIA has an enormous amount of information, apparently, at least about what's happening inside the Kremlin, you know, so these are very significant leaks. But they didn't appear, they weren't being like, you know, kind of filtered out and released by an agency like WikiLeaks. They weren't being sent to journalists, they were just kind of showing up in these, you know, Discord is basically a series of chat rooms. And They were just kind of showing up in these, you know, Discord is basically a series of

chat rooms. And they were just kind of showing up in different Discords. So this is, you know, a mystery. And it's the kind of mystery that, like, a certain kind of person who is extremely online is not going to be able to get out of their head and is going to kind of try to trace back to its origin. And in the case of this specific mystery, the nerd who could not get it out of their head and decided to trace it back to

its origin was my former boss at Bellingcat, Eric Toller. Eric is a very nice guy, probably the most talented and skilled researcher that I've ever met in my life. And, you know, Eric started seeing these like everyone else, these top secret documents and was like, where the fuck are these coming from? And this is one of those things we'll talk about. It's become extremely controversial among a certain set of people in the day since. But when this kind of started, number one, you can't really deny there was an intense public interest in figuring out what the origin point of these was because that was the only way to figure out are these actual leaks when you see something that's just like listed as a top secret document randomly on the internet if you call up the us government

and you say hey is this real top secret info they're not gonna yes, right? You don't get that response from them. I mean, and especially right now with all of the AI chat generation tools, generating fake documents is one of the main things people are doing for disinfo, generating fake sources, fake documents. Of course, you can edit things further to make them seem more realistic. But yes, someone who is extremely curious is going to wonder if this is actually a real thing or if this is just some bullshit prank or something. And there were edits of these documents did also go viral. In fact, Tucker

Carlson, one of the original documents shows kind of U.S. estimates for killed in action on Ukraine's on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side in the war. Obviously, it showed more Russian casualties than Ukrainian casualties, which is consistent with all previous reporting. a Ukrainian dead as Russian dead, which is, you know, something that was valuable for the people who are trying to argue that like this war is unwinnable on behalf of the Ukrainians, guys like Tucker Carlson, who covered the leaks on his show and knowingly used the fake edit of the leak. I can't imagine he I have to assume it was knowingly because it had been very well exposed

by that point. So there's really no other explanation, I think. But anyway, the fact that there were edits of these documents that were not legitimate going around is just kind of part of why there was a legitimate public interest in trying to figure out where the fuck are these things coming from? Eric is, again, an extremely good researcher. is again, an extremely good researcher. And through a mix of open source intelligence, and eventually just kind of like calling up people and talking to them, he found what appeared to be the source of these leaks, which was an invitation only clubhouse on discord of like 30 ish people, most of whom were teenagers. Over time, it kind of became clear that this group was a bunch of kind of young people who had gotten together during the pandemic to talk about, you know, games. These guys are all gamers. Most of them were like kids in high school. They kind of were cut off from

their friends. So they wanted a place to be social. They would share memes, including like extremely racist racist you know borderline nazi shit uh they would like watch movies over and like chat over kind of the voice app um they were all what you call trad cats which is like basically weirdo catholic fundamentalists um like i think a lot of them deny vatican too that sort of shit um it's it's like a whole thing a lot of them were that at least so there was a lot of like praying and anyway a bunch of weirdos uh and the head of this group of weirdos was the oldest of them a guy who was known on like in the discord as og um and og he's uh was you, in the land of the teenagers, the person in their early 20s who

can buy an AR-15 is king. And so this guy, this guy is in his early 20s. He's in the military, which he talks about. He posts videos of himself, like shooting guns and like, you know, saying racial slurs and like signposting to these like you know weird memes and stuff that they're all into which to them like makes him seem extremely cool right um it's one of those things when you kind of read the different coverage of this it's um there's a little bit of like weird culty stuff going on um i don't know if i'd say that it was a cult in more than just like every discord server is a cult. Exactly. The insular online communities like this very often reproduce aspects of

cult dynamics, right? Yeah. Hey everybody, Robert here. We had a little audio error, obviously in the recording. I wanted to clarify this section because it was kind of garbled.

The name of the discord server they were in was Thug Shaker Central, which is potentially a reference to one of a couple of things. You'll find some disagreement about this online, but it's not really relevant. That's the Discord name that they worked under. You get like the overall point of this. It's a bunch of like

kids who are fans of games. They're fans of like this YouTuber Oxide. it's like a little group of dudes who got together via fandom and the uh the the pandemic and over the course of years developed like a shared culture and part of the shared culture is this guy og who's the older one of them you know trying to uh uh keep them aware of what he thought was important about kind of global politics. And that particularly included aspects of like battlefield conditions in Ukraine, information about North Korean ballistic missiles, all of this kind of stuff that he had access to,

because spoilers, he was in an Air National Guard wing as an intelligence, like he was in the intelligence sector of like an air national guard ring and he had a security classification right um and once this all got revealed people are like why the fuck is a 21 year old because that's this guy's age have access to top secret data and everyone who knows anything about the way our our government classifies information was like most of the people who have access in our like 20 yeah fights our wars 50 year olds yeah like i think it just genuinely like you know like if we've been around war and conflict

and the people who do it quite a lot i think most people would be genuinely blown away that most people doing it are children yeah and this has caused like obviously some problems before for the defense uh department but it's also like it's kind of a thorny problem because like most of your workforce are always going to be young kids these are spoilers shitty jobs often um and uh that's the only one who will do a lot of them and also just like if you're fighting a war most of the people you have that are going to be tasked with field intelligence are going to be in this age range. So it's not at all weird that this guy had access to this shit. Um,

what is weird is that, so he starts off kind of like arguing, you know, uh, sometimes he'll bring up stuff that he knows that's from classified documents while he's arguing, you know, about the war in Ukraine or whatever with his friends online. And then he starts doing like a series of regular updates where he'll basically he'll type out details from like a bunch of different top secret documents and these massive long and apparently kind of hard to read posts. And he'll just like post them into the chat to kind of keep his friends abreast of what

he thinks is important. But he gets frustrated over time that like they're not reading this shit because it's really boring and like kind of weird to just info top secret info. And they don't these kids don't again like these other folks are like in high school. They don't really realize where he's getting the info or what he has. But they do. The folks who do pay attention recognize over time that like stuff will happen in the real world that corresponds to something he posted a couple of weeks ago. And they're like, wow, he seems to have like actually really good information.

Eventually OG gets frustrated because he's not, no one's paying attention to his posts. So he starts taking photos of just the top secret documents themselves and posting them in the Discord deck. Amazing. Now, this is unbelievably illegal. Yeah. He really crossed a line there. And just unbelievably dumb.

By the way, it was illegal before, but this is really illegal. In terms of allowing yourself, making it so much easier for the consequences you're fucking around to to find you like that he crushed the rubicon right there yeah and and and now we have to face the hard question is this guy an illegalist king or is he more problematic and this is this is the question that we have to actually focus on now um stop because it is it is on one hand pretty funny it's extremely funny there's zero argument there among people who aren't shitheads it's very funny yeah it's very funny that like he could be doing an

illegalism without with with zero intention of doing so now i, I do think there's a, some people have kind of errantly called him a whistleblower. Which is not, that's not accurate. That is not what he's doing. He's a Nazi who's posting top secret information to impress children online.

That's right, Garrison. I do think we have to, I think we have to, let's dig into that a little bit, because a whistleblower is somebody who exposes information from inside of an organization for some sort of purpose, right? They believe that what's going on is wrong. They think that like, they believe there's some sort of public interest in information that is being kind of siloed inside of an organization that they're a part of. And they released that organization, right? Fundamentally that's what a whistleblower is. This guy was telling his friends and this 30 person discord,

do not post these anywhere else. This is not stuff that you're allowed to share. This is just for your eyes because we're friends, right? He does not intend for this to get out. But here's the thing. All of his friends in this group are like dumb kids. And just like those people on War Thunder, they start getting into arguments with people outside of the Discord chat and other Discords. One of them is a fan Discord for some other YouTuber.

One of them is a Minecraft Discord. And they get into arguments with random other users about like the war in Ukraine and stuff. And when they're having those arguments, they'll hear someone make a point and they'll think back to a top secret document that OG posted. And they'll be like, well, I know you're wrong

because I've seen like some CIA like satellite footage that like shows that this isn't accurate. And rather than being like, well, I guess I can't prove this person wrong on the internet without exposing my friend in our private discord to, uh, being imprisoned for a decade. They, they just grabbed top secret documents that he posted and they post them in these other discords. And that's how this shit breaks containment

right um now it's one of those things i do want to note that like these are not generally speaking super pleasant people um og is the kind of guy who like one of his big arguments that he tries to like make to these kids he like claims that based on the top secret info he has which he posts nothing that proves this uh the mass shooting in Buffalo New York by that Nazi uh at that uh majority you know black uh frequented uh grocery store that that was like a government plot to Institute gun control and it was a false flag so he's not just posting good he's like lying here too because obviously there's no intelligence to post backing that up flag so he's not just posting good he's like lying here too because obviously there's no intelligence to post backing that up he just he's just kind of trying to it's a mix of he's trying to like prove that you know he's trying to make arguments about like what's happening you

know in in various overseas conflicts using us intel but he's also just like spreading different kind of uh conspiracy theories that he has to these kids who are by and large looking up to him um there's a couple like the washington post has done some some really deep reporting where they talk to some of these kids who they're like yeah man we loved him like when he realized this shit had broken containment he like called us and we were all crying because we knew he was going to go to prison um like they're they seem legitimately distraught um yeah there's like lines like he said something had happened and he prayed to god that this event would not happen but now it's in god's hands so these are like these are like weirdo ashy kids i hesitate to like

condemn like the literal children too much because they're very vulnerable this guy is like a bad person yeah this guy is a bad person who is deeply like in a very fucked up way influencing this group of like 30-ish teenagers on the internet um in his like weird politics it's not great now that's separate from the question of like is there a value to these leagues which we can talk about in a little right but so as we've talked about eric toller tracks down where this is happening tracks down like the name og publishes a piece on bellingcat it's sort of ripped off by like i don't know it does like every other newspaper uh in the world and then additional reporting is done bellingcat um and uh the new york times team up and they eventually like track down and publish an article on who this guy is, an airman named Jack Teep-Sara.

And they publish an article about that about a day before this guy gets arrested by the FBI. And it's one of those things, one of the, if you, if you look at the FBI affidavit, it kind of makes clear how the FBI cracked this guy down and found him because they did so, you know, using the resources they had before the times did online, people have been going after the times and Eric for like revealing this guy to the government, which is, is not the case. Basically once it became clear what had gotten leaked, the FBI, because they have access to the systems by which people utilize and get access to sensitive compartmented information, found out who had most recently, like on the days that kind of corresponded to the leaks,

pulled up information about that and narrowed it down uh to this guy jack um they they like it and they they were they had access to like one of the things they did is they called discord and talked to discord and discord helped them track down where the leaks were originating from um and then because they could see that the account that had posted you know the top secret data originally was a paid account, they were able to like provide the FBI with this guy's home address and the shit. This is exactly what you'd expect for the FBI. Yeah. I mean, the FBI has a lot of non-open source means to do this type of investigation. Yeah. They are not doing what Eric is doing and just kind of like clicking through shit for hours and hours and hours until they figure out where it's come from. Like they

have, they are the FBI. They have access to other things um and it's what you'd expect from discord too right like they yeah they will comply with whatever yes they are yeah absolutely these are top secret like if they don't have a legal choice here they're a gigantic company they're going to comply um so this is the kind of thing where like one of the there's this big argument i don't even even know if it's big but there's definitely like a weird chunk of the left that has like leaned on because the right has immediately started calling this guy a whistleblower um fucking marjorie taylor green was like he's a christian and he's a leaker trying to expose crucial details about our government and like no he wasn't he was like trying to expose crucial details about our government. And like, no, he wasn't. He was like trying to fucking groom some teenagers

and they posted it without his permission. A lot of the more conspiracy type stuff is like trying to call out like, you know, it's a lot of the more conspiracy related stuff is related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and making it seem like the US isS. is doing things that are wrong and secretly helping the Ukrainians too much. And it plays into this weird thing that people have

against the way Biden's been handling the geopolitics around the Russian invasion. And it plays into a whole bunch of right-wing talking points we've seen around Russia. You know, we've seen this type of stuff get talked about by Tucker Carlson quite often. There's a whole bunch of like little nodes that this that this touches on. And we even see we even see stuff like that among like, you know, people who are authoritarian communists who are who are still pro-russia despite russia not being a communist country um but but still like being like oh they're you know this is something he's

trying to expose the the the things that are we people are doing wrong to russia and it's like okay all right yeah yeah and to me it's one of the and there's also you've gotten i i among some chunks of this attitude that like well you know i don't care why he did it or like what he is in his personal life any leak you know of the u.s military machine is good and should be you know protected and it's like for one thing this guy like nobody knew where these things were coming from there was a vested need in sort of figuring out what the origin point was to figure out if they were accurate um but for like another thing i don't know man um you can argue about like what point you know the digging whether or not like the the it's ethical to dig this shit back to its source

um i would argue that like people also have a right to know if there's some sort of fucking like like if the documents were fake or altered in some way, there was a reason to be trying to figure out the providence of this shit, but more to the point, like, I think it's good to have access to like data from inside of our military. I think that's, that's broadly positive. And I, when I look at these data or when I look at what's been leaked, I don't think most of it's, you one of the concerns that's always that always exists when you're talking about a leak of data is like is this going to expose like potentially innocent people um to any kind of harm and there is a potential for that with some of this because

some of it dealt with ukrainian military readiness for the upcoming offensive and like well like i don't really care if some guy inside the Kremlin, who's like a member of the Russian general staff and a double, I don't care if that guy, like something bad happens to him. He's probably not a great dude. But, but I do care about like a bunch of random Ukrainian soldiers potentially getting harmed. Now, I will say, from what I can tell from this, I think the odds of that are pretty low. It looks like this has impacted kind of the timetable for the counteroffensive, but I don't know that it's, I haven't seen any evidence that it's exposed things in a way that's like going to cause loss of life, although it's a little bit unclear as to whether

not that might happen. But also, while I think it's accurate to say, I'm not seeing evidence that like a lot of people's safety have been harmed by these leaks. It's also not, you know, it's not anything like what Snowden did or what Manning did. Right. Again, Manning revealed, you know, videos like the collateral murder video, evidence of like breakdowns of order and things that I think are accurate to call war crimes that were being kind of hidden by our government. Whereas Snowden revealed intense details about an NSA spying program, all of that's extremely relevant to the average American. Most of this is just kind of like wonky inside baseball military stuff, which again, I'm not like sad that it's gotten out, but it's also not, it really does seem like a bunch of shit that like a guy pulled out based on his own kind of like weird interests. It's not, there's not like a strong

unifying theme around them. And again, most of it's, most of it's shit that's not going to be interesting to the average person. One of the documents I just read an article about, because like, we don't entirely know everything that was leaked right now, right? There's been, there's like the post and the times seem to have a pretty complete archive of what was leaked but they haven't published anything because you know they're reading through it and you know actually reporting it out one of the articles that just came out was about the the fact that the ukrainians made some overtures to the kurdish-led uh um self-administration in northeast Syria to Rojava, to the SDF, in order to talk about the potential for them attacking Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. When this has kind of gotten out over Twitter, it's often been described as, oh, the Ukrainians were going to

team up with the Kurds who attacked Russia in Syria, like, like this was an actual like serious plan, which is actually the document, it seems a lot less inciting than that. Basically, what happened was some folks on the Ukrainian general staff or whatever, we're like, looking into the possibility, hey, you know, is there any way that we could kind of anything we could pay the Kurds over in Syria to carry out an attack on the Russians, and apparently they had access to somebody who claimed to be in the SDF, at least, and that person was like, we might be able to do something if you can get us some anti air defenses, right? Which I don't know how Ukraine could possibly ship meaningful anti air defenses to northeast Syria. It's kind of bordered on all

sides. There is some stuff, if you're a walk in the region, there's some interesting stuff about this, which is that the SDF basically responded like we could potentially do this. We couldn't attack Russian assets that are within the borders of the self-administration. Russians are acting as peacekeepers there between Turkey and its kind of desire to invade the entire region uh they're not great as peacekeepers the armenians will tell you that russian soldiers are not great great peacekeepers but the sdf didn't want to like shit where they were eating right um so there was some like debate about where they might be able to attack one of the things that is really interesting about this leak is that apparently ukraine Ukraine like talked to Turkey about this because obviously the Turks consider the core of the SDF, the YPG to be a terrorist

organization. Um, but when Ukraine was talking to them, they're like, Hey, we might basically bribe these people to carry out an attack on Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. Turkey was like, okay, well don't do it here, here, here, because that's kind of close to some of our guys that might upset. That part is interesting. But again, none of this matters all that much because nothing happened. As far as we know, in December, Zelensky was like, no, don't proceed with looking into this. This is the kind of thing, like the US military has plans for what happens if we have to fight Canada. This is the kind of thing defense departments do. And as far as I can tell, there's no evidence that went much further than like a series of phone calls. Right. Which, by the way, the SDF denies ever happened. I don't know what exactly occurred. I don't know if it's hard for me to tell. Did the Ukrainians were they

talking to someone who was actually a representative of the SDF's like military hierarchy? Or was this like some guy that they thought was because maybe ukraine doesn't have great context into the like or did the u.s and it's it's not kind of clear did the u.s maybe like hook them up with somebody um but it doesn't like at the at the end of the day you can argue i as someone who follows the region i find this kind of interesting it's not exactly like uh groundbreaking you know in its importance because nothing happened no one did anything this is like some guys in ukraine thought about doing a thing and then decided not to which is you know potentially interesting

context but we're not talking about the manning or the snowden leaks here yeah yes it's yeah it's that particular document i think is kind of clearly they have access to people who have formerly fought in syria with the ypg right there are there are probably dozens of them now fighting in ukraine with other volunteer units like it's it's not hard to see how this thought came up but like you said nothing really happened it was just some people like spitballing so So I don't know. There's some other like bits and stuff in here that are kind of interesting. One of them was there was a document in there about how the U.S. had kind of like interfered in peace negotiations in Yemen due to like kind of concerns that they had about the fact

that China was kind of brokering a degree of peace between the Houthi rebels and between the Saudi government. There's definitely some like slightly some somewhat shady shit from the US in there. But at the end of the day, it didn't derail the peace negotiations. It's just like, yeah, there were like, like, and a lot of it's like that, where it's kind of like, this is useful context. I'm glad historians or journalists reporting it out will have that. But at the end of the day, like the fact that like, oh, hey, at one point in these peace negotiations, the US was like, you know, being kind of a dick isn't exactly like shocking, you know?

It's not going to like change your overall concept of what's happening over there. And it's not stuff that like is, most of it's not stuff that's like massively important. It is really interesting that the detail that our defense establishment apparently has from within the Russian government. I do think it's worth noting, because we're talking like when we talk about sort of the provenance of these

and the reliability of these leaks as they regard the war in Ukraine, there's been a lot of talk about like, oh, this reveals that like the Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to carry out a counter offensive or that the war has gone much worse for them than they think. It is kind of worth noting that like prior to the expanded Russian invasion, that like prior to the expanded Russian invasion, all US military intelligence suggested that the Ukrainian government was going to fold in a matter of days. So even though a lot of this is top secret info,

that doesn't mean it's like 100% accurate, right? Like our guys, like think back to the Iraq war. Our dudes get shit wrong constantly. 20 years. Again, this is all really interesting. And I get shit wrong constantly. 20 years. Again, this is all really interesting. And I will say two things. I think it's very funny that this guy nuked his entire life

basically to impress children on a Discord. I think it's extremely funny. I have laughed many a time at this. I also think it's like as someone who is interested in this stuff, interesting and good that we have this context. I don't think any of this is like massively surprising or shocking. Like the shit that's in that defense industry or a defense intelligence agency analysis of

the Ukrainian position right now is like stuff that you would know if you were paying attention to the good OSINT aggregators who have been covering the war would know if you were paying attention to the good OSINT aggregators who have been covering the war and if you've been like just reading good reporting on what's going on over there. I'll read a little bit of a summary from an article that's kind of going over some of the other stuff that appears to have been leaked. One details information apparently obtained through US eavesdropping on Russia's foreign intelligence service and suggests that China approved the provision of lethal aid to Russia in its war in Ukraine early this year and planned to disguise its military equipment as civilian items.

Another includes details of a test conducted by Beijing on one of its advanced experimental missiles, the DF-27 hypersonic glide vehicle. On February 25th, it says the vehicle flew for 12 minutes across 1,300 miles and that it possessed a high probability of penetrating U.S. ballistic missile defense systems. The documents contain new details about a Chinese spy balloon dubbed Killeen 23 by U.S. intelligence agencies that earlier this year flew over the United States. They detail sophisticated surveillance equipment. U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese spy balloons, the documents say in another previously unreported revelation. And so let's kind of break that down.

One thing we have here is basically an argument from the US that based on their intercepts, they believe that China has approved provisioning weaponry, selling weaponry to Russia and disguising it as civilian items. That doesn't mean they have done this. It means that like there's SIGINT that someone in our government has that says that they were. That could be disinformation from them. It could be out of date. It could be something like with this Ukraine and Syria thing that they talked about doing and then didn't do. It's interesting. I would say if you are a defense industry reporter, it's something that should definitely spur you to further reporting because that's really relevant if that's occurring. But it's not the final word on the matter. Meanwhile, you've got this thing on like, yeah, this hypersonic missile the Chinese have is good at shooting shit, theoretically. This is, you know, the kind of thing that's interesting,

and I think is probably more accurate than, you know, talking about China providing lethal aid, because you can kind of, you know, theoretically, you're looking at actual, like, data on how the missile has performed. It just seems like it's something that you've got more fidelity on. But this is, again, to kind of contrast it with like the Snowden and Manning leaks, well, what do you do if like the NSA is spying on people? Well, you could at least attempt to pass laws that restrict their ability to do that, right? What do you do if there have been like war crimes committed by your military that would then cover it up? Well, you can at least attempt to prosecute people. What do you do if some other country's got a

better missile? Well, there's not a whole lot for you to do sitting at home in like New York City or, you know, fucking Austin, Texas, right? Like, what are we to do about China's hyper? I don't know. My assumption, generally speaking, not that this isn't interesting, but my assumption, generally speaking, is that when you're talking about Russia, China, the United States, we can all murder each other if we wanted to. Right. Like we've all got real nice missiles at this point. And it's this, you know, the Chinese spy balloon stuff is like interesting. I don't think anyone's surprised by this. Like we knew there was a spy balloon. I assumed it had sophisticated surveillance technique. this? Like we knew there was a spy balloon. I assumed it had sophisticated surveillance technique. It's again, it's interesting that there were four other spy balloons in the area, but we simply know from older reporting that this happened like three or four times while Trump was in office too. So like, yeah, this is something we've known about. There's been reporting about this is corroboration. That's interesting. Again, none of this is really like a sea change in our understanding of any of these conflicts.

It is interesting context. Some of it's being blown up, you know, into stuff that it isn't. There's reporting on like the number of US servicemen in Ukraine that's being like spun as like, we've got boots on the ground there. And it's like, well, they're like embassy guards and stuff. There's like 29 dudes that this like confirmed.

Michael Tracy asked. Yeah, this confirms there's not a lot of US guys on the ground there. We do send a lot of people when we're doing wars. But yeah, like every embassy in the world has a contingent of Marines who make sure that it doesn't just get, I don't want to say Benghazi'd, but yeah, Benghazi'd. Yeah, that's fine. And this is not new news to anyone who's been paying attention.

But if you are Michael Tracy, this is brain melting shit. Michael Tracy is a weirdo quasi left journalist who like early on in the war, he didn't want to go into Ukraine very much, but he like hung out in Poland and took pictures of like US soldiers and like a facility that they were, had been in for years and was like, look, you know, this is evidence of the secret US support. And it's like, guys, I mean, for one thing, like, look at this, look at how much shit just leaked out because some kid wanted to impress children. If there were like, like secret massive formations of US troops or even large like forces of. spec ops guys carrying out operations in Ukraine.

How good do you think they'd be at keeping that shit secret? Right. For one thing, like special forces guys get killed all the fucking time. Like they get killed. They get overrun. Like it's a terrible risk for us to just like send SEAL Team 6 in to fight the Russians. When, spoilers, the Ukrainians have really good special forces guys,

every bit as good as ours, actually with a lot of cases, more experience fighting this kind of war. And we're giving, and it's like, if you want to talk about us involvement, we're giving them their weapons. Like we're involved fucking plenty.

There's just not much of a point in us, like sending the green fucking berets in to bakamut right like why um that doesn't that doesn't help us at all um that doesn't like help our our government that's not like good for the military it would be stupid um anyway whatever uh anything else to talk about here do we want to talk about the israel one and oh yeah no this is one of the interests although it's not again basically one of the Uh, anything else to talk about here? Do we want to talk about the Israel one? Oh yeah, no,

this is one of the interests, although it's not, again, basically one of the things that leaked is like the U S is spying on all of its allies, which this leaks every couple of years. We're always spying on our allies, um, including Israel.

Uh, Israel has spied on us a bunch. That's why they have nuclear weapons. Um, yeah, James, you want to talk about this? Yeah.

So this is a document that's why they have nuclear weapons um yeah james you want to talk about this yeah so this is a document that basically um what it alleges is that what what has been alleged perhaps incorrectly is is that it was encouraging mossad staff to to attend protests against net yahoo when he was attempting his uh like uh his auto golpe his, his coup from within, whatever you want to call that, right? He was attempting to centralize power, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, it's a document, and it says that, I'm quoting from it, or I'm quoting from reporting on it at least, senior leaders of the Mossad spy service advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli government's proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government, according to SIGINT, signals intelligence.

yahoo himself has been asked about this um and it's worth noting that he appointed the mossad director a guy called david i think it's by mayor yeah um and he has also uh he's he's on the record previously in news media before this saying that he had clarified to mossad personnel who could attend protests and who could not attend like because at a certain point uh in in any of these things like you're not allowed to to be explicitly political right um yeah folks even at a very low point in the u.s military like you're not you're not supposed to say and do certain things um so uh the there was a petition that went out earlier and again this has already been reported uh they that was sent by intelligence officers basically saying like we'll go on strike yeah and there had been again like widely reported instances of other israeli military people saying that they would

go on strike or not show up for work uh if these judicial reforms went ahead. So I think, again, it's been kind of, we've really stretched. What was interesting, I thought, was that it had a FISA label on. FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And if people aren't familiar, basically, it allows US intelligence to wiretap things which they could do without warrant if it doesn't include a US person. So a US person is not just a citizen, but also maybe a permanent resident, something like that. Like a person who has more rights than others in the United States. But in this case, they seem to have got a FISA warrant,

which is very easy to get, right? It's like a closed courtroom procedure where they go to a judge and it's not like an adversarial argument. There's no one who argues that you should get the warrant. So in practice, they nearly always get these warrants. But what it showed,

they have to just prove that it's an intelligence asset of a foreign power. And so it showed, they have to just prove that it's an intelligence asset of a foreign power. And so it showed that at some point they went for a judge and said like, hey, you know, we need to wiretap some kind of, some kind of communication.

I'm using wiretap in the broad sense, rather than the specific sense. But it's interesting, I think, that they have some intelligence asset in the United States who said, hey, we know there's an Israeli intelligence asset. And to be clear, this could just be shit that's going in and out of the embassy.

And they've decided that they needed to wiretap that and keep an eye on that. Now, given that Israel's foreign policy has been toxic and terrible for decades, but Netanyahu is a new degree of crazy, it's unsurprising that anyone concerned with, I guess, international relations would want to know more about what's going on and again like that's it's interesting context as you noted a lot of this had been reported out previously um so yeah we're it it's it's just like um it's it's it's all interesting again i'm my my my attitude here is like i'm glad this information is out and i don't really care what happens to jack texiera like, yeah, in my ideal world, the policing infrastructure that's come down on this kid would not exist. But he made this decision knowing full well what happens when you leak top secret.

Like, it's one of those things where it's like, just within the context of shit that's fucked up in our country, the thing I'm going to be upset about is not a kid leaking top secret info to win an online argument and then having it blow up on him. Right? Like, especially not a kid who's a fucking Nazi.

At the end of the day, he did something that was obviously done. It's like if some guy hops on Twitter under his real name and starts posting pictures of heroin and saying, Hey guys, this is my name and address posting pictures of heroin and saying, hey, guys, this is my name and address. I'm selling hella heroin. Here's photos of a felony quantity of heroin and guns. Well, I think heroin should be legal, but I'm not going to like I'm not going to like make a crusade out of that guy's arrest because that's stupid. Like that, like, you know

what happens if you post, hey, here is my home address and name. Here is all of the heroin I'm selling. Yeah, you'll probably get in trouble because you have posted online a serious crime. Obviously, that could be a problem for you. That's just not my primary concern in the world when people do really stupid shit and it blows up on them. And it's like, again, leakers, you look at the way Manning proceeded, you look at the way Snowden proceeded. They were aware of the danger of what they were doing.

I mean, you know, Chelsea did years in fucking prison. Snowden fled the country. That's because they were actually whistleblowers. They were whistleblowers. They under, they under,

they understood this is a serious, like, this is very illegal and I have to try to take steps to to protect myself because the government's going to come after me. The thing about Jack is, like, just the level of, like, arrogance that, like, I can post this shit all day long and nothing will happen. It was like, well, for one thing, this is never going, like, it's information you're posting online. Like, I don't care. There's no way to keep stuff completely contained within a 30 person discord it's going to leak out and when it is the government's gonna want to know who the fuck is leaking this shit and you took like took

pictures of this shit inside his home like it's just dumb i'm not gonna like i don't at the end of the day i have no room in my sympathy for like a fucking fashy kid who committed the dumbest crime possible and got in trouble. Like, I don't know. There's there's people who I don't know, for example, we're camping in a forest and are getting charged with terrorism and facing longer penalties. Right. Jack might do 15 years at the most, which is like fucked up, I guess. But, you know, there's people facing a lot worse for a lot less. And I just, you know, whatever. I don't care what happens to this kid. He seems like he sucks.

I think the leaks are interesting. There's nothing in here that's like fundamentally changed my understanding of geopolitics, though. That's where I am. I would agree. It is a useful reminder to keep your crime offline. Yeah. Don't continue, continue to not post crimes on the internet.

Again, if you're selling heroin, don't post on Twitter. Here is my name and home address. Anyone want to buy some fucking China white? That's not a great idea if anyone has any top secret documents you can find me on the star wars the old republic forums just just post just post them there yeah i am a part of the jedi initiate program so just

locate that and it'll be i'm sure i'm sure i'll see it yeah uh i I am on the Nosdormu server on World of Warcraft. You can just hit me up under my given name. Just DM me and we'll figure it out. You can send that shit to me over AOL Instant Messenger. That's how I take all of my leaks. It's the most secure platform. You can find me in the Mountain Project comment section where only good things happen.

We're all on War Thunder, too, so you can hit us up there, too. For work reasons, yeah. I'll be shit-talking your grading on a problem, but also accepting national security leaks. Yeah, we do it all. All right, everybody, that's an episode. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo.

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where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, podcast enjoyers. It's me, James, today, and I am joined again by Mo. They are an educator, attorney, abolitionist, and they serve overlapping communities of activists, queer people, and prisoners.

And we've heard from them before. We heard from them about June 11th. But today we're talking about something a little different. We're talking about redistributing power in the attorney-client relationship. How are you, Mo? I'm doing okay. How are you, James? I'm existing. I'm fine. I'm thriving. So, yeah, you wanted to talk today you reached out to talk about this i think it's a really interesting topic and it's one that like i've become increasingly more aware of in my coverage of some sort of uh different stuff that's various prosecutions i

guess in the us and so i was very interested in this. Can you perhaps start out by explaining what it is exactly that you wanted to discuss within the attorney-client relationship? Yeah, sure. I wanted to talk about building a trusting relationship with your attorney where you feel heard and respected and understand what you have a right to expect from your attorney and feel empowered to push for it. And this actually, I want to address this both from the side of the client, particularly for people who are accused of criminal offenses. And I also want to speak a little bit to the people who may be representing folks who are accused of criminal offenses.

For people accused of criminal offenses, I want to make sure that anyone in that position really understands what you have a right to expect from that relationship and to feel really confident asking for it. For people who are representing individuals who are politically radical or people who are facing politically motivated prosecutions, I want those attorneys to feel safe and ethically empowered to practice criminal defense in a way that honors the goals of clients who may define their legal interests, not with respect to only their own personal liability, but with respect to a larger set of principles or a larger community. Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a very, it's a good distinction to draw. And I think like a good

thing for people to be thinking about so why is this sort of a topic that's that's important right now well so I certainly don't want to say that participating in protest or in social movements is dangerous or that it's even more dangerous than it has been in the past. But I am concerned that we might be seeing some arrests and charges that are a little more unhinged than we've seen in a while. So this isn't new, but it may be new to a newer generation of activists. And I think some of the community knowledge that was cultivated and held 20 or 30 years ago may be outdated or it might be inaccessible to folks who weren't involved

back then, or maybe who weren't involved in things that were like subject to this level of state repression 20 or 30 years ago. So that includes activists, but it also includes even very experienced criminal defense attorneys who maybe haven't interacted with these kinds of prosecutions, you know, for whatever reason, because they were doing a different area of practice, maybe because this wasn't happening to the people they were representing in the geographic area where they practice, or like it wasn't happening at the time that they were practicing. So I think that people on both sides of the attorney-client relationship could benefit from considering that there are some

maybe important and time-tested methods of working to mount a collaborative defense in the context of a politically motivated prosecution. for a long time often we do have to learn things like the institutional memory of movements can be quite short and a lot of people have come to the protest movement now who were not uh like in my own case like involved in sort of the uh the the campaign against neoliberal globalization in the early 2000s right where we we screwed up a lot and learned a lot, and some of us are still around. And some of us are not, sadly, because part of the screw-ups that happened. And a lot of people, understandably, have been radicalized by having their bodily autonomy attacked,

by seeing the cops continue to murder people after we all got in the streets and got shot with rubber bullets to ask them to stop murdering people. All these things that have understandably made people realize that the institutional, the institutions haven't really responded to their demands for basic human decency. And so, yeah, they might find themselves out in the streets and government doesn't generally yield power willingly. And government doesn't generally yield power willingly. And certainly government right now is doing everything to kind of take what little liberty and autonomy folks have and slice into that. So it's very reasonable to consider these things. what would be some areas of friction or of, maybe I'm phrasing that wrong,

but places where people might want to advocate for themselves in order to get an outcome that they desire? Right. Well, so I'll certainly get more into the specifics. But I guess, you know, I want to talk about this because I am seeing disconnects between people in these relationships. And just from where I sit, I feel like I can see what's going wrong. And I think that there are some straightforward solutions. And I think that having compassion, each party having compassion for the other can be really useful here. So I think one thing that's happening is that attorneys are very much educated to be confident unto the point of arrogance. And clients often either don't feel authorized to push back on their attorney's ideas or they do and attorneys then just maybe steamroll them. And this is not entirely because attorneys are assholes.

I think it is because criminal defense attorneys are very often taught to minimize their clients legal liability by any means necessary. Well, by any lawful means, I guess is what I should say. So for criminal defense attorneys who do not primarily work with movement-aligned clients, this often means negotiating deals with the prosecution that involve cooperating with the state's investigation, handing over information on your Confederates, putting the client in an isolated or adversarial position with their co-defendants or co-arrestees, or doing things that require a person to renounce or disparage the people or the communities that they've been involved with, that they come from. And I think it's true that using these kinds of tactics to minimize your own legal risk is very often what people charged with

criminal offenses want. But that sort of approach is often at odds with movement values. And it's often totally inconsistent with what activists want when they are facing charges. So, you know, trying to minimize legal consequences is, you know, certainly always a part of our job. And it's often a totally valid thing for lawyers to be doing. But the idea that an attorney's job is solely to mitigate legal fallout is not actually entirely accurate. What lawyers are supposed to do is work with the client to help the client articulate their goals. And then the attorney should use their expertise and their experience to help the client lawfully pursue those goals.

And that's what attorneys are supposed to do in every case. But I think it often becomes most salient when the client's goals are less focused on minimizing legal consequences and more focused on, for example, highlighting movement messages or acting in solidarity with other people who are facing similar charges. So, you know, again, I'm talking about this right now in the context of explicitly politically motivated prosecution, but frankly, the goals of the client have to lead in all cases. Yeah, of course. So one thing that we chatted about a little bit that I think maybe folks in some areas that I've looked at might not have been aware of is the concept of

a joint defense. Could you explain for people who aren't familiar what that looks like? So a joint defense is a way of approaching a legal case where there are multiple defendants or multiple arrestees. Typically, in a criminal case, if you have multiple defendants, there's sort of a presumption that their interests are at odds with each other. That, you know, one of them or one or more of them is going to get thrown under the bus to reduce the punishment of one or more of the others. When we're talking about something like a mass arrest or an arrest that takes place in the context of a social movement where there are multiple

defendants, very often those people do not see their interests as being at odds with each other. Very often they see their interests as being unified. And so they want to act in solidarity with each other. And there are a bunch of reasons for this that are legal, and there are a bunch of um reasons for for this that are legal and they're also political and social reasons right um just in terms of people you know having caring social relationships they often have commitments to each other and to community. But politically, people often feel that their individual legal interests are less the important thing that's at stake, and that the thing that's at stake is actually the health and welfare of their social movement, right? And that if they did do something like cooperate with the state's investigation, they would actually be undermining their larger social movement goals.

approach allows all of those people to work together in a privileged context, right? Because they share a unity of interest. And so they and their attorneys are able to work on legal strategy together, are able to do things like negotiate for non-cooperating plea agreements as a block, are able to just have, you know, more eyes on the problem, more people doing legal research, more people drafting motions, right? And so, in a very material sense, this is a legal strategy working together actually leads to better legal outcomes for everybody involved. So I want to be clear that this approach, both using joint defense agreements and using that approach, but also just in terms of an individual attorney-client relationship, acting in a way that's more collaborative is not just cosmetic. And it's not just something that makes you feel good if you're someone who's committed to anti-authoritarian principles. In a material way, approaching the attorney-client relationship in a way that is calculated to more fully incorporate the goals and expertise of the client

or of many clients leads to better legal outcomes, less punitive outcomes. It leads to outcomes that are more closely aligned with client values, and it leads to outcomes that are better understood by the client even if those outcomes are bad right yeah yeah at least they're part of that process i think a great example of a joint defense that we discussed would be the the j20 case right if i'm not uh mistaken it was a group of folks who were tried together or who mounted a joint defense, I guess, against charges that were like filed against them. I think it was Trump's inauguration. They were kettled in D.C. protesting Trump's inauguration. And there were more than 200 people arrested in this mass arrest.

And there were more than 200 people arrested in this mass arrest. And they had a very coordinated defense and they all worked together. And ultimately, I'm going to say in large part, because they had so many eyes on the problem, they had so many people working on it. They were able to really go through discovery, go through the state's evidence against them and find prosecutorial misconduct that led to the favorable resolution of those cases. The other thing that they did is that they really all refused to cooperate with the state's investigation, which limited the harm that was done to larger social movements, because it meant that people were not just rolling over on each other and giving the state information to which it was

not entitled, right? Like, you know, information about people's relationships or interpersonal conflicts or, you know, different kinds of First Amendment protected information that the state always wants to have about activists, but which they actually are not entitled to, but which they often end up getting because people who are facing criminal charges, you know, sometimes will offer that up in exchange for, you know, what they hope will be some lenience. I think that was a really good explanation of how these techniques, like you say, they're not just cosmetic, it's not posturing or an aesthetic thing. It can result in material benefits as well as aligning with your moral desires. Can you explain substantively then how this looks in an attorney-client relationship, either with an individual or as a group mounting a joint defense?

So, you know, like any other relationship that's predicated on anti-authoritarian principles and shared values of mutual aid and self-determination, it requires building trust. It requires clear expectations, honest communication, respect for each other's expertise and consent. And I think, you know, the piece that I think is sometimes missing is a real understanding from both parties that the accused is the person who has rights and liberty on the line. The accused is the person whose goals matter. The accused is the person who has rights and liberty on the line. The accused is the person whose goals matter. The accused is the person who needs to be able to make decisions about things like whether or not to accept a plea offer, whether or not to cooperate with the state, whether or not to go to

trial, and whether or not to testify at trial. The attorney is presumably the person who has a lot of expertise with the law and a lot of experience with the legal system, the attorney is presumably the person who has a lot of expertise with the law and a lot of experience with the legal system. And that is valuable and important. But, you know, it really, I want people who are facing criminal charges to understand how much power they ought to feel comfortable exercising in this relationship. You know, it is up to the accused whether they want their attorney to take part in a joint defense strategy. Now, we are seeing some stuff. I have recently seen some bond conditions imposed on people facing criminal charges that appear to me to make it very difficult for attorneys to engage in a joint defense strategy,

because sometimes it looks like these co-defendants are being forbidden from communicating with each other. And so, you know, that is an interesting wrinkle. But one of the things it can mean is that it's up to the accused whether they need their attorney to go and argue to have that bond condition removed right yeah i hadn't thought of that but there are definitely cases especially if you are being prosecuted in a group or it's alleged that you've conspired to do something illegal then it yes that might be a condition of your bond and that would make it very hard to to do a joint defense but like you said that's when you should feel empowered to ask your attorney to stop that from being a thing right right the person who's facing charges gets to make these decisions right and i'm saying well

it's your right to decide whether to be involved in a joint defense, it's also your right to decide not to be. You can absolutely exercise your right to independent counsel, meaning the right to have an attorney who is not representing anyone else who's involved in your case, like who is not in any way connected to a co-defendant or co-arrestee. Now, this is not to say that your attorney has to do everything you want and they're just a yes man and that if they decline to do everything you instruct them to do that you should fire them. You know, attorneys do have to operate under certain constraints and this ranges from things like, you know, some law is not relevant to this case, right? I've occasionally had clients ask me to use the uniform commercial code to defend their criminal cases, which is not a thing. And, you know, I've also had clients

ask me to like hold, have a hearing or file a motion at a time when like procedurally that's not permissible, right? So, you know, you can't just do everything that the client says. But look, typically, the attorney has control over legal strategy, because, you know, as I said, presumably, they have expertise with law. But like, even if you have decided that you're just going to defer to your attorney entirely in matters of strategy, or even if you have an attorney who's like not super comfortable involving you in strategy to the degree that like I might be, at a minimum, the attorney needs to be able to explain their strategy to you and justify it, Right. So, you know, again, there needs to be

mutual trust and respect for each other. So expertise, they're not just a mouthpiece, but if you feel like they're genuinely not listening to your goals or not helping you to understand what's happening or they're actively disrespectful, it's really important for you to know you can fire your attorney. Yeah, I think one area, at least where I've become aware of this, is somebody whose attorney was either refusing to or somehow was incapable of gendering them in the way that they would like to be gendered. And in cases like that, you have the right to ask your attorney to use whatever pronouns you prefer and to be referred to using those

pronouns. Is that right? Absolutely. Absolutely. I've certainly heard horror stories and not just, and I'll speak to this in a second. I have heard horror stories, not just about public defenders, but also about private counsel being, you know, casually racist, being misogynist, being transphobic, and, you know, being ableist, being really disrespectful and classist, particularly around things like transportation and childcare. So, you know, if you have an attorney who's just straight rude or being disrespectful or like being oppressive in some way, I would say, you know, the first step I suppose would be to bring it to their attention. attention. And if they don't, if they are not responsive, you know, you should know that you do have a right to choose your own attorney. Now, I do understand that there are, you know, financial issues with just choosing your own attorney, but particularly in the context of, you know,

movement related prosecutions, they're often, not always, but often resources available to you, where people will either work to find you someone who can represent you pro bono, or, you know, will raise money. And the other thing is that if you have a public defender, you can almost always have appointed counsel from another office if you have some kind of irretrievable conflict with your attorney. So I think we should talk about public defenders a bit because i think sometimes people can think that like they're sort of the the worst option or like the bargain basement choice or what have you when in fact there's some there are some things you can get with a public defender you're very unlikely to get with private counsel and

absolutely yeah let's talk about public defenders a little bit. Sure. I would love to. Um, I love public defenders, um, especially in, uh, large cities that have, um, what we would call institutional public defenders, um, as opposed to, you know, everyone takes a turn being a public defender for one week out of the year. You know, people who want to be public defenders do not go into public defense for the big bucks. They go into it because they care about defending people and keeping people out of jail.

people and keeping people out of jail. And very often, you know, the people who are in those positions care very much and are really, really well trained. And they are not dummies. And they will work really hard for you. And I do want to push back against the widespread perception that public defenders are not good attorneys. They very often are the best available option. You are often in very, very good hands. Now, this isn't to say that you're never going to come across a public defender who is rude or incompetent in some way, but I would really, really caution you against assuming that the public defender is not a super qualified, committed attorney. The other thing is that the offices of the public defender often have resources available to them that private counsel do not. You know, they have investigators, they have social workers, they have vouchers for public transportation. And all of those things are resources that

I think can be very useful in supporting someone who's facing criminal charges. So again, you know, certainly if you're having some kind of interpersonal problem with your public defender or any attorney, I want you to feel really, really empowered to address it. And hopefully they're able to, you know, respond in a way that's appropriate and explain what's going on and you know why things are happening in whatever way they are but um i think it would be a mistake to dismiss um the public defender as a good option yeah yeah i agree i know some public defenders and some of them are really great people very very committed like you said to keeping folks out of jail which it is his goal in a lot of these cases some of my best friends are public defenders no they don't and like i people obviously will be i guess a lot of people in in some who are anti-authoritarian

right are going to be um like less than positively aligned with any sort of institutions or feel concerned about interacting with people who are part of these institutions but like as far as those people exist within those institutions is to keep people out of much worse institutions like jails uh so i think a lot of people who do public defense really have the sense that they're you know that their mission is harm reduction, right? And they're prepared to operate in the confines of what are sometimes sort of Leviathan bureaucracies

in order to achieve that mission. Yeah, and maybe a lot of folks will have run into it. I certainly know I met a lot of public defenders in 2020 in the course of covering protest. And yeah, it's pretty clear that those folks were largely aligned with good things, stopping the state doing violence to people in all of the different ways that it does that. Mo, is there anything else that you'd like us to get to with respect to these relationships people might have with their attorney? Yeah, I say this a lot.

people might have with their attorney? Yeah, I say this a lot. Attorneys have an obligation to give their clients their best understanding of what's going on, what paths are available to take, and the possible or likely outcomes of each of those paths, right? An attorney has an obligation to give you the best possible legal advice based on your articulated goals, their understanding of the law, their experience, and their clinical judgment. And their clients have no corresponding obligation obligation to follow that advice, which can be frustrating from where I sit, but it is nevertheless a critical attribute of my work that I do not get to make big decisions for other people. They get to make decisions that I would not make if I were allowed to make them, but I'm not. I think that, you know, I try to be really transparent with my clients about what my ethical commitments are, what I will do for them, what I'm not allowed to do for them.

what I'm not allowed to do for them. You know, I try to have those conversations in an ongoing way. I don't know that that's common practice. I think people are really busy and that's a hard practice to maintain. But I want to encourage people who are in an attorney-client relationship to initiate those conversations, right? I guess the only other thing I would say is, you know, if you have concerns with your lawyer, address those concerns immediately. Because the farther into a case you are, the harder it is to have that conversation. And the farther into a case you are, the harder it is to have that conversation. And the farther into a case you are, the harder it is to fire your lawyer. Typically, you have a right to choose your own attorney. But if you're,

you know, one week out from going to trial, the judge may not allow you to do it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I guess I just. I just wanted to tell anyone who's listening that if you are bad situation. And you should be in a relationship where you feel like your lawyer is taking all of your goals seriously, which includes not just your straightforward legal goals, but movement support and solidarity. And if your lawyer is disrespecting your goals or disrespecting your identities or disrespecting other kinds of ethical commitments you have, you can choose to find a different attorney. And there are resources available.

And ultimately, these decisions are yours. And then I had some resources that I wanted to... Yes, I was going to ask for those. That would be great. So for people who may be accused of criminal offenses, there's a really great book called The Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant. And if you Google that, you can find a free PDF of it. I would also encourage people to reach out to and to become non-lawyer legal workers. So people who have experience with jail support, people who have experience with court support and with providing sort of community support to people who are facing charges.

If you are somebody who has an ongoing case, having a support committee that includes at least one legal worker can be just so critical in maintaining morale and in feeling supported and in having the wherewithal to be an active participant in your own defense. And we do know that when people are active participants in their own defense they have better legal outcomes yeah i would imagine even if they don't have better legal outcomes they have ones that are easier for them to understand they're more satisfactory because of that yeah absolutely. Absolutely. There are a lot of

times when there are no good options on the table. I want to be very clear, being an active participant in your own defense or having a really great attorney who really listens to you and respects your goals does not mean that you are not going to experience punishment or state repression. It means that you are going to have a better handle on what your options are and why things are happening in the way that they are. So even if you end up in a situation that involves, for example, spending time in carceral confinement, you will at least understand how you got there. And you will understand what the other possible options were, right? You know, somebody might choose to endure punishment rather than cooperate with the state.

And even if that is not what most people would understand as a better legal outcome, it is an outcome that at least was more intentionally pursued than the alternative. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So where can people find these non-lawyer legal workers if they wanted to add one or if they wanted support from one? If people wanted to find legal workers

in their own community, I mean, typically they're involved with movements. They might be associated with your local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. They might be the people who are most active in jail support. If you really can't find anybody, you can call the National Lawyers Guild Anti-Repression Hotline if you are actively facing charges. That number is 212-679-2811. And we can try to connect you with appropriate legal resources in your community. That is one way that I would encourage people to reach out if you are facing charges and you're having a hard time connecting with legal resources.

That hotline is mostly for federal cases and for federal repression. But if you call it, we will do our best to connect you with appropriate resources wherever you are. best to connect you with appropriate resources wherever you are. And there are also some resources for lawyers that I wanted to hype here, which are, first of all, the National Lawyers Guild, which is a bar association for people who value human rights over property rights. What a dark situation that this is a subset of human beings uh yeah that the nlg are great for some positive nlg experiences what a dark situation that it hadn't occurred to me how telling that was about lawyers as a whole yeah yeah when a subset of your profession well a subset of my profession is equally the dark and terrible people so we just have to try and be better i guess

the other thing that is available for attorneys who are interested is um there is a book put out by the same people who wrote the tilted guide Defendant for attorneys, and it's called Representing Radicals. And that is, I think, available through AK Press. You should buy it from AK Press directly and not from Jeffrey Bezos in any way. Thank you. But, and the other thing is there are a lot of attorneys around the country who are more than happy to consult, to act as mentors, to share motions, to share legal research. um always prepared to to share our experience and resources um because we have a stake in other people becoming really good at this um you know uh you know my goal is to have fewer clients

so uh if anyone is interested in uh helping me to achieve that goal uh either by going to law school or by taking some of my clients or taking some of the people who might otherwise be my clients. Please, I would be delighted to shepherd you into movement defense. Yeah, that would be great. If we have any little budding movement defenders, how would they be able to find you oh yes uh if you would like to find me on the internet please don't um but um i do have a website uh that you can find if you google me it is mo at law and uh uh i am pretty available if you reach out to me by email and have questions right um but generally when i come on these things i uh the only thing i have to plug is the concept of

not talking to cops i want to do an episode on that maybe we'll do that one day i think we should do an expanded how to not talk to cops guide the i guess it's not just the concept of not talking to cops it's actually the practice of not talking to cops and certainly like it's somebody myself who lives on the border uh and has to deal with all kinds of different jurisdictions of cops on an almost daily basis just in the travel i need to do to live my life uh it can be complicated and scary and if you're not a life. It can be complicated and scary. And if you're not a citizen, it becomes even more complicated and scary.

So that's the thing we should discuss in detail. I would like to say that apart from some very, very specific exceptions that involve being at borders or being subpoenaed to a federal grand jury, you never have an obligation to talk to cops to answer their questions or to cooperate with their investigations. That doesn't mean you can obstruct their investigations, but you absolutely have no affirmative obligation to speak to police officers. And if they ask you, if they are trying to interrogate you or ask you questions, you can say, I am going to remain silent and I want to speak to a lawyer.

And if the feds show up at your house or call you on the phone or come to your office or your place of work, you can say, I am represented by counsel. Please leave your name and number and my lawyer will call you okay yeah it's good to have scripts uh i want to yeah i think we should we should break down in detail some more scenarios we should do it in another episode because it'll be maybe a bit longer yes um yeah i think folks maybe uh i think everyone understands the concept but the practice and there's that advice you give is great. Yeah. And if you don't yet have an attorney and you feel uncomfortable saying I'm represented by counsel, you can just say, please leave your name-Federal Repression Hotline at 212-679-2811 and have a privileged conversation about your rights, risks, and responsibilities, and we can connect you with an attorney in your area.

Yeah, that is excellent, actionable advice. Yeah, thank you so much for giving us so much of your time and help. Yeah, I really appreciate it. I'm sure everyone else does too. Not at all. It's my pleasure. I am always available to come and talk to you about the various rights of people accused of criminal offenses. Usually I am talking about your rights with respect to the state,

Usually I am talking about your rights with respect to the state, but it has become really evident that I needed to talk about people's rights with respect to their own attorneys. Yeah, it's good. It's empowering for people to hear this. So I'm glad we talked about it. Me too. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly

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Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.

Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. It, in today's parlance, meaning Tucker Carlson getting fired, because that's what we're talking about. Today is one of our classic timely reaction episodes to the firing of Fox News fascist and popular anti-Semite Tucker Carlson. Today on the show to chat about all of this, I've got Garrison Davis, James Stout,

Mia Wong, and Sophie Lichterman. Hi, everybody. Wow. When was the last time we got the whole crew together? A long time. This is the bulk of us. Wow. When was the last time we got like the whole crew together? A long time. This is, this is the bulk of us. Yeah. Yeah. Even Sophie wasn't here for the come episode.

No, Sophie, Sophie refused to be on for the come episode, threatening to quit. No Shireen, sadly. Yeah. Yeah.

But so, you know, today is a couple of days since we all got the surprising news that Tucker has been let go at Fox. This was news that was surprising to Tucker. There's a couple of things that are funny about the announcement itself, namely that he signed off his last episode saying, see you guys next week. signed off his last episode saying, see you guys next week. Fox play in the messaging they've put out was like,

you know, we, we both agreed that he needed to leave the network, that this is a, an amicable split. The, the Brian Kilmeade who replaced him the next episode with a Fox news tonight was like, Tucker and I are still good friends.

He's just decided mutually to take a leave from the company. This is definitely not true. We'll talk a little bit about all of this, but the gist of, I think it's kind of worth talking about like why this happened as far as we know. There's not, you know, objective kind of confirmation about why specifically he got fired. But the broad speculation, some articles have quoted a Fox News insider who says that it was due to something. Either he said in a recorded but unaired episode of the show, or that it was something that was found in the emails that were revealed during discovery that was profoundly anti-Semitic.

I've heard in one source, at least, said that it was anti-Semitic enough that it might have been legally actionable. That's obviously like, what the fuck? I would love to know what that specifically means. But what we do know is that a former producer for the Tucker Carlson show, who was a booking for him, is currently suing the network, both for a hostile work environment. She claims that she was exposed to intense anti-Semitism while working there. And she alleges that she was basically threatened into changing her deposition.

So the lawsuit came alongside her, like, issuing a correction to her deposition and saying that she had basically lied in order, like, because she was being threatened by people at Fox, which is like... So there's a lot going on here. So that's kind of the gist of what we know right now as to like why he got shit canned. Yeah, that's the basics. It's interesting too that he, it's been like a day now and he has said nothing. There have been multiple people who said that he's not responding to his texts, which is extremely funny.

He I saw one report that I don't I don't know how accurate is. I saw one report that says he found out 10 minutes before Fox like released the statement. Yeah, he was in contract negotiations. So he was in the middle of presumably getting Fox to agree to pay him a shitload more money. Yeah, and now he has no money, which is very funny. Well, he'll still probably get a lot of money somehow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd be interested to see if he, like, pivots to something like OANN or Newsmax.

I don't know if they have the means to pay him what he would probably want. Yeah. No, I mean, this is one of the questions following this and how this decision is going to affect politics going forward, especially with 2024. Two big questions being where is Tucker going to go

and who is going to take his place? For the next few weeks, Fox is probably just going to be doing a rotating selection of hosts until they make a final decision so you know a lot of people could end up with that

job but in terms of where he's going there's a few interesting options now it kind of does come down to who's going to be willing to pay the probably pretty high price or if he's just going to try to stay independent but I think something like Newsmax isn't out of the question. I think this is just like a guess,

but I think there's a decent chance that the Daily Wire is going to go after him really hard. He's already pretty friendly with a lot of the people there. They've been willing to dish out a lot of money for someone like Steven Crowder. Now Tuckerucker will be undoubtedly more but also he's going to be more of a pull and that that is something that's entirely possible i mean the daily wire already produces like usually two of the most popular podcasts in the world like in like the top 10 they already have a they have a lot of web traffic. They don't have cable, but they get a lot of other ways to spread their work.

They have a paid streaming service, don't they? Yes, yes. They also have the Daily Wire Plus. Yep. They are, I think they're probably the only people on the right that can offer Tucker both money that's broadly in line with what Fox could and an audience that's sizable, potentially even an audience that's larger. which made him the most popular host on cable news, but also is minuscule based on historical, number one minuscule based on the kind of audiences that you can get on streaming platforms today,

which are much larger than cable audiences, and is minuscule based on like, I mean, it was like 10 years ago that three and a half million viewers on a night 10 15 years ago would have been like an unsuccessful show on nbc right uh for for some for some perspective the most successful tv finale of all time was the mash finale which had like 105 million viewers um like the cable cable don't or you know period, does not get the kind of viewership that it does anymore. And I think when you're looking at Tucker,

he is, the main draw for him has to be the audience. He's not, he's the heir to the Campbell or to the Swanson dinner fortune. He cannot be motivated primarily by the paycheck, right? That he simply, like it just, that, that there's, he simply like, it just, that can't be the reason he's doing it. It has to be the, the, the fame, you know? And so Daily Wire, I think is,

is a likely place for him as a result of that. Yeah. Another thing that's interesting, I thought, is like Mia mentioned that he hasn't said anything yet. And he's probably taken advice from his lawyer, Brian Friedman, who incidentally is the same dude who's representing Don Lemon,

who lost his job on the same day. Great. Which is just a magical illustration. Good year for that guy. Yeah. It is a good year for this guy. He like, this is the guy who gets a shit ton of money from networks Good year for that guy. It is a good year for this guy. This is the guy who gets a shit ton of money from networks when people get fired from networks.

He has represented Megyn Kelly before. When you hear of a famous person getting let go by a network, it's probably this guy who's representing them. I thought it was utterly hilarious that uh yeah both of them retained the same guy on the same day having been fired but uh thinking about lawyering up uh made me think about like and um sophie mentioned it um that like carlson defames people he lies on an almost daily basis right we we recently spoke about how he took the statistics of russian deaths uh from those leaked documents how he took the statistics of Russian deaths from those leaked

documents, that he used the blatantly altered version of those documents long after everyone knew they'd been altered, right? He needs serious legal clout to defend him from the fact that he lies and defames people every single day. So even though he has a sizable fortune, going out on his own would be costly in the sense of he would almost have to be permanently defending himself. bailing Fox to the wall is going to be a sort of big factor here because it, it makes it seem easier and more plausible and things that like lawyers are willing to risk getting in fights about for actually going after these people for just like defending people. And so,

yeah, it'll be, it'll be interesting to see like how, how long Tucker can last on his own before he gets into a giant court battle with someone and whether he is, I don't know, attempts to be slightly more careful yeah like i yeah exactly i don't think if he's if he goes to youtube or something he's not going to be spending his his frozen dinner fortune on legal fees i don't think so he just and he can't do what he does without spouting shit right like his whole

thing is just straight up lying and doing this sort of credulous fool routine that he does, which always results in these ridiculous conclusions that he comes to. So like, I don't know, with that maybe the daily why I can sustain that, I don't really have a good sense of sort of their clout. If people aren't familiar, should we summarize the Dominion case?

I know you'd spoken about it on Bastards. Yeah, I did. I mean, you can listen to the two-parter I did with Katie and Cody on the dominion case i know you'd spoken about it on fast yeah i did i mean you can listen to the two-parter i did with uh katie and cody on uh on the dominion lawsuit where we basically just go over the entire uh uh document that dominion prepared for that but the gist of it is that tucker knowingly um and knowingly we know that he knew because uh the discovery process revealed a bunch of his text messages and emails where he talked about knowing that the election fraud conspiracy theory was bullshit. And he propagated it and attacks against Dominion and another company, Smartmatic, in order to keep his

audience on board, which is a criminal defamation. Or not criminal, but at least legally actionable. You can sue, as Dominion did, and won like 800 million bucks. And I do think that's really worth – that is kind of pertinent when we're talking about who's going to take him next. Because obviously, the Daily Wire would want a guy like Tucker, except for the fact that he could cost them another $800 million, which has to be part of the calculus of any company looking at taking him on, and I think is something none of us, nobody really knows what's going to happen with this, but I think

there is a good chance he is permanently marginalized in terms of audience, just because of how much, like $800 million is not enough to sink fox on its own but it is enough to make anybody looking at bringing tucker on board a second guess themselves yeah i i saw some numbers that were i i think i think they were saying he was bringing in the highest like amount of revenue of any like uh like kibble news anchor but it was like it was like 78 million dollars a year and he lost like so he lost 10 years yeah of his income he basically lost it lost everything he'd made fox during the time when he was the number one yeah yeah and that has to be that has to be a huge part of the calculus of like okay you know these these these people like as as as as much as the right

is ideological it is also capitalist and the risk reward on that is terrifying yeah and like especially when it comes to the daily wire a cost like that would just probably make their entire company fold because like they don't have burdock behind them they're not they're they're not that big of a company they just have a disproportionate amount of influence because their hosts are really good at marketing and social media manipulation. Talking of ad revenue, now would be

a great time for us to pivot to some gold or coins with Ronald Reagan on it. Oh, yeah. You can hear the ads for the new podcast that our future colleague Tucker Carlson's going to be doing. Yeah, it's where him and Don Lemon just have a debate. Yeah, him and Don Lemon. for the new podcast that our future colleague, Tucker Carlson's going to be doing. Yeah, it's where him and Don Lemon just have a debate. Yeah, him and Don Lemon.

We're calling it, I don't know. There's a good joke with their two names somewhere. I haven't figured it out yet, though. So you do that for yourselves, audience. Ah, what a good time that we're talking about here. This is just a great day, great week. So yeah, we're looking at, I think kind of when we're talking about what's possible here, Daily YRA agrees kind of the most likely thing. If you look at what leaked recently during their drama with Steven Crowder, the contract that they were offering Crowder was somewhere around $30 million, which from everything people have

said is a big deal for them. That's one of the bigger offerings they're capable of doing. That is probably the most Tucker is realistically going to be able to get, but also one of the things that kind of is noteworthy about the contract they were offering Crowder is that it included clauses where like Crowder's take home could be reduced significantly if he got kicked off of platforms. And fucking Tucker Carlson is not going to keep it a YouTube account. I mean, it is, it is interesting in that sense of like, Tucker Carlson is not going to keep it a YouTube account. I mean, it is interesting in that sense of like,

all of his content was able to be kept up when he was under Fox. Like on YouTube, you can find all of his segments and it'd be interesting to see how the content moderation differs if like he starts his own channel and how comparatively what things would be would be counted as like community guideline strikes but yeah i mean uh just i think i think like last week uh matt walsh's show got got demonetized on youtube which if his contract

is anything like crowders means that he is going to be suffering up like a personal financial hit yeah he's they're taking probably you know in the millions that he's losing yeah and there's something i think this is an interesting thing that's been happening the last maybe like six months has been there's there's been sort of increasing tension between sort of the the the far right that basically sees control of the Republican Party and like the money. And they keep running into these issues where in order to keep their base going,

they need to say stuff that like, they're sort of like corporate backers are like, this is either losing us money or is so far out there that like, it's either directly losing us money from lawsuits or it's losing us elections or it's losing us like business and now i'm never gonna claim that like murdoch is not the far right because he is but it's it's interesting that we've gotten to a point where people like murdoch are getting more gun shy about what they can put on air because

it's finally like the the money is finally starting to see actual consequences and they're starting to pull back from the stuff a little bit. Well, see, that's part of what I'm questioning is I'm sure that that is something that's entering his calculus more now since the settlement. But at least the early reporting suggests that's not really why, or at least not most of the reason why Tucker got shit can't. It's a bunch of shit, like stuff that is not revealed yet in the deposition that he was saying

in email. I mean, one of the things came out that woman who was accusing him of, of creating a sexist and antisemitic work environment is that he like, when she got hired, he plastered swimsuit photos of nancy pelosi over her office um and that's what we've heard like the shit that like i think it's possible uh that what actually got murdoch to make the call to can him is that he murdoch himself found out through discovery that he was saying shit in uh emails

that would sink the company like if he's saying full-on nazi shit and yeah and there's there's documentation of that uh which i don't think is unlikely he had ye on like yeah there's no there's there's no there's no limit at that point like yeah no Yeah, clearly that shit aligns with his views and he's made a concerted effort to mainstream more and more outright fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist talking points every year that he's had that show. So it would not, especially when they got his text messages. He might be smart enough not to maybe use his work email,

but I think that the fact that there were some things in his text messages, yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. It's either that or he said something personal about one of the Murdochs. Well, he did talk shit about Fox executives, which some people have suggested as like part of why they made the decision to can him, that he actually just pissed off the money men too.

And this was kind of an excuse to take more action. Yeah. Again, like it's kind in like a practical way. I think there's something about cable news where you're reaching an audience that's different with the ideas that he was. When he was on Fox, he was hitting people who would never have encountered some of this fascist shit, this great replacement stuff. Whereas if he's saying the same thing on a Daily Wire podcast, he's probably talking more to people who are already, you know, pilled, so to speak.

So I, I do think there's a good chance that overall this kind of tanks his ability to actually like influence culture in meaningful ways. Radicalized boomers. Like everyone listening can probably think of a person who they know or is in their sort of greatest circle of people who their friends know who is an older person who is very much offline and has encountered these great replacement ideas through tucker carlson and become a significantly worse person because of tucker carlson's program yeah i mean and you can

you can see how all of the daily wire guys, like Walsh and Michael Knowles and even someone like Andy Ngo, they suck up to Carlson so much and have been for the past few years because they realize that that actually gives them cultural access to be on his show on that platform in a way that they're much more like- Peterson too.

Peterson, sure. I think Peterson's broken into the mainstream, I think, a bit more. But all of these other guys, like Andy Ngo, Walsh, Knowles, they're all heavily internet people. And they influence internet shit. And sometimes that can start crossing over. But in general, the cable news platform kind of reifies things into a broader culture in a way that someone like Walsh just doesn't because he like most people don't know who Walsh is but most people do know who Tucker is and that is my dad is like a

lifelong Republican voter and when I talked to him complaining about shit Matt Walsh is doing like the first thing he said was like I've never heard of this guy yeah uh and it's like yeah because he's, he's a fucking internet weirdo. And my dad doesn't, you know, he knows Ben Shapiro because Ben breaks through to the mainstream, but he knows Ben Shapiro from like catching clips of him randomly being

shared on Facebook by other people in his age group, as opposed to like seeking this shit out. And that's, that's kind of the power of Tucker. And I think one of the things you've seen, Gare, that you were kind of talking at, which is,

is, is the thing that is maybe most hopeful to me is how scared people like Andy know Glenn Greenwald flip the fuck out when this got announced, because they see this is a major threat to their reach into their earning potential. Yeah. Tucker can't host them anymore. that's potentially disastrous for them. And the fact that that's happening right as we're gearing up for 2024 is something I'm hopeful about, at least, I'll say.

Right. I mean, it is a massive rejection of that platform to people like that. of that platform to people like that. Like this type of like rhetoric that Tucker is doing, having this be like publicly rejected in this way will make all these people that are more on the fringes probably make it harder for them to break through in little ways. Like they used to try to by being on Tucker's show. Speaking of reifying things into the broader culture,

buy these products. And we're back okay so there's one other thing that i we've quite been touching on it but i think is really interesting is that tucker tucker basically has a sort of media ecosystem that revolves around him and you know there's a very established pathway for how you can become a sort of like a successful and profitable right-wing grifter which goes through you know you you sort of go viral on twitter you go viral on tiktok and then you go on a tucker and you know and like like people like lives at tiktok right like i i think i think there's there's a specific kind of media campaign that even even with whoever like whatever absolute asshole that like fox puts in that slot after tucker's you know whatever they

sort of figure out who that's going to be like there's still i think going to be sort of a hole there yeah where i think it gets harder to run the kinds the very very specific kinds of campaigns like lib to tiktok like uh the sort of moms for liberty shit that's been just making the country unfathomably awful for the past few years with like that i've been kind of working on writing something scripted about this trans panic that happened in a town very near me in santee right which like was an extremely clear like uh like that was the goal right like like do the speech, go viral, go on Tucker, create, you know, then go on the speaking circuit, make money. Like to me, at least it seems very clear that that was the goal. Yeah, he's a weapons system that they have learned, like has become kind of the center of right wing strategy really.

It's like get on Tucker, cause, know moral panic culture war shit yep yeah and and you know and like obviously like other fox hosts do this stuff it doesn't work anywhere anywhere near as well and no i think it's the person the person that gets the closest is probably laura ingram but i think she she kind of suffers from the glass ceiling problem yeah she actually cannot be as influential boss down yeah i mean but comrade misogyny i stand with laura ingram robert you bigot specifically viewing tucker as this thing that was like a targeted weapon i think it's a really good way to look at this and specifically now that that weapon no longer can like actually aim correctly because it does or at least may not be able to right i mean maybe he'll come back somewhere and we're wrong but i i i i am optimistic i think i'll say

yeah it puts a spanner in the works of the hate machine that that he built and that fox built and that's a good thing but uh mia you were saying before i rudely interrupted you you asshole you left out to go bust down i cannot remember what i was gonna say you're talking about how how other other hosts kind of do the thing but not quite yeah they well i mean part of it also is just you know part of the power of tucker is just the time slot that he's in yeah which is you know that that that's the one where like all the people who've gotten off of work or who are like turning on the television at night get to but yeah like tucker was i think was really in in the entirety of the sort of tv and media sphere was uniquely good at

that stuff and no one else no one else can do it like that and you know like the like the fox people will create someone else but until they fill that spot a there's a gap and b it really remains to be seen whether they're going to sort of pick someone who is as embedded in like that part of the sort of fascist right as tucker is or if they're going to find someone who's like i I mean, still really, really right wing and sucks, but isn't like having ye on. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I am kind of curious slash worried about who's going to follow him into that time slot.

Folks, real old heads will know. Tucker got his job after Bill O'Reilly, who was the Fox News fascist of my childhood, got shit canned for sexual harassment on an industrial scale. And so that's why Tucker is in. And obviously, as bad as Bill was, Tucker was worse. And maybe the person who follows Tucker will be worse than Tucker. I do have trouble imagining what that could be, because my God really he he went he went right up to the edge of putting on a fucking swastika armband yeah yeah i i will say about the bill o'reilly thing people people have been like oh like tucker's gonna disappear in the way bill o'reilly did i don't i don't think that's i think he's gonna be a bigger like but assuming he winds up somewhere

i think he'll be still be a bigger influence than like bill o'reilly was after he got fired but yeah i mean bill was also a lot older, right? Yeah, yeah. No, I think that is an accurate assessment. Well, I'm excited to get my new Rumble subscription so I can watch all of Tucker's new race. It's going to be glorious to see him finally pair up with Tim Poole. The two of them carrying AK-47s and doing field journalism in 2024.

Yeah, Tucker Carlson, for those who are not familiar, carried a gun when reporting in Iraq, which for many reasons is a fucking terrible idea, including putting everyone else doing your job in danger. But it is really funny it is very funny I will say that it is funny I genuinely part of me does hope he decides

to do a thing where he's like I'm going to go do field journalism in Ukraine and just immediately so funny just gets fucking murked by god damn like you know what happens he embeds with the Aesop battalion Just gets fucking marked by a goddamn like a hemorrhage. No, no, no. You know what happens?

He, he embeds with the Aesop battalion. Yeah. And they all get taken out. Yeah. And they create this God willing kindness. But I think one thing I was definitely thinking about like the past few years, less, less so that this, this like past year specifically, but for a while it was a quite frightening prospect to think about what if Tucker was going to run for president. And I don't think he, he is, he is not going to do that in 2024. Absolutely. That's, that's,

that's not happening. Um, but I mean, it's still possible he could in the future. 2028 is likely if he wants. But I think the loss of this position at this point in time will probably affect that decision because it's something he's certainly been thinking about considering he's one of the most influential conservative people on the planet. He determines policy. He did. He determines policy, or did.

He did, yeah. And now it's interesting with him leaving his job in this way, it'll be interesting to see how that affects any kind of potential prospect for him running for office. My big question around all that, and this is kind of unanswerable, is does Tucker have any appeal outside of the right- wing base? Three and a half million cable news viewers is not evidence of the kind of broad based appeal that can draw an independence and win an election. And Tucker has never, you know, the one, the closest thing he's been to a political candidate is when he went up against

Jon Stewart, and that didn't go great for him. No. And he moved after Jon Stewart kind of destroyed his Crossfire career, he moved to a situation where he had unprecedented control over his show. It was almost entirely recorded and stuff out of a studio in Maine that he set up. He built everything he was doing around being able to totally control how he was seen, what was shown, what of his was put out to the public. And you simply can't do that as a presidential candidate. You have to accept and be able to make work for you the fact that every eye is on you and you do not have total control over what about you is put out and published, among other things, you're going to be repeatedly questioned in situations where you can't edit

the footage or stop things from going out afterwards. And I don't know that Tucker has what it takes to succeed in that kind of environment. Yeah. In inshallah, he fucking never succeeds again and we never have to hear about him. Yeah. We should shout out uh this lady kat

abu gazale that the person who had to watch tucker carlson for years and years and years and then explain it to people uh she works at media matters for america but she is taking the biggest victory lap that anyone has ever taken right now and it's it's kind of glorious to watch doing the lord's work truly yeah taking on trauma for all of us but her stuff was quite good like she she did a good job explaining how toxic tucker was to people who might not have been aware of it yeah yeah anyway in conclusion tucker uh we would love to have you on at cool zone uh totally welcome to come host uh your own podcast we'll bring you on it could happen here you could do a bastard's guest appearance yeah um send him to myanmar he cool zone. Totally welcome to come host your own podcast. We'll bring you on to It Could Happen Here. You could do a Bastards guest appearance.

Yeah. We'll send him to Myanmar. He can find you. Right into the jungle. We'll drop him directly. Come on. Come on, Tucker. We'd love to have you.

Anyway, I think that's a soad. 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. 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 podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear

to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters,

this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with cheese man laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture

to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been four months since French President Emmanuel Macron effectively declared war on French society. Euphemistically called pension reforms, Macron's proposal would increase the retirement age from 62 to 64, effectively robbing the working class of two years of their lives. In January, French unions filled the streets of Paris with trash.

Now, French workers build brick-and-mortar barricades on highways and set branches on fire on train tracks. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. on fire on train tracks. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. The escalation from protest to uprising is, in part, a product of how Macron forced the retirement age increase through a national assembly he no longer controls. Without the ability to win a vote, Macron's Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, suddenly invoked Article 49 of the French Constitution, which allows the ruling government to force a bill into law without a vote. Macron argues that because circumventing parliament to force legislation through is legal,

the move is democratic. Millions across France disagree. We spoke to two French protesters, Mael, a student in Lyon, and Nagat, a union railway worker at a state-owned rail company, about the movement. The two met through a struggle committee designed to bring people from different backgrounds and movements together to fight against Macron's reforms. And four, as Mael put it, victories for our class. Agathe had this to say about Macron's anti-democratic sleight of hand. What they are using right now is a rhetorical trap, which consists of confusing democracy and constitutionalism. I don't know if I'm using the right word. But, for instance, you know that they maybe, you know, that to impose this reform, they have been using an article, which is Article 49.3 of our Constitution. And they say that, well, this article is in the constitution,

we are in a democracy and therefore this article is democratic, which is absolutely false. It's a fallacious reasoning. It is not true. The 49.3 is an anti-democratic article of the constitution. And this is what they have been trying to do lately, to say, to make us believe that everything that's been happening is absolutely normal and complies with the democratic standards of France, which is not true.

Also, what they are trying to do to disqualify any opposition from the left wing is to say that the left wing party is actually an extreme left wing party, which it is not. left-wing party, which it is not. And it's kind of, they are trying to induce a kind of history in all this and to radicalize what is not. What we are asking for is simply for them to listen to what we for once can call the people. Generally, when you have a protest, it's only a part of the population

that disagrees with the policy of the government. But this time, honestly, there are seven people out of 10 who disagree with this and nine workers out of 10 who disagree with this, and nine workers out of 10 who disagree with this reform, honestly, I think we can call ourselves the people. Yeah. And in a democracy, well, what you do is listen to the people, not the representatives and not the members of the government,

but the people in the fucking streets. I'm sorry. And because they do not want to do that, they try to say that we are radicals and that we are supported by radical political parties, which is not true. Yeah, it's a very religious situation. Yeah, this is what I wanted to say about their current strategy, aside from the repression of which we are going to talk in a few minutes.

This is what their strategy is. Yeah, basically they confuse all of the forces on the left together. They say that Mélenchon is funding the black bloc. So it's things like that the cgt's lfe all of them it's all the same and they all want uh the destruction of civilization and i don't know that's that's the discourse on the far right yeah and we eat babies yeah that sounds like the American right too yeah

and this is kind of linked to police violence this discourse when you were talking about how they're saying that the constitution is democratic and there's nothing you can say even though, well, the point of the constitution is to bypass the parliament. I don't know if that's democratic. But yeah, so when it comes

to police violence, the reaction is to say that the state holds the legitimate monopoly of violence, so therefore they can repress us however they want. That's literally what they're saying right now, which is kind of worrying. The French police have been incredibly violent in their campaign to suppress the protests. At an ecological action in Saint-Séline on March 25th, tens of thousands of activists were met with helicopters, armored vehicles, and 6,000 grenades, many of which were the French police's new and incredibly dangerous military-grade GM-2L CS gas grenades.

One protester was shot in the head with a tear gas grenade fired by a grenade launcher mounted on an armored vehicle. He remained in a coma, fighting for his life for an entire month. Earlier today, his parents released a statement saying that he has begun to wake up but is not fully conscious, and his life remains in danger. The day before, a special police motorcycle unit called BRAV-M, created in 2019 to suppress the Gilets Jaunes, or the Yellow Vest protests, was recorded threatening a group of random people that had arrested for sitting in front of a

building. From the Washington Post, the cop says, quote, You're lucky to be sitting there now that we've arrested you. I swear, I'd have broken your legs, literally. I can tell you, we've broken elbows and faces, but you, I'd have broken your legs, one officer says in the recording, Limonde reported. Two slapping sounds can be heard, the report says, along with an officer saying, wipe that smile off your face. Later in the clip, a police officer warns the young people they have detained, quote, next time we come, you won't be getting in the car to go to the police station. You'll be getting in another thing called an ambulance to go to the hospital. police station, you'll be getting in another thing called an ambulance to go to the hospital. Paris Police Chief Lorette Nuez said on Friday he was, quote, very shocked by the audio clip.

Mayel and Agat were less shocked. This is not really a surprise, unfortunately, because, well, our lease is not as, I don't know, it's problematic, but maybe not as problematic as in the US. I'm sorry if I'm wrong about that. But we also follow sometimes what happens on the other side of the ocean. But I must say that we have had issues of police murders on the street and police violence, wanton violence. And unfortunately, now it's not new. And there is a newspaper, Mediapart, who managed to find excerpts of, I think it's a group on WhatsApp or whatever, of policemen talking about race war

and all these kind of things. And unfortunately, we know that there are such people in our police. The police are basically fascists, all of them. They have one of their unions, which is called Alliance. one of their unions, which called Alliance. And for the presidential elections, they invited the right-wing party, who are basically only people who dog whistle about genocide.

And then the classic Marine Le Pen and Zemmour, as the far right who is openly calling for a civilizational war with Muslims. So that's the police unions. And for a little bit of history on the police, we have for example one of the very violent units that you see arresting people all over France, which are called Brigade Anticriminalité, or BAC for short. And these people come from some sort of colonial units who were in Algeria during the war. And when there was a need to repress populations who previously lived in colonies and then moved to France, to the main country, They created a lot of very violent units

recruited through people who were in the Algerian war to basically break down people's houses, things like this, beat them up. It was really colonial practices. And all of this kind of stayed with the repression of poor and non-white areas of town where they try to always have a strong police presence and catch people, they say, in the act, but they really like making up reasons to arrest people police violence is not new at all and uh yeah basically these units train all year long against poor non-white people and then during protests they come against people who have who come to protests, which are generally different people,

but not entirely different people, of course. The police response to protests, Agathe says, has gotten more violent since the Gilets Jaunes protests in 2019. But instead of clearing the streets as Macron had hoped, the increase in violence is just narrowing the traditional gap between more moderate trade union protesters and the more radical protesters found in black blocs. I've seen people in America and England saying that the movement is dying down

because the inter-union protests are more and more away from each other. But in the actual protests, people are much, much more radical. And what happens is that the people who are in the front of the protests before the union and who may potentially fight with the cops that the union will never do, they're more and more numerous, like four times bigger than the protests a month ago. And so the cops cannot charge us. Every time they charge, people get around them and there are rocks which happen to hit their heads.

I don't know how. Yeah, could I ask about that a bit, specifically about the dynamic of there being a sort of, I don't know, a kind of divide between the sort of more milit a sort of i don't know a kind of a kind of divide between the the sort of more militant people who are fighting the cops and the sort of more moderate uh like trade union like protesters i wanted to ask i guess like how how firm has that separation been and what i guess have the unions been doing here?

Have they been trying to contain things? Have they been trying to push forward? Well, I think it's a very recent phenomenon, kind of, especially the way it's taken form now, because it's basically a mix of a black bloc and some gilets jaunes and some radical people. Yellow vests. Yeah, yellow vests. But, so the black bloc, it started really in 2016.

Before this, there was no real black bloc all the time at protests. And the attitude of the unions is that they hate the black bloc it's pretty simple i mean not of course as uh everyone who is in a union but the unions who organize the protest they don't want anyone in front of them they want people to go behind them and follow whatever they want to do. So they've been really aggressive, but even if there are conflicts right now, I would say the fact that the people in front of the Union are more and more numerous, I think there's somewhat less tensions. The Unions, I don't think they feel like they can really push against even the black bloc or radicals who break stuff.

If I may add in something, indeed, there is a difference between the attitude of the union directions, let's say, and people like me, the simple unionized workers. And what Myles said is absolutely true about the hate. They really don't want any backlogs, especially in front of them. head of the demonstration, even in front of the unions, the official union group, where there are the black blocs and the yellow vests. There are more and more people, I was going to say like me, but I'm still a bit cowardly and I'm still afraid of getting in this kind of place. But there are more and more unionized workers

who mingle with the blood blocks and etc. And we also have what we call manifestation sauvage, and etc. And I you know we also have what we call manifestations sauvages the wild

and not organized protests that are not organized by unions but are

kind of spontaneous. They happened after Macron forced the reform through parliament without a vote and people just went in the streets without a union and

they burned, there were images in Paris of everything burning. It was that day and that's what we call a wild protest. Yeah, and for the first time i saw unionized uh workers joining in that is crazy because they were feeling that what the unions were proposing within the the legal and pacifist and nice frame was not enough. Because really, our president was really just making fun of us. And we couldn't have it. And what we usually do was not longer enough for us.

And this is really something new. I asked about the appearance of the Gilets Jaunes in the current protest and what the two thought of them. Mael, the student, was somewhat dismissive. But the impact the Gilets Jaunes had on Agathe and the railway workers was very different. Yeah, I can say a little bit, but I don't know much about the yellow vests. So what I saw of the yellow vests were a lot of blockages and people against taxes on gas. And the way it radicalized was towards towards some form of radical democracy, but maybe not so radical because they wanted... The mass movement seemed to end on the demand for referendums, basically. They wanted to be able to call their own referendums. The demands were not directly linked to economics, as I saw them very often.

When we saw them in protests in Lyon, they were kind of weird, but I don't know them very well. What I saw was that the government repressed them really, really hard. Much harder than the usual protests that we do because they were really scared of them. Yeah, because I took part to the Yellow Vest Movement. And I tend to disagree a bit with your analysis on this. Yeah, go ahead. No problem. No, no, no, no. It's just a, I'm just saying, and it's not an attack at all. At first, I must say I hated this movement because, well, just long story short, it began in 2018.

It began in 2018. And in 2018, there was a big movement in the SNCF where I work in the railway public company. Because the current, it's very funny because it's the current prime minister who was the transport minister. They just move them around. We keep seeing the same people it's absolutely i i can't stand that anyway uh i have a personal vendetta with this woman and um we had been trying to fight off the well uh they kind of started to kill off our company it's only now dying of its slow death but this is where it really well this is where the end really began in 2018 for us you mean by privatizations or killing the company we are not private yet but but the door has been opened. Yeah.

Yes. And so it's been a really, really hard protest for us. And we, in the end, we lost. It was really hard. And after that, I've seen these people, the Yellow Vest, stand up and take on our songs to make them their own. The famous On est là. It started in the railway world. And it really started in Lyon.

I was there. And suddenly these people, whom I did not see by our side a few months before, started to invade the streets and sing our songs. I was really outraged. I was furious. Then I, fortunately, I spent time with people who are more intelligent than me and who said that it was worth going to see these people and see what was on their minds and what they were thinking, especially because there were people who had never before protested they had never been on the street to demonstrate about anything and um and they were right to do that and it's it all started with the price of oil and of gasoline and i found that really really insignificant and in fact it really opened my mind about the reality of other people because I do not have a car

but some people have a car and they need it to live together, to make a living and not only that but the motives of the protest, they rodent and rodent, these people they got politicized at such a speed, a high speed.

This is incredible because quite rapidly, what they were demanding was not simply the lowering of the oil price. It was also more democracy. It was more social justice. It was against the cancellation of attacks on fortune, on the great fortune of people, on great wealth, and on climate also. It merged with a lot of climate demonstrations.

And it was about really a social model and what world we want to live in tomorrow. And so this is why I say this movement was really incredible. It was also incredible because it was taking place without the unions. It depends on the regions in France. In Lyon, for example, there is no love lost between the Yellow Vests and the unions, the direction of the unions. But in other regions, like in south of France or in the north, it's very different. And soon they began to protest together. And the Yellow Vests, they gave us a new,

a fresh new breath. It was really a breath of fresh air. They were such spontaneous. They were so spontaneous and so angry also. They reminded us what it was to be angry and to have the right to be angry and not to be helpless in front of an unjust policy. And it really changed this.

And just like i said uh that uh earlier that uh in this very movement the movement we live in now there are there there are unionized workers who mingle with the black dog for example well there were a lot of us unionized workers in the yellow vest too and um so yeah it influenced us a lot i think we can say that if 2016 added a black block to the protests now with uh the yellow vest it changed completely the way we protest as well so all the blockages are much more regular and the way where people fear less to demand things and to organize without unions. I think we can say that it definitely changed things. Also, personally, I think that if I say wrong things about yellow vests, or I don't know them in particular, it's because the concern about oil gas price was not one of mine, because I live in a city and I don't have a car. So I think it affected more the countryside of France, which is more

concerned with gas prices than big cities. Also because we already have lots of political movements Lots of political movements here. So, like, it's kind of different. I don't know. This is very well, to be honest. Maybe I should just show up. No, I mean, it's interesting to me because I remember when the Gilets Jaunes protests started up there was a lot of debate outside of france and kind of like westerners observing the protests as to are these guys is this something that's like a positive

movement are they all right wing um and it's interesting that um the way in which kind of all of these different sort of eras of protest movements in France have melded together for this most recent kind of uprising. Like you've got, you know, you've got these trade unions, you've got Gilets Jaunes, you've got the Black Bloc, all sort of working as different pieces of this uprising, you know know based on kind of the different tactics of their eras that's fascinating to me I was I was discussing uh and saying that it's kind of a feature of movements uh about pensions even if they can be very different is that they tend to attract a lot of people and at first the protests were not very radical at all compared to protests we could have with similar sizes but gradually the movement is radicalizing

a lot and it seems to me the people who are in it and the fact that it tends to mobilize everyone at first, even if it's not very radical, well, it created this sort of mingling of everybody. There's the Yellow Vest, the Union, the Black Bloc. Everybody except the political parties because they're useless. Alongside the radicalization of protesters from all walks of life inside France, there's been a surprisingly strong international reaction from other European workers and activists. You know, I'm wondering, you know, during the Black Lives Matter protests in the US in 2020, international attention was significant. And it was to some extent useful in terms of helping to

raise money and stuff for different bail funds people from all around the world help to that extent but i'm wondering is the is the degree of international attention by other countries left-wing you know movements on what's happening in france right now is it having an impact directly or is it just sort of like noise? Well, on my part, it seems to be a lot of noise, yes. Because a lot of people seem to misunderstand completely the situation. And, yeah, they just give their opinion and that's fine, I guess. And yeah, they just give their opinion and that's fine, I guess.

But I think there may be actual solidarity with some militants. I mean, I know among anarchists that there are anarchists who come from Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and other countries who try to help actions and protests. And I'm pretty sure that among unions, there is international solidarity as well. But maybe, Agathe, you should say something about this. Yes, there is international solidarity. Honestly, this is not something I was expecting. international solidarity. Honestly, this is not something I was expecting. But for instance, last week in Belgium, there are workers from a

Total plant that actually blocked the freaking port to prevent them from sending products to substitute it to the product that was blocked by protesters in France. And that was, for me, this is absolutely wonderful. And yes, so yes, there are international solidarities. So, yes, there are international solidarities. We have been in our interprofessional assembly because we have a local interprofessional assembly. the people in Greece, in Argentina, in Spain, in Germany, who expressed their support openly. And personally, I was really surprised to see how many people actually were paying attention

to what was happening in our country. That's true. what was happening in our country. That's true. And it gives us, well, it gave strength to many people. And it also gives hope because I realized that, well, you know, the main leverage we have on our politicians is the economical leverage. we have on our politicians is the economical leverage. And so when the bosses of big companies and investors and everything start to say, well, Guy, your reform of pensions in France is starting to make a mess in Germany, in Spain, in Greece, please stop your madness.

Well, this is a leverage I was not expecting. We are trying to use the leverage of the big wealth and the big companies in France, which is already something quite hard to move. And that was really an unexpected support. And we really hope that it's going to have an impact because Macron is very, he's a narcissistic guy and he loves his own image. So if his image is starting to suffer internationally, I think this is

going to be a big problem for him. And his image at the time is really a catastrophe. Belgium, of course, is not the only place where blockades are happening. They've become a staple of the uprising in France as well. I'm very interested in talking about the blockages of the highways around Lyon. Because many cities are trying to do this. There is Rennes, which is in Bretagne, which manages to block the highways very often. which manages to block the highways very often. And so they started in Lyon. We tried once a few weeks ago. It was a call by the unions with a few points to block in the morning.

And people and militants from all over joined the points at like 6am or 7am, I don't remember. But when people arrived, there were cops everywhere and they were pushed away. And circulation and capitalism could work normally and everything was fine. So we were very frustrated. So we reorganized completely. frustrated so we reorganized completely and through the struggle committee we assembled people from general assemblies all over the city and also various groups and we managed to organize a blockade last thursday and it worked pretty well It was not exceptional but for first try people were very happy about it and it led to many people from all over in the movement working together

on a project and meeting together in assembly and then being together on blockages. And I think it's moments like this which are very important for the movement to develop. I'm not sure if the blockage in itself is the most interesting action in terms of economic damage, especially if we don't stay very long. But the different social relations it can create, and I think it can have a lot of influence in the movement, especially when we're thinking about the unions and the unions and the leaders of the unions who don't want to mobilize too much,

who don't want to go too far, what can we do outside of that? Well, I think that's part of the answer, at least. I agree. Yeah, I think that's something that was interesting to me, because I think roadblocks and barricades like that as a sort of social site is like a really... It's a thing you see a lot in the past like 20, 25 years of protest movements. Like this was a big deal in like in Oaxaca in 2006. There was a lot of similar stuff in Tehran during the uprising there. It's interesting to see it sort of like

re-entering the repertoire of stuff. Yeah, the kind of, the different species of social interactions that are made possible by these kind of zones of autonomy that are created. Yeah. And they ask a lot of new questions for militants, like how to hold a barricade against cops and against cars.

It's a lot of different questions, which, uh, I think they can radicalize people at least to demand more things. So it's not clear what they want to demand for now. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I'm really, really happy to see people from different parts of society really coming together and accepting to work together. Like, so many things seem possible now. As a student, I've met basically students from all universities in my town. I now have free access to all publications in French and I'll never pay for anything. It's really really great.

In terms of blockage, there is just south of Lyon, there is an oil refinery which is not on strike. It's among the only ones. So it's really important because in France, there's a special system because they wanted to stay independent from oil producers. So they import the oil and then they refine it in France. So basically, if we stop all the refineries, there is no more gas for cars. And right now, it's becoming a real problem because of the strikes. And this one stays open.

And so people have started to try and block the entry. So right now there's like something like 50 union workers and like 50 radical militants who come there every morning. Well, not this week, but last week they were doing it because this week we haven't said, but everyone is on holiday, so many people take their paid leave right now as well. It's kind of a special time. But next week, probably the blockages are going to start again. And it's great to see union workers meeting with more radical people to try and get an action together. I think when there is solidarity like this, great things can happen. If I may add something about blockages and everything, what works pretty well and it's quite satisfying, there are big days of mobilization. There are several appointments a little everywhere in the town to block something, to block a highway, to block a factory, to block a school or whatever. to dispatch and to stretch the forces of the police.

And so they are never enough everywhere to, to, to stop us. And that makes, that can make, that can make the day a real success because you have a lot of things happening at the very same time, but there is only so many cops. So yeah, it works pretty well.

This is, interestingly, the same analysis the US police came to in 2020. It's easy to stop one large action, but several smaller actions split police forces and prevent them from just kettling one large block of protesters. I guess the thing I was interested in is that I think one of the things that happens in the US a lot is you'll get a national day of action but all of the actions like there'll just be one giant action in a city and you don't get the kind of like diffusion that's been helpful with spreading out cop numbers and i was wondering like is this something like the unions are specifically planning to have multiple events all over the place or is that something that's been happening like outside that or no no no the unions only plan well they plan for a strike and for a protest and there are also actions but only one action and and the others are uh organized, I mean, regular people or...

No, but like, you mean the actions on the day, they're not organized by the national unions, local unions, which do the actions, right? That's what you're talking about? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so there are local unions because in France, unions are very federal somewhat. This we can talk about, it's a bit of a problem. But like you know the CGT, it started out as an anarchist union. So they were very into federalism and all of this. So there is local autonomy and what happens is workers in very mobilized sectors like the railways, the energy workers, they will organize through their union actions on that day for example and on top of this for example you have

students in a certain high school or a certain University who decide to block something and for example they need support recently there was a notably right-wing campus who was blocked by students. And so a lot of us came to help them because we had never seen this campus blocked ever. And of course what happened was some fascists attacked them, but we were much, much more numerous than them. So it was no problem. But the next time they had a blockage planned at this campus,

they ended up not having enough numbers, so they cancelled. But the fascists didn't know that it was cancelled, and so they all came really armed with metal bars and all of that, you know. Still, despite the threat of fascist street gangs and their better armed and more legitimate counterparts in the police, the protests continue. They continue to block roads. They continue to occupy universities. They continue to strike.

They continue to fight the police. They continue to find new forms of resistance, new forms of solidarity, new worlds composed of people who in ordinary times would never have met. And in the process, they continue to find new ways of being free. Beneath the cobblestones, the beach, said another generation of French protesters in May of 1968, all you have to do is pick it up and throw it. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill.

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

since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking

real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. This is a...

We are once again talking about Wizards of the Coast. Now, this time is not about Dungeons & Dragons. It is about their other property, Magic the Gathering, which, if you don't know, is Wizards of the Coast's trading card game that's at the forefront of some truly wild stuff right now. Now, you could ask, Mia, why are we even talking about this,

about Magic the Gathering on this show? And, you know, there's multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial profit rates have been decreasing in the last half a century, capital has increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to make money. Magic is now a billion-dollar brand, partnering with everything from Fortnite

to The Walking Dead to, and this is not a joke, being in the process of releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings cards. As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry, and Magic in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the frontlines of class struggle. Workers at TCG Player this year, given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands of cards that TCG Player processes, finally won their second attempt to form a union after two devastating union-busting campaigns. And this is where things get very, very weird. Now, bear with me here, dear listeners. We have to talk about a little bit of magic minutiae to understand what has happened in this incident, and then we will get back to what the show is usually about, which is corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So, a few days ago, Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small Magic YouTube channel called OldSchoolMDG, bought what he thought were cards from the latest Magic the Gathering set called March of the Machine. Now, Magic releases new cards periodically in what are called sets.

These sets have plots and characters, they have written stories, they are enormous sort of lore events, they have enormous hype behind them. And March of the Machine, story-wise, is basically the version of an Avengers movie. Giant apocalyptic threats, all the heroes crossing over, people hopping through multiverses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, okay, this has happened before, you know, Wizards does big sets. It wasn't that weird, but Wizards decided to do something very, very weird, which is they printed, for the first time ever, a mini set called March of the Machine's, March of the Machine Aftermath.

Now, the regular March of the Machine set has 387 cards in it. Aftermath has 50. Now, I don't know why they decided to do this. They've never, they've never done anything like this. They've never printed just a tiny set they release a bit after the regular set before. And, you know, the names are very, very confusing, right? One is called march of the machine the other one is march in the machine aftermath how how is a regular person supposed to keep track of this the mind boggles etc etc either way so dan cannon tries to buy cards from the regular march of the machine set what he gets in sent instead are by by accident, March of the Machine Aftermath cards. Now,

these cards are still secret. They have not been revealed yet. No one knows what they are. No one's supposed to know what they are. Before every set, there's an incredibly elaborate process where Wizards gives cards to influencers to, you know, reveal them to the public and at a certain date, everyone reveals

the people, you know, your influencer reveals what their card is. And there's this whole hype cycle on Reddit. And everyone argues about how good the cards are and how cool the art is and what it means for the story. It's sort of similar to the sort of hype cycles that would happen around trailers from Marvel movies where people would be analyzing every detail of it, et cetera, et cetera.

And these spoiler seasons, as they're called are a huge deal for wizards they wizards tries to heavily control the entire process but sometimes cards leak out now dan cannon suddenly has been handed a bunch of cards no one has ever seen before so he does what you know every person who just suddenly has magic cards that haven't been revealed yet do uh and have been doing for years and years and years. He makes a video showing off the cards. Now, importantly, this is not illegal. I need to stress this because of what's going to happen.

What is going to happen next? You know, it's very, very easy to look at the sort of severity of what's going to happen to this guy and assume that he broke a law. But no, he did not. He did not break a law. Nothing he has done is illegal. Literally, what he's done is he bought some magic cards from someone who screwed up and accidentally broke the street date for selling cards because he confused March of the Machine with March of the Machine Aftermath. Wow. How could anyone make that mistake?

Right. The genius of Wizards of the Coast marketing is unmatched. Everything they do is incredibly clear, etc, etc. Now, in the process, because of how many cards he bought and how small the set is, he reveals most of the cards that are in the set. And then the Pinkertons show up to his house, force their way through his door, make his wife cry, threaten to arrest him, and threaten to put him in prison for 10 years with $200,000 fines for copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material. The Pinkertons also harass his elderly neighbors. neighbors. Literally just today, as I'm recording this, a story broke on Gizmodo that revealed that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkertons before to go after stolen goods. Now, some of you may be asking, who are the Pinkertons? And I think some of you probably know

in very broad outlines who the Pinkertons are, but in order to really get at the core of what this organization is and why they look the way they do today as compared to how they've looked in the past, we need to ask another question, which is how has the balance of military power between the state and corporations changed over time? And this seems like a very weird question, but the Pinkertons emerge in a very weird period of time in this balance. They are what fills in the gap between corporations directly having armies that could conquer nations and modern corporations who, instead of having their own personal armies, have vast intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and the government as the people who do violence for them.

So let's go back and tell the story from the beginning by taking a brief look at the most infamous corporate army of them all, the army of the East India Trading Company. The East India Trading Company was formed in 1600, and it was given a vast state monopoly over trade in what they called East India, which is an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia in the South Pacific today. And at the start, these guys are optimistically, they are half trading group,

half pirate. The level of piracy is really high, especially in the early days. They, you know, trade for spices. They steal a lot of other people's spices from places like Java and they bring them back for spices. They steal a lot of other people's spices from places like Java and they bring them back to England. They make a lot of money.

Now, over the course of their actions, and again, it's worth noting, these people are kind of the descendants of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake, who'd been, you know, just pirates who had been hired by the government to only go after like Spanish ships instead of English ships. So they are, you know, from the beginning, the East India Company has this sort of DNA of army in it. And over the course of about two centuries, they are going to conquer with their own army most of what is now India and Pakistan. And that territory is either going to indirectly or

directly come under the rule of the East India Company. And the East India Company is fighting wars everywhere. Again, they seize India and Pakistan by force. They are fighting wars in Afghanistan. They kill unfathomable numbers of people. The worst of these events is the Great Bengal famine. There's a Behind the Bastards episode about this that you can listen to if you want a really sort of long thing about the East India Company and the famine. But I want to talk about the famine a little bit because – so the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 kills 10 million people. And I knew this intellectually, right? I studied a bit in college, but what I had never actually looked up somehow,

what I'd never seen was the percentage of the population that this famine kills. And this famine is directly the fault of the East India Company. This is something that all historians who have looked at this agree, is that this is directly the fault of the East India Company and the combination of their agricultural policies

and their tax extraction. To sort of put into perspective how bad this gets the highest serious estimates for the number of people who die in the great leap forward stands at about 30 million dead this is an unfathomable atrocity it is a scale of death at which the human mind breaks down and loses the ability to process some of my family lived through it it is horrific in ways that are difficult to even begin to to describe the great leap forward killed about five percent of china's population the great bengal famine killed 30 percent of the population of india that the east india trading company controlled 30 percent that's not just sort of small population statistics either, right? It's not like they killed 30% of a country with 30 people in it,

right? They killed 10 million people. This is an unbelievable force of human evil. They are capable of killing people in numbers that defy comprehension. They're able to do this because they have an army that is the size of a great power nation state. The East India Trading Company's army in 1800 had 200,000 soldiers. That is a massive army today. That is like the size of the active Ukrainian army in 2022. It is more than twice the size of the British army in 1800.

And, you know, in 1800, it's not like the British aren't fighting wars, right? They are, in 1800, the British are fighting the war of the Second Coalition. So they are fighting Napoleon, right? So this isn't a sort of, you know, completely half-assed, like, peacetime British army. This is a, you know, this is a serious military force.

And even once they like fully build up their army, at the peak of the Napoleonic Wars, 13 years later, the entire size of the British army is about 250,000 troops. That's not much larger than the East India Company's army at the same time. And at the height of the East India Trading Company, their army swells to, again, 250,000, which is, again, the size of the regular British army in the most desperate war that the British had fought to that point. The East India Trading Company is a full-on military great power, right? military great power, right?

But, and this is something that is going to shape an enormous amount of the sort of arc of the relationship between corporate and military power. It is unbelievably expensive to maintain an army like this. The British East India

Company, even though they are looting entire nations, right? There are entire states where they've fully taken over the tax services. They're just walking into temples and taking stuff. But even with all of that profit, they have the ability to mint their own coins in a lot of these areas, but they still lose money. And they still lose money, again, because they're maintaining this 250,000 strong army.

And, you know, so you have this problem, right, which is that you have this item on your balance sheet that is unfathomably expensive, and then you have a second problem, which is that if you have an army, there's always a danger that the army goes into revolt. And that's what happens in 1857. revolt. And that's what happens in 1857. The British managed to piss off their own army, which is almost all composed of Indian troops, and they fight an incredibly bloody war known as either Sapoy Mutiny or the Sapoy Uprising. And the British win, and after victory, they strap a bunch of prisoners' bodies to cannons and shoot them so they can't be properly buried. bunch of prisoners bodies to cannons and shoot them so they can't be properly buried but the consequence of this sort of horrifying war and and particularly the sort of fear it invokes in the minds of of you know the british populace of like oh my god these non-white people can actually fight us is that they directly seize control of India from the East India

Trading Company. And for all you nationalization fans out there, the British assuming direct control of India was actually a nationalization. It's not actually inherently socialist, guys. You have to be a bit smarter than this. But that aside, right, this marks an enormous shift in the sort of political economy of violence. What is happening here is that states are assuming direct military control over their

colonies instead of operating through corporations. And this means that what you see is a shift from direct corporate armies to corporations using the state to do violence for them. And this doesn't mean that corporations don't use force directly today. And it also doesn't mean that the government's you know weren't acting as the armies of corporations in like the 1800s but what's happening here and specifically the the direct seizure of india from the east india the direct seizure of india from the east india company marks a dramatic shift in the balance of forces away from corporations with armies doing violence

towards states doing violence on their behalf. And this is one of the things alongside sort of slave catchers in the US that leads to the formation of the police. You see this both in Britain and in sort of France, right? You start to get police agencies that are, you know, largely tasked with putting down their own working class. And this is one of the sort of inexorable marches that happens over the course of the 20th century. And it's also happening in the 19th century, too. There is a sort of mass centralization of state and police power. And particularly, that's an expansion of the bureaucracy, right? The American state in 1840 is barely a functional

state by today's standards right like they they have an incredibly difficult time even figuring out how many people there are in the country their provisioning of services is a joke um nobody has id cards like people people don't even have birth certificates for the most part and and that's something you know and that's something that changes, right, over the course of sort of the 1800s and 1900s is that you get a massive bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is built on the model of the police and they get bigger and more powerful.

And by the time you're, you know, you're halfway through the 20th century, you get a modern standing army. And that's something that is very, very weird. The founders who, you know, suck ass in enormous numbers of ways are also fundamentally and deeply opposed to standing army. And that's something that is very, very weird. The founders who, you know, suck ass in enormous numbers of ways are also fundamentally and deeply opposed to standing armies because, you know, they are students of Roman history and they know that standing armies have this,

you know, this sort of way of seizing power. But we've landed in a situation where, you know, they don't really need to, right? The U.S. army is kept in check by the fact that it has basically a limited budget that increases every year, so you can't even, like, talk about cutting it without getting accused of treason. But it didn't used to be like that. In the 1800s, right, after a war would end, you know, entire parts of the, like, you know,

all the U.S. Cavalry, for example, sometimes, would just get disbanded, right? There would be these massive reductions in troop size in between wars. You know, and that, like, doesn't happen anymore, anymore right but the product of this was that you know there weren't that many like armed agents of the state running around with guns and that's the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern american life i mean modern american life has reached a point where people you can't even imagine

what it would be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere, and if you didn't have the ability to call the police about anything. And that was just the sort of the state of affairs for a lot of the 1800s in the US, is that just, you know, there really weren't police. And, you know, this kind of midpoint in the level of level of bureaucratic development and the level of the bureaucracy of violence that is the police happens after – a bit after the Civil War, where there are not enough police to develop the kind of sort of – to deploy against the kind of violence that companies need to stop unions from forming.

And, you know, there's a secondary problem, right, which is, okay, so, you know, there are armed troops in that you order the militia in and the militia aren't people from the towns where i you know where the striking workers are from and this is a real problem with sheriffs too right is that in this period you get you get a lot of sheriffs who just won't prosecute workers because the entire town and the sheriff are all pro-union and this is where we come to the Pinkertons. But first, and this is something that the Pinkertons would have approved of, some ads. And we're back. So who are the Pinkertons? The Pinkertons are founded by a guy named Alan Pinkerton.

Alan Pinkerton is an interesting guy. He's kind of a radical when he's young. He like he's a hardcore abolitionist who like funds john brown right um there's a whole debate about the extent to which he was involved in a sort of british workers reform movement called the charterlists i'd every source i've read disagrees about how much he was involved in it uh Everyone's disagreements are basically pinned on their ideology. I don't know if we're ever going to get a good answer about how involved in it he is. But Pinkerton briefly and kind of by accident becomes a bounty hunter, but he just walks across, just runs into a camp of people who seem to clearly be counterfeiters.

And he eventually becomes a detective around Michigan and then in Chicago. And then he becomes a postal cop. And in the process of being a postal cop, he figures out something that is more lucrative. He figured out a more lucrative way to do detective work than just working for the state, which is working for the railways. So by 1850, he has a full detective agency going that he renames the Pinkertons. Now, you know, this is the 1850s, right?

You are rapidly approaching the Civil War. During the Civil War, he is hired by George McClellan, the worst Union general. He runs a spy network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks. Like, all the spies get caught his intelligence being awful is one of the things that leads mcclellan to suspect you know that there's like secretly way more confederate troops that there actually are so he just never does anything for the entire world he's like the worst union general until he gets replaced yeah when mcclellan is axed pinkerton's also out um but you know the agency is still around and the detectives are

initially known as cider as cinder dicks for complicated railroading reasons I yeah I don't know about that one but it's very funny and what they sort of do right is in in this early phase they have this massive network of sort of informants and spies that they sell to the highest bidder. They're not sort of, you know, they are detectives, right, in some sense, but they're not detectives in the Sherlock sense, where you have a guy who sees a bunch of evidence

and then uses logic and uses investigation to deduce like, who did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives. They do infiltrations this is basically their one trick right is they send a guy undercover and then he gets people to talk to him and then they catch the guy because someone talked right now the other thing that the pinkertons are really really good at is spinning mythology around them uh pinkerton claims that he saved

lincoln from an assassination plot. And, you know, he, he successfully convinces Lincoln to flee a building in a disguise, right? The problem is that, you know, as early as like the next day after this, like supposed plot happens, assassination, assassination plot happens. I, people were already claiming that there wasn't one. And, you know, I think the, the evidence for there not being one is bolstered by the fact that no one was ever like not only was no one ever tried for this no one was ever even arrested for again a plot to assassinate the president of the united states so i i am inclined to suspect that this was fake so sorry to disagree about this

but he's able to milk this for incredible pr right he? He's, you know, he's like, I'm the guy who saved the president. And he does this whole sort of like, ah, if I had been there when I, if I, if I, if I had only been there when Abe Lincoln was being gunned down by John Wilkes Booth, I would have saved him. And, you know, this, this makes them very famous. They also start doing, you know, it's sort of worth noting right the kind of crime that they're doing these guys are they're they're basically a corporate anti-crime group right they they solve crimes but the crimes that they solve are people stealing from

corporations so for example they do a lot of solving bank robberies they do a lot of security to stop train robbers they do counterfeiting these are all kinds of crimes that affect rich people and that you know and so and so the pinkertines are slowly starting to gain this reputation to sort of like the hired hands of capital now they're also sort of doing like frontier outlaw stuff there's a gang of people who this is a gang of sort of bandits who they very successfully break up uh but they also go after jesse james and okay we need to tell the story of jesse james briefly here because it's it's an important thing to get an understanding of what the sort of conflict that's going on in the west is at

this point and the thing that's incredibly important to understand what the sort of conflict that's going on in the West is at this point. And the thing that's incredibly important to understand about the story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons is that there are no heroes here. Every single person involved in all sides is just an absolutely terrible person. So Jesse James is an ex-Confederate terrorist who somehow managed to make robbing trains uncool by doing it dressed in a K uh rope with the aim of like restoring the honor of the confederacy so this sucks and this is where part of the sort of like rebel flag like that part of the sort of like lost cause mythos comes from right there you know there are these

sort of frontier outlaws who are like ex-confederates whose thing is like yeah we're like against the man and like the man is like, yeah, we're against the man. The man is like the North, right? But these people suck, right? These are people who fought and died for slavery. Jesse James in particular, he's in this group of guerrillas who are fighting in Kansas and Missouri, and they do things that are genuinely unspeakable so these people suck right but the problem is

the people going after them are the Pinkertons and we're going to learn a lot about the Pinkertons by what they managed to accomplish by going after again ex-confederate terrorists who are like some of the worst people who've ever lived so the Pinkertons take this case in 1871 he sends in a bunch of agents

try to infiltrate the gang and Jesse James James just, like, smokes them all. So in a very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons do a raid on Jesse James' house. So they throw in this weird pseudo... It's a very weird kind of explosive device thing. I don't know. They claim that they were just trying to scare the family out of the house so they could arrest them. But the family sees this thing that looks like a bomb and they throw it into their fireplace and it blows up.

And instead of smoking the family out, they have now blown up Jesse James' nine-year-old stepbrother and maimed his mom? So, the Pinkertons absolutely suck, right? Like, so far in their attempt to catch Jesse James, they have managed to blow up a child and maim a woman? Now, you could ask the question, right? Okay, so they have killed a child,

they have maimed a woman. Do they get Jesse James? No! No, they don't! They never get him! Because that's what happens when, you know, you have an ex-Confederate in places where with a bunch of ex-Confederate with a bunch of people who support the Confederacy. Right. They won't turn over their own people. And, you know, and when the people they're going up against are the Pinkertons who are like the hired guns of Northern Capitol, a bunch of people, you know, what happens is a bunch of random people end up dead. the hired guns of Northern Capitol, a bunch of people, you know, what happens is a bunch of random people end up dead. And yeah, but both sides of this are incredibly deeply evil. Jesse James is later shot by one of his own men. And yeah, that is that, that, that is the famous

story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons, which I think is useful in establishing that like, God, like the South are obviously the bad guys in the civil war but a lot of the people in the union are sort of genuinely awful hired gun for capital people and you know that's not that's not so much of a big deal during the war but after the war you know you get these battles just, God, everyone here is like everyone here should simply die. Now, Alan Pinkerton dies in 1886 and he is replaced by his even worse sons. And at this point. The Pinkertons cease even sort of the pretense of being a detective agency, and they devote themselves full time to being strike breakers.

Now, they have spies everywhere. of being a detective agency, and they devote themselves full-time to being strike breakers. Now, they have spies everywhere. They have, you know, over a thousand of them at their peak, spread across dozens and dozens and dozens of unions. They are spying on meetings, reporting with the Pinkertons, and this allows corporations, for example, if you know who's in a union meeting, right, you can just fire all of them. And this is especially easy in the, you know, in this sort of pre-1930s period where there is no protected right to strike. If you

stop working, that is illegal. The other thing they do is provide security for corporations between strikes. What this looks like in practice is shooting people. And sometimes those people are striking workers, like the three strikers that killed in the Pennsylvania coal

strike of 1890. Sometimes they just shoot random bystanders, like the random guy they shot in 18, in 1866 while providing security. And, you know, again, when you're shooting a random bystander, you have to ask like security for who like who who is the security you're providing for when you're just shooting random people you know nominally it's for the boss between a doc strike and sometimes like in in 1877 they shoot children where they shot and killed a 15 year old jersey cole wharf strike you know and they do stuff like this all the time right there's a famous incident in chicago where a bunch of people are yelling at them because again the

thinkers have a really bad reputation among workers at this point and you know there's a point where they're they're going by on a train and people yell the train and the pinkerton just by taking out the rifles and shooting four people out the window so you know these are these are uh good people t TM, right? The other thing they do is they start getting into breaking strikes by being a company you can hire to import scabs. And this culminates in the Homestead Strike. Again, this is another thing there's like a giant bastards episode on, but we'll do a short version of the Homestead Strike. So the Homestead Strike is this giant confrontation between steel workers and the forces of andrew carnegie and henry frick

carnegie and frick like lock the union out of the factory and they call a pinkerton army to seize control of the town of homestead um this is from the book inventing the pinkertons quote by the end of june he had built around the mills a protective 12-foot fence that included rifle holes, water mains capable of blasting strikers with boiling water, and wires attached to a generator which could be electrified. In response, workers dubbed the mills Fort Frick. Now, striking steel workers and other residents of Homestead hear the Pinkertons are coming, and they, you know, the Pinkertons are trying to land on these, like, invasion barges that they've modified, and so the Homestead people go to try to stop the barges, and the Pinkertons start shooting at them.

And this is another thing that's very interesting about this whole story, is that, okay, every account at the time agrees that the first person, the people who started shooting first were the Pinkertons. Later accounts suddenly, like mysteriously later on, suddenly start to claim it. Like, well, nobody really knows who started the shooting in these fights. Or like, maybe it was a worker. But like, again,

everyone at the time goes, it was the Pinkertons. So, I, I, I, and given what we know about the track record of Pinkertons of shooting children, of shooting random people yelling at them outside of a train, of shooting just literally random people on the street, we can be pretty sure the Pinkertons started this. But, you know, the workers in Homestead are heavily armed, and this starts a massive gun battle. I'm going to read from Inventing the Pinkertons again.

This serious battle would last the next 14 hours. After an initial surge, the pinkertons were pinned down in their barges after several hours the crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire residents borrowed the cannon that had been that the city used for commemorations by the way that that's a civil war cannon that they're using in 1890 to try to sink these boats the crowd also sent burning rail cars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil into the river which they attempted to light on fire in hopes of burning the pinkertons out of their barges the lubricating oil thrown onto the water proved impossible to set aflame so the

pinkertons like try to surrender but by this point people hate them so much that every they do this four times and each time that someone will hold up a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag and refuse to let them surrender on try five. The Pinkertons are finally allowed to surrender and the Pinkertons are crushed. But unfortunately, the state militia is brought in to sort of break the strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania is essentially destroyed. But PR wise, this is terrible for the Pinkertons. And they start trying to do like a giant PR op to sort of recover their reputation. And a lot of what the sort of popular image of the Pinkertons, right, comes from the PR op the agency does like after the Holmes district that gets reproduced by like TV producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit to some other

stuff that they're involved in. In late 1905, someone blew up the notoriously anti-union governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking workers a few years ago. claiming that like basically every instance of violence in the last five years in in in that part of uh the u.s was committed by the iww who are the iww are a very very radical union whose thing basically was that society should be run by like confederations of direct democratic unions like run you know all of society all production should be run by workers in these in you know in in in in the form of like one giant direct democratic union and people hate this by people i mean like bosses absolutely hate this the iw very iw very popularly with workers bosses are going to spend the next rest of their just murdering them you know but having having tortured this guy into uh saying into fingering the the industrial workers of the world in this conspiracy they get big bill haywood who is one of the most

famous and like successful organizers of the iww and several other iww leaders kidnapped and taken to idaho to stand trial for murder which again they had nothing to do with. Haywood is defended by Clarence Darrow of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, and Haywood gets off, but the case does serious damage to the IWW. If you want to learn more about this whole story, go listen to cool people who did cool

stuff. There's two episodes about the IWW in this period called the IWW and the Hobos Who Saved Free Speech. It's good stuff. I should also briefly mention right another thing that the pinkertons do is okay so if someone if someone's wanted in one state right instead of having to like make you know the government having to like the state government have to making requests have to be having to make requests to another state in order to get them to extradite someone they would just have the Pinkertons kidnap them

this is one of the sort of big services they provide they also seem it's very unclear I don't know the historical record is a bit muddled they seem also to have been people you could hire if so if like your spouse was trying to divorce you which

sucks it is deeply evil they do sort of lots more deeply evil stuff which we will get into after these ads all right we're back so speaking of deeply evil stuff they also send a hundred detectives to break a strike of the mostly black brotherhood of timber workers which is an iww affiliate in louisiana they break this, they try to break this union by walking into a union meeting, shooting 44 people and killing four of them. There are like 40 more stories of a guy with a Pinkerton walks in, shoots a bunch of people

that I could put here. I had to find the limit at some point to how many stories about Pinkertons murdering people that I could sort of put. But, you know, there's an interesting shift that starts to happen in sort of as the 1900s, you know, the 1900s turn into 1910s. The Pinkertons start to figure out that it's more effective to form mobs of vigilantes than it is to fight unions directly. And there's a few benefits here, right? There's less danger to Pinkerton detectives themselves. It's easier to deploy large numbers of people instead of having to sort of like pay an enormous amount of money for a bunch of like 800 detectives and weapons and logistics. You can just sort of whip up a mob and get them to do the shooting,

right? The Pinkertons also get plausible deniability, which is very helpful for their reputation. And, you know, the Pinkertons are very much ahead of the curve here. The government, you know, who is going to displace the Pinkertons as sort of the main force opposing the IWW and later sort of like CIO union organizing that, you know, turned into the two red scares, they're going to start taking pages from the Pinkertons' book. And eventually they're going to, you know,

instead of like sending the U.S. Army to invade Nicaragua, which is what they would have done in the 1800s by, you know, by the time you get to the 1980s, right? They are sending people to train Nicaraguan death squads. And so we can track the shift here, right? comes to a close and we get to sort of the October revolution to the height of the Red Scare, we're in a place where there's starting to be enough cops and enough federal agents to do the job the Pinkertons had done in previous generations. And there's a sort of robust argument in the sort of historiography about to what extent J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were influenced by the Pinkertons. I think there's and the fbi were influenced by the pinkertons i think there's decent evidence that they that they were influenced by them but the fbi kind of turns into what the pinkertons are

you know they're the people who suddenly are like showing up and shooting people showing up and arresting union organizers deporting union organizers from the country but this puts the pinkertons in kind of a weird spot, right? The Pinkerton name has become synonymous with sort of this kind of like, they're called sort of like feudal retainers, right? These sort of lawless private armies that are not supposed to exist in a democracy. And so in the 1930s, when the Wagner Act makes strikes legal, right? I talked about the Wagner Acts a long time ago in an episode called The Union Makes Us Strong. But after this, they tried, Robert Pinkerton II, who's the new sort of owner of the Pinkertons, tries to do a rebrand. He has this great quote that's, quote, he's talking about union busting.

That is a phase of our business that we are not particularly delighted or proud of, and we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal about it at the time. Now, okay, you can say a lot about what was or wasn't illegal in a period when, you know, you could order a drink that was cocaine mixed with wine, and, you know, you could just get, like, opium prescribed to your baby, but torturing and murdering people was still legal back then. Now, I guess if you, you know, if you really wanted to have fun, you can get into an argument that nowhere in the Constitution does murder specifically ban, but have fun with that. But FDR and the New Dealers go after the Pinkertons very hard, and this has a lot of interesting effects. What it means is, on the one hand, you can't have some guy with a detective badge who works

for a corporation walk into a union meeting and start the killing. But it also means that when you need someone to smash a union by force, it's going to be the state doing it. And the apotheosis of this, one of the internal contradictions that destroys the New Deal, is that its reliance on the state to contain the worst excesses of capitalism means that they have, have in turn directly enormously empowered the state and the state's military capacity. And this means that in the 1980s, unions are going to be destroyed by the state that the New Deal had built. The Pinkertons are replaced by Hoover and the G-men, and the G-men are eventually sort of become known as the dreaded modern Fed who, you know, lurks at every doorstep eating babies and is the terror of every sort of political known as the dreaded modern fed who you know lurks at every doorstep eating babies and is the the the terror of every sort of political movement in the u.s now the pinkertons

for for their part right with union busting now technically illegal and when i say union busting like i mean walking in shooting people stop them from forming a union uh they start working basically as as regular security guards, and then they move on to selling surveillance equipment and training for government organizations. And this reflects a kind of larger shift in what

kinds of military operations the corporations run, which is that instead of directly running armies or hiring groups like the Pinkertons to do violence for them, now what they're in the business of is intelligence operations. And this changes the way that corporations kill people enormously. You know, when Coca-Cola now needs to kill union organizers, right, they have paramilitaries for this.

Now, some of these guys are contractors, some of them are paid under the table, some of them are in it for ideology, some of it for money. contractors some of them are paid under the table some of them are in it for ideology some of it for money but it's not you know it's not quite like coca-cola has its own military force like it would have been in the 1800s in the early 1800s it's also not there is just like a private but there's not like it's not they're not they're not also not like hiring a specific private military contractor right the way they do where they do it tends to be they, you know, sort of semi-clandestinely armed paramilitary. Now, there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies will have private armies in places where civil wars are going on, but that's usually a

thing that happens when they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity. When they're in a place that does have state capacity, like for example, Nigeria, you get a very, very different story. So Nigeria is a major oil producer. And this has a number of consequences on the places where that oil is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency. So, okay, why is there an insurgency there, right? Part of the reason is that there is an indescribable amount of wealth coming out of the oil in Niger Delta, and that money goes mostly to, I mean, I say mostly, 90% of it, right, goes to Nigerian elites and corrupt foreign oil companies.

And, you know, another part of the reason this turns into an insurgency is that people try nonviolent civil disobedience in the Niger Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental consequences of companies like Shell doing oil extraction. You know, and they have these marches that will draw out 300,000 people in places where this is half of the population, half the total population of the ethnic group being affected. The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one of the movement's leaders, the famous activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, by hanging

him and then dissolving his body in lime so he couldn't be buried, which is some real British Empire shit. Okay, so at this point, you've come to the sort of crossroad of a non-violent movement, right, where the government's answer to non-violence is we will publicly hang you. And you get to this question, do you

take up arms? And the answer is, yeah, a lot of people do right this is this is this is a very complicated insurgency in a lot of ways that you know we can't do justice here too but i want to read something from this interview from a guy from the movement for the emancipation of the niger delta amend which is one of the like many many many many many like militant groups that appear in the delta over the last 25 years quote this is our territory the soldiers dare not come here now they came and we defeat them he says we are civilized people educated people and we do not want our children to be deprived as we have been deprived so other people can get rich from what is under our feet. The oil companies have had many years to treat us right. They have never done that.

Now we are making them think. Now, if this is, you know, 1820, right? And Shell is dealing with people taking up arms and cutting off their ability to sort of like extract profits from oil, they would form an army of semi-literate Belgian and British barbarians, arm them with cannons and conquer the region and place the entire area under direct corporate rule. You know, if this was, say, like the 1890s, right, they would hire the Pinkertons and

the Pinkertons would go shoot these people for them. But this is the 1990s and the 2000s. So instead, what Shell does is literally pay the salaries of Nigerian cops who go slaughter protesters in the streets. And eventually they move to spending hundreds of millions of dollars, just between 2007 and 2009 alone, directly funding, equipping an army,

the Nigerian army, and a special war crimes task force called the Joint Task Force, the JFTE, which is this sort of incredible thing where the Army, the Navy, and the police do a fusion dance to massacre civilians. And, you know, I say there's hundreds of millions of dollars, right? That's an underestimate.

That's just three years. That's just what we know about. The actual total that they sunk into, sort of, like, literally funding the Nigerian Army is enormous. Now, what's interesting here is that Shell does have its own security guards, but

the ratio of what they spend on the Nigerian army versus what they spend on their own security guards is two to one. This goes to demonstrate the point that I've been making this episode, which is that there's been a shift in, you know, if you are a company like

Shell, right, who has a need, you know if if if you are a company like shell right who has a need you know who are horrifically exploiting a bunch of people to the point where you need to shoot them in order to keep them in line instead of going to like a private detective agency or having your own army they are increasingly simply funding the state and you know this this means that, right, again, instead of the Pinkertons, the actual trigger pullers are cops, they are the police, they are the military, they're weird special forces groups. And, you know, where that sort of leaves space, groups like the Pinkertons now, is the area that's left for them is in corporate intelligence. And this seems to be most of what the Pinkertons have been up to recently. Amazon hired them in the last few years to work with their intelligence division, the Global Security Operations Center, which they use to try to stomp out union organizing in their warehouses.

And Amazon isn't just sort of spying on union organizers. They're spying on basically every social movement they can get their hands on. Here's from Vice. In 2019, Amazon monitored the Yellow Vest Movement, known as the Gilets Jaunes, a grassroots uprising for economic justice that spread across France, and solidarity movements in Vienna and protests against state repression in Iran. They've been deployed against strikes of communication workers in West Virginia. Google and Facebook deploys them against their own employees to root out leakers now this is all in line with the pivot of sort of corporate repression towards mass surveillance interestingly the pinkertons have been planting stories in the press about going back to their roots as mercenaries pitching themselves as you know the force that can stop climate chaos with ex-military forces.

The company claims to have been deployed by corporations in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017. I don't know if that's true. This is possible, but again, this is something that you have to be very careful with. The Pinkertains is that they are very, very brand obsessed, even though they're now owned by like a different sort of Swedish security company and they lie constantly. So it's very difficult to sort out sort of the myth from the fact when myth making has been such a vital part of their branding from the beginning. For another example,

here's from a New York times magazine among their most popular new services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional, in which agents join a client's company like any other new hire, allowing them to provide intel on employees. By 2018, the agency said it could count among its clients about 80% of Fortune 1000 companies. Are these numbers correct? Who knows? They absolutely could be lying, right? On the other hand, here's Gizmodo talking about the current reach of the Pinkertons in Magic the

Gathering. There are other connections between Wizards of the Coast and the Pinkerton agency. Robert M. Klimmick, who's been the Director of Security Risk Management at Hasbro Inc., which is the parent company of Wizards of the Coast, for 12 years, was previously the director of supply chain security practice at Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations.

The current manager of Global Investigations is also a former Pinkerton agent. And so what we saw in the fact that, you know, Wizards of the Coast sent the Pinkertons after a guy who made a YouTube video showing some cards that he bought from someone else is, you know, you can see in that the arc of the, the arc of what, of what the Pinkertons are trying to do,

right? You have on the one hand, the Pinkertons falling back into their sort of intelligence role. You also have them like specifically trading on their reputation to intimidate people. And the other reputation they acquired by killing unfathomable numbers of people between the 1800s, which they used to sort of intimidate people by just sort of the power of their reputation. canon directly right they're able to leave with the sort of goods but what they threaten dan canon with is the regular police and that is i think a very important aspect of what the story actually is which is it's a story about the modern division of labor of violence against people who corporations

don't like and that division of labor runs through security you know you you have your major you have a major corporation that corporation has its own security division that security division is connected to the pinkertons they use the pinkertons as an intelligence network and they have done several times now and then you know when it comes time to you know you can use the pinkertons as like the people with the stompy boot but when it comes time to actually do violence against someone, when it comes time to arrest someone, that's the state's job. And that,

that I think is the thing that's that, you know, that, that, that that's very important to understand about the way all of this stuff works is that the thing that is true now about the year 2023, that was not true about the year, like 18 is that the sort of primary driver of corporate violence in the US and abroad is not necessarily private security companies. It is the state and it is the police.

And yeah, this has been It Could Happen Here. The police suck, ACAB. Get rid of them. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

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