It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 96

Episode Date: August 19, 2023

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You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial

picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened

is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is being recorded far too early in the morning. With me to help me stay conscious is my friend and coffee entrepreneur, Prop, a.k.a. Jason Petty. Prop, how are you doing, buddy? Man, I'm wonderful on this fine day.

I almost did an a.k.a. song forgetting which show I was. I was like, oh, wait, that's a Die Guys bit. Happens to me all the time. Yeah. I was like, which bit for which show am I supposed to do right now? Here's what we were talking about before the show, which is that we're both exhausted despite sleeping normally this week. I feel like this may be something to do with these aliens everybody's talking about.

Something's going on here. It's, yeah, aliens or just this kind of week-long sort of holiday festival i've been a part of that apparently all of black america has been participating in we're all experiencing a level of bliss i don't think we've had in a long time that is uh That is our subject of today, which is, I think the term generally being used for it is the Montgomery Riverboat Brawl. That seems to be what we've all settled on. Yeah. AKA the fade in the water. I mean, there's new spirituals and hymns.

Weed and Ritten. The Ballad of Black Aquaman. Yes. Love that kid. But we should, before we get into all this, we should talk about what actually happened because I'm going to guess there's at least a chunk of people listening who are like, what the fuck are you guys talking about?

Yes. The short of it is a couple of days ago, a video dropped, two different clips, I think, are mainly what people are watching of a fight at a riverboat dock in Montgomery, Alabama. And basically what happens is you had this this riverboat and it's, you know, Montgomery, Alabama's got a lot of tourism. It's one of these big boats. It holds about 270 people, I think, takes you up and down the river. You know, you go up and down the river, you look at the pretty things.

I assume there's beer or something. You know, all sorts of cities do this. So this boat is heading back into dock, and they've got all these people who want to get off the boat because they've been on for a while. And a line of people to get back in. And a line of people to get back in. To get on the next one, yes. Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, they have a set spot that is their spot. No one else's to park their boat at the dock, as is usual for a large business like this.

And some dudes with a pontoon boat have taken it up. They've parked there. So the captain gets on the PA for quite a while and is like,

hey, guys, move your pontoon. Hey, guys, you got to get that pontoon out of here. Hey, y'all guys, you got to get that pontoon out of here. Hey, y'all, if you don't get that pontoon out of here, I'm going to call the cops. And if you have open containers, the cops are going to fuck you. You don't want that.

So why don't you just move? And these guys get like shitty at him and start like yelling at him and cursing at him, flipping him the bird. So he sends over his co-captain and the captain of the boat, uh, from the videos I've seen appears to be a white dude. The co-captain is a middle-aged black man. Um,

he gets off the boat and he goes over to just like move the pontoon boat, right? Which is the thing that boat people do when situations like this occur. This is not like an unheard of situation. Um, and while he's doing it, uh, bunch of the presumably the dudes who own this pontoon boat who are all white surround him and start attacking him. And at one point, it looks like five or six people trying to. And he's for the record, he's holding his own.

He's doing for a while. He's holding his own. As long as you can. Yeah. And then a number of uh nearby people start running to his aid uh including at least one of the kids on the riverboat uh hops out or like hops into the water and like swims across yeah you want to talk about the rest of this yeah yeah there's a hood politics episode we recorded where i try to do like initial reactions and try to add some like color to this, which will come out a little later.

This will come out before that. But there's, yeah. So you're watching the video. You can't, it's all inaudible. So you can't really hear, except for the people recording, you hear them talking. Yeah. Them talking. Right.

But judging from, there's so many context clues to understand what's happening right so as the co-captain the black dude's getting off the boat to come talk to these white boys right the way that you could just you know when someone's like and unfortunately for white people y'all can't when you're drunk just your skin shows it you know i'm saying like oh yeah so you could just see okay this dude's like your skin's very flush with color right now so you're you're clearly drunk you know i'm saying and it's hot as hell because it's montgomery alabama right it's also montgomery alabama so you just from seeing the interaction and the body language of both people in this conversation, you're like, OK, this conversation is getting intense. And then and then once once the the the white gentleman decides he's going to put hands on on his black dude, the black dude throws his hat up into the air.

He sure does. He sure does. As a unit. Now, robert is that not a universal signal i would go so far as to say it's like that's damn near like a mortal combat opener right like they have it is universal it is universal this man is about to throw hands yes it's like all right oh we about to throw hands right right? Oh, it's so good. It's so good. So at that point, that's when like, clearly either these white boys are very inebriated or have grossly underestimated the feeling of collective identity black people have.

Because when they decided to jump this, man, you're in front of hundreds of black people. Oh, yeah. Who are all waiting in line to get on this boat, right? Who pissed at you because you're not moving yeah right so so when he does that as you can see there are people running you know black men running as fast as they can to kind of help you know this uh this this co-captain who by this point is being stomped because he's yeah overpowered by five people. And then you see this young man swimming to the shore, which is like, he's a, I mean,

that guy's a national treasure now. So I don't know that guy, but I can tell that we can tell a couple of things about him. One of them is that he reacts quickly in a crisis. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And the other is that pretty good swimmer. Pretty good swimmer.

And he's in a lot better shape than most of us. Yeah. He must be a teenager because how are you going to have the energy to swim there and then still start doing work? Well, and then pull yourself up onto a dock when your clothing's all soaked. Very impressive feat. Yeah. So anyway, so as that happens, people finally catch up the boat finally gets a chance to dock now these other people who were on the boat and watched all this happen are like now

it's our turn so they get off the boat go go to the pontoon shirts off again another universal signal if i've taken my t-shirt off, we're going to throw down. So they start throwing down. I mean, it's women getting involved. And then now it becomes this entire brawl, right? And if you've ever been in situations where brawls break out, they kind of move and shift as different people decide they want a part of it. And other people get tired. And somebody's finally, you know,

is nosebleeding, whatever. And while this is happening, there's a few clips where you can see whether they're security officers or police, they're kind of just watching. Yeah. Kind of like, I don't know if we need to do anything about this just yet.

Now, finally, the brawl gets around the corner and a brave old man, old head, who sees his opportunity while, who has brought the internet. And he's got the soul of a sniper. This man is like watching and waiting to act. Yes. Yes. man is like watching and waiting to act yes yes so at this point uh there are some security officers involved who have finally been like all right man maybe we just maybe we should stop this and it's almost like again you can't hear it but judging by their body language the cops are kind

of like i don't know man and white boys kind of asked for it like and you don't say so they're just kind of watching like hey man they you asked for it like and you know so they're just kinda watching like hey man you asked for it man and this is what happened you should've moved your boat shouldn't have been talking shit you know what I mean

like like like like Cat Williams says shouldn't have been talking shit you know so

so anyway they do this and this this hero of a man grabs a white folding chair and just whacks a dude over the head with it who was attempting to attack some other people now clearly again if you've been in a brawl i may be adding color that's not on the video but like if you've been in a brawl you

understand at some point you kind of black out and you just you just get punch drunk. So while he's hitting a guy with a folding chair, there's this other white lady who's attempting to intervene with the interaction that one of the security or cop guys is having with turns out, which with probably one of her compadres. And this is, by the way, a mixed gender brawl. There's like, yeah, this is not just dudes throwing hands previously to this point. Yeah, it's girls on girls. It's girls on dudes. It's dudes on girls.

It's a brawl, you know? So the officer, like officers do when you try to intervene with them having interactions with somebody, pushes the lady away. Now, the lady's in riverboat Crocs, right? So her feet just fall right through the Crocs, right? She gets pushed down and just happens to be in the eyesight of this 60-year-old man with a folded chair. this 60 year old man with a folded chair

and while she's down he just turns and just whacks her over the head with this chair oh he sure does he gives her the WWE special I mean just new world order suck it

just smacks her with a folding chair and at that point it's almost like and again it's all inaudible but you just see the officers go like shit man yeah now we gotta do something now we gotta like fuck man now we gotta arrest you dude right so yeah so the cops finally go like what the fuck man they take the chair from the guy and the dude his body language is so like like he doesn't even know what's happening like i'm just swinging you know so when the officer finally takes the chair and they like they're

like dude you hit the lady you hit the lady you hit the lady we gotta we we yeah we gotta do something here we gotta arrest you now yeah right and which of course the internet watching it and even the person holding even the person shooting the video. We all like, oh, yeah, nah, he going to jail. He's definitely going to jail. That guy going to jail. Everybody else, y'all might be fine. He going to jail.

Yeah. And that's pretty much where the video stops. Yeah. So it has obviously gone everywhere since then. There's a lot of writing about, like, yeah, why this has, like, taken off so much and been seen as so inspirational to people. I think it's because it seems we've all seen, like, too many videos that are just kind of the first part of this. Where, like, yeah, there's, like, a bunch of racist white people. Yeah, there's like a bunch of racist white. And by the way, there's at least you can't hear it on the video, but people have said that, like these folks, when that co-captain came down, were like shouting the N-word at him and stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So we've all seen the variants of this that are just like, yeah, some some black man or black woman getting abused by a bunch of racists. And this one starts looking like that and then turns into like a beautiful comeuppance. Like these people picked a fight against a man they thought was like alone and kind of heavyset and older and that they could like

wail on and just wound up getting absolutely housed. Based on at least what I'm looking at here it looks like three uh of the white folks involved in this have been charged with crimes uh the police are talking to the chair guy um i it's unclear yet like what exactly charges he's gonna catch he was on a uh he was on a radio show a morning show in alab with just sort of an internet personality that, like, in the black community, we're all very familiar of. And so they asked her, or they asked him, like, the lady asked him, like, okay, okay, you had the chair.

And the lady was already down. Like, what happened? And the lady was already down. Like, what happened? And he said, it feels like we wrote this script where he goes, man, I blacked out. And he said, I just thought about Rosa Parks and that lady that wouldn't give the seat to her. I was like, I'll give her a chair. You know, fights are ugly things, but also in some ways beautiful things i don't it's uh there's a lot going on in this video i'm not surprised that

it's it's been taken by so many people there's some lessons i think uh bystanders can take from this uh from one thing if like 50 people are having a giant brawl might want to get out of there just leave yeah just bounce you should know to leave yeah yeah yeah not a good thing to get in the middle of um but second if uh you're parked in someone else's boat spot maybe instead of shouting racial slurs get your fucking boat moved it's not it was like yeah i think what what it's it speaks to so much because this was such an avoidable situation.

Yes. This is completely avoidable, bro. Just slide over a little bit. I feel like if you've, like, if you've driven a car on a highway,

then you've seen a semi truck. Mm-hmm. And when the semi truck come, just get out his way. Like, why, why is you picking this fight man just

he can't it's a big old 18 wheeler just it's just courtesy that's a bigger so i'm just saying like that's a bigger boat than you you're more nimble you can move and clearly it's a line of people waiting to get on i just don't understand yeah no, that's one of the things I think that's involved here that's interesting to me. Is that there's this, this is not just, I mean, like, obviously the fact that these guys were bigots is a factor here. But there's also just this increasingly common freedom that the most selfish people in our society feel to be, aggressive about the fact that they don't owe anyone else like basic, like politeness, right? Like the,

the very basic though, 270 people are being inconvenienced because I parked my shit in the wrong space. I should bounce, you know, I should probably at least say, Oh, sorry,

I fucked up. But instead like, no, we're going to make this a thing because like we get to park wherever the fuck we want and fuck you like that that kind of attitude um is is like it's so frustrating like i can't even get myself under the head of someone who would do what these guys did and not like feel like they were an asshole like i had to do the thing every now and then. I think most of us do where like,

I parked my car in like a, like a red zone or something. Cause it's like, I gotta be, it's like, there's no spaces. I'm 30 seconds. Right.

And you get out and someone's seen you like in the fucking red. And they're like, yes. You know, like I know it's not good. Everyone does it at one point, man. I'm sorry.

Yeah. Dude, I'm so sorry, bro. I'm so sorry. Look, at one point man i'm sorry like yeah dude i'm so sorry bro i'm so sorry look i'm gone i'm gone my bad yeah totally and to have the the fucking chutzpah to just like look at a boat of 270 people be like fuck all of you like i want to keep my stupid ass pontoon here for some reason yeah and then the willingness to be like what the fuck you're gonna do about it well we'll jump you if you get that mad and just and whether it's whether you're adding to either the lack of like situational awareness or just that that overall chutzpah like you said of just like whatever i'll take all of you like really you really really like yeah i think that there's a there's a lot to color here, too, with the fact that, first of all, this is take where it's taking place. I mean, we're still in Montgomery, Alabama here and which and on a dock that.

That. Was obviously and verifiably a dock where slaves were dropped off at, you know, I'm saying so you have that history, right? You have the history of the Montgomery bus boycotts. You know, I'm saying like this is this is the city where Rosa Parks did the thing. You know, I'm saying like this is where it happened. So there's so much history in the city. And on top of that like i mean there's high schools in alabama named robert e lee like robert e lee high school like we're talking about we're talking about a place that i mean what it was in the news in the aughts that like i mean there was a high school that just desegregated like in the year 20 something like they got there yeah yeah they just desegregated a high school right they it made the news in 2010 because they finally had a a desegregated prom but that was just the prom and it's just that the prom white school invited the black they not they can't go to school together

they could just do a dance with this this is this is what, this is the state that this happened in, so you're, you're like, you're in this, like, and I hate to, like, otherize them, but I'mma otherize them, in the sense that this is some, like, multiverse bizarro world, where you, where desegregation is recent, you know what I i'm saying so when you have that type of thing you first of all you have to have you have to remember like both of those things are sitting in sort of the collective consciousness of that community whether especially for the black people who are like this this the world we live in but we've also proven that if you push us far enough, you know what I'm saying?

Like, we're not going to stand for it. You know what I mean? No, we'll pick up a folding chair. We'll pick up a folding chair. Which has become something of a symbol in the last week. It's the new open carry. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I saw at least one TikTok video that was just, it was like, there's like a couple of people watching as this young black guy in a Walmart like was holding up and like testing it like the way that you would like a gun at the gun store.

He's like, yeah. Man, the memes have been glorious. I've seen folding chair earrings. I've seen, but the one is this, I sent Robert a video of the folding chair getting interviewed. Yeah.

First of all, that's one of the funniest accounts you could ever follow. But he was just like, man, you know, I was just sitting there and then we started doing charity work. And which account is that? Oh, yeah. Ace Vance. A-C-E-V-A-N-C-E. He does just the most incredible voiceovers. Yeah. But the chair was just like, we was handing out charities. I was doing charity work.

It's glorious. Freely giving ass whoopings, like, have a seat. You might step up, have a seat. Anyway, it's so good. But I think that that like is important i think another thing that i think is interesting specifically for like that it can happen here um audience which i what one thing i love about this show is like you you give y'all give so much historical context to whatever we're looking at you know i'm saying, as almost like proof of concept that not only can it happen here, it is happening here. You know what I'm saying?

And I think for this one, there was this interesting moment. This is another good follow for you guys. This guy named Conscious Lee. So his name is the Conscious Lee. Lee. So his name is the Conscious Lee. He was a like, like world renowned, like debater, a master debater. I'm just kidding. But he was a world renowned debater. He was one of the first like, like him and his partner was like the first black like co champions in like professional or college level debate. Anyway um so he's a brilliant brilliant thinker he's like you know youtuber of the year styles whatever right anyway um content

creator anyway he brought up this this point among sort of the uh the the black community that what came out of this too was this hashtag of like yo we are not our ancestors you know which as i understand the sentiment it also shows um sort of a lack of historical knowledge of like really how our ancestors handled slavery like yeah like of the amount of resistance the amount of resistance we actually had you know i'm saying and and even just, I would even encourage just like a simple Google search of the amount of rebellions. You know, whether you're talking about the famous ones like the Haitian rebellion, which we did a bastard's pod about. You know what I'm saying? Where like these fools threw off their oppressors.

Where you got Nat Turner. Nat Turner. You know what i'm saying um which i talk about more on on on hood politics but like i my seventh grade like historical figure report was on nat turner and i bet and i was bused to like a suburban like middle school for a little bit so i'm walking into the suburban middle school with my Nat Turner paper. My poor English teacher. She had to be thinking.

I don't know what she was thinking. But anyway. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? You have like. There was one. There was. There were one in New York.

There was the one in during the 13 colonies. Like we have such a history of like rebellion and resistance. Like don't think. Not to mention slave ships that were overtaken you know i'm saying by their captors like you know i'm saying so like these things have there is a rich history of us of us rebelling so like it's almost a point a point of lesson a point of learning for the black community too yeah yeah i think that's a really useful, teachable moment while everyone's kind of amped up about this thing to talk about. I've heard it described as like left-handed power, kind of in some books that would talk about not just, you know, we've been chatting about which are these kind of big moments of insurrection among enslaved people, but like the everyday acts of resistance by people who are enslaved like

while they are you know on the plantation stuff different ways of like pulling autonomy of like you know teaching their kids how to read or you know taking you know getting things like money or extra resources you know out of the out of the the people who are attempting to uh yeah to to own them like yeah methods of escape and resistance, you know, all these methods of like preserving, um, traditional art and religion while,

you know, in chains, like all that kind of stuff is also, yeah, I hope it, I hope it like spurs some of that, you know, the,

uh, the, the folding chair can be added to a rich, uh, history of resistance. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And yeah, I'm also curious around like,

obviously you and I on this, that are currently being recorded, plus a lot of the community that both of us represent, like, yeah, we're not pacifists. Oh, no. At all. You know what I'm saying? And I find that discourse to be interesting, too,

and especially around, you know, if you're, and I'm like, you know, neither is the broader racist community. Like, y'all not pacifist either like you asked for the smoke you got the smoke yeah like what is more american than this it's i i think a more optimistic chapter especially like as we we head into 2024 as we deal with like um kind of these continuing efforts to disenfranchise particularly black voters uh across large chunks of the south um i'm glad that we've got this uh what will hopefully continue to be uh uh a powerful image for people to to kind of rally behind this is uh this is a nice thing to have. I don't know. And it's

interesting. Things are said in a video like this that is just kind of like chaotic brawling, but it speaks to people in a way that a history textbook maybe isn't going to reach them because there's just something so kinetic and powerful about like watching, watching a large group of people realize that an injustice is going down and then be like, well, I guess we've got to throw, throw hands to stop this shit. Yeah. Yeah. It's a microcosm of like a century and a half or so of, or a couple of centuries of history. Whether it, yeah. Whether it's a, absolutely.

The couple centuries of history and Yeah, whether it's a, absolutely, the couple centuries of history, and then you're like, at least 10 years of witnessing, you know, black bodies being brutalized when no one was there to help. You know what I mean? Yeah, just seeing a video and like, oh, this is such a fucking terrible thing, thing yeah yeah and and then seeing no recourse like okay well there's well there's never i mean are we gonna wait for the justice system you know the best thing we've

gotten so far is like no no knock warrants i mean i mean thanks you know i'm saying like you know at a state you know like so so and and a lot of promises of police reform you know i'm saying so you just you don't i i mean like during trump's presidency there was i mean there was an uptick in lynching like yeah i'm saying like these fools are getting old school you know so it is without hearing any video without knowing anything that those men were actually saying, whether they were have been on the bottom of that river. Yeah. That man would have been strung up in a tree in the woods and we'd have never seen him again. like rapidity with which he was surrounded and put on the ground by a large number of men did not suggest that they were that the uh that the additional dudes who had arrived to wail on him

were in a mood to like de-escalate the situation yeah um yeah and that's like i mean i feel like that's like a reality that uh you know you this it's almost like for the rest of the country it's like this if you understand like this is the reality we need you to understand when we say i could die you know i'm saying like when you talk about all racism and i think it's just some people are stupid there's fucking bigots everywhere like no when we say it's life or death like you're that's what you're witnessing like he could have died today that moment you know i'm saying and i think at a at a whether it's front of mine or back of mine that is something that as a person of color like you just kind of know that like this this would this if it would have just been a fight you know i'm saying then i think if it was just just been a brawl like most people would have just been a fight, you know what I'm saying? Then I think if it was just been a brawl, like, most people would have just stayed out of it.

Like, if them two just, if they just were scrapping. Yeah, just the two guys swinging on each other. That's usually the smart play, if it's just two guys swinging on each other, right? Yeah, you take your phone out and you watch. You're just like, all right, man, hey, get your licks in. You know, you cheer for your boy, but, like, I'm going to jump. But when somebody jumps in, it's like, okay, I'm going to help the homie. But if you jump in helping the homie in Montgomery, Alabama, then it's like, all right, yeah, he might die.

So we're going to – it's different. Anything else to get to on this? Man, I think I might be – I think one more thing I think to add color to this and I might be like aggrandizing but I think it's also important because what I'm

really interested in is just the collective cathartic sort of feeling this has had is because there's so much built up tension you have to talk about the florida of it all you know i'm saying and being aware of the idea that like you're right in front of our face The idea that like you're right in front of our face.

Like you're trying to erase history. Do you know what I'm saying? And I just five minutes ago watched that PragerU video for kids about Christopher Columbus and slavery. And it was just like, well, you this is approved approved approved um content for children like well you know at least we didn't kill them yeah you know what i'm saying and like well you know and you know in europe we don't we draw the line at like cannibalism and these people that we're enslaving like they practice it you know so i guess it's kind of you know yeah maybe slavery's not bad and slavery i mean it's all over the world they've always had yeah yeah yeah you know i'm saying so like they learned useful skills yeah well i mean you know okay so there was no

skills in africa like so you're trying to tell me well this this civilization civilization that is the bedrock of civilization where all of humanity come from. You know what I'm saying? We didn't know how to do nothing. Right? Yeah. I don't know. Like if you're – yeah.

It's so frustrating because it's – I think they're trying to like draw a line between, I don't know, the way slavery was often practiced in like the Mediterranean where there was a lot of manumission, people were often freed. And when they were freed, there was not like ongoing stigma against having been a former slave with like a racial slavery system in the Americas that was completely different, where manumission very rarely happened. And when it did, you were still subject to heinous restrictions on your personal liberty. Like it's just not a comparison. Yeah, trying to use the lack of awareness of just even the term slavery and what you mean by that. You know what I'm saying?

Using it to your advantage. It's like, well, anyone who's read a book or two can be like, ah, what you did was different. You know what I'm saying? And you know it. You know it's different. You know what I'm saying? And you know it. You know it's different. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Like serfdom, involuntary servitude, debt slavery. Whenever, if there was ever two tribes and a tribe got raided by another one, there was slavery. I know that it exists

since the dawn of time. Not what you talking about though you know i'm saying and you and you know it you know so you're playing on that so i just think like collectively us just like keep hearing this shit and keep having to like you know keep your cool and try to fight it in the ballots and just and just the just the mind fuck of like. These folks, y'all really you're going to you're going to vote for a dude that's out on bail, that's a felon like this. This nigga's facing 70 years and y'all really finna y finna, you're really trying to put this man in office again. Like, just, it's such a mindfuck that you're like, man, I just need to hit a white lady with a chair.

Like, I don't, I just, I'm just going to hit a white lady with a chair. Yeah. And, yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And we you know, something I've brought up many times on the politics is understanding sort of like the collective sort of black American psyche is we just process trauma through humor. Like we when we make a joke out of everything and it's really so we're just not like pushing random white people into moving traffic, you know, just because if not, you'd be like, what's his name? James Baldwin says that he was like to be black in America is to I'm butchering the quote, but to be constantly under the surface at a rage level that you're constantly trying to push down. You know what i'm saying so i feel like the humor why why we got so many jokes about like nah chair chair homie going to jail like here go your bail

money but that was amazing because like you just good job you know i'm saying an aquaman coming out the water like why why we make jokes about it is like well well, yeah, I mean, it's funny. And if not, we'd be enraged all the time. Well, prop. Amen. I do feel like this is a good lead in for the fact that we are actively, well, preparing to do our Robert E. Lee lee episodes which have taken a lot of reading but i think you're gonna enjoy um i can't wait yeah because again i just like i'm already locking and loading the jokes like i can't wait yeah he's he's he's such a baby um i think like that was

the thing that surprised me like i expected like okay well this guy's you know a bad person for obvious reasons being the military leader of the confederacy but like the degree to which this dude is a fucking baby is uh right yeah we're we're gonna have a good time with this one i also i i also as a thought experiment my question would be okay robert evans if you were in Montgomery at that moment, I just, how would you handle that? I mean, if I see a bunch of people wailing on a single dude, even outside of a situation where it's clearly racist, I'm going to try to stop that because I don't want to watch someone get beaten to death in the street.

Yeah. Like, unless they have it coming. I don't know if it's like a guy with a swastika armband and people are kicking him on the ground. I might not intervene. I don't know. In that case, I might just to try to stop people from catching a fucking murder charge. But like, yeah, I feel like now at the point at which there's like 60 people fighting on the dock. I don't know that I'm running into that.

Like, for one thing, it seems like enough people are there. But yeah, you see a bunch of people like kicking the shit out of a man trying to do his job. You should try to intervene. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like those fucking security should have gotten in there faster. But like, yes, I would hope that I would run in at that point and attempt to stop what was happening. Yeah, absolutely. That's good, man.

I don't think I would have had the presence of mind to pick up that chair, though. The chair is, Yeah, absolutely. That's good, man. I don't think I would have had the presence of mind to pick up that chair, though. The chair is, yeah, no. I just, I would hope that, like, it would be, I just wonder, like, because, again, once you black out and get punch drunk,

it's like, I would hope that, like, that the black people around would have the wherewithal to be like, no, no, no, no, he's with us. Yeah, yeah, we'll see. That dude's with us, no, no, no, no, he's with us. Yeah, we'll see. That dude's with us. No, no, no, no, he's with us. He's good.

He's good. He's good. I think that's part of why you don't roll in when there's like 60 people fighting. But also at that point, yeah. Yeah. It's hard to tell how do you help. And if you've got like five people beating a man on the ground, it's easy to know how to help.

You try to get that guy up and away from them. You try to get them off of him. If you've got what are effectively like two or three dozen fights going on, on a dock, it's like, well, do you just like start throwing hands? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Just put somebody. Everybody put somebody. Yeah. Just like, you know, you just grab like fine children and just kind of like,

let me just move y'all out the way y'all back up yeah yeah yeah you should i think when you're anytime you're in encountering a situation like this like your first is like what can i do that will help you know again it's easy if you if there's a guy getting beaten or if there's someone seriously injured that needs medical care if it's at a point where it's like well this is just fucking chaos then maybe you just watch yeah yeah yeah get it get it get a higher vantage point just make sure you can watch the watch where it's going you don't want to get sucked in you know because you might get trampled you know i'm saying yeah yeah keep your fucking don't don't fall into your phone because shit like that spreads yes yes yes yeah. Yes. Yeah. So true.

Yeah. Lots of usable piece of information. Yeah. For this otherwise. Just jokes full podcast. Yep. Yeah. Well, we all had a good time today.

Prop, where can the people find you if they would like to do that? Man, please. I am on the same network you are. I'm on the Hood Politics pod. My socials are all the, they're all prop hip hop. Like you said, I am a coffee business owner. It's Terraform Cold Brew. You can use promo code Hood and get 15% off your cold brew needs. Please help me sell.

Please buy this coffee. Good Lord. I suck a lot of money into this shit. Please buy this coffee. Good Lord. I suck a lot of money into this shit. Please buy the coffee. But yeah, man, Profit Pop and yeah. And yeah. And Hood Politics Pod. I'm on the network, man.

And please check out the show. Yeah. Check out Hood Politics. Check out Prop's Delightful Coffee. Check out Hood Politics. Check out Props Delightful Coffee. And yeah, you can find us right here tomorrow, unless it's a weekend, in which case you can find us here when the weekend ends, the next weekday. We're here every weekday.

We never stop. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. 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. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second you get your podcast. inch 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. it could happen here a podcast about frustrating people and frustrating times that's not all it's

about sometimes we talk about nice things like like raising sheep or unionization efforts, you know, the endless struggle of working people to better the world. But not today. Today we're having a real piece of shit episode about a real piece of shit, and it's going to make everybody unhappy. Hello, Garrison. Hello, James. How are you both doing today?

So much better for hearing that, Robert. Oh, yeah. Yeah, just ready to have a fine evening here yeah learning about yeah something that's probably very fun yeah you're gonna be good you don't have you don't have your soda stream disappointed in you yet james and i are now soda stream pilled i've not i've not gotten the company soda stream yet that hasn't it's a generational thing yeah no the uh unfortunately the company beverage is uh is billy beer uh billy carter uh jimmy carter's brother's beer that was on sale for roughly a year in the 1970s um is it made of peanuts if only no so today um let's start i i got a question for you. Have either of you seen the Barbie movie?

Yes, I have. How was it? Well done. Gare? Oh, I didn't go, buddy. Just told Gare. The set dressing was nice. It was a great lesson in, like, liberal recuperation.

I'm sure it'll be great for, like, kids who, kids who don't know what feminism is. But yeah. Yeah, it seems I have not watched it either. It doesn't seem like my kind of movie. But it seems broadly accurate. Correct me if I'm wrong here, that it has what you might call very, very modest and fairly mainstream approachable feminist messaging. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah.

That seems like it's fair, which most people would not be particularly angry about. But a sizable chunk of the very online right, the chunk of the right particularly that makes their living by having takes on shit has been up in arms ever since it came out, and particularly ever since it made more than a billion dollars in the box office. ever since it came out, and particularly ever since it made more than a billion dollars in the box office. I'm sure a lot of people are aware that our old friend Ben Shapiro

filmed a 42-minute video tearing it apart in his signature pre-teen stolen valor voice. You know... Stealing the valor of a prepubescent boy. After I watched the movie, me and some friends tried to watch the Ben Shapiro video for fun.

We made it like six minutes in and then everyone forced me to stop. Intolerable shit. Cowards. Yeah, they are cowards. But that's, yeah. So, elsewhere in the right and kind of the less

mainstream acceptable chunks of what we'd call the insurgent right around here, various thought leaders attempted to declare the movie stealth conservative propaganda as a way of insisting that its success was really due to it being anti-woke. That's silly, too. None of this is worth discussing in detail. I promise you all this is not going to be a podcast about the fucking Barbie movie. None of this is worth discussing in detail, save to say that Shapiro's anger at the movie, and particularly its comic relief character, Ken, seems to have been the more widespread response

from those kinds of people. Now, because I have made over the years a lot of poor decisions in my browsing and engaging habits over the years, Twitter sends me a lot of weirdo right-wing responses to everything that happens in the world, including this movie. And one of these posts that I caught somewhere in late July, around the 22nd, 23rd, caught my eye. Now, this post features a vaporwave-filtered kin photoshopped in front of a burning Viking longhouse, accompanied by the text, exit the longhouse. Now, when you see something like this and you don't know what they're getting

at like you have two choices if you're like you get like i don't know kids a really demanding job uh anything at all going on in your personal life you scroll right past it if you're me you spend like four and a half hours reading various like fascist essays about feminism to try to figure out what the fuck a longhouse has to do with the Barbie movie. Now, the guy who had made this post is a low level fascist political columnist named Lomez. He is he's kind of on the he's he's a little bit of volapilled. He's he doesn't he's not like a very major figure he's kind of several steps below anyone you've heard of I would say like two or three steps

standard deviations of fame below like Jack Posobiec but his writing has a degree of purchase among the kinds of conservatives who trick Ron DeSantis into running incomprehensible campaign ads with Sonnenrads in them he's got a little bit of influence among that kind of crew, and he's sort of in the conversation with a lot of those people.

I took notice of his post because I'd seen the term longhouse being used by a couple of these guys off and on, and because Lomis' post got like 3,000-something likes, which meant that, yeah, there's some community out there that gets what he's talking about. So on a whim, I clicked to view the quote tweets for this post, and I found a post by a user named Siege, which is, of course, a reference to a book about carrying out acts

of terrorism in order to bring about a white ethnostate. The post says, Ken is you. He is an exaggerated Western man in the 21st century, anxious, confused, chasing women who don't care about him. He exits the longhouse and discovers his own will to power. Like you, he decides to bring this knowledge back to his fellow man. And it's, you know, I'm going to I'll show you guys this this post here. It's pretty. It's pretty Nazi.

Yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty Nazi. It's not the best work on Ken he looks like a blob I will say I have a little bit of respect for the craft here that he didn't just go to an AI that looks like somebody crudely cut a picture of Ken that they had

color inverted and then photoshopped it into a picture of a longhouse with a fire behind it it's too crude a photoshopped it into a picture of a longhouse with a fire behind it. Yeah. It's too crude a Photoshop for AI. I will say Siege's description of Ken from the Barbie movie is pretty accurate to what's in the film. That's good.

So what is the longhouse? What the fuck does a longhouse have to do with what are otherwise pretty standard neo-Nazi-esque messaging about the decadence and failure of modern man and all that kind of shit? And is this dumb fascist meme something that you need to care about? to that is yes, because all of this ties back to one extremely influential insurgent right-wing ideologue, whose followers have been close to the presidency once before and may yet find themselves there. Again, that asshole is an MIT graduate named Kostin Alamariu, who posts online

under variations of the name Bronze Age Pervert. You guys, how aware are you of Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP as aware are you of Bronze Age Pervert? Or BAP, as he's often known. I've heard of BAP, but maybe only in passing because I wasn't familiar with Bronze Age Pervert. Thank God.

Thank you so much for sharing it with me today, Robert. Oh, you're going to be so much less happy. Garrison, are you familiar with this fella? I think i may have only seen stuff from him in passing i'm not yeah i'm not i'm not overly familiar now yeah that was kind of my experience until like a month or so ago when i started really digging into the guy um and i i don't feel better as a result of having done that but uh yeah we know that this guy's actual name is costin alamario because of a a very recent Atlantic article. It was like a month ago that this guy got revealed in this article because this writer for the Atlantic was a friend of his at MIT. It was just somebody who – and recognized his voice on a podcast.

article, I find it frustrating for a number of reasons. I don't think it's great analysis of BAP's work or what people find appealing in it, or a particularly honest intellectual look at what this guy has to say. But it does have some interesting reveals, including the fact that Bronze Age Pervert's first public media appearance was a parody audio tour for an exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, written by BJ Novak, who played Ryan in The Office. Yeah. So that's odd. And it's one of those, BJ Novak is not a stealth Nazi, don't worry.

But the video or the thing that they put together does kind of fit for like a fascist art project. And I'm going to read how The Atlantic describes this audio tour they put together does kind of fit for like a fascist art project. And I'm going to read how the Atlantic describes this audio tour they put together together or put that they assembled together. Novak had recruited a Romanian classmate with a deep voice and together they'd recorded an audio tour for the exhibition Tales from the Land of Dragons, A Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. With the help of friends, they then slipped cassettes containing their tour into the museum's official audio guides. Art lovers must have wondered about the thick Eastern European accent

that greeted them over the twang of a Chinese string instrument. The Romanian soon became opinionated. Personally, he said, I think this painting is a piece of crap. Then deranged, he alluded to his disgusting anatomical abnormalities. He called his listeners decadent imperialist maggots and confessed a desire to smash

a glass case with a sledgehammer and rip a scroll to shreds with my teeth, which, by the way, are extremely long and sharp, more like fangs than human teeth. At last, he offered an interlude of idiot music while he fumbled with his script. This should keep you occupied, you drooling imbecile, he bellowed at the listeners,

by now either amused or complaining to management. So there's like little whiffs of degenerate art stuff in there, but it's also just kind of like a little bit like Max Headroom-y kind of stuff, like where you're kind of tricking

people into consuming this like parody artwork thing. Like again, I think this was a pretty innocent joke on Novak's part. But Koston, number one, probably got picked for this because he's got a thick Romanian accent that he very much plays up. He was noted in this time as kind of talking like Dracula deliberately. He also would always wear these like long and elaborate black coats so that he kind of looked like a Dracula type figure. Like he was, you know, he was, he was doing a bit,

he was putting on like a, um, that was the image, uh, he wanted to, he wanted to portray himself as to people as kind of like mysterious and Eastern European sort of, uh, sort of figure. Now, Koston first started posting as Bronze Age Pervert on a series of obscure web forums in 2010. In the November of 2013, he joined Twitter and immediately fell in with a loose community that some people call Frog Twitter. And these are, you know who these guys are. It's like a general term for anonymous alt-right adjacent posters with like Pepe avatars. Yeah. And the other group, the kind of related people that he fell in with and that he started to have traction with

are adherents to a fascist philosopher known as Curtis Yarvin or Mincius Moldbug. Curtis is his real name. Mincius Moldbug is the pseudonym he wrote under. Now, I know it's a terror. These people are very frustrating. Why do they always do this shit are very frustrating it's just so pathetic play Dungeons and Dragons

just 20% of our fascist problems are like people didn't get a reliable D&D group early enough I think Baldur's Gate 3 is going to save us from a lot of these guys in the future it is the Antifa computer game yeah so curtis

yarvin aka mincius is a a uc berkeley graduate in computer science who joined the tech industry and got pilled on a strain of anti-democratic libertarian theory this is this is like a this is a pathway man yeah this is perfect well Bronze Age pervert also goes into tech after graduating from MIT, right? And a decent number of these guys come out of Stanford and shit. It's all these guys who are, in fact, to some extent, intellectual elites. Bronze Age pervert's dad is a teacher at MIT. Just kind of like you look at Stephen Miller's background, right? A lot of these guys come out of like liberal academia families.

But anyway, it's very common. Yeah. Curtis comes out of, yeah, gets into the tech industry and he writes a book kind of while he's working and like he's a founder and stuff for some company. He writes a book in 2001 titled Democracy, The God That Failed, follows it up with a series of blog essays, and his writing becomes very influential among Silicon Valley proto-fascists. Yarvin's idea in brief is that the US is run, and a lot of Western society is really run by what he calls the cathedral, which is a mix of

professors and journalists who act as a Brahmin class dominating the United States with a progressive state religion. He sees their egalitarian impulses as toxic, the destruction of natural civic order, and advocates for his followers to design new architectures of exit to replace the cathedral with what is effectively a right-wing dictatorship. textures of exit to replace the cathedral with what is effectively a right-wing dictatorship. The number one supporter of Curtis Yarvin's ideas and financial backer of him is Peter Thiel. Thiel has funded Yarvin's work, is a big fan of what he has to say and his philosophy,

which is generally referred to as the dark enlightenment. And this is, when we're talking about the dark enlightenment, we're talking like mid aughts is kind of when this stuff starts to really take off. This is before the alt-right that kind of becomes really well-known nationwide is a major term. This is like in the pre and right around Gamergate period is when he's really starting to take off with a lot of folks. And he certainly, he feeds into the alt-right to Trump, you know, and to that period of time, but he's much more on the pseudo-intellectual end of things as opposed to the like hitting folks in the street end of things. That's why he gets a lot of Peter Thiel money. So yeah, Bronze Age pervert is kind of a – he espouses a philosophy that rhymes with mold bugs, with Yarvin's philosophy in many ways.

But where Yarvin dresses his words and his writing up in a costume version of mainstream academic discourse, Bronze Age pervert is unapologetically online and weird. And he writes like somebody who spends too much fucking time on the internet. and weird and he writes like somebody who spends too much fucking time on the internet um a lot of his stuff is cloaked in things that are like half jokes or at least want to be have plausible deniability of jokes so that like if you take them seriously you can make fun of you for falling for the bit but he describes himself on twitter as an aspiring nudist bodybuilder uh free speech and anti-xeno estrogen activist um so just just the most irritating kind of guy imaginable. Yeah, he's a normal guy. Much of his politics centers around a worship of ancient Greece,

which he believes settled on the scientifically ideal human form. He believes men should engage in bodybuilding and nude sunbathing to emulate the Greeks. And you'll see sometimes his followers be like, oh, you're an idiot if you fell for that. But legitimately, half of what this guy posts about is just pictures of bodybuilders and his pictures of himself being looking very jacked. Like he's he's it's it's that if that's all a bit, then all he has is this silly bit because it is dominant in his content. BAP's ancient Greeks are incredibly straight and hate women with a passion. One of those things is more or less right. Greek, like upper class Greeks, not super pro women. Yeah, not woke. Yeah, not woke. The cathedral in his eyes is an oppressive dictatorship of femininity, if not always of women, over masculinity.

Cancel culture is a particular topic of his ire. And he seems to see it as basically these – that there are traditionally feminine methods of argumentation and conflict, whether or not women are the ones doing them in any given situation. Cancel culture is like the purest expression of this. And he believes that these kind of feminine methods of conflict destroy masculinity and make cultural progress impossible. They chain men to this kind of like he sees, you know, a lot of anarchists will talk about how ancient societies, hunter gatherer societieser societies, and like we're often more egalitarian than a lot of like medieval societies, classical societies. And this is often,

a lot of folks do make the mistake of like idealizing these cultures, but like that's a thing that gets talked about a lot positively by some anarchists. And I think obviously it's worth studying. He takes the opposite tact of like these ancient cultures, like light,

like people lived in the fucking mud and were miserable. And it was because they weren't egalitarian. It was because the women were dominating the men, right? This is going to lead us to the long house in short order, but we have some more to cover right here. So he focuses a huge amount on anti-egalitarian arguments and on supporting a culture dominated by strong, beautiful, powerful people

who look like Greek statues and suppress women and anyone else who doesn't look sexy, basically. You get the feel, like that's a big part of it to this guy. Like he wants a dictatorship of hot, violent men. That's a big part of what he argues with has he watched lenny reifenstahl's olympia because this seems oh god yeah i feel like that's playing in the back of his fucking mind at all times yeah now bap argues that the state in its uh present form preserves the lives of the weak and feeble minded allowing them to oppress the naked aryan bodybuilders who by all rights ought to run things.

The prime repository of his philosophy is his 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset, which was at one point in the top 150 books on Amazon. A former Trump White House official told Politico in 2019, if you're a young person, intelligent, adjacent in some way to the right, it's very likely you would have heard of it. In chapter 35 of his book, Bronze Age Mindset, BAP writes, quote, gain the power it seeks and then be challenged enough to feel itself in danger, the mass annihilations that will be carried out by homosexual, transsexual, and especially lesbian commissars will exceed in scale and cruelty

anything that has yet happened in known history. Imagine lesbian mulatta commissars with young Martin Sheen face and haircut manning the future Bergen-Belsons, installations that will span tens of miles. Yep. S sending you to the transgender gulag yeah it's um it's it's something else and it's very funny because like that fucking

the atlantic writer here um like talks about how he's he's got this like almost hypnotizing quality to his writing and he's he's got this really like fascinating mind that you just want to engage with. And it's, I'll read you a fucking quote from this guy's profile on Bronze Age Pervert. And try not to gag.

I consider myself a connoisseur of brilliant lunatics and I have a high tolerance for their lunacy if it has compensating virtues of say humor or ingenuity. But even I find Bap worrisome. What starts as comedy can become something more sinister. And Bap schtick, while sometimes hilarious, shows every sign of transforming into a mode of new

far-right radicalism. He goes on at a various point to be like, yeah, he likes this book that I like, so I was willing to put up with the fact that he was uh he was bigoted for years because like we would talk about uh literature together um you know i just had so much respect for his mind that uh i was willing to be strung along for a long time i don't know i find this guy kind of a connoisseur yeah a connoisseur a connoisseur of Pig shit I really love sifting through All the different types of donkey dogs Yeah I just can't lick quite enough shit You know what won't make you

Become a connoisseur of dog shit Internet content What James What will not It it's it's a washington state highway patrol uh i love some effort that's that's the i hope they are ready for the lesbian commissars um oh you know i am yeah they're there the woke police ah and we're back we're back we're back

we're back we're back we're back oh yeah so it was Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo that this Atlantic

writer and Bronze Age pervert both loved yeah I'll read you another fucking paragraph for many years we corresponded

Koston's messages arrived irregularly and the tone ranged from friendly and inquisitive to boorish and insulting. I went to South America on assignment. He sent long messages extolling the virtues of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, which is set there.

A friend who reads books like Nostromo and can talk about them is a friend worth putting up with. South America. It's fucking, not even a fucking country. No, just generally South America. And like fucking not even a fucking country just yeah incredible just generally

South America and like right after that he says after about 10 years he took to calling my friends and then he uses a series of slurs at some point

he had begun bodybuilding and he sent me a picture of himself shirtless with the message do you like this pic of me again just a normal thing just a literature guy do you like this pic of me? Again, he's- Just a normal thing. Just a literature guy.

It's just a real genius. So Bronze Age perverts writings. Devastating prose. One of the Greeks he's obsessed with because he claims that like frames himself as an expert on greek society which he portrays as something of a a paradise but he only knows about like six guys and one of them is alcibiades and alcibiades was an athenian general and a statesman who was a big player

in the peloponnesian war he defected from athens to sparta and then from sparta to the persian empire before being recalled and reinstated as an Athenian general. He is a real motherfucker and an interesting guy. And because he was so interesting and kind of he was very charismatic in his own time and this kind of like very shady figure, too, he becomes an early celebrity. He's like one of the first famous people that's really out there. And a big part of why he stays famous is that Plato will write a lot about him and Socrates, right?

And Plato's at writing, I think after they're dead. So a lot of Alcibiades is like a character written by Plato, as opposed to the actual historical fact about the dude. It's also worth noting, given how anti-queer BAP is that Alcibiades and Socrates were lovers. Uh, Socrates was, like, famously kind of a simp for Alcibiades, while Alcibiades was kind of a piece of shit to Socrates. Um, lot of fun stories about that, but these guys were not at all straight.

Um, yeah, I mean, Pater Asti was an institution in ancient Greece. Not that Pater Asti is the same as being gay. No, I don't think that's the same as what was going on with these two dudes. Yeah, these dudes were just in love. It's nice. I'm happy for you. Bronze Age perverts' rants are profoundly silly to anyone who isn't a deranged chud obsessing over why girls don't like him while shooting steroids into his ass.

But because that's a fertile demographic demographic he has influence among some important conservatives former white house child in the technical sense of the word yeah not after all those steroids yeah you hit that testosterone too much well and none of these guys will let themselves touch a because they're they're so they're so horrified by the concept of women. Yes, that's also true. So former White House speechwriter Darren Beattie followed him on Twitter and interacted with his writing, as did Minnesota State Senator Roger Chamberlain. Curtis Yarvin called him his White House cell leader. because BAP himself has encouraged his young followers to avoid supporting him in public and instead hide their sympathies while taking positions in the government to institute his ideas. It's also worth noting that you can find some fans of Bronze Age Pervert on the so-called anti-woke left.

There's clips out there from the Red Scare podcast, which the less said about the better, where the two hosts read segments of his book with a what seems like a degree of appreciation calling it the good kind of racist yeah that also makes sense in terms of their kind of they're like anti-feminist stuff that they do yes yeah yes yeah um and i think his his writing he has that he has a very like florid purple prose style. I don't think it's good writing. I don't find it particularly engaging. It's very channy and kind of exhausting, but people who are dumb fall for it. So yeah, he's hit his demo well.

Now his influence is significant enough that some conservatives have sought to explain it. I found a fun write-up on americanmind.org that describes his appeal this way. So what exactly is the teaching of Bronze Age mindset, and why is it so attractive to so many young men? The answer, I think, is simple. It is a revitalized paganism obsessed with strength and beauty. It appeals to today's young men because these things, strength and beauty, are exactly what contemporary society has tried so hard to deny them.

contemporary society has tried so hard to deny them. The gospel of sun and steel, of vitalism and strength and power are exactly what have been denied to the boys of the Western world. And their spirits militate against this. Everything great ever achieved, Bap tells us, was done through strong friendships between two men or brotherhoods of men. And this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power. Now, I should note, part

of what he gets at when he's talking about how these strong groups, friendships between two men or small brotherhoods of men, he is a big advocate. And one of the reasons why he is popular among, like, the Adam Woffin set, is he's a big advocate of his followers forming small two, three, four-man groups and training with weapons

together and preparing for the future day of the rope style thing. He doesn't use that term, but he's speaking to those people from like a more educated mindset. And there's, I think, an extent to which you could see his writing as trying to pull in that kind of educated upper crust kids of the upper middle class, you know, with Ivy League educations who go into politics, trying to draw them in closer to the actual violent insurgent right, at least in terms of

the sympathies of their ideas and support for methods of organizing that are more traditionally found against, you know, the Elohim city set, right? I think there is a degree of that going on here. Now, Bronze Age pervert is more supportive of Trump than a lot of these guys, largely because he finds him funny and sees him as an avatar of disruption and destruction. Yeah, it's like it's it's like an accelerationist support. Which is actually – honestly, that's perfectly logical because Trump is accelerating both the death of the kind of conservatism that is state loyal, that is sort of system loyal, right? The George W. Bush kind of conservatism, which is very much system loyal. The neoconservative movement of like the mid-2000s, yeah. Yeah, and Trump is – has done terrible damage to that and damage to the structure of the state in the whole. So it doesn't – it's perfectly logical for him to support Trump.

He's not like, this is not inconsistent with the other things that he talks about. One of the people that that Atlantic writer talked to is Michael Anton, a former Trump administration national security official who wrote a 2019 essay in the Claremont Review of Books about Bronze Age pervert. He acknowledges that BAP's work is racist, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, misogynistic,

and homophobic, but suspect suggested that like, you know, that that's all, that's not, you know, that's not necessarily what he really believes. Maybe it is,

but the big reason why he does this is it key. It distracts leftists from his, like his more serious, like secret heresies that are like the real deep dark arcane wisdom at the center of it like hang out with your bros and and train with guns or whatever um or yeah like hide in the fucking government and uh uh waiting for the right moment to strike but then blow it all up when you make an ad for Ron DeSantis. That kind of cleverness.

Anyway, Anton writes that Bronze Age pervert, quote, speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction, especially among white males, with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day. A hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all differences, while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite. There you go. So what does all this have to do with longhouses? Well, let's finally get to that. Longhouse describes a category of dwellings that have existed on basically every landmass in the planet in some form stretching back to the Neolithic period. These are, in general, large halls, sometimes with private family rooms built into them, sometimes with communal sleeping arrangements, but always organized around a large single communal hall.

In ancient days, these are where feasts would be held and where groups of families or tribes would huddle together in long, cold winters. Bronze Age pervert conceives of the longhouse as an example of the miserable lives primitive and shameful cultures, not his beloved Greeks, lived in before modernity. In his writing, he makes it clear that his fear is ruled by degenerates and our fallen modernity will cause society to regress to this prehistoric misery. Now, part of his hatred of what he calls longhouse culture is that in his mind, these dwellings were dominated by women who forced men to live inside the smoky, cloying, stinking confines. This is not really accurate to any kind of history. I expect his conception here comes largely from the fact that longhouses are often suspected, because we know relatively little about many of the cultures that had them, are often suspected of having been organized among matrilineal lines. In other words, if you as a dude marry a lady, you move into her family's longhouse, right? This does sink out. There are modern cultures that

lived, that had longhouses or have longhouses who also lived this way. The Iroquois being a good example, right? That was a longhouse culture and which house you lived in was matrilineal. But it is a mistake to characterize matrilineal as meaning like the women are completely in charge because they were not in Iroquois culture nor many other cultures where longhouses existed. Vikings lived in longhouses and you might recognize their society as not precisely anti-masculine. Yeah, the woke Vikings. Yeah, the woke Vikings. So this is more of a problem, though, with the conceptions of the only thing that in his view can bring progress, which is small groups of beautiful men enforcing their will through violence, right? That's what he talks about when he's talking about the longhouse.

His followers tend to use the longhouse as a short end, more of a shorthand for the kind of stuff Curtis Yarvin gets at with the cathedral, a catch-all term for progressive modernity, women who get to say no to sex and have their own credit cards, trans people on hormones, vegan meat substitutes, and yes, the Barbie movie. Now, I opened this episode with a post about that movie by Lomez, an adherent of BAPism who wrote an interminable article on the Longhouse for a website called First Things,

which describes itself as america's most influential journal of religion and public life i bet it is yeah i bet it is buddy you can tell because they always let you know straight away yeah that's true yeah yeah they really gotta hit that up for you i'm gonna quote from that now even for those of us who use it the longhousehouse evades easy summary. Ambivalent to its core, the term is at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate in-joke. Its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles.

It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic government, but also to wokeness, to the progressive, liberal, and secular values that pervade all major institutions. The most important feature the progressive, liberal, and secular values that pervade all major institutions. The most important feature of the longhouse and why it makes such a resonant and controversial symbol of our current circumstances is the ubiquitous rule of the den mother. More than anything, the longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations

toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. As of 2022, women held 52% of professional managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57% of bachelor degrees, 61% of master's degrees, and 54% of doctoral degrees. And because they're overrepresented in professions such as human resource management and compliance officers that determine workplace behavioral norms. They have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally. So the WOMs have taken over human resources. He sounds like he lost a fight with a thesaurus when he's writing that, like, at every point. Like, he's just using

unnecessarily long word yeah it's it's i mean it's also just like women have are dominating society because they they're getting more bachelor's degrees yep that's what it is okay uh-huh yeah that's a famously useful bachelor's degree which always leads to employment in a powerful position. To tremendous wealth. Oh, also, and the idea that like human resources are in some degree to somehow setting the terms culturally as opposed to responding to the needs of corporations to mitigate risk, right?

Like that's what HR actually is. It's not setting an agenda. It is avoiding lawsuits. It is minimizing exposure, whatever. Lómez also goes on to quote Richard Henania, an influential conservative thought leader who was revealed recently to be a neo-Nazi, or at least someone who regularly wrote neo-Nazi things in neo-Nazi parts of the web and wants to be seen as respectable now. We'll talk about him later. Lómez approvingly notes that Hanania echoes a BAPIS talking point when he discusses how female domination of HR has given them control over public and private institutions. Now, again, the way Lómez is talking about this shit is not actually in line with how Bronze Age pervert conceives of

the longhouse and one of the funnier results of everything that i've been talking about today is that bronze age pervert now spends much of his time on twitter angrily tweeting at his followers that they're using the longhouse wrong i'm gonna read you a post of his from july 27th longhouse has gone crazy out of control, usually misused. It's not a synonym for feminism or matriarchy, nor for group consensus, though those are part of the story. It's a concrete image from pre-Aryan Europe

of lower life and of most traditional societies. The author's text strikes again. Your baby got away from you. Yeah. And some of his ire is likely due to the fact that his followers, who are largely very young tend to apply what they see as his analysis to children's movies here's a here's a real good one yeah this is uh uh it's a post for a picture of like the female

villain from the movie tangled by activated sleeper if you want a good example like the female villain from the movie Tangled by activated sleeper. If you want a good example of the nebulous longhouse, look no further than Mother Gothel. Fade narcissism driven by resentment and envy of the young whose primary and most effective weapons are gaslighting, manipulation and the rhetoric of fanatical safety ism. It's good stuff. Thank you. Activated sleeper. Thank you. Activated sleeper thank you activated sleeper exposing the that great cutting cutting commentary on her 2000 2012's tangled

now one of my favorite recent examples of how many of these guys use the long house was a post in the off my chest reddit which went viral on twitter the post is by a woman who says that she interrupted her husband while he was telling a story and he was like hold up tawny men are talking as like a joke and she got angry at this and they had a fight uh one

popular bapist response to this story 1500 likes and counting when i found it stated men attempt to take one comedic step out of the longhouse and the locks get 10 times bigger. Jesus Christ. It is. It is very silly to like bring up actual history with this. But one of the points you'll find in like writing about longhouses traditionally is that because everyone was cooped up in the winter come spring, the women were generally like doing everything they could to get them in to fucking leave and go hunt or something like get the fuck out of that get out

of here like go do something else we need we need like a fucking week or two without you hanging around go to war we didn't care yeah go to war do something jesus christ nobody likes being cooped up in a fucking long house. Anyway, that's that's the long house. That's Bronze Age pervert. It is kind of worth noting because these guys are convinced that like they are the intellectual vanguard of this movement that's going to overturn what is classically described as liberalism, this idea that like people have like rights that are worth protecting and shit, that that's a failed idea. It's obviously failed. Look at how ugly buildings are today. And they'll post some picture of like the Chicago World's Fair. These people are like weirdly adjacent to the Tartaria conspiracy theory that a hundred years ago, the world was ruled by this like vast advanced Russian empire that made all the nice buildings.

And then World War II was a secret excuse for the rulers of the world to destroy all the good architecture. And that's why buildings are ugly. I definitely seen like this bad guy in those like circles of people who are like, like culture critic or like Greek,

Greek enjoyer or whatever. Yeah. Like, yeah. Like post pictures of like, like old expensive architecture stuff. Yeah. And mixed in with like,

like either like, uh, mostly, mostly like brutalist or like modernist architecture and be like, what happened? What, what, which way we should imagine this cathedral anymore

well for one thing like the society that people like you insisted upon this one in which like value is maximized at all costs so we we took windows out of my school that was built in that brutalist periods because it was cut down on heating costs. It's like, because some prince bankrupted their country building this pretty building, and that's why we don't do that anymore. Idiots like you who thought, like, yeah, jacked dudes with guns should run everything started

a series of wars that bankrupted those countries, and they had to sell their nice buildings to the Americans. That's why we got the London Bridge, I assume. But it's definitely all in that same rough Twitter milieu. I mean, it's certainly, now that you've explained all of this,

the Longhouse stuff, it certainly makes sense why they're kind of fawning over the Barbie movie. And I mean, very clearly, Ken is going to become one of these memeable characters because of what he does in the film um it's he's he's going to join the pantheon of like american psycho and uh all of ryan gosling's other roles um yeah it is it is fascinating how ryan gosling kind of has become like the literal poster child for much of like the dissident, like anti-feminist, right. Um,

just because of the types of roles that he's taken. Uh, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's certainly a cautionary tale, male actors. It certainly makes sense in context of the Barbie movie in terms of how they

kind of structured all of the like social critique in that, in that movie. Um, but, but yeah, this is very silly. I mean, I'm excited I won't have to hear much more about the stunning poetic prose of Bronze Age perfect.

Yeah. The Atlantic, every time. It never fails to disappoint. It's so weird because there's this whole thing that opens the article where he's talking about how like, you know, the first strains of this new anti-democratic, you know, anti-liberal thinking in academia came out through philosophy students who, you know, realized that their professors just took for granted, you know, the truth about things like the value of human rights and weren't ready for their arguments against them. And it was these people who didn't want to be told not to think in certain ways. It was like, no, man, they were assholes.

They're asshole rich kids who needed somebody to hit them in the fucking face. They need a folding chair deployed on them. Like, yeah, yeah. We all got to see it recently. I demand a shutdown of all coastal universities until we figure out what the fuck is going on yeah yeah yeah i'm sorry if you were pretending that you were like somehow in the insurgent underground uh as the son of an mit professor going to mit yourself like

you fucking dilettante that's all that's all this fucker is is a dilettante and that's all most of the people following are it's a mix of dilettantes and guys who are going to shoot up walmart's um anyway yeah great yeah cool give them give them a follow give them a follow i've been checking out activated sleeper and i've learned a lot already so uh oh yeah yeah you're getting pilled by him yeah yeah yeah pretty much I you know as much as one can be pilled by a 14 year old but uh yeah really interesting stuff here

fair to say that this is an insight into a world oh buddy fuck me alright yeah wait we're not talking about that we are not talking about his bedroom wall bye everyone oh oh wait now I gotta look James what did you Fuck me. All right, yeah. Wait, we're not talking about that. We are not talking about his bedroom wall. Bye, everyone. Oh, wait, now I got to look. James, what did you...

We can bleep it. You have to at least tell us what you... Oh, wow. His pinned... It's fucking... I'm not sure if you can see the fucking... Oh, it's a Confederate flag. Yeah.

No, what's on the bed, though? Confederate flag and what looks like... Is that a German nationalist flag? No, buddy. Is it like a German empire? Oh, it is. There's a fellow in there. Is that Imperial German nationalist flag? No, buddy. Is it like a German empire? Oh, it is. It's yellow in there. Is that Imperial Germany?

Yeah. I think this guy's a Kaiserreich dude. No, dude, he's Francoist. This is certainly impressive, Benjamin. I'm sure he's getting all the ladies in there. I gotta show you guys this pinned tweet, and then I'll read it. It's all caps.

Fed post. Let me tell you how much i want a fed post there are 100 billion neurons within my brain if a fed post was written on each and every one those neurons it would not equal one billionth of the compulsion i feel the fed post at this micro instant fed post fed post that means posting about doing a terrorism so that the feds come and shoot you. This is the type of tweet that could either come from some, like, like, mentally unwell leftist. Yeah. Or a Nazi. It's really unclear.

Yeah. The flag he has, just to be clear, it's a Francoist flag of Spain, which is something that at some point we will have to talk about, which is the American right has been embracing Franco as, like, based in good. For a while now, like, it's this kind of return to Catholic tradition and, like, it's this anti-woke crusader.

I do like all of the suggested follows here on Activated Sleepers page. Sun optimist. Alaric the Barbarian Imperator Philippus. All of these people are such sad nerds. He's retweeted a post from Bronze Age Jacob Yaroski. Jews are like the one ring for politics.

All right. Well, I think we've done enough here. I think we've reached peak usefulness. I don't think we've done enough here I think we've reached the I think we've reached peak usefulness I don't think we have I hope you've all learned a lot from this have a wonderful week everyone

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where if you're listening to this episode, it's the middle of the week. You probably know what this podcast is. You know what it's about. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Now, if you've been reading the news about China at all in the past few years, you've probably at least heard of China's Belt and Road Initiative, probably followed by a stream of almost panicked fearmongering about China displacing America's role in the world and luring countries into debt traps that allow the CCP to seize control of the country's assets and then its entire foreign policy. And all of this begs the question, what actually is Belt and Road? This is not a simple question, because Belt and Road isn't really a coherent single project at all. It is effectively a marketing term slapped onto an enormous array of loans, investments, some things that are effectively grants, infrastructure projects, and special economic zones across the world.

The money for these projects comes from a variety of Chinese banks, and sometimes just like government agencies like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and involve a vast array of different Chinese companies and contractors. So what are these banks and companies and governments actually up to? I'm going to run through three examples to get a sense of the kind of program that composes Belt and Road. One very common program is extending lines of credit to state oil companies of oil producers in order to secure China's supply of oil. I'm starting here because this is not typically what people think of when

someone brings up Belt and Road. And it gets at a couple of the central complexities of Belt and Road. One is, you know, a lot of this stuff is just in some sense almost banal attempts to just sort of secure natural resources by paying money for them and investing money in them, which is very, very standard sort of capitalist behavior. But another complexity of this aspect of Belt and Road is that these loans to oil producers were happening well before Belt and Road ever existed. The credit lines were simply absorbed into Belt and Road when the project was announced in 2013, and now these loans are considered Belt and Road projects. This is a very common tread in Belt and Road. Much of the vaunted $1 trillion of investment in Belt and Road projects comes from, you know, the extension of pre-existing projects, which really sort of puts into perspective all of those like very, very scary like maps that you'll see where they're like 100 blah, blah, blah countries have accepted Belt and Road Project. It's like, well, yeah, okay. How much of that's new and how much of that is people who had some random agreement with China beforehand? Now, lest you think the fact that China is giving a bunch of money to Brazil's state oil company means that this whole Belt and

Road thing has something to do with socialism, here's a quote from china's 13th five-year plan quote we will speed up efforts to implement the free trade area strategy gradually establishing a network of high standard free trade areas we will actively engage in negotiations with other countries and regions along the route of the Belt and Road Initiative on the building of free trade areas. Now, this is the ancient neoliberal dream. It is a dream of a world where corporations can freely move their commodities across borders while maintaining zones of just unlimited exploitation of workers and special economic zones. Now, speaking of sort of the condition of workers, let us move to a more typical Belt and Road project, Jamaica's North-South Highway.

In 2014, at the astounding cost of $700 million, the Jamaican government opened the North-South Highway. Here's from an article that was republished in Laosan. Quote, Since Jamaica needed a Chinese loan to finance the highway, Chinese Harbor Engineering Company was granted the right to own and operate the highway for 50 years as part of the arrangement. Also, the tolls collected on the highway cannot be used for debt servicing and rather go to the China Harbor Engineering Company directly as profit. Additionally, the tolls are astronomical by local standards. To drive the

length of the highway in a standard car costs the equivalence of over $12 each way. This is well out of reach for the vast majority of Jamaicans, where the average monthly salary is about $600, and only 60% of workers have a wage or salaried position at all. Many of my respondents wondered, for whom was this highway? The answer may lie in the additional concessions granted to the China Harbor Engineering Company. Primarily 1,200 acres of land across the highway to be held in perpetuity. Apparently, this will be used to construct hotels and adjoining infrastructure by Chinese companies for Chinese tourists. A kind of economic enclave from which locals would not benefit directly as acknowledged by the then jamaican minister of transport now this sucks for jamaican workers who you know

didn't get any of the money from the contract which you know went to chinese firms that imported chinese workers and it's also not a great deal for like the Jamaican government, which is an enormous amount of debt and gets seemingly very little for this. And this begs the question, why do countries agree to this? now the short answer is that they need money for development projects and you know for a poor country that money is very hard to come by part of the popularity of the project is that economies who've been through the you know the just devastating process of imf structure reforms who've had literally their entire economy and social system torn apart, who have literally watched food being taken from the mouths of their children in order to pay off IMF loans, are looking for literally any alternative. And as we've discussed on this

show before, Jamaica itself was the first country to be looted by the IMF as its social democratic government was forced to shred its welfare state and its economy in the 70s as a condition for getting IMF loans. make it more likely that countries will turn to Belt and Road rather than the IMF to deal with their complete lack of development and to stave off economic crises resulting from the fact that their government has completely run out of money. And this is something even liberal imperialist institutions will admit. Here's from the Council on Foreign Relations' Belt and Road Task Force report. Quote, In contrast to loans from traditional providers of development finance, China's loans are generally not concessional, and the Chinese Development Bank and the Export-Import

Bank of China expect to make a return on their investments. The loans also lack policy conditionality. They contain few or no exceptions of host country economic policy or political reforms. Now, the Council on Foreign Relations concludes this with a very slick line that goes, quote, for many Belt and Road Initiative countries, especially authoritarian regimes, this is an attractive package, especially compared with other lenders who insist on reforms tied to loans. Now, okay, when you hear the words, you know, when you hear that authoritarian regimes don't want to do the quote reforms tied to loans, that makes it sounds like the quote unquote reforms are like, you know, you dictators cede power to a democracy, you won't get IMF funding. That is not, that is not how IMF loan conditions work. What those reforms actually entail is much

closer to sell every state-owned asset in the country to a bunch of American investors and we will leave your children to die. Now, you know, and this leads into some other stuff that the Council on Foreign Relations talks about a lot, which is, you know, they have entire giant sessions about corruption on Belt and Road programs to which, you know, the immediate response is like, man, do you know how much money the IMF gave Pinochet? They gave him over a billion dollars in 1980s money. That is like $3 billion in today's money. Now, hilariously, the other people who gave Pinochet a boatload of money was the Chinese Communist Party. Although, you know, orders of magnitude less because this is like the 70s Chinese Communist Party who do not have much money, but they had enough money,

apparently, to give a bunch of it to Pinochet. And it's at this point that I want to remind everyone that China is the third largest voting member of the IMF, which is a real issue for both the sort of liberal and pro-CCP accounts of the conflict between the CCP and the IMF over providing loans. Because, you know, contrary to the way both of these groups seem to think about sort of the modern capitalist economy, China is not a, you know, an old communist radical, like throwing stones at the liberal order from outside the house. They are parts of the global financial institutions. And to the extent that like, you know, China can be fighting an institution that it is also a part of, right. To the extent of the, to the extent that that even makes sense to talk about what you're really talking about is just inter-capitalist competition over who gets to give people loans.

Now, there's other interesting stuff in this report, like an admission that the Chinese, you know, the sort of Chinese debt trap narrative is overblown. in about like a Chinese company taking a port in Sri Lanka is not it's not exactly like the story that everyone thinks it is and you know like the Chinese company like got the port after like a bidding process and stuff so you know and this is true um and the fact that it's been used sort of like hyped up to do fear-ongering is absolutely true. However, the thing the council on foreign relations can't actually sort of say is that the actual conclusion that you get if you look closely at sort of this combination of, you know, a country like Sri Lanka that has both IMf loans and like uh loads from china is that uh all of the lenders in the global capitalist economy absolutely suck and they all exploit the working class of the debtor countries like in their own ways do you know who else exploits the working class of debtor countries? It is the products and services that support this podcast.

And we're back. Now, what is notable about Belt and Road is that Belt and Road's infrastructure projects usually do actually get built. But for all of the sort of screaming about like China's geopolitical expansion, its attempt to subvert the democratic order, the actual reason why these projects, unlike, you know, so many other large scale development projects actually happen and, you know, actually do get built is much more banal. It is a product of internal Chinese economics. So to explain this, I'm going to turn to another example of a type of Belt and Road project, giving countries loans to buy telecommunications and internet equipment from Chinese companies. Here's from fizz.org. China's demand for infrastructure, including communications and internet gear,

is not as high as it used to be, said Chinese Development Bank President Zhang Zhijie. So, what can we do with the excess production capacity? We can only send it abroad. We may give you loans to buy Chinese equipment or materials, but there must be a Chinese element, Zhang told AFP of his bank's loans to help Chinese firms abroad. Now, this is an interesting quote for a number of reasons. Recent sort of American and also Canadian, the Canadians went wild over this. Concern around Chinese telecom companies have, you know,

argued that the spread of Chinese communication technology is like a geopolitical power grab by the CCP. The Chinese Development Bank, however, kind of like lets the actual game slip, which is that the reason for these loans and a major impetus for the sort of broader Belt and Road Initiative is finding a solution to Chinese production overcapacity, which is the giant structural problem, which sort of hangs like the doom of Damocles over the Chinese economy. And this is incredibly important. Foreign policy analysts have a tendency, which is replicated in the media, to think about Belt and Road as fundamentally a

geopolitical tool. Take, for example, this line from foreign policy, quote, Well, the developing world fall under China's sway. Many policymakers in Washington, D.C. certainly fear so, which is one of the reasons they have created the new International Development Finance Corporation, which is slated to begin operating at the end of this year, like the Marshall Plan, which in post-World War II years used generous economic aid to fight the appeal of Soviet communism in Western Europe. The International Development Finance Corporation aims to help Washington push back against Beijing's sweeping Belt and Road Initiative. Now, fascinatingly, the authors

don't seem to understand what the Marshall Plan actually was. Now, the Marshall Plan, you know, despite what you will like, probably read in sort of like mainstream, like diplomatic histories, was not like, originally was not really driven by anti-communism at all. It was in large part a product of massive industrial overcapacity in post-war, in the post-war US, particularly in the automotive sector. Demand from the domestic American market couldn't support the enormously expanded auto industry's industrial capacity. And so the auto industry went to Congress and tried to get them to rebuild Europe as another market that they could sell cars to that could absorb the product of their

overcapacity. The only way they could actually get this to work was to that could absorb the product of their capacity. The only way they could actually get this to work was to tie it to a raft of anti-communism. And this is now how the project is remembered as this, you know, as this sort of like grand anti-communist, like political strategy, you know, and, and in this sense, Belt and Road can be understood as China's Marshall Plan. It is a bold attempt to forge an international solution to its domestic economic problems. And this means to actually understand what Belt and Road is, we need to go back to the beginning. In response to the financial collapse of 2008, China carried out what was, until COVID, the largest stimulus in human history, an incomprehensibly large Keynesian program focused on internal infrastructure

development designed to shock the Chinese economy back into shape. And it worked for about one year. In 2010, the Chinese economy hit 10% year-on-year GDP growth, and it has been falling ever since. In 2011, the round of global uprisings kicked off by the Arab Spring hit China in the form of the Wukong riots and a wave of strikes. And by 2013, a year into the first term of new Chinese President Xi Jinping, the economy was doing terribly and the government was still not out of the woods politically either in response the government announced two programs within about four months of each other belton road and the so-called mini stimulus another chinese stimulus package aimed at improving chinese rail is that the proper term for it? It ended up proving the Chinese train network. Now, these two programs were effectively the same response to the economic crisis faced by the CCP. Rising wages and strike activity and later environmental protests were threatening the profitability of the Chinese manufacturing sector in its traditional coastal urban sectors like Shenzhen.

coastal urban sectors like Shenzhen. The solution, then, was to move Chinese capital towards the interior of the country into more rural areas with lower wages, and then build an infrastructure network to export Chinese commodities abroad. This move served several purposes at the same time. On the one hand, cheaper rural workers were less likely to organize either strikes or environmental protests. On the other hand, some kind of rural investment could secure rural factional support for the party at a time when the rural wukan riots meant that such support was anything but assured. But even in 2013, it was clear that the vaunted Chinese transition to a consumer economy was going to fail. Because, and this is really blindingly obvious if you think about how the Chinese economy works for like 10 seconds. Okay, in order to have a consumer economy, you must have a class of consumers.

Now, this requires average people to have a thing called money, and both Xi Jinping and the Chinese capitalist class more broadly just absolutely resolutely refuse to do anything that like involves paying Chinese workers more, which is what you need

to make this happen, and they just refuse to do it. It is genuinely stunning. jinping xi jinping would literally rather force like force the force the randomly the head like the ceos of corporations to give money to charity and call it a government program before he would he would like fucking raise a minimum wage so you know if you're in 2013 right you can see the writing on the wall you can see the chinese economy isn't going to like turn into a consumer economy there's been you know there's been some transition into like a service-based economy but like you know ask ask the u.s how gross that a

service-based economy works for you and because they've seen the writing on the wall, Chinese capitalists start looking for ways to make money overseas. And this overlaps with a growing demand to do something with the enormous reserves of American dollars that China has from basically propping up the US economy by buying a trillion dollars of US bonds in the 2000s and early 2010s. And like, you think I'm joking when I say like a trillion dollars, but it is actually around a trillion dollars. Well, OK, this is where I need to make an enormous disclaimer. Oh, boy. OK, it is atrociously difficult to get reliable economic statistics out of China to the point where like the Chinese

central government, when they get data from their own provinces who are legally required to report data to them, they have to mess with the data to make it make literally any sense at all. They have these, they have these equations that they they were that they like apply to the statistical data from the provinces they get that are effectively attempts to calculate how much the provinces are lying to the central government and how you know try to figure out a way to fix it and you know they're they are doing things they are doing things like they're doing things out of like the old late soviet union they are they are they are using satellite pictures to check how much light there is from factories at night they are like measuring

how many freight trains are like going into a province and trying to use that to estimate their actual industrial capacity it is wild and that is just the c the CCP trying to figure out its own numbers. And that means, right, that the numbers the CCP actually decides to release when they're done trying to get the data to look kind of real so they can understand what's going on in their own economy um the you know so there's that data which is unreliable because again like you're dealing with everyone just lying to you about what the data is but then the day the ccp actually releases uh oh boy uh so we're gonna come back to this in a little bit but uh chinese youth unemployment right now is 20 and the ccp's response to this is they've announced that they refuse to release any more youth unemployment numbers until they finish, like, recalculating it or something. So great stuff. Amazing stuff happening in the world of Chinese statistical annexes. It is awful.

I don't wish this on anyone. Yeah. Now, all of this is to say that the case I'm about to make is probably true. Like there's like a 90% chance that what I'm about to say is true, but we don't 100% know because it relies on Chinese economic data that is incredibly sketchy. And a lot of this has turned into this sort of like game of financial hide and seek with all these assets that are in weird places. But what seems to have happened is that a lot of Belt and Road projects are being funded by Chinese foreign exchange reserves, which is those trillions of dollars of like bonds I was talking about earlier of that. You know, we're moved from the People's Bank of China, which is China's central bank to like other banks.

And then those banks use that to do investments. And this appears to be some of the money that was used to fund Belt and Road projects. And this is where things get very sketchy. Now, these banks seem to initially have been flush with capital, which contributed to a massive – as the product is initially starting and up through about 2018, like it's just, you know, it just keeps the, the amount of money going into this keeps increasing, keeps increasing. And then 2018, it starts to slow.

And then after the pandemic and particularly after like 2021, 2022, like the amount of money that's going into Belt and Road projects has imploded. And the amount of loans that the CCP is writing off has just diminished enormously. that these loans have sort of dried up. And the reason that this has been decreasing is that China is like burning through its reserve of foreign exchange. Like it's burning out of, it's burning through its reserve of like US dollars that it has in its banks. This may be true.

Maybe it's probably not true of like 2018 because, and this is the thing that's been discovered very recently. Um, a lot of Chinese was like a lot of things that, that like a technically foreign exchange reserves were like technically aren't qualified classified as foreign exchange reserves because they've been weird stuff.

What's happened to the balance sheet. I know it's kind of a mess, but like it's, it seems like China has way, way larger. They have these things called shadow reserves that are the things that they've been using to turn Forex into investments. And this seems to indicate that China has way, way larger foreign exchange reserves than it technically are on the balance sheet. So what the actual relationship between how much foreign

exchange reserves China has and how much money is putting into Belt and Road, we don't know. It's a disaster. But what we do know is that these investments were not like sort of like mere geopolitical tools, right? These investments were actually designed to make money. And that means that they were and still are an attempt to solve sort of the weakness of the Chinese economy by finding ways to invest capital with better returns than the absolutely terrible and increasingly dog shit rates that you can find in china and this is something that we've been seeing you know in the last year we've been watching sort of the dogs come like the the chickens come home to roost for the chinese economy we're like you know all this debt build-ups paying off well i say paying off all this debt build-up is you know like really starting to damage the economy like the housing market's kind of imploding and you know belton road was supposed to be sort of the answer to this right if you combined if you combine the fact that we know for a fact that these loans are an attempt to actually like

generate returns and we also know that these loans are a way to sort of stimulate demand for chinese goods that there's no domestic market for we get this clear picture of what's really driving belt and road it's the crisis of Chinese capital, which in and of itself is just sort of a reflection of the global crisis of overproduction and underconsumption that's haunted the world since the 1970s. Now, there's one last aspect of Belt and Road that we need to talk about that gets way less attention than any other aspect of the initiative. Belt and Road also acts as a work program for a very specific kind of Chinese worker.

Belt and Road projects, as you see in Jamaica, are run by Chinese corporations almost always. I mean, occasionally other firms get contracted, mostly as Chinese corporations, and they import Chinese workers to do the work. And, you know, we've looked at it from the Jamaican end, where, you know, Jamaican workers are getting screwed out of jobs and wages, but we should also look at it from the perspective of Chinese workers as well.

Working in China, as we've discussed elsewhere extensively, sucks ass. Wages are dog shit, the hours are inhuman, and there's intense competition for what jobs do exist. On the other hand, salaries for Chinese workers on built-in road projects are much, much higher than they are for the same job in China. Amazingly, Chinese corporations abroad actually have less ability to just not pay people for their work, which is usually the first thing that rich people try to do when they are faced with having to pay someone. And Chinese corporations absolutely constantly attempt to just not pay their workers. And as a bonus to that, on top of the fact that you're like actually getting paid and you're getting paid way more than you would for working a job in China. These belt and road jobs have a much faster promotion track and the cost of living is much lower than it is in China, which allows workers to save money and send remittances back

home. This means that belt and road jobs, which are specifically in sort of like nationalist circles conceptualized as quote Africa, which is, oh boy, is seen as, you know, it's seen as a way out for Chinese workers. And we actually talked about this a long time ago in our Lying Flat anti-work episodes. Part of the origins of Lying Flat was his reaction to this sort of like nationalist discourse, but like finding your own personal Africa to break out of like Chinese involution. And, you know, from this kind of like ultra nationalist, like really racist, like concept, you get this like left wing backlash, a co-opting of like the refusal to work that is, you know, lying flat. But for our purposes right now, the important thing about this is

Belt and Road was a solution to a sort of new, highly educated Chinese working class who were suddenly realizing that this education that they put literally everything into and sunk their entire lives into was just going to get them nowhere. And Belt and Road appeared as a sort of mirage of a way out, but it's not. It's not a way out for Chinese workers. It's its own kind of imperialism. It's the same sort of shit that oil companies do where they said highly paid American workers to oil wells in Nigeria to avoid having to deal with a class of skilled and politically sophisticated Nigerian oil workers. It's the same kind of sort of racial divide and conquer that funds Chinese workers at the expense of workers in Jamaica. And that ultimately is the core of both Belt and Road and the American response to Belt and Road. It is a desperate attempt to keep the embers of capital burning by lighting the

working class on fire and feeding it to the flames. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. 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 gasoline counters with

shape-shifters 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 the 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 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. If you're 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. Hi, everyone. It's me, James, today. And I'm joined by Megan Beaudet, who's the Director of Research at the Kurdish Peace Institute. We're picking up where we left off at the end of last week to discuss more about the Autonomous Administration in

North and East Syria and perhaps more specifically to talk about the detainees, the ISIS detainees in the Al-Hol camp and in other camps around there. How are you, Megan? I'm doing well. Thank you, James. Thank you for having me on for this important conversation about a really critical security and humanitarian issue that we're seeing in northeast Syria these days. Yeah, thanks for joining us. So I think to start out with, would you be comfortable giving a sort of baseline explanation of what's happening with these ISIS detainees and why, despite the fact that many of them are citizens of other countries, there haven't been a return there? Yeah, that's a very important place to start with. So essentially, after the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2019 by the Syrian Democratic Forces and the International

Coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Autonomous Administration, which is the political body governing northeast Syria, ended up with tens of thousands of ISIS detainees and the family members of these ISIS members as well. And in the Al-Hol camp, you now have a population of essentially ISIS-affiliated women and the children of ISIS members who are now housed in that camp as well. And this camp is a serious humanitarian issue. You have these children who are in very difficult conditions. It's a massive security problem for the surrounding Syrian and Iraqi communities that were victimized by ISIS and the world. ISIS openly wants to reconstitute itself. It is operating inside the camp clandestinely to reconstitute itself. It wants to break prisoners

out and go right back to its genocidal policies against minorities in the region like Yazidis and Christians and to continue terror attacks, not only in Iraq and Syria, but around the world. It's also a real drain on the resources of the Autonomous Administration and the SDF themselves, who we have to remember are not a state actor, but are dealing with the sort of problems that even the wealthiest and most militarily established state actors would have trouble with. So they've ended up in this unenviable position of having to take care of essentially criminals from around the world who came to their country to commit mass atrocities, while the victims of these ISIS crimes across northern and eastern Syria and victims of

the subsequent Turkish invasions that northern and eastern Syria suffered during and after the fight against ISIS really lack basic resources. Now, this is something I heard a lot on the ground when I was in the region in February and March, speaking to people from Afrin, which was invaded and occupied by Turkey in 2018, and to people from Serikaniye and Tal Abyad, which were invaded and occupied by Turkey in 2019. Many of them asked rightly why there were so many resources from international bodies and NGOs and governments provided towards the ISIS detainees in Al-Hol and the ISIS-affiliated individuals there, when their communities, their families, who had done nothing other than simply living in areas that Turkey decided to invade and occupy,

who were displaced because of that in what experts, including myself, would refer to as ethnic cleansing, these communities are receiving nothing from the international community. You know, they feel forgotten and they have some serious questions about that. Of course, the autonomous administration has many needs and many pressing security problems that it simply can't devote enough resources to when it's tasked with managing the world's ISIS members. So in a recent study that we published at the Kurdish Peace Institute by journalist Matt Broomfield, who spent a lot of time on the ground in northeast Syria during and after the defeat of ISIS, he found that just 4% of foreign ISIS fighters held by Syrian Kurdish

authorities have been repatriated since 2019. 4%. Most of the repatriations have been women and children, not the fighters themselves who are housed in prisons. But of course, the women and children are a humanitarian issue and a security issue, too. So think about that. Those are really dangerous numbers. Yeah, I think that differentiation between fighters and women and children is interesting. And perhaps one we should pick apart a little bit because um there's a bit we talked about this before we recorded like there's there's a betrayal uh certainly of like western women who went to join isis as having been sort of victims in their own uh right which some of

them were very young right and might not have been making like adult choices at that time and that's that's one thing but like a lot of these people willingly participated in an extremely oppressive and violent regime. And they sort of are being, they're often not portrayed as such in the, in the press. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Look, what I always go back to when I talk about this issue is reading accounts from Yazidi women and children who survived ISIS captivity, who've said on multiple occasions that the women were no less brutal than the men, and that they were willing participants in every aspect of the worst of ISIS crimes, of genocide, of crimes against humanity, against the Yazidi people, and of course, all the other peoples that

ISIS targeted. So that I think when you have these genocide survivors saying that, no, these women participated fully in these crimes, they facilitated these crimes, they made this system of genocide, of crimes against humanity possible, that's something we have to listen to. And I'm glad that you bring up the Western media portrayal because you really you see this idea that the women could not have been perpetrators themselves when what we hear on the ground is that that's not true. And what legal cases have begun to find is that that's not true either. There's been trials in Europe for ISIS affiliated women for their complicity in acts of genocide against the Yazidi community. And you know, one point that you hear very commonly on the ground is that how can there

have only been one or two, just a handful of trials? I'm not sure the exact number. But after all of these people missing, all of these people killed, how are all of these ISIS members, and that's why I said, you know, ISIS affiliated women, because I don't think I do agree with you. It's a disservice to just refer to them as ISIS brides or whatever sensationalistic media framing you have. These people simply aren't being put on trial. And one of the reasons for that is that when we come to female members of ISIS, there is this perception both in media and from governments, from international institutions, that these women are victims, that because they're women,

because they subscribed willingly to a political and ideological system that was very, very oppressive of women, that puts women only into certain roles as housewives, as mothers of the next generation of ISIS, that these women couldn't have committed atrocities, but they have. They did. And you know what we're hearing right now in some of the reporting that's coming out of northeast Syria is that even within the camps, these women have continued to commit some of the most serious abuses that ISIS has been committing. There's reports that they have raped, sexually assaulted the teenage boys who are in the camp in order to essentially become pregnant and raise more children to create that next generation of ISIS that they seek to create.

And so this continued perpetration of sexual violence against these boys who've done nothing other than had the misfortune to have their parents be members of ISIS. You know, this is a very, very serious allegation. The reporting about this is something that needs to be taken very seriously. Like I said, this is a massive human rights crisis for these children. like i said this is a massive human rights crisis for these children um and it is you know these women are no less dangerous and no less culpable for their crimes than uh their male counterparts uh who joined isis yeah i think that's very fair to say and it's somewhat of a like sexist outlet to be like a women couldn't have had agency in the way that men clearly have been held accountable for and like i think it's that the last issue you raised is obviously pretty horrible um but also we should at least dig into a

little bit i think like the the ongoing like not only the abuse of children but like the sort of attempt to indoctrinate children into that same like extremist ideology the attempt to even like i've seen videos of kids training with little wooden guns and yeah and sort of raising another generation of people who believe in this kind of hateful outlook and and can you talk a little bit about how common that is or how i guess you don't know entirely but can you speak to that a little bit yeah i mean that is something that none of us know how common it is because of the sort of difficulty of accessing that information. But if you look at what is coming in from sources from North and East Syria, from international reporting on the camp,

these women are indoctrinating their children into the ISIS ideology. They have said many times over in many of their communications that their goal is to raise the next generation of ISIS fighters. There's no reason to believe that the majority of these women have given up on their beliefs. And there is evidence that this is what they're trying to do. And of course, when you look at the broader situation that these children are in, it's a situation that's exceedingly conducive to radicalization because of the poor conditions in the camps, because of the fact that they remain with their mothers, many of whom believe firmly in ISIS ideology and who see the role of women in ISIS as doing exactly that, as passing down this ideology. And, you know, when these children,

they can't be safely repatriated to their countries, they can't be put into safe environments where they can receive the support they need, the positive influences they need, any kind of medical or psychological help that they need. In these conditions, it's inevitable that you're going to have the continuation of this ISIS ideology being perpetrated. And the adults there, these women continuing to pass this down on these children, who again, have done nothing to be put in the situation that they're in. They're continuing to be victimized by the actions of their parents and the other ISIS members. So, and the international community too is at fault here, you know, for refusing to repatriate at least these children and to try ISIS perpetrators of war crimes,

crimes against humanity and genocide. Yeah. In some cases, they've even been like, had their citizenship stripped from them of the countries that they came from. The UK has done that, for example, right, which is kind of just failing to do anything to acknowledge that this is an international problem that they have. And that's something we can get into is the international dynamic surrounding these issues, because it's obviously very closely related to the ISIS issue, but it touches on so many other very internationalized conflicts as well. Yeah, let's do that. Perhaps before we explain the way that nations that are more distant from this are engaging with it, we should talk about how nations that are more

proximal to this are engaging with it, and specifically how at times it seems like turkish drone strikes which we've discussed previously um on on our podcast so people will be familiar with them have at the very least not helped the sdf to keep these camps secure right and uh in some some cases, you can see there's a video that the YPJ have of these people celebrating a drone strike inside the camp. Can you talk about the impact these drone strikes have? Look, something that has been reported by journalists, by local sources, and by all sorts of international researchers and experts since the earliest days of the war against ISIS is that Turkey wanted ISIS to succeed in its mission of taking over northern Iraq and northern Syria in order to not only destroy Kurdish political and military

structures operating there, including the YPG, the YPJ, the later the SDF and the Autonomous Administration, but also to destroy the social base for any form of Kurdish autonomy, any kind of multi-ethnic project to potentially be able to exist there either now or in the future. And this facilitation of the rise of ISIS reached such a level that you've had legal experts through the Yazidi Justice Committee, which published an in-depth report on this last year, end quote, by ISIS, by allowing fighters to cross its borders, to join the group, allowing ISIS-related economic activity to go on, and other forms of facilitation of the rise of ISIS when it was committing its most serious crimes. So this is not something new. The way that these drone strikes specifically impact this issue, they're part of the broader Turkish campaign of aggression against northeast Syria.

Obviously, the two ground invasions of Afrin and of Serekani and Tal Abyad had very negative impacts on the fight against ISIS. And the drone strikes now, first of all, they make it difficult for any SDF or autonomous administration structure to simply do the day-to-day work of providing security and providing the government. If a government official or a member of the local security forces has to modify their behavior, has to modify where they go, how they interact with their constituents, what kind of missions they can conduct to avoid being assassinated in a drone strike, they're simply not going to be as effective, right? So this is a problem in many

areas. It certainly impacts the counter-ISIS mission. And Turkey has specifically started to increasingly target ANES, SDF, and ASEAN internal security forces personnel who are directly engaged in counter-ISIS missions. We saw this in late 2022 when there were severe Turkish air operations following a bombing in Istanbul that Turkey, based on all evidence, falsely attempted to attribute to Kurdish groups despite there being no real evidence supporting that claim. These attacks targeted civilians, civilian infrastructure, and SDF forces engaged in key counter-ISIS missions, including SDF forces involved in securing the Al-Hol camp. And now we've even started to see, in addition to these anti-SDF, anti-autonomous

administration drone strikes, Turkey's been using drones to fire essentially warning shots at the international coalition led by the U.S. and the other coalition countries itself. We saw this in November when there was a drone strike on the joint SDF coalition base, where the SDF and the international community worked together to plan ongoing counter-ISIS missions. And earlier this year, in I believe April of this year, the drone strike on Sulaymaniyah International Airport in Iraqi Kurdistan, where there was a joint SDF coalition convoy, where SDF Commander-in-Chief Mazloum Kobani was present and US forces were also present. That strike, for all intents and purposes, was Turkey's attempt not only to threaten the SDF and the

autonomous administration, but to threaten the coalition as well, specifically for its continuing counter-ISIS partnership with Syrian Kurds. So this has risen to a level where Turkey's not only using these to disrupt governance and security at the local level in the autonomous administration, it's not only using them against locally- SDF, YPG led counter ISIS missions, but Turkey is using drones to threaten the entire global counter ISIS campaign, of which on paper, it's formally a member. So there you go. Yeah.

And Turkey is kind of, we talked about this again before, how it pressured like newer NATO members, Finland, Sweden, to even stop accepting Kurdish refugees, right? It's while at the same time being a member of NATO and as you say, also drone striking other members of NATO. It's certainly like, it's making it as hard as possible for people in this part of the world to have the stability and peace and the things that they fought so hard for, for such a long time. I wonder if you can talk about like, so what is the, as far as the international community

exists, which is a pretty nebulous thing to really kind of pin down. But is what is specifically like this US led coalition to defeat ISIS, I think they call it, doing to help? And like, I guess a little more broadly building on that, this coalition has a very narrow focus in a place where there are a lot of different aggressors to include various other Islamist groups, to include the Turkish state and obviously the state in Syria. Can you explain a little bit about how the mission of this coalition is narrow in a way that helps it doing the things that people on the ground then need to ensure peace and stability? Yeah, exactly. That's a really important question. Because as you said, this international relationship with Northeast Syria

is very narrowly built on a counter ISIS focus, which means a military focus. So there's relationships between security forces and security forces. What we don't see are political relationships. And this connects to a wide variety of issues related to this immediate problem of ISIS, of securing ISIS prisoners, of bringing ISIS perpetrators of genocide and war crimes to justice. But it also connects to the deeper problem of the kind of long-term stability in Syria that's necessary to end this ongoing civil war, to bring justice to the victims of ISIS and to all other abuses and atrocities during the 12 years of conflict in Syria,

and to prevent the next endless war in this region from inevitably taking place in the future. So we have this narrow military partnership. The reason that this relationship evolved in this way was going back to the role of Turkey, because the United States and its European allies had no other YPJ at that time that would be capable of the military responsibility of defeating ISIS. It was essentially, if people remember, the resistance of the YPG and the YPJ at Kobani in northeastern Syria that held out long enough where the United States and the International Coalition realized that their only option, if they wanted to defeat ISIS on the ground, was to partner with these forces. Before that also, we're recording this in August, the situation in Sinjar, where ISIS had gone in, had committed genocide against the Yazidi community,

and were the only people who were able to actually come in and help Yazidis defend themselves and evacuate refugees to safety in Syria, were again the YPG, the YPJ, and the PKK guerrillas as well. Because these Kurdish forces were able to help local civilians in Sinjar defend themselves and evacuate so many refugees to safety, it forced the international community's hand to act. The PKK intervened in Sinjar to start that humanitarian mission on August 4th. U.S. airstrikes began on August 7th. It was this local response from these non-state actors that forced the international community, you know, these states with actual treaty obligations to respond to and prevent mass atrocities to take action.

But because Turkey views the PKK as a terrorist group, it views the YPG and the YPJ as indistinguishable from the PKK and therefore as a terrorist group, the entire counter-ISIS mission from the very beginning was faced with this question of how these states that wanted to fight ISIS could do so without offending their relationships with Turkey as a member of NATO and an ally in other respects. So this connects specifically to the ISIS issue, not only because the contradiction here dates back to the counter ISIS campaign, but because actual international trials for ISIS members, actual security policies that could address the problems in al-Hul would legitimize the SDF and the Autonomous Administration on the international

stage and would legitimize the political philosophies behind what they're doing, all of which Turkey deems to be a very serious national security threat to its existence. I mean, imagine you have a Kurdish woman judge questioning an ISIS member responsible for potentially European and American casualties, certainly responsible for casualties and all sorts of abuses across Iraq and Syria, about the evidence that we have, that the international community has, that Northeast Syria has about how Turkey facilitated ISIS actions, you know, with the YPG and the YPJ there for security, with international observers from the U.S. and other coalition countries facilitating, providing legal and security support,

that would absolutely destroy Turkey's narrative about what individuals and entities are terrorists and which ones have actually contributed not only to the territorial militarily defeat of ISIS, not only to the territorial militarily defeat of ISIS, but to social and political and governance projects that are able to prevent, you know, the resurgence of the next ISIS. So, you know, this kind of fear of building political relationships with the autonomous administration, with this fear of legitimizing the Autonomous Administration project and helping it address security problems in a way that would, you know, both increase its standing and legitimacy locally and internationally, and would show how the actions of states like Turkey contributed to prolonging and intensifying the civil war in Syria. States simply don't want to do that yet. But, you know, when we look at the

long-term consequences of whether it's allowing Turkey to continue aggressive actions against northeast Syria and more broadly to pursue a military solution to its Kurdish conflict, whether it's allowing ISIS atrocities to go unpunished, you know, leaving communities that were impacted by ISIS to be essentially re-traumatized and left to live in difficult conditions, not receiving justice, and allowing these ISIS members to continue to have the space to attempt to reconstitute their group and go back to the kind of atrocities they were committing and attacks they were carrying out worldwide in 2014, 2015. In the long run, this sort of appeasement of Turkey over the issue of the Kurdish question

and the role of the autonomous administration, it's going to create the start of the next endless war in the Middle East. And, you know, if policymakers want to avoid that, they need to be addressing these problems from a pro-peace perspective, from a perspective that brings about justice, you know, political solutions based on democracy, on gender equality, on the equality of all communities in the region. All of these values that while imperfectly the autonomous administration is really trying to fight for. Yeah, I think it's super important to point out that like this isn't a necessarily a like turkey versus kurdish people like a dichotomy or like that's those aren't the only people impacted by this right like because like the i think the majority of the anes is not kurdish people right and i think the majority of

the sdf also are not kurdish i mean there's a very good paper by uh dr amy austin holmes who wrote in an analysis of this conflict and the sort of Turkey SDF security dynamics that what we would refer to as the Turkish Kurdish conflict or the Turkey PKK conflict is actually a conflict that impacts every ethnic and religious group in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. And of course you have, and we could do an entire other episode on this, you know, there are certainly Kurds who support Erdogan and the AKP, whether from an Islamist perspective or on the basis of class interests. And you have Turks, ethnic Turkish people, who went to northeast Syria during the height of the fight against ISIS as members of socialist

groups to provide humanitarian aid and to join Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIS on the ground. You have Yazidis, Christians, Syriacs, Assyrians, Armenians, Arabs, all different ethnic groups in Iraq and Syria that are very much impacted by this conflict. And particularly because of the Autonomous Administration's multi-ethnic and multi-religious model. And while the Autonomous Administration system certainly has its shortcomings and hasn't been able to perfectly overcome years and years of sectarian and religious and ethnic challenges, it has made a real attempt at including all of the peoples of the region. And that's one of the reasons why, despite all of these Turkish attacks, despite the threat of ISIS, you know, these communities have continued to band together and participate in SDF and autonomous administration structures in order to try to build governance and real post-ISIS security. So it's certainly not just

a very narrowly defined Turkish Kurdish issue. It's an issue of civil rights, of political rights, of long-term security and stability, of what kind of society and what kind of governance can and should exist in this region, where many Kurds and many other ethnic and religious minorities would argue the European imposition of artificial borders and nation states onto areas that were multi-ethnic and multi-religious for thousands and thousands of years was the source of a lot of these problems that we see today, not only with ISIS, not only with the Syrian war, with the Kurdish conflict in Turkey as well, with many of the issues that we're seeing in Iraq, in Iran, all over the region. So it goes much deeper than that. And I think that understanding the very deep historical roots of these issues is places or trying to or trying to at least

sort of use force to extract wealth are really open to and so it creates this sort of half-assed like you've said that this sort of limited support for only some parts of a project which it doesn't work if you only support part of this project right as we're seeing i wonder i like if people are interested in following more about this i think it's something that like so much of the coverage of this whole area focuses on like specifically women in our whole right or women who went to join isis where can people find out more about what sources would you suggest for following goings on in this area? So, yeah, I would say following local Syrian and Kurdish news sources would be a good place to start.

You have sites like North Press, where I've written before, that provide good perspectives from Syrian Kurdish writers. You have human rights organizations working on the ground, groups like Syrians for Truth and Justice that's done a lot of documentation of issues like, for example, ISIS members who've joined Turkey-backed groups in the occupied areas. You have arguably one of the best English language resources, not only for their own publications, but for researchers and journalists to reach out to. The Rojava Information Center, it does a lot of good work on their own and also a lot of really incredible work to facilitate the work of international researchers and journalists. You have the Kurdish media sites like Hoar News that will give good updates on what the Autonomous Administration is doing and saying

from their perspective. Of course, there are a lot of official pages and sites for autonomous administration and SDF institutions as well. Those tend to be in Kurdish or Arabic. So of course, if you know either of those languages, you can follow them. For English, you have some of the SDF affiliated sites that have been translated. The YPJ Information and Documentation Office have done a lot of work on this issue of ISIS and the related security challenges. They publish in English. They provide good information from that security perspective. And then really, I think any sources on social media online that provide good perspectives from people who are on the

ground, who are providing reputable information, whether it's from a human rights side of things, from the security side of things, from the administration side of things. It's good to get that full spectrum of perspectives of what different actors are doing and seeing. And then, of course, I'd be remiss if I did not promote my own institution. We have published coverage of certainly the ISIS issue in northeast Syria, but also a lot on the wider political, humanitarian and security challenges related to these interlocking conflicts in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, that have sort of formed the very unstable basis on which these developments relevant to global security issues like ISIS are taking place.

So you can certainly read what we've been publishing. Yeah, I think that's an excellent list of resources. And lots of the ones I've been using are the ones that you've mentioned. I would just, I suppose, warn people, especially the latest YPJ Information and Documentation Centre video on our whole comes with a heavy content warning for violence that you will see there, which is it's documenting things that happen. It's not like they are doing the violence.

They're not, but still, if that's something you don't want to see, that's probably a video you don't want to watch. Megan, is there anything people can do to help? I was thinking when we were talking of, I met a Kurdish man a month ago at the border, being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But immigration and customs enforcement, but it's not a topic that gets much coverage in the US. And as a result, people both there and people coming here don't get the compassion that, let's say, Ukrainian people who are also fleeing conflict do get. And you can see that in the way that they're literally treated differently in immigration law. So is there anything people can do to help? Well, I would say that the first thing is exactly like we're doing

now on this discussion and like you as a listener listening to this conversation are doing by hearing from us and following this issue, encourage media, research, human rights groups, analysts, and all others who do work in any of these fields to cover this issue in its full political and security context. Look, we can't only talk about North and East Syria when there's a crisis. ISIS did not come out of nowhere in 2014. The Turkish invasion did not come out of nowhere in 2019. And had we as a society and certainly our institutions been more informed and more aware of the root conditions causing these outbursts of violence, these outbursts of violence may not have happened. They might have been addressed before they happened. And so what does it mean to build that awareness? That means everything from writing a letter to your local newspaper, to producing a report at your university with input from institutions in

northeast Syria, some of these local media and human rights organizations that we've talked about, to hosting an event for your community group on the state of this broadly defined conflict in Turkey and Iraq and Syria and Kurdistan between the Turkish state and these Kurdish groups that, in addition to fighting against ISIS, have been struggling for autonomy, self-determination, equality between men and women, equality of people of different religious beliefs of different ethnic backgrounds long before ISIS was on the agenda and Northeast Syria was on the agenda. We at the Kurdish Peace Institute are always available to help you do this. You can reach out to us on our contact page. We have information on everything from submitting content of your own to resources for reaching out to us for media appearances. Of course, there's all the sources I mentioned as well. And there are other episodes of this

wonderful podcast with very talented expert speakers and interviewers as well who've spoken about issues related to Syria, Turkey, and Kurdistan. You can advocate for greater political support for the autonomous administration, for an end to Turkey's aggressive actions against northeast Syria and its ongoing human rights violations in the occupied areas of Afrin and Ras Al Ain, and for international political support for a democratic, just, peaceful solution to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. This is, I think at the end of the day, the root of all of these problems that we're seeing here. And if this conflict were to be resolved, if Turkey were no longer to take an aggressive militaristic approach to the very concept of Kurdish autonomy, approach to the very concept of Kurdish autonomy, the very social base of Kurdish communities that has the capacity to seek and organize for autonomy itself. This would mean an end to

authoritarianism in Turkey, which has been leading Turkey to all sorts of destabilizing behavior and certainly immiserating countless Turkish citizens. This is one of the reasons why not only Kurds, but many Turkish people of all ethnicities as well have been fleeing Turkey to Europe and even to the United States, has been the escalating persecution, poverty, and difficulty of life under Erdogan, which is directly connected to Erdogan's choice in 2015 to end peace talks with the Kurdish movement in order to consolidate his total power over the state using war and far-right nationalism. This would end not only these difficult conditions within Turkey, this persecution, this economic devastation, this oppression of all oppressed segments of

society, it would end Turkey's aggressive foreign policy in the region as well, which would be hugely important for allowing northeast Syria the stability it needs to put ISIS members on trial, hold them accountable for what they've done, begin to rebuild, give post-ISIS communities a future, allow these people who have suffered so much to defeat this group, of course for themselves, but really for all humanity, to be able to build new lives, recover and have a say in their future. And by doing that, to pursue a political solution to the Syrian conflict. Right now, northeast Syria is the only major part of Syria outside of government control that has a system that is semi-functional, despite all of the setbacks of the war and the economic crisis, which again,

could be a whole other episode, which has empowered women, you know, which has empowered different ethnic and religious communities. They could be part of a political solution in Syria. Turkey's war on the Kurdish movement, you know, is preventing that. This goes into a lot of challenges in Iraq as well with increasing Turkish military operations there related to the conflict that have made life extremely difficult for many different Iraqi communities. But again, all of this, this conflict, you could argue, is the largest and most impactful and certainly one of the longest running, you know, for 40 years now of the modern Middle East. It is an international conflict. The United States, European governments, like we saw with the example of the

U.S. and European position on NATO accession and the concessions to Turkey made there, have been very involved in supporting militarily and politically Turkey's efforts to resolve this conflict militarily and to deny the Kurdish people their rights by force. And we, you listening to this, our communities in all of these different countries that have a stake in this conflict, we're the ones who can change that. And you can do that on two different tracks. So one, you can build awareness in your own community. You can build connections between your community groups and institutions in Northeast Syria, in Turkey, in different places impacted by this conflict in order to find ways that you can help respond to specific needs,

work on specific projects together, and two, in the long run, use those connections, your knowledge you gain from those connections, the resources you create as you reach out to the media, as you meet different people working on this, to reach out to decision makers and show this is an issue that their constituents care about. This is an issue that's not something that governments can do without a response from public opinion. And this is an issue where there is organized pressure to change policy, you know, in favor of peace, in favor of stability, in favor of political solutions. Because when we do that, and there's lots of examples of how different communities and organizations have done that, when we do that on a large enough scale, we're not only

addressing a humanitarian problem, we're not only contributing to peace and stability in the region, but at the end of the day, we can find solutions for these conflicts that mean that there won't be another rise of ISIS. There won't be another Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Syria. And there'll be models for political and social transformation that can help us end conflicts in other parts of the world as well. So there's lots of ways to contribute.

I hope you're inspired to do so. And I think that just listening to this conversation, hearing about what's going on and thinking about what you can do, that's already the first step. You're already there. And that's the most important thing. Yeah, great.

Thanks, Megan. That's a really good, I think, place to end because it gives some people something to do. I think far too often, like it's really easy and immediate to just point at something and say it's bad and then walk away and not sort of leave people a way to help or do something. So I really appreciate you doing that. Is there anywhere people can find you on the

internet? So you can find all of my research and writing at Kurdishpeace.org, as well as all of the research and writing of our brilliant contributors, many of whom are on the ground in northern Syria themselves, in other parts of the region, or who have extensively traveled to that region for their work. I encourage you to read all of our content and to follow our social media pages as well at Kurdish Peace Org on Twitter. And yes, you can read not only my work, but the work of a lot of other really great people that I'm very lucky to collaborate with. Amazing. Thanks so much for your time, Megan.

Thank you, James. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. It's just me, James, today, and I'm joined today by James Cordero and Jacqueline Arellano. They're both from Border Kindness, which is a group that does border aid, chiefly like water drops and support to keep people alive as they're making their journey across the desert here in San Diego. Is that a fair characterization of what you guys do? Yeah, we do work all across the border in california uh currently the two of us we're based out of san diego yeah but we do some of our uh water drops in eastern san diego county and imperial county yeah yeah the organization is based primarily in mexicali baja california

on the mexico side and that's where it was founded okay in response to the arrival of the migrant caravans in 2018 we've personally been doing drops since 2016 but we brought the program over to border kindness a little over a year ago and we operate programs on both sides of the border primarily james and i are involved with water drop but we also as organization, have a school on the Mexico side. We have operated a pro bono clinic on the Mexican side. And currently we're providing direct aid with the families of migrant farm workers in Imperial and Riverside counties. Nice. Yeah, there's a lot of very important things that don't get enough money or attention. So you said you started about a year ago i bet you but you've been doing

the border drops for what's that seven that's a long time seven years yeah um since 2016 and i wonder like if we could start by and we can get into some of the details later but um i've been reporting on the border for that long and there certainly have been notable changes and i wonder what changes you've seen like we go back to like pre-2015 2016 like that was before the whole wall shenanigans um so like do you guys want to describe like what changes you've seen in in patterns of migration and like i guess how safe that journey is or isn't and how that's changed? Well, as far as patterns, I think it's definitely increased. It's definitely increased by the year.

Um, as far as seeing the amounts of supplies being used the traces of you know migrants crossing through in the desert and mountains seeing the amount of border patrol apprehensions and interactions with people that cross and the overall militarization of the border yeah yeah and i think like as far one of the biggest changes that we've seen on the border overall and that has reflected in the water drop as well is a change in the demographics of people that are coming through even as recently as when we started in 2016 there were um much more of like the trend that was generally kind of like stereotypically the case of like who was crossing which was men of origin of working age crossing to work and send send money back to their families yeah that's obviously still a large um part of who is coming through but in the most recent three to five years especially um

the demographics are changing not just by country of origin to include all over the world and reflecting like this global migration crisis that's going on but also the reasons and like the desperation is changing so now it's not just like economic migration there is asylum seekers refugees and it is just changing in tone of like why they're migrating and in what ways they're migrating yeah yeah definitely i've noticed that and like as the climate continues to change right like more and more people come from those countries and you've seen that too that are most heavily impacted by climate change and yeah yeah and that makes a journey as it gets hotter and hotter in the desert like that makes a journey more and more perilous i guess they've come from farther too and they're the least sometimes like not at all familiar with

the weather with the terrain what they're up against with like how you have to move in border towns if you're not from a border town you don't really know how to move and who to trust or more importantly who not to trust yes yeah and people there's a lot of pitfalls to just arriving at the border even from like um internal migration like within mexico people arrive to the border and don't really know how to operate like the day-to-day there. And it's really made an already incredibly dangerous situation, like just totally perilous. As more people have migrated from different countries around the world, you're also seeing people who have been on that journey just to get to the United States line for longer amounts of time that, you know,

instead of maybe just weeks or a month, you're talking about months on months that people have been traveling, you know, by foot, by train, by bus, you know, sometimes by plane, however they can. And we've seen, you know, we've seen like invoices for like hotel stays that people traveling from Turkey came and they stayed like in Cancun for like a month. So like, I mean, people are gone from their, from their homelands, you know, longer amounts of time now that, you know, isn't a comfortable thing. So it's not like you can relax and not like you can, you know, rest and, you know isn't a comfortable thing so it's not like you can relax and not like you can

you know rest and you know mentally and physically everything like that so it's definitely making that part harder for for people crossing yeah for sure like i'm seeing more and more migrants from from africa and like i know they are very much like it's the community for them is hard to find sometimes like you know that like there are different spaces um for them and like they they end up in like distinct spaces from from other like migrant who are coming from other areas and i know it can be very perilous for them like you say just just moving around border towns and navigating the pitfalls of that yeah it's it's becoming like a more and more difficult and i guess kind of complicated issue

but i think what's not particularly complicated is that like no one should have to walk across the desert without water right like it's it's pretty basic so maybe we could go through what a water drop is and like what just if we could walk through like you know how far you guys walk what what you're leaving out there what you find that people take what you find that they need in their journeys and and you were talking about the receipts i found tons of those and plane tickets and stuff like the things that you find that help you understand how better to help people i guess you want to talk about like how far the drops are generally and like all of that yeah so right now it just depends on the the season the weather you know the the length of the drops uh we hike

you know a lot of our drops we also utilize four by fours to get us closer to areas to start our hikes so we don't have to walk even more miles that helps us out and you know being able to carry more supplies you know with less walking in some areas but when it's a cooler times and the temperatures are you know below 80 degrees you know we can hike you know anywhere up to i think the max that we did was just about 20. But on the average, the cool weather hikes will do right around 10 miles or so. And then when it gets hot and the desert gets really hot out there, like over 110 degrees on a constant basis and starting to get over 120 degrees you know we can maybe do

about five miles by foot we've kind of ran a trial and error this season as far as trying to push further to see how far we can go yeah and we attempted seven miles and that i mean we all were gassed right around the five mile mark. So like we have to, you know, set limits because not only is the distance, but the time spent underneath the sun without shade. And that exposure is, you know, what drives the internal body temperature up and everything like that. And if you don't have a chance to cool down, that's when your body starts to wear out. You get heat exhaustion and, you know, we want to avoid heat stroke at all costs and we're trying to you know make sure everyone's safety is accounted for so we have to kind of cap that in the in the summertime to like five miles yeah yeah sure we

have to definitely make pushes in the winter to stockpile the areas that are just simply not accessible in the summer months and be strategic and like paying attention to what are entry points and can we hit those entry points or exit points so maybe we can't um really access a route throughout its entirety but we can hit certain points of it more um safely as a team during these like incredibly hot months but we leave supplies of water food and protective clothing and the protective clothing varies depending on season so i mean a lot of people don't really take into consideration how cold it gets in these areas it gets well below freezing in the winter in the mountains of east san diego county it snows um you know some drops have gotten snowed out. We haven't been able to complete them because of

the snow. And, um, so the protective clothing varies in the summer. It's things like bandanas, um, cooling towels, hats, socks. We leave throughout the year. Um, people's footwear not being appropriate almost always. Yeah yeah a blister can be a death sentence out there so if you get a blister and you're not able to keep up with your group there's a really good chance that you're going to get left so something like having dry socks to change into can very well save somebody's life so we leave socks throughout the year pop-top cans of food and of course water yeah in thetime, we leave sweatshirts, beanies, like mittens, gloves, scarves, jackets, sometimes puffy jackets, sometimes blankets,

you know, stuff to keep people warm when the temperatures, you know, can be freezing for, you know, most of the day, you know, in those, you day in those harsh months of January and February where eastern San Diego County gets the winter storms, the freezing cold. When roads get shut down, we can't even access. So as Jacqueline mentioned, when it is cooler, we try to go as much as we can, as far as we, to stockpile as much as possible for when the weather prohibits us from doing so otherwise. Yeah, and just to give people a sense of the temperature swings, I've been in the mountains down by the border at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which is minus 10-ish Celsius, I think.

And yeah, also at 120, is like almost 50 degrees celsius and so you can didn't swing that much in one day but there are days when it's above 40 degrees celsius and also they're freezing in the same day like it's um it can be really yeah it's a perilous place it's that's why people don't live there as a rule. It's not a place that's kind to people. So I wonder, a lot of people, I know we did a series on Title 42. We spoke to a lot of people and a lot of people reached out and they want to help. And I understand that the border, I think, for a lot of people, I think reporting on the border as a rule is not great.

We tend to see migrants as numbers and not as people and a lot when when people report on the border right and that's kind of it happens with with more liberal outlets as well as more right-wing outlets but i wonder like a how people who aren't in town like if you're not in if you don't live in the borderlands right it's say you live in the borderlands, right? It's a, you live in the middle of America. Like how can they help? What, what can they do to kind of support the prices that you're doing,

making this horrible thing a little kinder. We have, um, on our, all of our social media and as well as on our website, um, ways that people can help. Um, media and as well as on our website ways that people can help. We have wish lists for items if people help want to contribute in that way. And that's literally like contributing the items

that we leave. We also have donation links. So if people want to help financially, that goes a huge way in order to facilitate everything that we do. It's, I mean, gas is incredibly expensive. The supplies that we don't get donated by a wishlist have to be purchased, that sort of thing. So providing material aid is one way of contributing. And then aside from that, I think just following along with this work and sharing it and changing the conversation, because like, as you said, reporting on the border can be really tricky.

People tend to not just utilize migrants, but utilize the border as a region in order to have talking points for either like media outlets or campaigns or that sort of thing. And the border gets treated as sort of like its own foreign area. That's not related to either country. Like nobody wants to take responsibility for it. And, you know, residents of the United States also are complicit in that because they don't really, they just talk about the border. They don't say like, this is something that's happening in my country. So I think sharing

and discussing and and becoming informed of what's going on and also feeling like that kinship and ownership of like hey this is happening i mean for people it doesn't have to be as far as like the middle of the country a lot of people in san diego don't really engage in that they don't bother you know it feels like so far away even though it's like 20 minutes away meanwhile people are dropping dead so close to where people live and they choose to turn a blind eye so i think um kind of demystifying that for ourselves and sharing in that it goes a long way as well yeah definitely i think that's that's very true it's always amazing to me like how like 2018 or the other big one i guess would be the end of title 42 which was this year

in may like people will become more aware of what's happening and turn up and like it's so very radicalizing for other people in a positive way like it engages them in a way they haven't been engaged before but it's uh i know it's like it shouldn't be like we shouldn't be something we ever get used to how like cruel our border infrastructure is and what it does for us but people are just blown away every time absolutely yeah you did but it's i think you're right like witnessing it is very important even if you you know you can't donate financially or if you can't get down here. Yeah, definitely just share stuff that, you know, if our organization posts something on social media, you know, I mean, it has to be taken as the truth because we're out there firsthand. We're the ones on the ground seeing reporting back. seeing reporting back and by sharing that you get people you know in different parts of the country or even you know different parts of the world seeing like the realities of the us mexico border

because you know most people in the united states don't know if they don't don't see it they'll live near it so that's you know something that most people rely on the media and what they see on the nightly news and you know even that you know the big media outlets don't take the most realistic or don't share the most realistic uh parts of the border, you know, only to, you know, cater to their, you know, their sponsors or cater to their crowds. And so a lot of people will get like the headlines, but they don't get the real deal, like, you know, what's going on down the border. And so sharing is a big part of, you know, how the word spreads about the work that we do in other organizations as well.

Yeah, I think that's very, very valid. It was interesting to me recently, I don't know if you guys saw this, but the floating border barrier in Texas. This week people have been reporting that it has blades on it, which it does, and that's fucked up. Like they shouldn't. It's horrible. But like it was kind of illustrative that I guess none of the other none of the national outlets had someone who'd seen it because the blades have been there for like months when the prototype sat there.

They were in the 2020 solicitation to like it just seemed odd to me that someone had to tweet a video for them to like understand because like obviously no one had walked up to and checked it out which which i don't know i think it's hard to do border reporting in new york personally but uh like i guess you're interested in the northern border um so i wanted to ask about title 42 because i think our listeners are pretty well informed on like what that was and what happened before and after that. So did you guys notice when that came into effect? Just to recap, I guess, for people, Title 42 allowed Border Patrol to bounce people straight back south without processing them. And in nearly all cases without hearing their claims for asylum if they had.

And in nearly all cases without hearing their claims for asylum if they had. And then those people were sometimes laterally translated across the border to a border town where they may not have had contacts or family or any resources. And it often resulted in those people finding themselves in an even more difficult situation than they already were or trying to cross in more difficult and dangerous places to avoid that. So did you guys notice any changes like around and that came in what march of 2020 as soon as they could as soon as they found an excuse in in covid um not so much from what we see because we don't come across people too often face to face, did notice that once the policy was put into place, uh, meaning title 42 and,

you know, with the pandemic starting, we did notice a big uptick on the amount of people coming through. We seen, you know, before that, you know, just a handful of people, maybe like that we'd come across. A lot of times those people crossing at nighttime

and it wasn't something that we came across much. But after that went into effect in 2020, we started running into a lot more people. We started seeing people that knew, you know, somewhat of, you know, the policy and that people would try multiple times every day to, you know, cross through. And if they got apprehended and got, you know, taken into Mexico, they try again that same day. And so we noticed a lot more of our supplies being used, a lot more foot traffic and a lot more interactions with us.

We started seeing a lot more interactions with, you know, Border Patrol and people crossing through. the only thing that we really saw increase was the amount of people trying to get in before, you know, quote unquote got closed off, you know, before like the, the bands would go into effect and, you know,

like the, the no, you know, you can reenter for a certain amount of years and all that kind of stuff. So like the camps in Hakumba, you see thousands of people showing up. As that stopped, as Title 42 stopped, we really can't notice too much yet that less people are crossing through compared to the beginning the middle of the policy um our supplies are still being used at a high rate yeah still see a fair amount of traffic

come through you know these these corridors and everything like that so um it's kind of hard on our end but you know we also know that people who do cross um not at a port of entry by foot whether it's over a fence whether it's around a fence whether it's through the desert over the hills we know that people are still being apprehended, processed and released with their asylum claims. So it's hard, as you know, on the border to know exactly what's going on because a policy can say one thing. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Exactly. Like the presidential administration can say one thing yeah it doesn't matter exactly like the the presidential

administration can say one thing the dhs can say one thing and completely different is happening you know right right there um i don't know i mean i can't really say honestly how much it's it's changed from our perspective i think when these things happen like it's always really difficult because like like i think the three of us are aware of there's the things that are put in place and they're that's how they're going to be applied in theory and then those of us that have been doing this work can anticipate how it's going to have an impact in practice so like the things that are occurring now in order to so-called like curb the influx of people like um using an app or or like having like bands on certain things like all of these things like we know and and we don't have like any faith that they were put in in good faith

we don't have like any faith that they were put in in good faith and we know like that we can anticipate okay you're going to be banned if you don't go in through these like really ridiculously inaccessible means and that that word is going to get around that people are going to freak out they're not going to bother and they're going to hit the desert and that's what we're seeing like whether we can actually like attribute it directly to like these policy changes. What I think we can attribute it more directly to is like one global migration, regardless of policy is increasing all over the world.

And that desperation doesn't like really wait for any kind of policy change. Two is like the misinformation and sort of like chatter that people are hearing about like yeah this is changing oh i heard that like if you don't use this app they're gonna put you in jail and like just like literally these things that we're hearing on the border um that is funneling people directly into the desert because they want to avoid any kind of interaction with border patrol even if they have like what would be a um you know like an asylum claim people aren't trusting because there's so much change and uncertainty at like a policy level there's no accessibility to this information there's no clarity to this information nobody knows what's going on whether it's people that are working in border aid or people that are seeking asylum

so people are just you know taking their chances and hitting the desert and regardless of the policy change like ever since the last like you know like we said like three to five years um the increase has been um like exponential every single year it just continues increasing has been um like exponential every single year it just continues increasing i wanted to add in is that so the title 42 policy was used you know in conjunction with the you know national emergency with covid and all that kind of stuff with the country you know ending the the national emergency, they couldn't justify keeping Title 42 in effect.

And in a way, I feel that the administration was just playing political chess and using people, vulnerable people as pawns. And so the rhetoric coming out and, you know, the, you know, we're taking a hard stance and this, that and the other and a crackdown on immigration. And that I feel was the current presidential administration just trying to appeal to a larger audience.

Or when the election comes up next year, you know, can say, hey have like say in san luis and yuma arizona you would see you know hundreds and thousands of people every day showing up to present themselves for asylum those all got recorded as apprehension numbers so you've got in one month you know however many you know thousands now title 42 ends now that number shrinks down now that looks better that looks tougher on you know immersion that looks like you're doing this than the other meanwhile you have people just you know being vulnerable being you know in limbo you know on the other side of the border or you have them taking to the mountains and deserts and taking a dangerous trek just so they can be apprehended and you know plead their case and

try to get asylum and try to get released into the united states so people that way are being used as pawns in this political theater that we always talk about. Always. It doesn't matter the administration, whether it's blue, whether it's red, whether it's orange, whether it's old, whether it's money. It's all money. Unfortunately, we have to

constantly dispel a lot of that false narrative that comes out. It gets exhausting, i mean it's what we have to do because you're not going to find that out any other way yeah you're really not um i think that's an excellent point like and the point about apprehensions is good right they always reported and i've heard like npr do this report apprehensions as if they're individuals which they were not under title 42 like if you cross five times in a day and get apprehended and sent back five times that's five apprehensions it's one person um and they

were deliberately using that to make this to seem like more people were coming and as you say now it will seem like less because that doesn't happen anymore um i think your point about like the jackman the points about the the misinformation is super crucial and one that again often isn't reported but like i'm not a lawyer uh and i can't give people legal advice but constantly when i'm in tijuana when i'm in um sonora when anywhere where i'm like on the southern side of the border or on this side of the border people will ask me or when the people are trapped in between the two fences that constitute the border um people will say hey have you heard this hey i got this and they'll play like voice messages on whatsapp often or show me a whatsapp and we'll

go over like that's not my understanding you know like i don't think that's the case um but but it's it's i understand you're vulnerable you're scared and this shit like i have a phd and speak all those concerned languages but i don't understand it fully like it's it's complicated and petrifying if this is your only hope of like a dignified life and i think it's something that people don't understand is how hard it is for those people to get decent information about like what they're quote-unquote supposed to do um especially when we have this app which like i don't have a ton of foyers in around the app but i don't think i'll ever get any documents back from the feds to be honest but um yeah it's atrocious i think it's ridiculous yeah no and then information that people receive isn't even accurate like so

whenever there it is that somebody like say um has come to like our office downtown in mexicali and like you know brought in their paperwork and say like i have a court date there will like there was a time like during um you know mppP and all of that, like where people were being given court dates on Sundays or being given court dates in Texas when they were sent back after their arrest in Arizona to Mexicali, like just crazy stuff. Like, like if people are even lucky enough to get somebody to help guide them through the process it's not even like a certainty that the information that they're provided is even going to be accurate on purpose like people are given inaccurate information to wade through this process that doesn't seem to make sense to anyone

um it's it's wildly like convoluted i mean that's the intention right like it's not meant to be navigated in any way no no it's not it's meant to put people off i think and like even with the work that our friends at alto alado do and other legal aid groups like i was speaking to a ethiopian friend who i met in tijuana and he lives in the u.s and he helps other folks now who arrived more recently and he was saying that like getting a lawyer to represent you can cost you maybe five grand maybe 12 and and you might not have the legal right to work right so where is that money supposed to come from and then you know if if your language is uh you know aroma or something it's that much harder to navigate that system to find useful resources to explain it to you and it's yeah it's people like to talk about like how i know that their

family did a legal micro legal quote-unquote migration when there weren't these checks in place and they didn't have to do any of this shit and uh i don't know it's i don't think people realize how brutalizing the system is until they've seen it firsthand. The cruelty and the confusion, putting people in danger is the whole point. And it's intentional. So if somebody's there and like you said, they speak, they're not able to even wrap their heads around the process, let alone access the resources in order to navigate that system. Then a coyote approaches them and tells them like, oh, I can take you over here to the Romerosa. All you have to do is pay me 300 American instead of 5,000 for this, like, eh,

you're probably not going to win that case. The town's a mile away, the town's a mile away and it's a straight shot and you'll get there in half a day and then you're good to go. And I mean, we've heard the most wild stories, like even from people in the middle of the desert lost saying they told me it was two mile walk and that there were, they were hiring in the town on the other side of that hill. Yeah. Like, and I mean like who wouldn't at that point, it's like you don't have a country to go back to. Yeah. Like it's no longer like, oh, I'm fleeing my,

I'm migrating from my country because there's no work. No, there is no country to speak of, at least not for you. And you're here and this coyote presents you this, like, so it's misinformation and exploitation, like every single step of the way.

And a lot of the time, people's most straightforward avenue is through the desert, even though it's like unbelievably hard and very very often deadly that's like the surest shot that they have and they take it because i mean it wouldn't yeah no it's not like yeah like you say people aren't like you know doing the numbers and thinking they'll make more money in the u.s it's like i will die if i stay at home or someone has already killed someone i love and i have to leave now and especially when like the trump administration like at the end if

people aren't aware like towards the end of the trump administration trump started making claims in presidential debates about the number of miles of wall he was he had built um as far as i can work out he pulled out of his ass and then the like then they they started rushing to build more wall um and they they i i asked them how they came up with that number and that they like they just did this thing where they were like oh we'll be repaired this much wall and they were like eight miles of border wall prototype and like a cool man um like they they didn't build that much wall but they started skipping the harder parts, right? Like Valley of the Moon,

even that boulder pile outside Hukumba. Like there are areas that don't have wall and those are the areas that are harder. And then that's where people try and cross. And like, I love to go outside. I'm a pretty fit person. And like Valley of the Moon is hard going. Like if you're not going up

the road like that's tough travel and that's where people don't have a choice but to cross right right yeah that's where and that's where like you in may it was i think with the first second week of may when you know just a few days before title 42 was ending, that's where thousands of people came through was through that area down into the town of Okumba. And a lot of people, I mean, we're talking about, you know, thousands came through there and a lot said that they paid upwards to a thousand dollars ahead to coyotes that brought them there and said hey when you get down there you just follow this road once you get down to the bottom there's gonna be a bus waiting for you it'll take you in and they got stranded for days after going through that terrain the temperature

that's when like the the season really started shifting so the night really cold the daytime highs were pretty hot and I mean that was the designed cruelty the invasion that gave the semblance of the invasion because you could huddle people together and then claim that you weren't

detaining them there right exactly but they weren't free to leave the border patrol told them that they would arrest them if they left the... Yeah. I mean, I say camp loosely because it was just like out in an open field with

people, you know, cut down branches and turn into shelters and use areas that they cut down for like fires, campfires at night to stay warm. And, you know, Border patrol probably didn't expect that a people locally in hukumba were going to care or be that the word would get out and so their cruel practices that they were um enacting on like the first day or two of people showing up and being stranded,

no food, no water, then it kind of backfired. And then, you know, I believe you went out there as well. You saw how many people showed up to, to care. And like, we were working around the clock to try to, you know, organize and make food, prepare food, pack, collect donations, everything. And I've gone through that terrain after all that was closed down and looking through as we did trash cleanups and people would have their last remaining food and water that you could see like coming through across you know the area where they were brought to and like people shedding clothes because the temperatures were so you know warm during the daytime and then just

wondering like okay so they show their clothes and now they're like freezing down the bottom of the hill and the terrain's too tough to go all the way back up yeah and you know it yeah there's no fence over there and the fences you know we've said have always been kind of built for the most part where people can see them so it gives the appearance to the rest of the country that's not out there that there's a fence across the whole border and you know into a lot of areas where we see that that's not the case and also we see where border fences stop and migration makes its way right around the edge of that yeah every time but the distance now has increased longer for the walks because instead of just being able to walk through like an open area,

now you have to go miles out of the way to get around to an opening in the fence or go up and over a mountain. And, you know, doing that in the summertime, you exhaust yourself from the strenuous hike on top of the unbearable heat. And then you pass away, you know, an eighth of a mile from a fence, you know, as someone that we know that happened to them a couple of years ago. So it's yeah, as you're saying, like the fences and like where they're not put, it's, it's just a point of cruelty and part of the prevention through deterrence policy that's been going on for, you know, almost 30 years now. And, um, yeah, and the, the CBP one app and all that kind of stuff.

That's just another extension of prevention through deterrence by making it harder for people and pushing people to ways that they can try to get through or, you know, what they think they can try to get through easier. And as Jacqueline said, it's just just it's become more and more deadlier and every year the the numbers go up of confirmed deaths but that doesn't count the amount of people that go missing every year yeah or the people who like border patrol don't find and they you know their numbers are only the people who they found and that's the areas they're going like if people die further north or yeah or the deaths that they they deliberately miscategorize as non-migrant death they're just john does jane doe whatever you know they just say like oh you know um cause

of death unclear or cause of death for exposure but they don't necessarily call it a migrant death even though it's someone you know traveling with a backpack in the desert yeah just out for a hike yeah and they know like say that they were migrating just because they had you know uh enduring passport on them um that happens all the time too because so all of this is like we don't know the scope of their cruelty like it's just what's scary is that like it's so much bigger than we even know even like those of us that are like in it every day yeah there's no numbers like i i would in a sense love to in a sense it'd be horrible i don't think it should matter like i don't think it should matter how many people like every single one of those is a tragedy and it's someone's mom or dad or brother or sister um i kind of wanted to uh to maybe talk about like

one incident that um if you're comfortable doing it like that you might be familiar with i think can give people a sense of how dehumanizing this is and how cruel this is um you guys i know you're familiar with it but uh the the the young women who died on the Shrine Trail in, was it winter of 2020 or winter of 2021? Yes, that was February 2020. Yeah, it's right before COVID. So for people who aren't as familiar, I spoke a little bit about it in our series, but can you describe kind of the process that, if you're comfortable, I know it's like a, it's a pretty horrible thing,

but can you describe like how they crossed and what happened to them? I mean, we can give you like some of the background that was like in a newspaper article that we had come to learn. Yeah, sure. We have like direct communication. Yeah, yeah. You're not in contact. I just like I think it would be helpful for people to realize like, you know, to respond after that happened to to like at least try and and help like deploy kind of resources to make that a bit less of a treacherous crossing so um as the

situation was unfolding uh it was nighttime and there was like a freak storm that came through eastern San Diego County around around the area of, I think, like Live Oak Springs, Mount Laguna area. And it was just, you know, raining and cold before. just you know raining and cold before but like later on that day it kind of turned into snow and just turned into heavy winds like zero visibility snowstorm and these three sisters that were from Oaxaca who've crossed over for work multiple times came worked went back home you know for you know whatever season came back worked went back home and it was my understanding that they were trying to save up enough money from what they made here in the united states to open up their own business. And so the day came when they were crossing over. They came through, I think, like in the Campo area, I think it was. And they were led by two brothers that had crossed previously in the same spot and knew the trail of which to go.

But I believe it was their first time actually leading people through and not just themselves coming through. So they, you know, they remember the way and got up close to where the shrine is of the shrine trail. There's a little shrine up there that people would, you know, leave little symbols and tokens and little items behind. Mostly to, you know, the the virgin guadalupe and from that point it is that that's the last time you can be hiking on that trail that far north and turn around and still see mexico Anything beyond that is kind of like the point of you can't see Mexico. You've got to keep moving forward. You've already gone. At this point, it's

close to 30, I think, air miles. Walking miles is a lot more than that. They were at this kind of rock, boulder outcropping, just about five minutes walk shy of the shrine when the sisters couldn't keep going anymore. going anymore and because of the extreme weather and the extreme cold they were soaking wet from the rain and then the you know sub-freezing temperatures with the snowstorm uh they

couldn't keep going anymore and so they were kind of huddled up underneath uh this boulder uh was the only spot that kind of gave like a little bit of shelter from that storm yet i mean those rocks are you know ice cubes you know being out there for that long so the two brothers i believe left to try to get cell phone signal uh because you know you're you're up pretty high in the mountains. I think that elevation up there, uh, on the mountain, I think it's somewhere around 5,000 feet more. So that location where they were, um, where they passed away and, um,

the brothers that took off to try to get cell phone range to call them, you know, EMS, which phone range to call, you know, EMS, which turns out to be, you know, border patrol in that region. And so we got ahold of border patrol, border patrol arrived to where the brothers were. And first thing, you know, before, you know, rushing to try to make a rescue or anything, they, you know, detained and arrested the brothers for, smuggling, trafficking, just being coyotes.

And then they put in efforts of trying to rescue. By the time I believe that they got to the three sisters, two of them had already passed away. And there was one that was still barely alive, unconscious. And due to the weather, as Border Patrol has stated, the agents, the Boar Star rescue agents, the search and trauma rescue, they had to take off. They couldn't airlift the last remaining sister out because there was zero visibility.

The helicopter couldn't even find them, couldn't get anywhere close to them, couldn't hover because the wind was blowing so hard. It was just about a whiteout condition. The most fucked because the wind was blowing so hard uh it was just about a whiteout condition so I mean the most you know situation possible and Border Patrol in order to

make sure it didn't turn into uh from a triple fatality to however many of them there were i think there was three or four they were out there so to you know in order to save their lives they they took off they put the the last remaining sister like in a like a puffy overall type of situation and they uh they had taken her wet clothes they cut her wet clothes off her and you know were actively trying to warm her with like heat packs and wrapping her and so they took off and kind of just like left her you know with basically as they said the the best you know chances possible of survival even though someone being left on their own in that condition there's zero chances of survival board patrol took off allegedly injured themselves you know in doing so got frostbite etc um i think it was the next day came back out for the uh

what turned out to be the recovery and all three sisters had passed away uh you know from you know freezing to death and so as we learned about that you know as the situation was unfolding we uh reached out to the journalist who wrote the article in local San Diego Union Tribune. His name's Alex Riggins. Yeah. the trial of the two brothers that brought the sisters through there in court for their deaths and reached out to see if we could find out any information if he could if alex could let us know like maybe where the shrine trail was or maybe where the location of the recovery was just something that we would have so we can you know put it on a map figure out how to get

there and get boots on the ground to leave supplies you know a few times a year whether it's going to be really hot or really cold we wanted to make sure that you know we responded to the crisis as we found out about it. That's something that we unfortunately have had to do. I'll do common in this work is that's unfortunately the way that we learn. Yeah. When it's too late sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of you have to learn after it's too late. And that's part of our expansion of areas that we cover uh that's how we learn stuff um and that's how we work at preventing you know further suffering and further

deaths so we uh got more or less a a good location and one of our team members at the time he uh he went out on a weekday that he had off and he just went kind of driving around the area and started hiking out in in this area that looked like from the photos that were in the newspaper could have been this location and were in the newspaper could have been this location and he put in a long hike that day and he found the clothing that was um removed from the last sister he found the uh like the puffy overalls he found a bunch of medical equipment like emergency equipment that was used for, you know, the three sisters during that process. And shortly after that, I think it was just like a couple of weeks, we got together some of our strongest hikers and we decided to go out there and leave a bunch of supplies. And that is, it is a hard, hard hike. Whether you're, you know, carrying 35, 40 pounds on your back,

or you're just carrying, you know, a backpack with like a bottle of water and some food, like it's hard no matter what. So we got up there and we left supplies and we, you know, we've been going back usually before seasons change uh whether it gets hot or it's cold and we we track to see if um you know anything's been taken and it doesn't appear that that trail gets too much use but it does get some use yeah and so um you know i don't know if if the three sisters passing away there had anything to do with like future travel for people on the

train trail or or what but um you know we we made that commitment in their honor and to prevent anything like this ever happening again yeah certainly a very sad very sad situation and like yeah it so many things have to go wrong and so many people have to like turn a blind eye i guess for three people to die like you know there's um blatant negligence on the part of border patrol very regularly given that they are supposedly like as james mentioned the emergency medical service that's out there um and there is outright blatant deadly discrimination that occurs um when it comes to providing emergency services for migrants in this, they prioritize apprehension over saving people. Every moment is going to count. And regardless of what the conditions were, those are the conditions.

And that's the story that they're reporting. I think we rightfully are skeptical of anything that they say when it comes to rescues and how they prioritize doing so when we have seen entirely the opposite occur on a regular basis, when they have the opportunity to provide aid, them electing to not do so. You know, going back to Hakumba, when people were out there and they had nothing, they weren't being provided a sip of water for days and days and days border patrol could have done that if they are the emergency services they could have provided emergency aid um when it comes to a rescue like

this they have the agency they are the agency they have the agency to deprioritize processing somebody for apprehension and prioritizing rescue and they chose not to do it like time and time again we see these situations and i think like when you know before we started recording you asked like what's the thing that like we want to talk about that doesn't often get talked about and i think it's this i think it's the it's not just like the surveillance and the patrolling and all of that stuff that dehumanizes migrants, but like when they're in danger, they're regarded as less than human by the,

because the only agency that's out there to help them is like the reason that they're in danger in the first place. So, um, we have come across multiple, um, search and rescues that aren't migrant related, just being out in the desert where either a U.S. citizen or in one instance, a tourist was lost in the desert. And their response is night and day. When there's a migrant that's lost and we are calling for assistance, you know, any kind of, can a search be initiated? Can we get like, the response is so blase and minimal and there's no accounting. There's no holding them accountable for acting or failing to act.

And it's blatant. Like, and I think that's the thing that like the general public that isn't involved in this work like should know about how cruel it is and how little the response is when somebody is lost when they're dying when they're dead like us having to call the coroner repeatedly to have children's bones picked up. That would not happen if that child was not a presumed migrant. So this is like we have story after story after story of like situations like this is just one tragedy. But there is a lot of could have, should have, would have like on the end of like eight organizations that we carry and it doesn't seem to ever be like a shared weight with any of the agencies that actually have the ability to respond to this kind of thing in like an organized way they don't care they don't

do anything about it yeah and there's like so much money spent on our border, right? Like I remember in Hukumba, I was like sitting underneath this thing for shade. And then I look, I'm like, oh yeah, this thing costs a million dollars, right? That little trailer with the solar panels that intercepts the signals. And they didn't give these people a bottle of water. Like all the water came from other people,

from random San Diego people who bought it right like and it it's just such a strange priority well not strange it's a cruel and horrible priority choice right to prioritize that kind of like enforcement over human lives like which are being lost and it's the same like you know i've reported in arizona a time i spent a lot of time there i spent a lot of time uh here i reported in texas a couple of times like it's the same all across the border right the priority is not rescuing people it's and it's not even particularly enforcing the law as it's written it's just stopping people coming here it doesn't matter actively though yeah selectively because they

do let a significant amount of people through like even like in hakumba when people that weren't familiar with this whole kind of like smoke and mirror show of the border were coming and responding they were saying like well why are they letting them through why is this open over here why is like the amount of surveillance um you know we've had people come out on water drops and say like oh should we be hiding the water should we be doing this and that should we like they have eyes on the whole desert so yeah and it's they do their the point is to stop people from coming through but not completely right is that as labor that's coming through you know that

it they're they're selective and how much they like you know how much the the gasket is being opened and shut yeah and in different sectors at different times like it seems like things are done and even like yeah there are the other thing i think that people who don't live on the border don't realize is to what degree every single person here whether they give a shit or not is surveilled because they live near the border like yeah but we saw that in 2018 with a lot of a lot of friends of mine who who can't go to mexico anymore right who have flagged passports yeah you too yeah yeah so many people i know i yeah i don't know how i went over a ton at that time but i guess managed to avoid it um but yeah it's it's that and then like i have been in the middle of nowhere in the desert and found cameras

uh surveillance towers right like um stuff that would not be and the constitution is largely irrelevant but like there wouldn't be legal or just like unjustifiable anywhere else and like this spans from here to like our autumn friends in in arizona to texas right like if you live on the border like or any within 100 miles of the border right the border can come to you it doesn't matter if you live on the border like or any within 100 miles of the border right the border can come to you it doesn't matter if you care or not it doesn't matter if you consider yourself to be uh like an immigrant to the u.s or if you've sort of decided that that doesn't apply to you or you don't care about those people like um then it doesn't matter that surveillance still impacts you and often it impacts like our indigenous friends right like like my my autumn friends kumi i friends had their

graveyards bulldozed to build the wall and and it yeah even if you don't care even if you think the wall is great that your cell phone still go through distinct rate out i know it's wild like how much people who are like very you know right anti-pro-freedom and all this stuff will very readily give up those freedoms in exchange for constant surveillance. If it justifies the means of their bigotry or whatever their worldview is, they're suddenly very pro-Border Patrol patrol very pro-cop very true well that's like in direct conflict with like everything else that they're saying right but yeah it's freedom for who i guess yeah well it also goes with the same people are saying like well if you're not breaking the law then what do you have to do yeah well everything starts at the border so the surveillance the facial, the plate scanners, all that stuff started at the border. And now we see that just recently, like the San Diego City Council approved to have the like the streetlight cameras and all that kind of the lamps and all those hundreds of cameras that are going to be out there like with that same type of technology.

And like, well, if you're not breaking the law, it's like, okay, well, give a little bit of time until you're not breaking the law, and then, like, stuff still happens. I mean, that's how, you know, things, you know, snowball. Hey, everyone. Shortly after we finished talking about why San Diego's lampposts are also spies, my internet once again died.

So that's where we're going to end it today. It's already been a long episode. But what I would like you all to know is that you can find Border Kindness online. You can find them on Instagram. You can find James there at Brolo El Cordero. You should probably be able to work out how to spell that. And you can find them on Facebook and you can find them on Instagram. And you can pretty them on Facebook and you can find them on Instagram. And you can pretty much find them anywhere. You go on the internet by searching Border Kindness. And like James said,

I'm looking at his Instagram profile right now. That's Brolo El Cordero. I guess B-R-O-L-O-E-L-C-O-R-D-E-R-O. James has a wishlist, an Amazon wishlist. So if you're not close to San Diego, then you can just click on there and buy them something. I'm sure you could collect donations and send those as well. So there are a lot of different ways you could help.

But I hope you all enjoyed this. If you're in town and you want to help go hike with them, you can reach out to them on social media as well. And I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from you. Thanks so much for listening. Goodbye. 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.

Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno 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 tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jumae Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions.

So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.