It Could Happen Here Weekly 168

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week there's going to be nothing new here for you but you can make your own decisions hi everyone and welcome to the podcast it's me james today and i am very lucky to be joined by azad who is fighting in myanmar chin land specifically with the aif welcome to the show thanks for being here yeah thanks for having me on of course yeah this has been a project that like i've been following from afar for some time maybe several months now, I think. But for listeners who have not been following, can you explain very briefly the role of the AIF in the struggle in Myanmar? Yeah, sure.
Getting right into it. Yeah.
First, I'd like to give a little bit of a spiel about the context of the AIF. Maybe for people who aren't so familiar.
Yeah. In Burma, already for decades, there have been some kind of established precedent of, we can say, foreign volunteers of some kind, or, you know, ex-military personnel, or, you know, somebody who is somehow drawn to the conflict.
There has already been the precedent for some decades of people coming in a very limited capacity and helping with this group or that group. But it mostly has been participation of two big characteristics.
The first characteristic is that, of course, it's been an individual basis. Like whoever individual had this idea, they organized it themselves.
They handled it themselves with the exception of like the Freebrim Rangers. But I wouldn't classify them as like, you know, foreign fighters or anything.
They do very, very good work, but yeah, slightly different role. Yeah.
Yeah. The people who did this kind of stuff were mostly coming as individuals, uh, you know, kind of on their own prerogative.
And secondly, they were overwhelmingly, we can say non-political or, you know, ex-military guys, uh, from Western nations or, you know, from, uh, neighboring countries who were somehow drawn to the conflict and wanted to use their skills in that kind of light. The AIF, on the other hand, is absolutely by no means like the foreign fighter organization in Myanmar, or it's not like the foreign battalion, or that's also not what the goal and the mission is.
It specifically came about after 2023, 2024,

there were slowly more internationals in the country,

internationalists, we can say,

who were here on a much more,

albeit at the beginning, individual.

It was the same where people were organizing their own ways,

organizing their own routes and connections,

but with a much more different perspective

of this kind of more intentional,

anti-fascist internationalist perspective.

Yeah. Which bled over into the name.
So kind of as a result of discussions between me and some other people who were here and also some other people outside the country, the idea to set up a formation or an organization like this was floated. And of course, after talking with local partners and local comrades who anyway were involved with on the ground,

there was a lot of enthusiasm on both sides,

both from people outside the country,

both from people inside the country.

So kind of within that context,

the idea to take a step forward

in a more organized, explicitly consistent,

yeah, to use a polite word,

consistent perspective for internationalism in Myanmaranmar that was kind of the goal yeah and if people aren't uh familiar it's the anti-fascist internationalist front right the uh the aif has a really cool logo with the uh the peacock tail and the three arrows and the uh like the white star and a red background that i thought it was I really appreciate your logo. Yeah.
So yeah, I think people will like, when they talk about the conflict in Myanmar, they will be like, oh, why is there not more internationalism? Why is there not more international volunteers? Something that you and I have spoken about before is that this has always been an international conflict, right? And it's always been an anti-fascist conflict as well do you want to explain that to people who because I think sometimes it's easy for people to fall into these orientalist or somewhat colonialist constructions of the conflict there and I think you and I both agree that those are not the lens through which we should view it yeah I mean of course the history of let's just use a big term the history of conflict in burma is of course very deep and very complex and has a thousand different ethnic and political uh you know branches that you can go down yeah um but if we're really focusing in on this post-coup situation which even though it has its roots and its context in of pre-coup with, you know, the existing ethnic resistance organizations and the democracy movement, if we're really looking at the conflict post-2021 coup, fundamentally, it is not any one nation's struggle. It is not anyone's people's struggle.
It is not even like a national struggle of Burma, we can say. It is fundamentally a fight against fascism.
It is an anti-fascist people's revolution, where after, of course, the coup and after these initial stages of protest and uprising, the people were faced by a choice of, do we accept dictatorship? Do we go back and do we live like normal? Do we accept fascism? Do we live under fascism? Or do we prepare to sacrifice everything to fight against fascism? And that was the fundamental calculation in that. So insofar as it's a fight against fascism, that makes it an international struggle in itself.
I mean, without even, you know, going on too much about how anyways, the so-called nation of Burma is dozens and dozens and dozens of different ethnicities and religions and cultures, which, I mean, if you aren't thinking in the traditional nation-state sense of internationalism and more thinking in the kind of brotherhood of cultures and traditions, then yeah, of course, without the flashy, you know, foreigners coming, it's already an internationalist struggle against fascism. But I think, you know, on a more intentional level, the dictatorship represents fundamentally the same fascism that exists all over the world, fundamentally state oppression.
So yeah, in that regard, it's very much an internationalist struggle. Yeah.
And something we've spoken about before is like the links of the inspiration, I guess, that comes from the internationalist struggle in North and East Syria and Rojava and how that's very much been like a source of inspiration for young people in Myanmar. I've spoken to tons of them even two years ago, especially young women there, right? Looking at the women's revolution in Rojava and seeing like that this was a possibility that this was something like

on the horizon that they could strive for do you want to explain like your own perceptions of that and experience of it yeah sure well first you know not to overstate things well of course Rojava is a big inspiration I think not just for the people here in Myanmar but truly like a beacon of hope in general.

Yeah.

You know, a little biased

having spent time in Hrushava

as you also have. I think, how can we say, I'll give a bit of context.
In 2023, I think this message went out from the KNDF to the forces in Rojava. And I was there at the time.
So was I. Really? What? Yeah, yeah.
I was there to say we were there. We were both there.
Yeah, at the same time, everyone started hitting me up for book recommendations. It's like October.
I didn't know that. Yeah.
Okay. Right after October 7th, I think.
Okay. Anyways, so yeah, when this came out, like some friends sent this to me and was like, hey, can you translate this? And I like not only me when I saw it, but also all the friends and the leadership and, you know, all of the comrades there were like very, one, surprised, but also very excited and very happy to kind of see a message like this.
And I think also when the message was returned, you know, some of the friends from the leadership, you know, recorded this video message and sent it back. It was very much like a very pleasant, happy surprise for everyone involved.
And it really showed the degree to which fundamentally we are fighting the same struggles, even though, you know, maybe, you know, materially, we're not talking about like guns going from one place to the other. Fundamentally, we're comrades on the same very, very long frontline.
Now, I think what that looks like locally,, especially I'm happy that you mentioned like specifically the women's situation. You know, I myself sometimes when I'm giving training here, I like to show videos from certain parts of Kurdistan where they're very effective, we can say.
And of course, that naturally includes like the very, very heavy participation of the women's guerrilla units as well as the men's guerrilla units. And specifically here in Myanmar, we see a very difficult situation in the revolution in regards to like the position of women, where because of, I mean, it's a very new revolution.
Lots of these people are, you know, a couple years ago, they were just in, we can say, liberal society. They weren't in any kind of, you know, maybe at best activist context,

but it's not like these people had a strong revolutionary platform and then they said,

okay, let's launch a revolution against the dictatorship. It was a natural evolution from

protest to resistance to revolution, no? So because of that, the same social structures

that existed in liberal society were in a large part transplanted into resistance organizations,

which means that, yeah, of course, thousands and thousands of women from all over the country have traveled to these camps, you know, have prepared and have readied themselves to fight against the dictatorship. But in a lot of ways, they're still facing off against, you know, the patriarchy that is inherent in all of our modern society yeah so i think rojava in so much as like i think anybody can take rojava as an inspiration if there is anybody who more so than anybody else can take as an inspiration it is women and youth as that is of course like the revolutionary focus of of the entire paradigm of the rojava revolution so i won't it's like, you know, like the leading inspiration for the people of Myanmar or something, but definitely the people who have interacted with it or interfaced with it in some capacity, be it official or unofficial, of course, have gotten a lot of inspiration from that.
And us as internationalists, both me as well as some other people here, you know, having had that in person experience with the Rojava revolution, of course of course for us is eternal inspiration yeah and it's a really beautiful thing to see like you said just to see people like when we think about alliances in conflict right if we look at the extremely interactional way that the united states enters into those alliances right it's willing to allow the people of rojava to die for it in the battle against uh isis or daish but but it's not willing to stand by them when they're being bombed by turkey right something and you and i have both seen but to see something that instead begins with genuine solidarity and admiration one thing i really liked was when the kndf replied to the video that came from rojava they said that they still had a lot to learn especially with regards to gender and like it's so rare to see revolutionary movements admitting their faults especially during the struggle right during the moment of revolution and that's something that i've been so impressed with in myanmar for a long time is their willingness to like look out at the world and see things that they think are better and adopt them or to at least consider them. It's a thing in Rojava too.
Some of the, one of the friends in Rojava said that they were excited to learn more about Myanmar because they hadn't worked everything out and that they thought that there might be some solutions that they could learn from there and so it's really special to see that that solidarity that comes like from a very genuine place and not just it's not just rhetorical there are people such as yourself who have who have made the journey to to fight on behalf of the revolution in Myanmar but it's really a special thing it's really a wonderful thing to to see especially like with the world seemingly getting more and more isolated and more and more nationalist as opposed to internationalist. Like it's a really beautiful time for it to happen too.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I mean, not to make the podcast, you know, a democratic confederalism ideology lesson or something, but yeah, I think insofar as the revolution in Rojava considers itself a force on the side of democratic modernity, I think it's important to understand that they really mean it.
Like they really do see the conflicts that we're facing today against the capitalist system, against capitalist modernity. They really do see it in this all-encompassing light that even though something is happening all the way over here in Myanmar, and that maybe you could only tangentially connect to what's happening over there, they really do believe it when they say we are comrades in this same struggle.
And that's why the solidarity is so beautiful to see, because it's that real solidarity. It's not just like, you know, penduring to some internationalist kind of sentiment.

Yeah, no, it's very real.

And it has a very genuine basis in sharing more than common interests, I will say.

So for people who are not as familiar with the struggle where you are which is in chinland would you explain a little bit of i mean obviously we can and we will at some point explain a little bit more of the history of chinland because i think it's very important and it sometimes gets marginalized from even narrative of the revolution but can you explain like the groups and the the struggle as it has been since 2021? In many ways, Chinland is where the revolution, the armed revolution began, right? So can you explain how we get to a place today where in recent weeks we've seen massive victories in Chinland? Yeah. So as you know, the political situation, at least between the groups, is somewhat complicated.
So I'll try my best to like most fairly, but also somehow accurately describe. Yeah.
I'll start from the history, we can say. As you described, in and around MnDAT at the time of these protests, this was kind of like the catalyst and one of the first places that actual armed resistance to this dictatorship started.
And that wasn't armed resistance like with guns or something.

That was armed resistance like with the shotguns, like double barrel shotguns from India, muzzle loading traditional hunting rifles and air guns and things like this. And with that kind of weaponry, they were going and attacking police stations and checkpoints.
So it really was a sign for everyone, like not only the bravery of the people that are willing to do something like that, but the willingness and the risk that these people are able to take and the seriousness of their opposition to the dictatorship that look, this isn't just a protest anymore. Even we have only sticks and stones, we will dismantle this dictatorship.
Yeah. So yeah, that was a very inspiring early period.
And I think even before the involvement of some of the bigger ethnic armed organizations, there were already local CDFs, which stands for Chinland Defense Force, which is kind of just like PDF. It's a moniker that a lot of groups share.
There were a lot of different PDFs and CDF popping up just in the days following the coup in Chinland. so yeah from the very beginning there was uh the the precedent in the history of revolution there now these towns that were the beginning of the revolution have now been seized so mindat as of uh last month was taken yeah by the chin brotherhood alliance as well as you know cdf mindat and and alliance partners so the progress has definitely been made the current landscape looks a little bit like this in Chin State.
There's two big blocks, we can say. One block is the Chin Brotherhood and one block is the Chin Land Council.
At first, there was only one block called the ICNCC, which stands for Interim Chin National Coordinating Council or Committee. I always forget the last C.
I have to remember it same time as you were. And that was like the political big umbrella organization.
And there was the CJDC, which is the military big umbrella organization. That stands for Chinlin Joint Defense Council or Committee.
Again, last C always ambiguous. So, yeah, for a long time, it was everyone, including one of the, you know, very old ethnic resistance organizations, the CNA, CNF, the Chin National Army, Chin National Front, was kind of involved in this one big umbrella organization.
And everywhere there was resistance against dictatorship and on some level cooperation, both with Chin groups, as well as with the NUG. In 2023, political events occurred, and as we can say politely, a disagreement in the political future of Qinland separated into two groups, with CNA, CNF withdrawing from the CJDC and forming their Qinland Council.
And the groups that kind of subscribed to that vision and subscribed to that path, they joined the new Qinlan Council. And all of the groups that remained in the CJDC and the ICNCC continued to hold on to the ICNCC as a kind of platform and umbrella organization for the people in Qin state that didn't want to subscribe to this new path.
And then Qin Brotherhood was formed as the new practical military alliance of those people who remained, we can say. And since then, in only one year, I mean, both sides have had very incredible victories.
No, Qin Lin Council has been able to, in the north of Qin state, liberate Cheka and Tunzong town. And then, of course, in the south of Qin state, Qin Brotherhood has been able to take Matupi and Kan mindat so definitely victories all around but yeah i'll stop myself before i comment too much more on that yeah but victories that would have been unimaginable three years i mean we're almost exactly three years from the beginning of the revolution four years yeah yeah 2025 god yeah uh yeah four years from the beginning of the revolution when as you say like those videos that was when i first became aware of the post-coup resistance was seeing videos online of people with those traditional muzzle-loading hunting rifles but taking on police checkpoints or attempting to organize an arm resistance and those little air guns with the made of the blue plumbing pipe like yeah um they uh it was incredible like just the bravery of the people and their commitment and their willingness to risk their lives and sometimes lose their lives because like as one revolutionary doctor told me a few years ago he said like my grandparents died for democracy and my parents generation died for it And we don't think another generation should have to die for it.
So, like, we're all prepared to go down fighting for this, which I thought, you know, was really impactful. And then he was right that their willingness to risk their lives and to be so brave is unparalleled.
And the revolution wouldn't have got to where it's got to. But's such a beautiful thing that it has i wonder like it's a it's a crucial time for the revolution now right like the the revolution is as successful as it's ever been we're reaching the fifth year can you explain like the role of the aif within the broader revolution because i think people get really confused by all the acronyms and it can be easy to think that these groups and it's an alphabet secret I'm writing a book about this and Spain and like I've spent most of the last week just trying to write the dictionary of acronyms that goes in the back of the book but like can you explain these aren't groups that are necessarily sometimes they are opposed to each other have different visions for the future but can you explain the role of the aif within the broad anti-hunter movement sure first i'll say i'm reading a book right now about like the history of the communist party of burma and that history goes from like you know the 30s all the way to the 90s yeah and every single page has at least 10 different acronyms.
And it's absolutely insane. Yeah.
Yeah. About the AIF, the anti-fascist internationalist front, which I'm hoping everyone just recognizes as AIF because it's kind of a mouthful.
Our perspective so far has been that, especially as foreigners, and especially as like foreign foreigners, you know, like Western foreigners. Yeah.
We really want to avoid as much as possible the perception of we're coming here, you know, we've got military experience, or we've got this knowledge, or we've got that knowledge, and now it's time for us to tell you what to do, or now it's time for us to train or something like that. Yeah, I would say our perspective is much more closer to the perspective of the, you know, the international structures in Rojava.
Our goal is recognizing that this enemy, the SAC dictatorship, the SAC junta, is fundamentally a fascist anti-human enemy. That makes it also our struggle.
And so not in some kind of like presumptive way or not in some kind of like imposing way, but in a very genuine and organic manner, we want to come here and implement ourselves into the revolution. Now, we have some friends who are coming who maybe have previous experience with this or with that, and in their capacity, of course, they give training because the people here, the comrades, have been overwhelmingly receptive to training like this, you know, there's been no pride or no like, oh, we don't need the help.
Yeah, quite contrarily, everyone at all stages, even the NUG is saying, I'm not talking about us, I'm just talking about publicly, you know, to everyone is saying, whatever help we can get, we appreciate it. But, you know, we're not just bringing people who are, you know, Rojava veterans or veterans of some conflict where they can come and give training.
Fundamentally, it's an anti-fascist conflict, which means even people without experience are able to come and not only participate in the revolution, but in a less transactory way, not to say like, oh, I have something and I will give it to the revolution. And the most important way is to come and to learn from the revolution.
Exactly as you said, even a revolution like Rojava, which has decades and decades of history and tradition and culture and ideology and is steeped in this, yeah, I would say, you know, one of the most powerful, prominent revolutions of our time, is still able to say, a revolution like this, of course we can learn from it. We need to learn from the struggles of our comrades there.
We need to learn from the developments happening in this revolution. Our perspective in AIF is very much the same, where, yeah, okay, maybe we have some limited material things we can contribute, but ultimately, it's about organically participating in this revolution which is against fascism, and in our own ways, to take the lessons of this revolution, to take the fundamental meaning of this revolution, and be able to translate it for ourselves, and for, of course, the future works which are ahead of us, shall we say.
Yeah, I remember when I was much, much younger talking to a veteran of the international group, an anarchist veteran. No, it was from the International Brigade, so correct myself.
And I asked him to explain anti-fascism to me and he said that for him like when someone devalues humanity like the junta does in burma like the francoist did in spain right um like as i did in syria it debases his own humanity and like anyone who attacks humanity in that way is attacking him and all humanity and therefore it's a responsibility of humanity to defend humanity, to defend compassion and kindness.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think what you're doing in Myanmar is part of that desire to defend humanity against, inhumanity against whatever we want to call it.
What are the struggles that the revolution faces? I know you guys have recently been doing a fundraising campaign for example and and the revolution is almost unique in its complete lack of solidarity from the states of the world right there is not a state that is backing this revolution it is entirely the force of the people of miyambar so can you explain some of the struggles within the revolution, perhaps because of that? Yeah, I mean, as much as some people, you know, like to say CIA or something like this is involved. Yeah, well, they can fuck off.
Of course, the reality is that, you know, I've heard the term crowdfunded revolution. I think it's incredibly accurate.
Yeah. Because, no, in the AIF, we recently did a fundraiser for vehicles and equipment and things like this.
But that's on our scale. On the scale of these organizations, I mean, they are fundraising from the diaspora millions and millions of dollars to be able to wage this resistance.
And of course, even local people who themselves maybe don't have a lot are giving everything they can or are anyway acting any way they can or doing anything they can to help the revolution. So we can say overwhelmingly, it is a popular resistance.
Even I would go so far as to say it is fundamentally a people's resistance against the dictatorship that, of course, represents itself in a lot of different organizations. But these organizations enjoy the like 95% support of the people against the junta, you know?

Yeah.

So yeah, in that regard, the challenge, of course, is always resources and always the strength of the enemy. No, we're still going up against jet fighters, helicopters, mortars, artillery.
You know, they have a lot of ammo, us not so much. So there's like lots of these practical problems.
I think the, how say cynical kind of as you mentioned earlier western outlook has been to paint this struggle kind of in oh it's a tribal struggle there's all these different groups they're all fighting for their own area what's going to happen after they win now i disagree with that assessment obviously i think you know yourself as you're familiar conflict, I think it's much deeper than that. And even across these many different identities and cultures, there's very deep, very real coordination and cooperation where I don't think it's just like chaotic.
But on the other hand, that is, you know, not to give the cynics credit, that is a question which going forward will politically very much be on the agenda. Because, I mean, now, you're seeing, most of the country is no longer in the Junta's control.
And the parts that are in the Junta's control are contested, and then you have the tiny sliver of land which they can say they somehow, without any kind of, you know, contestant control. So very soon the onus will be on revolutionary forces to answer that question.
Okay, how are we going to consolidate? How are we going to transfer these wins on the battlefield into something that is more permanent and more lasting? And I think, you know, already as you're seeing in Chin State that I can speak of and that people are seeing in elsewhere that I can't speak of because I don't know. There are definitely frictions.
You know, I'm not going to say it's perfect. Everyone is smiling.
Everyone is working together. And there's frictions that will have to be worked through.
But fundamentally, I think the trajectory as it currently is, is positive for the resistance, we can say. Yeah, definitely.
I was talking to someone yesterday in another part of Myanmar, and I was saying, you know, I'm going to come visit you hopefully soon. And he was saying like, oh, you'll love it.
Like just to be in the liberated zone is so special. Talk to us about like liberated Chin land, right? MnDAT's just been liberated.
Large areas have been under the control or semi-control of a dictatorial regime that has been extremely oppressive to the Chin people for decades. Like, how are people receiving their liberty? How are they governing themselves or attempting to take care of one another in these liberated spaces? Sure.
Well, I think the first thing I'll say is maybe to contrast to other parts of Myanmar, we've been relatively lucky in Qin state, and that even, you know, for some years already, the junta, due to the mountainous nature of Chin State, has anyway been reduced to the cities for years. Like, all of their checkpoints, all of their, like, external places, the last of those were cleared in 2023, and most of them anyway in 2022 were gone.
So, by landmass, even before these towns were seized, the junta controlled, if you were to add up all of the area that they actually physically control in Chin State, maybe a couple square kilometers.

You know, just the area of, like, their bases and something like that.

So because of the nature of Qin state, they never had the, of course, they did these atrocities and massacres and things like this, but on the kind of like, you know, fascist dictatorship level of oppression, since after the revolution, they had not really had the opportunity to impose themselves too much. They were the ones kind of cowering in their corner.
But I think especially after these towns are being seized now, you know, take Rikodar, which is the border town on India, or take Mindaadam or Tupi, these towns that have just been recently seized. These are towns which people are wanting to live their lives.
I mean, Chin State has always been autonomous, even in British rule, in colonial rule. It was just labeled as unadministered, you know? And there was a very rich democratic tradition, or how can we say, maybe not democratic in the traditional sense, but tradition of self-rule and autonomy in Chin State.
And the removal of the junta from these areas is allowing those relationships to much more naturally flourish. And I think the aspiration of a lot of people, both abroad as well as internally displaced from Chin State, is to return to those places where there's been fighting and to continue their lives as normal, which I think finally now that not just in Chin State, all over the country.
We're slowly seeing these alternative systems of you know let's not call them like communist or revolutionary or anything. But fundamentally they are alternative to the state administration system.
Yeah and I think that narrative that you pushed back on already. And we've seen it from so many.
think think tank every analyst ever every so-called expert has said the eros will only fight for their territory when they've reached the limits of what they consider to be their like ethnic homeland they will stop and that hasn't happened right it's not happened anywhere but the fact that even if it did right or even if some of these eros have visions for the future, which is not as liberatory as maybe you and I would like, the fact that there are parts of Myanmar that are free now and that where people can live their lives as they wish will never change. And that will mean that those places are always there for people to go to.
And like, I'm sure lots of people you're fighting with and alongside have come to chin land right like like not all of them will be will have spent their whole lives there they'll have they'll have come there from but my majority cities maybe is that correct look like not to give any specifics so i'll just make a very broad term to exaggerate the fact you can say that i have met somebody from almost every single group in Myanmar, in Xin State. Now, that's just to say, that's not to like, you know, be shocking or something.
That's just to highlight the level of interconnectedness logistically, materially, militarily. You know, even if it's just someone sending someone to say hi from somewhere, you know? It's not like, oh, everyone's in their corners fighting.
I mean, I promise you, there are soldiers here which are giving their lives for the towns in Chin State, which maybe they never even thought about Chin State before this revolution, you know? They're coming from opposite sides of the country. Yeah, absolutely.
It's fundamentally a fight against the dictatorship. It's not the fight to liberate Chinland or to liberate Kareni or something like this.
Yeah. I to mandalay pdf a while ago and they were saying to me like they were really scared when they first left the cities because they've been told that like wild people lived in the mountains yeah yeah and that like now we're wild people we like the wild people like but yeah this this narrative i mean james c scott talks about this right in of Not Being Governed, this idea that these mountains were never really places that were amenable to state control.

And that now they're places where people can go to avoid it.

But it's also important that this revolution extends beyond the mountains and into the cities and that people living there don't have to live under the boot heel of a dictatorial state, which is what's happening, right?

Yeah, absolutely. which is which is what's happening right yeah absolutely people will be listening to this i'm sure and like thinking this is laudable this is incredible and a they'll be shocked that they haven't heard about this maybe especially if they're newer listeners and i do want to say that like you can go back and listen to our other coverage on miyama there is a lot but like in terms of conflicts right conflict is always messy and war is never inherently a beautiful thing beautiful things can happen in wars but we rarely see wars where there is so much good on one side and so much evil on the other.

And why do you think that especially the Western media has largely overlooked the conflict in Myanmar?

That's a good question.

I will say, just on a very base level, without getting into any kind of pondering or something like that,

I've spoken with a few journalists.

And before anything, before we even talk about politics or something, there is just the material calculation that these outlets are making. From what I understand, from what I have heard, people don't care.
Now that's really unfortunate, but like these like big networks, you know, CNN, whatever. Yeah.
I have to make the calculation of the people they send and the risks to send them and the actual exposure that these news articles will get. From I understand from conversations that I've had with some people that are you know involved in these networks right now there is not on like the executive board level there's just not a lot of push to cover Myanmar and that's you know that's really unfortunate and I think one really bad side effect of that is whenever there's a tragedy the media is there yeah you, like whenever there's some massacre or whenever there's some, you know, intertribal conflict or whenever there's something bad to report about, or maybe, you know, on a good day, the really big, like a win, like in Lascio that we saw, you know? Yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
For these big things, the Western media will be there. But I think even from recording these very like clickbaity, eye-catching things, it seems like they're not getting the exposure that they want to get out of this content, which is putting them off of covering the, you know, in our opinion, much more meaningful wall-to-wall content that exists, I mean, every day in Myanmar.
It seems like this Western eye is only interested in the suffering, we can say, which is really unfortunate. But, you know, even if the media is not paying attention, we can say for better or worse, the governments are paying attention.
Absolutely. I mean, almost like hawks, you can say there are every single regional government as well as foreign governments, of course, keeping a very close eye on the situation, circling, looking at developments.
I mean, China, especially, no, being very involved in the process yeah so yeah well unfortunately the the kind of liberal media

eye is not so much uh you know giving me and more of the coverage that it deserves as a popular

revolution the powers that be are definitely watching its progression we can say yeah yeah

definitely i mean it offers an alternative for the world that like it's distinct even from rojava

like the uh the building of a revolutionary movement like you said the crowdfunded revolution

Thank you. I mean, it offers an alternative for the world that like, it's distinct even from Rojava, like the, uh, the building of a revolutionary movement.
Like you said, the crowdfunded revolution, the revolution that like entirely, I mean, at points armed itself using guns, it downloaded off the internet. you know it it offers sometimes i think when i'm like thinking about you know my background in studying anarchists in spain and like obviously i've looked a lot at the past

but it gives me a vision of the future. And it's only in covering the small parts of the revolution that make it truly a revolution that we can see that.
You have an Instagram, and on there you're posting about training. Sometimes when you're doing the trainings, are women who are coming to train you know with rifles to be i was gonna say marks marks

people i guess like i don't people yeah only u.s military guys are weird about calling things

snipers yo they're snipers yeah okay yeah let's do that okay in the moment that that they receive

that training and become like efficient with their weapons like a revolution happens for that woman

Thank you. do that okay in the moment that that they receive that training and become like efficient with their weapons like a revolution happens for that woman and it's only through like following those those little revolutions that happen every day that make up a big revolution that we truly understand it and i'm sure that's something that like you're seeing on a daily or weekly basis right like people's worlds opening up and their horizons changing because of the revolution.
Well, listen, absolutely. Now, of course, you know, as leftists involved or interested in this revolution, studying it, whether you're socialist, whether you're anarchist, whether you're communist, whether you're opposed, you know, however you like to describe yourself, whatever flavor you are, you know, without pontificating too much, I think fundamentally this revolution is a symbol of hope that it can be done.
No, like, I'll give an example. From the conversations that I've had with the comrades that have been involved in this revolution since it was just a protest movement in the streets, one thing that I've heard a lot is that at the beginning of the revolution, when it switched, you know, when the police were firing bullets into the crowds and when people made this decision that, okay, now we have no choice but armed resistance, we have no choice but to fight the dictatorship.
When that calculus was made, when that decision was made, it was not made based on the kind of analysis of the situation that they could even win. it was not even like okay we, we're going to do this, and we have this strategy of guerrilla

war, and then we'll do this, this, and this, and then we'll achieve the victory.

The calculation that was made was a moral calculation.

It was saying, we have the choice, we can go back to our life, we can accept this oppression,

we can give up this struggle for democracy that we've been waging in one form or another,

or we can make the decision to fight even if we won't win. It's the moral imperative to resist dictatorship.
And I think what this revolution is showing, not just for the people who themselves were surprised at their capability and were themselves surprised at what they could accomplish when they actually stepped up and fought and sacrificed for revolution. Fundamentally, it's a message to everyone.
It says, look, these people at the beginning were going at checkpoints with like double barrels and air rifles. And at the end, now they are like threatening to overthrow what was previously assumed to be one of the most powerful militaries in Southeastern Asia.
I mean, now like everyone jokes on the Tatmadaw because they're obviously garbage now. But like, at the like, at the time, that wasn't the analysis, you know? It would be the same as saying, like, oh, you know, we're going to overthrow the USA or something like that.
It was fundamentally, people didn't even envision the victory, but on the moral principle to resist, they resisted, and from that moral position, they were able to materialize the victory that they had previously not even imagined. So, you know, for me, that's what I take away.
There's no books, there's no ideological books here that you can study and understand the underpinnings of the revolution. You know, there's no classes that you can go to that the PDF teaches you about what their revolutionary paradigm is.
fundamentally it's a fight of the people against oppression and against dictatorship and while of course there's some strengths and some weaknesses that we face in the revolution

ultimately paradigm is. Fundamentally, it's a fight of the people against oppression and against dictatorship.
And while, of course, there's some strengths and some weaknesses that we face in the revolution, ultimately, in the same way as Rojava, in the same place as other places in the world, it's a beacon of hope for democratic people who envision themselves fighting on the side of freedom and the symbol that actually, yeah, you can win. Yeah, it's given me so much hope.

Like at a time, the last few years,

when we've all desperately needed something good to happen,

like something good is happening.

Incredibly good.

Yeah, it's breathtaking.

Like I went in 2022 during the first year of the revolution

and I was shopping around this story for months, right?

I knew these guys who were doing the 3D printing

and I went to every major outlet. I was like, this is the story that's going to make people care.
And no one bought it until eventually CoolZone did. And here I am.
But even 2021, 2022, talking to those guys, I was like, they might all die. It's still been worth it for them.
But they might all be gone in a year. I'm unfortunately familiar with that from my line of work but like to see it succeed it's so uh like incredible it's obviously war is is terrible and terrible things have happened in the war but like it's such a beautiful thing to see people refuse to accept tyranny and just through the tenacity of their refusal to create liberated spaces and to now threaten to topple like you say one of what had previously been a feared army in the region like it continues to amaze me every day every every time i see people dancing in front of a captured military headquarters or i don't it's just such a such a uh remarkable revolution is that if people wish to be in solidarity if they wish to follow the aif if they want to learn more about the aif where can they do that are there places online or are there ways that they can support you aside from obviously like being part of the struggle like how can they help you yeah me personally my information platform is mostly on instagram where i post updates about you know either insights about what's going on or or news updates or something like that and that's azad underscore afa on instagram spell out azad for the non-kirtish speakers yeah azad azad if you will um yeah thank you underscore afa on instagram the aif also has Instagram for like official posts.
It's AIF Myanmar. In general about the AIF, especially at this early stages, right now we're involved in some front lines in western Myanmar and so because of that we don't really have a lot of information presence out right now.
But in the coming weeks, in the coming months, definitely when things get published, when more things like that come out, they will come out from kind of the existing distribution circles that have been going around, like Libcom. There has been like statements going out as well as Instagram and PR things like that.
Yeah. And recently we just completed a fundraiser.
Our goal was $10,000 for the vehicles and the equipment that we will needed to get started. Yeah.
For listeners who don yeah maybe they're not aware this only started in october of last year so we're still uh in the stages of consolidating and getting our equipment we set the goal for ten thousand dollars and we exceeded it we raised over thirteen thousand dollars for that nice so yeah we're very happy to say that but in the future of, of course, there will always be more opportunities. As you know, revolution is very expensive.
Yeah. So yeah, on all fundraising platforms, we have PayPal, Cash App and Venmo.
And all of those are AIF Myanmar. And yeah, in the future, hopefully we will have more news both about what's happening in Myanmar, both how we specifically are involved, as well as just very exciting

footage, we can say. We hope to share

soon. Yeah, that'll be great to

see. And I hope you'll come back and join us again, and

maybe we can delve into a little bit more of the history

of the revolution, and the revolution

in Chinlan specifically, because I think

these are things that we need to

cover more, and I'd love to

give people a place to learn about them. Yeah, absolutely.

Great. Thank you so much.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share. Gilbert King, I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.

I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2.
Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I am once again your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I am joined today by Spencer Sunshine, the author of Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege.
It's available now in paperback. I have my paperback copy from Rutledge Press.
So, Spencer, I let's get right into it. What is Siege and why should we still be talking about it? Well, unfortunately, we should still be talking about it because it's still influential.
It was a book originally published in 1993, but that is an edited version of newsletters published in the 80s by a fellow named James Mason, who was a lifelong neo-Nazi. He joined the American Nazi Party at age 14 in 1966.
He is still an active ideological believer in national socialism. It's a book that, in it, he makes the argument that any kind of normal, legal, political activity was pointless for neo-Nazis to engage in, and like forming organizations, holding marches, making the traditional propaganda, trying to build up parties, even guerrilla warfare at the end of it, he becomes very cynical about.
And he says through what are essentially dramatic random acts of violence, of terrorism or murder, he even goes into praising serial killers like Joseph Paul Franklin. We can destabilize the government and society.
And after this, neo-Nazis can come to power. This has become a very influential idea.
More recently, he was rediscovered. It was a pretty obscure, the newsletters were very unpopular.
He never made more than a hundred copies. original book had a print run of 1,000.
So it was a sort of obscure text. It was known amongst neo-Nazi circles for some unusual reasons.
It became mixed up with some countercultural figures, and that was actually what made it more well-known. But it was revived in 2015.
It was found by these younger aspiring terrorists, let's say at the time, around a message board called Iron March. It became the Bible of the Atomoffen Division, this neo-Nazi group that its members and associates killed five people.
And out of that, everyone in the Atomoffen Division had to read Siege, which became the hashtag. And out of that grew this whole sort of network first of groups and now really of totally decentralized like propaganda channels on Telegram, the Telegram promoting these same ideas.
And so it's become very influential today. It gets named in like terrorist manifestos, the school shooter, I think it was in Nashville, Tennessee, that just happened.
He makes a reference to people who are into siege in his writings. And more and more, I've documented before him at least 12 murders that were either by the Atomwaffen Division, by people inspired by siege culture, or by people directly linked to Terragram.
So if we want to look at the main text animating neo-Nazi terrorism today, which is now spread around the globe, there's groups in Latin America, there's groups in Eastern Western Europe, it's even influencing groups in the Middle East or people in the Middle East. They're called accelerationists.
They want to accelerate the collapse of things. And if there's a single ideological text today that's influential on this scene, it is by easily James Mason Siege.
And what I particularly am enjoying about the book, and I just told you before we started recording, I haven't finished it yet. What I'm enjoying about this book is so, you know, you're saying that James Mason started writing this in the 80s, right? But nobody was reading it.
It was very sort of niche. It wasn't popular even within its own niche.
He was not a popular man. He had a lot of beefs with other leaders in the movement.
It's rediscovered in the 2010s. It's big on Iron March.
It's the animating force behind Atomwaffen. And so all of a sudden in the last 10 years, people like us, you know, researchers of the far right, mainstream journalists, people are talking about Siege.
They're talking about Mason. But this, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is the only book sort of tracing it back to its root.
James Mason did not come into existence in 2015 on the pages of Iron March, right? They sort of dug back up this writing that was at that point 30 years old. But this book, I mean, it's an incredible work of research, but it's also sort of a picaresque, right? It follows James Mason through decades of Nazi history, right? He wasn't just a guy who wrote a newsletter.
He was a guy who was in a lot of rooms. He knew a lot of people.
So through the lens of James Mason's life, you can follow the origins of the modern neo-Nazi movement back to the sort of splinters and sects and rival personalities of the 70s, right? That you can't understand modern neo-Nazi organizing if you don't know the history that goes back to the 60s and 70s. Well, thank you for getting that.
I had someone write a review. It was an interesting view from the viewpoint of literary criticism.
And he's like, well, this is one of these books about a book. It's not.
And I'm like, yeah, it kind of is. But it's really, and I started, after I started writing this, which has an unusual origin, or just maybe it is a usual origin, like the first half is about neo-Nazism in the 1970s, which is incredibly undocumented.
There's a huge problem with documentation about the far right in general before 2015. Probably more books have come out in the last 10 years about the far right in the U.S.
before 2015 than came out before. And certainly about neo-Nazis who are almost always, when they are written about, American neo-Nazis, it's usually in a history of the white supremacist movement, and there's no differentiation made between them.
And I would say the National Socialists are quite different from other white supremacists for a variety of different reasons. So there is no book about neo-Nazism in the 1970s in the U.S.
at all. There are only two documents I can really name, and they're both written by National Socialists, actually one in Australia, and one the head of the New Order, which used to be the American Nazi Party.
It's actually not bad. It's an eight-part series by Martin Kirk.
So the first half is really reconstructing what happened in the 1970s, because this is what Siege is coming out of. This Siege is an answer to the questions that faced neo-Nazis in the 1970s.
And then the second half of the book is even, I would say, less about Mason. It's about these four countercultural figures who discovered Mason, helped publish him, and eventually created, published, and disseminated Siege itself.
And part of that is I was just around the scene these people were part of in the 1990s. Like, I saw one of them, Boyd Rice, play.
I had many mutual friends with another, the publisher, Adam Parfrey of Feral House. So, like, I was, like, right around what these people were doing as part of the 90s counterculture.
So So I became very interested in that because these people always denied their background, you know, or left it off or something. And I found just so many smoking guns in this.
And so I will say how this started is right after Charlottesville, the Unite the Right Rally at Charlottesville is you say these things and then you just give the name of the thing and people are like, wait a minute, that's like where I live, you know? It is where I live. We're more than that.
You know, I was in Seattle. I was like, oh, I was at Seattle referring to this 1999 demonstration.
And I'm like, people here weren't even necessarily born then and just saying at Seattle doesn't mean anything. So after Unite the Right, there was a spike in popularity in Siege and the hashtag read Siege, because it looked like the rally followed what he said.
And he said, no one in American society will allow neo-Nazis to succeed. And a lot of people don't know this, but what happened at the initial rally is that it wasn't.
The street fighting people might be familiar with, even that's fading from memory, was before it was supposed to start. And when it was supposed to start at noon, the police, who had been standing a block away and letting everything unfold, marched in and forced everyone out, meaning the rally never happened.
Nobody ever gave a speech. Nobody gave a speech.
As we know, the car attack happened like an hour or two later. I got to look at a timeline.
It's all I garbled now, right? 1.30, yeah. Yeah, that sounds right.
And the book is co-dedicated to Heather Hare, I just want to point out. So it seemed to coincide with what Mason said.
He's like, you can't do legal work, you have to do a terrorism, right? And so there was a spike in interest in it, and Adam Woffin had been doing more and more, Adam Woffin people are committing murders, strange murders. They're all very strange murders, which I think speaks to a lot of the personalities who are involved in this and other forms of violence, even in more structured political movements.
I think it does attract, tends to attract fringe people, except at certain times where people are intentionally using it as a strategy as part of a bigger mass movement. Anyway, these are questions for terrorism studies.
And so there was a spike of interest in it. So I was going to write a short article for a think tank I used to be associated with, which I will not name because I had such a bad experience with them.
And it was going to be an article. I couldn't get the facts to line up.
As I said, there's terrible scholarship about this period. And so I, you know, used this very sophisticated research tool called Google.
And through that, I found that Mason's Papers, there was a huge collection of Mason's Papers at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. So I decided I'd go there.
I thought I'd just straighten these things out. There were some documents I needed, some very obscure fanzines and stuff.
It'd be the end of the day. I got there.
Well, first I discovered it's not easy to get to Lawrence, Kansas. You have to fly into an airport.
And then I think I took an Uber for like an hour. It was like one bus a day or something.
Anyway, I got there and started poking at the papers. It was 60 boxes of his correspondence.
He had letters incoming and outgoing since the early 1960s. As you mentioned, he was an insider to the neo-Nazi movement.
So it was with all these people. He had kept carbon copies of his outgoing letters.
It was a unique slice of national socialist life in the United States. Never seen an archive like it.
People didn't keep their papers because they were doing illegal activities. The government sees them and has them in a warehouse somewhere or whatever.
This is even in the pre-internet. I can only do this because it was pre-internet and there were paper copies of stuff.
And I'm of the age where I grew up doing all research on paper and in archives. And I quickly found out what I had and there were paper copies of stuff, and I'm of the age where I grew up doing all research on paper and in archives.
And I quickly found out what I had, and there were two things. One, as I said, was that there was this whole story of American neo-Nazism, of when the American Nazi Party splinters, it's then called the National Socialist White People's Party, in the 1970s, and all these groups come out of it, many of which we know parts of, like William Pierce, who wrote the Turner Diaries, and the Skokie Incident, which is parodied in the Blues Brothers, some people don't know this, just of Paul Franklin shooting and paralyzing us, the publisher Larry Flint, and some other things.
And I was like, oh, these are all people who came out of one thing, a splintering of the party. And I realized that there basically was a terrorist wing that came out of the splintering.
And people knew Mason and people knew Pierce, but there was like a couple other groups or people, but people didn't put it together that they were all like the most radical wing of these splinter groups. So there was that story.
And then as I mentioned, there was a second story about these countercultural people who had always denied that they were involved in National Socialism or the level of it.

It was just a joke.

All these things that we hear today, almost word for word.

And so I found all their letters to James Mason, and they're adorned with swastikas and 8-8s, and they're helping him.

They reveal the extent that they helped him.

And the funny thing is, a lot of this stuff was actually available out in the open.

It was in published books, but it was like little pieces of flakes of gold scattered around everything. I started picking them up because I realized you could put them together.
And so one article turned out, it was supposed to be one article, and then it turns to two articles, and I sat down to write it and turn it into a book. And then five years later, I finally had the manuscript done.
Then it took another year at the publishers, and then it came out last year. So it's been seven years of work, and I've been going around doing talks.
I did 17 talks in support of the book and as many podcasts and stuff. So I'm still, the book is still part of my life as much as I would like to sort of put it down.
But thank you for having me on the podcast. This is great that you have me on the podcast.
Not against, no diss against you. No shade, no shade.
No, and I'm so, I'm so jealous of your trip to Kansas to see the archives. I only recently, a year or two, discovered that his papers existed in those archives.
And so I wrote to the archivist and I said, like, you know, are any of these digitized? I would love to see them. And they're like, you know, we've only digitized like one box and they sent me a couple of, a couple of scans, but most of it has not been digitized.
So you have to go to Kansas if you want to read this old pedophile Nazis letters to Charles Manson. Well, I do have thousands of pictures I took of this correspondence.
So, yeah, if you request digital copies, they won't tell you what they've digitized. And so it's like, you know, trying to like randomly throw darts or something.
If you get the right file, they have them. I know.
I was like, I was begging and pleading. I was like, please just like any letters you have with Bob Hike.
I just, I just want the Bob Hike letters, but I can give you the Bob Hike letters. I would love those.
I think they'll, they'll digitize stuff for, for a price though. Oh, I'm sure.
I'm sure if I pay for it, they would do me the favor. But that's the thing is that there's so much interconnection here because these stories always get told episodically, right? Like the story of James Mason and Adam Woffin, the story of William Luther Pierce, the story of the founding of the National Socialist Movement.
But nobody takes those pieces and slots them together because they interlock. They all interlock, right?

And so this idea of the lone wolf,

I mean, I guess James Mason's life's work

is to perpetuate and motivate the lone wolf,

but is it really a lone wolf if he's training them?

Well, the lone wolf question is a long question.

A lot of people know Metzger moved

to the lone wolf strategy

after a war was sued by the SPLC and collapsed, but Mason was advocating this beforehand and was very tight with Metzger moved to the lone wolf strategy after a war was sued by the SPLC and collapsed. But Mason was advocating this beforehand and was very tight with Metzger.
So there is actually a book describing what you've said, putting the pieces together, and it's called Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism. Exactly.
Which you can buy today. I mean, like I said, it's the only book that I know of that fits these pieces together.

No, it is the only book.

Actually, I've been in contact with James Mason, and he said,

when at radio interview, it's not the first of its kind, but it's the best of its kind. That's a high praise from the book's Nazi pedophile subject.
Yeah. Why did he donate his papers to the library? Because like you said, most people are not, not only not preserving these items, but they're not preserving them at all because they know what they've done is illegal or embarrassing to everyone involved.
And they're intentionally destroying the evidence of these kinds of communications. But he not only saved them, but he wanted to make sure we could read them.
Did you talk to him at all about why he did that? Well, he sold them. He was a Wheeler dealer in especially American Nazi party memorabilia.
You know, he sold furniture on the side, like antiques, go antiquing. And he, if you've seen pictures of his apartment, it's filled with Nazi knickknacks, right? He's got a knife collection.
I mean, it looks like the Aryan Nations booth at the Tulsa gun show. It looks like my apartment, but like in the inverse and fewer plants.
So he was a collector. So he was already, my understanding is he was already selling George Lincoln Rockwell, memorabilia, or whatever papers and such to Kansas.
They have this collection there called the Wilcox Collection of anti-extremist stuff. This guy, Laird Wilcox, had been in early Students for Democratic Society before they took the, like, Marxist turn and then decided that the left and the right were the same, like in the 70s or something, and started collecting all this material.
So they were one of the, they were probably the biggest collection of far-right material. And as I said at the time, libraries weren't collecting it and people weren't writing about it.
They were like, oh, these are just a bunch of kooks and wingnuts. They're not important.
And some of this is because, like as I say in the book, the first neo-Nazi mass murder wasn't until the late 70s. Like, it was what we know as neo-Nazism today really only emerged in the 70s, is one of my arguments in the book.
So the papers were there because he sold them. The second thing is he is unique, I think, not unique, but very uncommon because he is an unabashed neo-Nazi.
He does not try to hide it. He is not like the NSM, which is actually a party he co-founded, shockingly, but left over that as they turned, because originally it was to promote violence.
And then as it turned to a more traditional Hollywood Nazi party, he left. But it's the same one that was at Charlottesville and Jeff Scoop was the head of, I actually taught Jeff Scoop about how the party was founded.
That was very interesting. I interviewed him for the book.
Another one of those dishonest actors. Well, the guy who had made him the head of the party, who was actually the second head, Harrington.
Cliff Harrington. Cliff Harrington did not give him the truthful account of the party's founding.
Harrington claimed he was a co-founder and he wasn't. He claimed a different date.
This is one reason I spent so much time on stuff. Also that I found all these things had been printed that were wrong by scholars and others that were.
And it wasn't their fault. They were taken.
It was harder to get these documents, especially when a group is moving. And so Harrington claimed he had been a co-founder in 1974 or whatever, but he was lying.
Mason was one of the co-founders and not him. He only became the head in the 80s.
So this is some of the stuff I found. Anyway, I was going to say the NSM at one point go, we're not neo-Nazis, we're national socialists.
I was like, get the fuck out of here. Like, really? Like, come, all your flag is a swastika on it.
Oh, I mean, this is absurd. But people will do that, right? It's like the dead parrot skit in Monty Python, if people know this.
But Mason stands out because he's always been very upfront about his views. He's very proud of them.
He's not ashamed. And if this embarrassed other people, they didn't belong.
As he told me, they didn't believe in the one true religion. So I asked him about these counterculture figures who have denied they were ever involved in this stuff.
At the time, he was convinced they were national socialists, and he was like, well, they believed in something else other than the one true faith. I think that's the word he used.

So, yeah, he has nothing to hide. He's very open about it, very open about promoting terrorism.
As you know, and maybe some of the listeners do, young neo-Nazis go to his apartment and he tutors them. They take pictures with him.
This included Sam Woodward, who murdered a young gay Jewish man, Blaise Bernstein, recently sentenced to life in prison. There's pictures of Woodward in Mason's apartment.
So yeah, I mean, he wants, he wants his, he's proud of his lineage and he wants it documented. And I know I did him a favor by writing a book about his movement.
I mean, they don't have the intellectuals and the resources to, and the trained people to write historical books. And I did a pretty straight up book.
Even Mason was like, I kept waiting to read the smear. I kept waiting for the smear.
There was no smear. I was like, yeah, I just wrote it as a history book.
And so in a way I've given them insight into their history, which wouldn't exist otherwise. So this stuff is always a double-edged sword when you cover, as you know, when you cover fascist groups.
They want the publicity by and large. I was told sometimes at the SPLC, like groups contact them and they're like, cover us, give us coverage.
Sending them their press releases, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I mean, I think someone like Mason, I guess he doesn't see the smear because like you said he's proud of himself so this is i think is an honest appraisal of his legacy and most people would see that as a smear but he's proud of it well it's not a smear i don't need to say anything bad about him like he's he's there promoting nazi terrorism what's the point of like you know denouncing this or something? I mean. Whereas I think someone like Pierce, I think sometimes when people write honestly about Pierce, I mean, obviously he's been dead for 25 years, but he resisted the characterization that he was inciting terrorism, even though he, like Mason, very much was.
Oh, well, Pierce is just a liar. I mean, all these guys are liars.
Exactly. That's what I mean.
But I think a book like this about Pierce, I think he would not have enjoyed, whereas Mason is at least honest about his legacy. You know, there is a terrible book about Pierce by one of the sycophants, who is a professor, actually.
Robert S. Griffin.
Yeah. And that, again, that is one of those dishonest histories.
I think we were talking before we started recording that the problem with archival research trying to write a history of these movements is they are dishonest actors. And so Robert S.
Griffin, he wrote, what is it, The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. Yes.
Is that what it's called? He went into it, you know, saying like, I'm going to write this neutral appraisal of this figure of the movement about William Luther Pierce. And over the weeks that he spent on the compound to write it, he spent time with Pierce on the compound in Hillsborough, became radicalized and is a Nazi now.
I mean, he's still alive. I mean, he could take issue with that characterization if he wants, but yes, I'm sure you've read the book.
It's not neutral. It is a hagiography of Pierce.
Yeah. There's actually a book by Pierce's son too,, which is interesting.
I have read that. It's quite good.
Well, unfortunately, a lot of it's copypasted. I think his insight into his relationship with his father is very unique.
It is called The Sins of My Father by Kelvin Pierce. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's a window you don't often get, although I guess now we do also have The Klansman's son by Don Black's daughter. Black's daughter or son? She has transitioned.
Oh, I did not know that. Well, Mazel Tov.
Yeah. Yeah.
I remember reading their work before Trump and they actually wrote one of the most moving resignations from the movement that I've read very much taking, you know, being accountable, even though they were raised in it. I feel like children raised in this are not like as accountable as adults are, right? Especially like they were in college at the time, but it was like a true, interesting working through it.
And I felt like heartfelt apology for it. And yeah, actually, this is a fun fact.
You may know a member of the Aryan Nationalist Action, ANA, this terrorist, this bank robbing group from the 80s, I think became the first person to transition gender from- Donna Langen. Donna Langen was known as Pretty Boy Pedro when she was the head of the Aryan Republican Army.
Yes, there we go. It was a bank robbery gang out of Elohim City.
Yeah. She was the first person to win a battle with the federal government to transition in federal prison.
To get surgery. Yeah.
And just recently, actually, there was a filing in her case. She's trying to get the way the case is titled in the court records.
It's still Peter Langan, her dead name. And the judge denied her petition to retitle the case.
But she has transitioned and is in a women's prison. Is she in Texas? Oh gosh, I could look up in the BOP where she is.
Texas bans prisoners from changing their names. She is in FMC Carswell.
Yep, that is in Dallas. In Fort Worth, Texas.
Yeah, that's why. That's why.
So she's still in the BOP system under her dead name, but she was allowed to physically transition. So that's, again, just a strange twist of history, right? Yeah.
That the person who won that legal battle for us was a Nazi bank robber. Well, she has also long repudiated this politics.
So I think she's been the only person to have surgery, trans person to have surgery, who was imprisoned at the time. Because I think that was recently and then everything, you know, everything.
They changed. I know that they slowed down their trans policies waiting to see the results of the election.
So for a strange reason, I know actually a bunch of the stuff about trans people in prison. So anyway.
No, I mean, it's a remarkable history. Yeah, yeah.
So you started writing this book after Unite the Right because there was this renewed interest in siege. I mean, I guess what has the experience been like, you know, over the course of spending the last six years of your life working on this, realizing that it is only becoming more relevant and not less? Well, the problem is, is like for people like us who watch the far right, like our work is only important or people are only interested in it when there is a big upswing.
And then like, that's when people are interested and that's when it is more important. So on one hand, it's good that I didn't spend five years and then no one remembered what Siege was and it was just a blip.
I mean, that's good for me, but I'll have to say what's good for me is bad for society. And so, I mean, I think it would have been an important work of history regardless, but I guess as you're working on it, realizing that the body count is only growing.
Yeah. It's, it's, I don't know.
I don't, I don't really, you know, what do you say about that? I, I call these people empty people spreading emptiness. Like it's hard for me even to get mad at the more aggressive neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Like, often they're young, and I just see, like, sad young people who can't deal with their problems engaged in, like, hurting other people who are often not so different than them. You know, I mean, there's a trans man who was in Adam Woffin, you're they're tyler parker de pepe yeah numerous stories of people being you know of um not white descent either they're hiding that they're not or they're a mixed race descent and they're sort of passing as wide of being jewish of being queer all this stuff the movement's filled with these people sometimes it's the people are even, how many straight white men are there in the movement? Like, and it's just sad.
You're like, I see you're being attracted to this because you're so alienated or you're so, your identity is so shaky that you are attracted to this idea of a firm, strong identity. And I mean, sometimes people forget fascism in Italy and Germany arose in basically the last two countries that arose and solidified in Europe.
Like, those were countries that wasn't clear what Italy was going to be. There's such differences between the North and the South.
There's no reason, like, it was unclear originally whether Germany was going to be Austria, too. You know, and so they were, it's a way, part of fascism was shoring up that national identity, which was very fragmented.
And it works the same, I think, with people's identities. And one of the things that attracts people to neo-Nazism, I think, is this strong affirmation of an identity.
And people with mixed identities or conflicted about it or filled with self-loathing are drawn to this for that reason. One of the many reasons people get drawn to these things.
And they recruit so young. I mean, I think in the book you're talking about, you know, all the way back to James Mason's origins that he became interested in the Nazi party as a 14 year old.
Joined it. Joined it at 14.
So he's a child, right? Getting into this movement. And now that he is an old man, he is in turn indoctrinating children right that adam waffen members are very young i guess were adam waffen technically doesn't exist anymore but most of the most of the young men who spilled blood for adam waffen were 20 years old 19 years old and you know someone pointed out the founder of the fokrieg division, when he founded it, was 12.

He was arrested when he was 13 or 14, but he founded it at 12. And which, tragic, obviously tragic, heartbreaking, disgusting.
But imagine being one of the adults who was in that group and finding out that your Fuhrer was 12. I grew up in the South in an extremely Protestant area at the height of that, like, 80s fundamentalist Christian right thing.
And there were, I knew about, these are kind of an older thing, child preachers. Have you ever heard of child preachers? This was a big thing during the...
Yeah, they speak in tongues and they sort of parrot the cadence of the way adults speak. But if you listen carefully, they're not saying anything.
They've memorized the way that adults give these barn-burning, you know, adult Protestants, evangelicals give these barn-burning sermons, but they don't necessarily understand what they're saying. And so, I mean, I think it's pretty common.
People, adults will do this. They don't necessarily believe in what they're saying.
Maybe they understand it a little better. I think it's a bunch of post-structuralist academics who don't even understand what they're saying, but that can happen too.

And so I think people like, well, I don't know.

I was a pretty smart 12-year-old.

Maybe I would understand it better.

But you just need somebody repeating it.

The slogans and the narratives have already been formed by others.

You're not necessarily innovating on it. As long you can repeat the dogma.
Does it really matter who's saying it? Does it matter if the person is gay or Jewish? And I mean, the Estonian 12-year-old was not a one-off. In the Ethan Melzer case a year or two ago, Ethan Melzer was a U.S.
Army private who was trying to set up his unit in Turkey to be attacked by Middle Eastern terrorist groups. And the person he was communicating with online, sort of goading him into these acts, was a child.
It was a child. He was the Order of Nine Angles though, right? He was Ona.
He wasn't a neo-Nazi, right? I always try to distinguish. There's some O-9As who are not.
He was at the bleed point of an Atomwaffen splinter group and Ona. He was involved with Rape Waffen.
Oh, was he? Yeah. The lineage of these groups is so messy.
I think some of them don't even understand the ideological lineage of the sect they've ended up in. But Melzer was at that sort of bleed point where Atomwaffen was becoming Ona.
But I think what we're seeing now,

and definitely in these last two school shootings

in the last month,

is a syncretic murder cult.

The guy who just did the Nashville one was black.

But if you start looking at both of their manifestos,

they're referring to all different kinds of things,

some of whom are white supremacists and neo-Nazis,

many of whom aren't,

just other school shooters.

And they don't seem to have a real ideological,

necessarily, connection to some of this

Thank you. white supremacists and neo-nazis many of whom aren't just other school shooters and they don't seem to have a real ideological necessarily connection to some of this the political stuff it's just become and oh no they are founded by a neo-nazi and many of them are neo-nazis as i was going to say they're not they don't have to be and all the people aren't even if you were supposed to be they are they aren all.
And so we're just getting through these various online forums on Telegram and elsewhere. Sometimes they just spread over all kinds of the different platforms.
We're getting just this syncretic mix of these things. And this is one of the things that made O9A and Siege Culture parallel Mason's ideas, because Mason's not a Satanist, and in fact, he's recently denounced Order of Nine Angles.
And when he was around Satanists, they were atheist Satanists around the Church of Satan. That when you start saying, hey, we need to commit random murders in this goal of destroying the supposed Jewish-controlled society so there could be a white Aryan revolution, it doesn't matter matter if you have a really political reason or if you're thinking that these heretical acts will destroy somehow the consensus reality.
You're just trying to goad people into these violent random acts of terrorism and more random murders. Right.
And the end result is the same. Your thinking is the same and the end result is the same.
So they start cross pollinating. And then what's the difference between the school shooter cults, you know, and now we have groups like the maniac murder cult who are ostensibly political, ostensibly neo-Nazi and order of nine angles, but in reality, are just like, go attack old people from behind.
I mean, it's just pathetic stuff. Go, you know, beat up homeless people and stab them.
It's like at some point, I often say this in my speeches, and it's become more and more real, is like everything blends together in our society. I think, you know, you start with like school shooters, and it's hard to distinguish them from like apolitical mass shooters and from political mass shooters, right? At one point, it just becomes this one thing that's like all mixed together because we're having in the United States, we're having these constant attacks and constant, often the body count is very high.
Like what becomes the difference anymore? Does it really matter? Like the Allen, Texas guy who was a Latino neo-Nazi who killed a bunch of people in an outlet mall. It's really a neo-Nazi action.
Like he was, like clearly if you look at his stuff, or an article called Nazis of Color about this dynamic. But was his action, how was his action necessarily any different than like a school shooting or whatever? It's just like, you know, it's just like he's going somewhere and killing random people.
Like what is this about? So I think we're seeing this syncretic murder call is really, I know other people have different ways of posing this that is sprawling out on different online platforms and appealing to very young alienated people, probably whose whole lives are, you know, online. I think especially younger people who went through COVID, Zoomers, and I guess people younger than that, it'd be Generation Alpha, spend more time online than any other generation.
Obviously, they must. And this becomes, especially when they're much younger, the horizon of their world, right? And if they're incels and they're not really connected to other people and they're not connected to their family, like it just drives these impulses more and more.
And they don't have the maturity to look outside of it or to think about the repercussions of it or think i have the empathy to think about how it's going to affect other people and their families so when it comes to siege what would you say it's its current role in this sort of evolving, syncretic murder culture that we have is? Is Siege's legacy now just that its ideological lineage lives on in sort of the terrogram milieu, or is it still itself influential?

Well, some of this is a question of ideas. I think sometimes Siege acts as a symbol.
People can gesture that if they're neo-Nazis, there's a serious neo-Nazi 450-page tome. They didn't read it.
They didn't all read it. Yeah, I know, read Siege.
How many of you have read Siege? And I found out doing the work that there's an edited edited 100 page version. And then there's like a little pocket version.
And then someone even made the 10 tenants of Siege. There's the spark notes murder calls.
Well, Adam Wofford Division apparently had a test on Siege to get in. I'm like, I know these people didn't, right? They're like a lot of very, you know, disturbed or, you know, people who aren't gonna like, it's a boring text text.
I mean, I read it twice. I've read portions, but I'm not going to sit here and say I read the whole book.
It's 450 pages. Man, I read every newsletter and the book, and it's, yes, no, no.
So it acts as this symbol to be like, look, we have a serious intellectual thing. How many Christians have read the Bible? Let's be really serious.
I think that's the right analogy, right? That it is a foundational text, but they're not all sitting down and digesting or even understanding it. Yeah.
I mean, how many communists have read Das Kapital? Even just volume one, which I have, I would like to say I have actually. Is it more or less boring than Siege? It's more intellectual.
And so there's that. And there's also like the conclusions are there, right? The whole argument is developed in Siege, but you really just need to take the conclusions, which is you can't do any political work.
It's hopeless. You need to go out and commit dramatic acts of violence to help inspire people.
And then, you know, maybe afterwards there'll be some Aryan blah, blah, blah. Frankly, that's all you need to know about it because that's what it advocates.
You just need the praxis that it concludes. And most activists aren't intellectuals.
Like I always say, like a movement can have three slogans. And what you need to do on the left, you need to make sure those are the right slogans pointing in the right direction because somebody who flows into activism, who's young, who doesn't matter if they're young, doesn't have a background in politics, is going to take the things seriously that you say.
And you can only say so many things to people. Political movements are stupid.
I mean, this is why we are the 99% was great. It was great.
It wasn't true. I mean, half of Americans are like, you know, support the Republicans.
But like, it's like one thing, and then the person can think about those things. They're not going to have complicated ideas.
So what is, what is, what are the slogans that come out of something? What are the basic, what does it boil down to the things you're saying? And people have inherited that from Siege, or inherited it secondhand, you know, because Teragram is very well versed in what Siege is about. I mean, Adam often had to read it.
So they were more, I think, into it as a text. And then as it's gone out, you know, Teregram people, the Teregram collective certainly knew what was in it and stuff.
And so people are being affected by it even if they don't know, even if they haven't read it or even if they don't know that's the origin of those ideas. Right.
So Teregram is directly downstream of Siege, right? So Siege was a newsletter that became a book. People read the book.
And the people who read that book turned it back into a zine, right? So it's sort of— Oh, to some level. It's moving through its phases, and now it's regressing back into sort of memetic zine form.
But people who join these movements who want something more intellectual, because everyone who joins a religious or political movement, some people want a more rigorous, they're like, well, what's the reason for this? Well, I have these questions. How do you answer them? What is, why are we doing this? Want more rigorous.
Some people want a more rigorous background, can turn to siege. And as they get older, will turn to siege or move out of it.
And they're like, what were the ideas behind this? Why did we have these ideas? And I think that's, it's normal. I mean, there are all kinds of weird intellectual groundings for white supremacists.
A lot of it is theology, which is sort of curious, and I kind of concluded at some point that you just needed something complicated, because they couldn't use race science anymore, and there weren't people who developed social science, other than like Alanda Benoist who's saying something much more complicated than most white supremacists are. And so like theology just allowed something intellectual for people to chew on.
You know what I mean? Like people who are real smart who are very analytical want something to chew on with the ideas, whether it really changes their praxis or not. And I think there has to be something that serves that need.
And so I guess, wrapping up, because we're supposed to keep these daily shows short, what is the takeaway that you want people to come away from this book with, I guess, especially in this political moment? I think there's two things. The book has two things.
One, I just want to have people have a better understanding of neo-Nazism in the U.S. and how it developed.
It's just one big blur. It's part of other things.
And I see it as a distinct strain. And I want people to have just a better understanding about political movements origins, which is maybe a more scholarly thing.
And my next book, I hope, if I can get a contract, is to write a history of national socialism in America. Because, again, there's not a single book that describes that, which is very strange.
Certainly not a history post-war, and there may be a pre-war one, but not one that puts it all together. So there's a lot of ignorance about this movement.
And the second part about the cultural actors is about the danger of taking a radical cultural movement and to use impulses like transgression and turn them into the very toxic politics, into terrorist politics at the end of the day. I had a discussion on Blue Sky.
It was amazing. You could see it wasn't Twitter.
I had a useful discussion on Blue Sky and where I learned something. It was just fabulous.
And it was this woman posted that, she was like, essentially, that's how I read it, in the 20th century, there was always this assumption that transgressive art, avant-garde art, was implicitly progressive. Sometimes it was ideological, but even when it wasn't, even when it had some dodgy elements, the impulse of it led to progressive, left-leaning politics.
And it's very, transgression was progressive. And, I mean, these guys I'm looking at are working in the 80s, and you see it now, we've all seen it with 4chan, like that was never, that isn't true, and that was never true.
Never true. Right.
I mean, those of us in the punk scene in the 80s and 90s could see this, even if we certainly didn't put it that way, with like skinheads in particular, it was contested terrain where people were trying to take this subculture and pull it to the left and right, right? There were so many Nazis, but there were anti-fascist skinheads too. Sharps.
Sharps to some extent. Sharps were, a lot of them are rightly nationalists.
They just weren't Nazis. This is a common.
There was groups like Rash, red and anarchist skinheads who still exist, but there was a contested terrain where people were trying to pull it in different directions. This is still the case in neofolk, in heathen religious circles.
And that's sort of, there's an implication, which I don't think I can only, like, put it into words now, that, like, the transgressive elements of these subcultures didn't necessarily go one way or the other. And it was something you'd have to fight over.
Like, they could go in any direction. And I think it was clear on 4chan early on.
I once was mentioned very early on on 4chan, and someone chimed in, and they're like, leave him alone, he's my friend. And I'm like, which of my friends are on 4chan? End defending me.
But like, 4chan didn't have to end up the way it did, you know? And the earlier internet culture wasn't like this. It was progressive or libertarian or a more decent libertarian reading of libertarianism than we have now.
So that's the second part. I mean, other than these guys, if you ever were in the industrial or neo-folk scene and you heard about those Nazis, I have all of the receipts in detail in the book, if that's of interest to you.
Yeah, Boyd Rice will tell you he never meant it, but I've read some of the primary documents that lead me to believe otherwise yeah and i even made a video of him creatively entitled boyd rice neo-nazi collaborator and i know you're like spencer what are you really getting at here and i show the letters and stuff and just if you're not familiar with these figures i know a lot of people they were very obscure movements at the time and um you know people are not familiar with them but but I think are familiar enough with this idea of a super radical cultural movement about, step by step, I show how it can move into fully politicized. A transgressive movement can move into a fully politicized, super toxic neo-Nazism that is espousing terrorism, and that this is something that we always have to watch out for in our own religious movements, in our own cultural movements, in occult circles.
I just did a podcast with some, you know, occult-style esoteric podcast, and I was talking about Satanists to become Nazis. Satanists are sort of, I would say split these days, but there's definitely a Nazi, you know, piece in there, a very visible one.
And so some of it's just about these things.

That's an important takeaway, too, that, you know, in any subculture, especially these sort of transgressive subcultures,

like, you know, counterculture music and art and, you know, occult spaces.

If you have a magical practice that you engage in, people who engage in, you know, practice pagan faiths.

In all of these subcultures, you need to call out these bad actors early and often. Push back, don't let them bully you, and push them out of your spaces.
Absolutely, and Nazis ruin everything. They intentionally go into all these spaces, and sometimes don't intentionally.
Actually, this was a comment on Stormfront I learned from talking about Nazis and the animal rights movement, and they're like, Spencer doesn't understand. We're not infiltrating these movements.
We're just vegans. We're just also Nazis.
But we're not vegans because we're Nazis. We're not coming here from some other reason.
Well, you can't let them sit with you either way. Well, this is a funny story.
I don't know if you have time, but I heard this story from a friend of mine that they were in a vegan group in Southern California, I think, and they had a unofficial party, like a barbecue.

It was people from the group, you know, from the group doing it.

People brought their partners.

It wasn't an official group function, but this one member of the group brought her husband, who was Kevin McDonald.

Oh.

And they were vegetarians or vegans.

And people were like, holy fuck. And he was like, I mean, I feel a little sympathetic to him.
And he's like,

hey,

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hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, in McDonald's. Oh.
And they were vegetarians or vegans. And people were like,

holy fuck. And he was like,

I mean, I feel a little sympathetic to him. He's like,

hey man, I don't know. I'm just, I'm a

vegetarian or whatever. I'm here with my

wife. She's going to a party.

No, you're not allowed to have friends. You're not

allowed to have friends. You're not allowed to have hobbies.
You can't

be here. Yeah.
But he's

like, I'm not here to recruit

anyone. I'm here.
You know what I mean? The barbecue is over when the race scientist shows up. Well, this became a big discussion in the group about whether to push him out or not.
But you have to do these things. And if you even if you don't want to, they're my friend or everyone's welcome or whatever, what is going to end up happening if you don't push the Nazi out is that more Nazis show up.
Well, if you if it's a single person, people are going to start leaving. People of color are going to leave.
Jews are going to end up happening if you don't push the Nazi out is that... More Nazis show up.
Well, if it's a single person, people are going to start leaving. People of color are going to leave.
Jews are going to leave. LGBTQ plus people are going to leave.
And you're going to end up defending this one person, losing many more. So even just on your own enlightened self-interest, if you want to keep your group together.
And I've seen this again and again and again. And then they're like, you're defending a Nazi, so you're one too.
So yeah, you've got to kick these people out, even just for practical reasons. I have a very low bar for people these days, and I try to appeal to the baser reasons sometimes with people.
Well, if you would like to learn more about how a couple of guys in the counterculture movement in the 80s are responsible for the publication of the book that serves as the bible for modern nazi terrorism you can pick up a copy of neo-nazi terrorism and countercultural fascism the origins and afterlife of james mason's siege by spencer sunshine from rutledge press it's available i think wherever books are sold i bought my copy directly from the publisher rutledge pressledge Press. I think it was only $27, you know, a bargain and a steal.
So pick up a copy of that. And where else can people find your work, Spencer? Thank you.
Now that you mentioned that, I am on all of the socials, usually at transform6789. I have a webpage.
If you have an RSS feed, if someone said this recently, they're like, it's actually one of the better ways to keep track of people. as like, you have an RSS feed.
Someone said this recently. It's actually

one of the better ways to keep track of people.

It's like, follow a zillion people.

Anyway, it's SpencerSunshine.com.

Also, if you'd like to support anti-fascist

research and get a warm, fuzzy feeling, you should

sign up for my Patreon for as little as

$2 a month. You can help

me out with the rent and get

some exclusive content.

Well, hell yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show and get some exclusive content. So, yep.
Well, hell yeah.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me on the show.

It's been great.

welcome to Welcome to I Could Appethear, a podcast where the singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening all of the time. I'm your host, Mia Wong.
And one of the many, many, many chaotic things that has been going on over the last two weeks since Trump took power has been a bunch of funding freezes to the U.S. federal government grant system.
And I think to a lot of people that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal, but that is unbelievably catastrophic for like I would go so far to say is like the survival of the human species for reasons I will get to in a second, but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone on Earth. And to get a sense of exactly what this kind of stuff does, what these funding freezes do, and what the sort of threat, particularly to the future of American science, is, I have brought in two people who are intimately familiar with this.
Argyvan Salis, who's a surgeon and professor of medicine and friend of the show. Yeah, come on.
Yeah, definitely. I don't know why I had such a hesitant friend of the show because it wasn't in my notes.
That was I was ad-libbing it. But yeah, friend of the show, Kamehota, who is a gashow entorologist and the host of the podcast House of Pods.

And both of you two, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here for your most Persian episode ever.
Pretty sure. We may have done episodes of like that were like about Iran.
two Persian doctors talking about

Trump is about as Persian as it gets. And you're not overselling it.
This is a large-scale attack on the healthcare infrastructure of the United States on a massive level. So you're not lying.
It is a serious, serious issue, not just for us, but for the whole world. Yeah, and the place the place i want to start i think is with because it was happening i think in nsf nih a bit before this happened but the opm the office of personnel management sent out this memo last week that was a it was nominally a response to this very weird trump executive order that's him being like every single program that has to do with civil rights, which is like, so my description is anything that has to do with civil rights at all, like, gone.
His description of it is like DEI and woke, so like anything that has to do with queer people, anything that has to do with racial inequality, and they were supposed to go through and review every single government grant grant program for anything and but don't forget he also included the gender ideology which is a meaningless phrase and and the green new deal is all part of it yep yep yep you know and this is part of the raft of executive orders particularly the anti-trans executive orders but opm's response to this off of his personnel management's response, was to just freeze literally every single grant program in the country. And this was everything from Pell Grants and work study for college students to food aid for single mothers to my personal favorite.
And I don't know why this never made it into the press, because I'm apparently the only one who went through and read the list. But one of the things that he froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear weapons manufacturing sites.
So like, we almost like... Why? Yeah.
Why is that included? It was because literally what happened was they found a list of every single grant that like anyone does, like any like program that gives out grants, and they froze all of them. So like another one of them that when i when i said this is like this is a threat to all life on earth i was not i was not joking here one of the other ones was defunding one of the very important like international nuclear non-proliferation organizations like specifically the one that's there to make sure that like random people don't get like enriched uranium or like obtain nuclear weapons so like we we dodged a like giant nuke-ke sized bullet when like most of these programs got their money back after a judge was like, well, you obviously can't do this.
This is so unbelievably illegal that it's astounding. Like the Constitution, like very blatantly says that the power of the purse is Congress, not the president.
Like, stop. Yeah, but I would want to clarify for for the people listening here that it wasn't just grant specifically it was like all federal assistance yeah so one of the things that was very confusing and chaotic was this question of does this mean snap is gone does this mean wick is gone what about head startals on Wheels? I mean, there are tons of federal assistance programs out there.

And they had only made an exception for Social Security and Medicare in the memo, but not Medicaid.

And what happened the next day?

But the Medicaid portal went down, right?

Yeah.

And it's chaotic, too, because all of the programs you just named were on the list of programs that they were putting a freeze on.

But then it wasn't clear what was going to happen with them. And right.
And it's still not. Right.
Right. Yeah.
We just have a we have we found one judge with a backbone in the entire country so far. And and he said, no, you cannot.
Yeah. Yeah.
I am surprised, actually, that Trump hasn't gone out on the attack. Maybe I just missed it, like attacking that judge, you know, but it is.
I mean mean what's so confusing to me is you know i get it at least in some part of their weird internal terrible logic transphobic logic i i get why they're doing some of the things they're doing but then some of them don't even make sense within their own whack internal logic like when they scrub, for example, the CDC for all the terms that they didn't like, gender terms, transgender terms, things like that, they also scrub things like following maternal morbidity or opioid use, things that don't at least on the surface even fit with their attacks on woke ideology. So it seems like it's a complete mess to me what's happening.
And what's terrifying about it is not just that it's a mess, but it is happening. I mean, they are doing it.
They are pushing it, even though they clearly don't even seem to really know what they're doing or even have a great sense internally of what they're doing. I think that's the danger of this right now is that this is revenge, right? They're lashing out in sort of in pure anger and pure hatred.
And they have been given control of an apparatus that they don't understand at all, right? Like that's how you get defunding nuclear police. That's how you get them defunding like the Barry Goldwater Memorial Grant thing that gives money to kids for writing essays about Barry Goldwater.
They don't understand what the state is and what it does. And they're just trying to take the whole thing apart and they're just trying to sort of rampage their way through it.
And it means that we're in this situation now where like for a long time the line on like trans rights was like, well you should defend trans rights because they're going to come for you next. And that's no longer true.
What is actually happening here is in order to kill us, they are willing to let all of you die in nuclear fire. It's specifically in order to hurt us, right? That's the sort of line we're at where all of these sort of complicated systems and all of these sort of complicated funding mechanisms are just getting lit on fire

by people who don't understand what they're doing and don't care. Right.
Just out of spite or something. For sure, out of spite and hate.
But I want to just take a step back and think about the fact that all of this is happening because of two versus three executive orders, depending how you think about it. But they're literally executive orders.
They're not laws in the book. Congress did not pass anything.

It's like this elderly man

woke up and said,

hey, let's get rid of DEI and DEIA. For example, those are the terms they use exactly without saying what DEI is or what DEIA is.
And then just, I feel that we need to pause for a moment on the A, DEIA,-I-A, and they spell out, you know, A is for accessible.

Wiping out everything related to accessibility is directly in violation of the ADA and makes no sense and is cool and all of that. But also just like legally, it makes no kind of sense unless they are going to go after the ADA, which I'm guessing is part of their plan to the extent that there is a plan.
But the two key executive orders here are the sex and gender one that's like defending, quote unquote, defending women, that basically dictates that sex must be only male and female, thereby erasing intersex people completely. And that there's really, they're essentially saying there's no such thing as gender and that the only genders that they see are willing to recognize are male and female, thereby erasing trans folks, intersex people, non-binary folks, et cetera, gender, queer, gender, fluid, all of those people.

So for them to go into like the CDC data sets, take them offline so that they can binarize whatever is there, eliminate, I'm assuming, I don't know that this was happening, but I'm assuming that that's what they're doing, taking any sex that's not male or female out of there and then removing gender as a variable because they've said that no grant funding should go to any assessment of gender, period. So that's when you're talking to me about like how they're willing to throw everyone under the bus just to pursue this transphobic agenda, that's what you're talking about.
They're willing to take huge slots of information off of the internet so people can no longer, researchers, physicians, anyone else can no longer access this information just to make sure that there is no hint or reference to anyone who is transgender. That seems to be like the key thing that they're trying to do with all of this.
So they have thrown the entire government into chaos and the lives of millions of people into chaos, all to remove the T in LGBT. Yeah.
And the stuff that they're doing, like the destruction of this research data, the way that it's been just taken down and destroyed. Little parts of it have come back up after the sort of backlash.
But what what they're what they're doing is staging a digital version of the nazis burning all of the books at the institute for sexual research like that's that's explicitly what they're doing it's literally the same stuff like it is research on queerness and trans people that they are lighting on fire yep 100 and you know you know who else lights research on queer and trans people on fire? It's the sponsors of this show. It's the products and services.
Yeah. That's the way you get those big bucks.
That's how you do it. That's professional broadcasting.
And we are back. So I want to move from that to kind of the next phase after we got out of the sort of opm like suspending everything phase which has been this kind of this uncertainty around a whole bunch of the other funding agencies for science national science foundation national Foundation, National Institutes of Health.
Can you talk a bit about what's been going on with grants there before we move into how this whole process works? Yeah. So the first sign that something was materially going to change after these executive orders, as I recall, I'm living along with everyone else in what is time.
But the first thing that I recall is the study section being canceled.

The study sections are meetings where scientists come together.

They each will have read various grant proposals and scored them on a number of different dimensions.

And then they come together and discuss.

They don't discuss all of them, by the way. They only discuss the ones that seem to have the most merit.
And then out of those, they make recommendations for which ones they believe should get funded. So these are a critical part of the process by which the government gives out funds for research.
If these meetings do not happen, people's grants are not getting evaluated, assessed, and recommended

for funding. That means they're not getting the funding.
That means they're not hiring people or

they're having to fire people they already had in or lay off people they already had in their lab.

They're not able to continue the important work that they are doing. They may lose their job.

Really, truly, people can lose their job because they were not able to secure enough funding

to support themselves and their labs. So these are really, really important meetings, and those have been canceled for both the NSF and the NIH for at least the last couple of weeks.
And as of yesterday, I saw Dr. Megan Reade said that her, or maybe not her, but that study sections were canceled yesterday that were due to happen today so there had been some communication around perhaps the freeze of those activities ending on february 1st today that we're recording it's february 3rd and those study sections for today were canceled on the other hand nss which is obviously a separate organization um has informally i've heard decided that they're going to resume some study sections,

although they haven't resumed it yet.

And if I could add, just to be totally clear with your listeners,

these are incredibly important organizations for discovery of new medical breakthroughs

and for pushing science forward.

The NIH, for example, the NIH is a big part of the reason we have mRNA vaccines now. They were the ones helping to promote that research for decades before we were able to turn them into vaccines.
And it's because of a lot of what they did that we're able to do that. When we're looking for new breakthroughs, we're looking for something where a patient comes to us and they're like, isn't there anything? We've tried everything.
Isn't there anything that we could at least try or some trial that we could be involved in? That's where we find these things. These are the things that we're talking about, these really important healthcare infrastructure that we're discussing.
Yeah. And, you know, between NIH and National Science Foundation and, you know, Department of Energy is having a similar thing to this because Department of Energy funds all like high energy physics research.
So all of your sort of like particle accelerator or stuff like that. It's not just sort of like the national labs, for example, that they get funding from these places, although, you know, national labs are like, you know, you get your funding from grants like everyone else.
But, you know, I mean, this is this is all the way down to the level of like undergrads and college chemistry labs like they're they are getting paid out of these grants from national science foundation from the national institutes for health like all of these all of these institutions pay out everything and it's like this is the basis of how all science almost all science like there's some private sector stuff but the thing is like the the giant private like bell labs right like your your old school giant private sector here's our giant r&d thing like that's all kind of gone so you know like the only people who are getting funded by this are like weird startup guys and it's like okay look look look what they've invented in the last like 15 years it years. It's like cryptocurrency, NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again.
Theranos, don't forget. Yeah, Theranos, the metaverse, Jucero.
Like, they're doing great. They're doing great.
And people will be like, oh, they invented AI. It's like, no.
National Labs were using those AI algorithms, like, a decade and a half ago. It's like, yeah, the generative AI, blah, blah, blah.
Okay. We're not here to get into me complaining about generative AI.
Go listen to Edgitron's entire show. Yeah, go listen to that.
I mean, I think the bottom line of what you're trying to communicate here is that a lot of scientific and medical breakthroughs have come from labs and from researchers who have been funded by the NSF and the NIH. And I will just say, as an academic, these are certainly the kind of premier funding opportunities that we have.
Like, it also is really critical in the careers of researchers to be able to show that their work is worthy of this kind of funding. And that's part of why I was saying people's jobs, yes, the people we pay off of our grants, but also people like me, our jobs can be really dependent on whether we get the funding or not.
And it's a generational thing, too, because the students also need this funding. And so people, people who are undergrads, particularly people who are like doctoral students, like their research, right? Like the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school, like getting PhDs

so they can become scientists, that's all also

like funded by these grants

and if that stuff goes away, like

it's not just that you're obliterating this

generation of science, like you're kneecapping the next

like three generations of scientists

because each one of them down the line

suddenly doesn't have the research experience

that they're supposed to have. Exactly.

Yeah. Right, and also who would want to go

into science if it's going to be like this?

Yeah, right. If they're just going to be like some random person who goes into the White House and says, never mind, we're not doing that anymore.
Who wants to be exposed to those kinds of wins? A lot of the smartest doctors and scientists I know, they tend to be risk-averse people. I mean, there's a lot of people at the CDC that could try to maybe sue for, you know, for not being able to use the terms that they want to use and study the things they want to study.
And they might even, I don't know, maybe they could win. I don't know.
You need to talk to a lawyer about that. It seems unlikely because they're not private sector.
But to them, they're not going to because they're living paycheck to paycheck to some of these people that are in the lower levels. People that aren't making a ton of money, they have livelihoods that they're trying to maintain.
They're not going to try and rock the boat when it comes to these things. It's putting them in a really tenuous position already.
They're already worried about their next grant or their next, however they're going to fund their labs. Yeah.
And I just want to highlight that postdocs, I think, are particularly vulnerable because they are often, like the NSF freeze actually demonstrated this very well, they are, as Popit said, like they're definitely often living paycheck to paycheck. And what the NSF freeze did was that it made it so folks could not get their next paycheck because we were, this was happening at the end of the month, right? So it was delaying people getting their next paycheck.
And in particular, I'm talking about postdocs. Yes, it can affect graduate students as well, but a lot of postdoc funding, like one of the grants that I have actually, we work directly with postdoctoral and some predoctoral, but many postdoctoral training programs that funddocs.
And to the extent that any of those grants are put on hold, that is threatening the income of people who really don't have buffer, who cannot afford to not get paid. And also, you know, and this is another aspect of this too, I really doubt they understand this, but you know, there's also a lot of postdocs who are not from the u.s right there who are either international students who are just coming in from other countries and those people if you suddenly don't have a grant you don't have a job and that is really really bad for your immigration status like that that is enough to get you kicked out of the u.s and this is the

thing that's constantly leveraged in in sort of labor organizing right or like one of the threats that universities will make usually they do it implicitly sometimes they'll just go out and say it very legally will be like okay if if you this postdoc or like you this grad student like tries to like join this union like your your legal status in the u.s is going to be compromised but that's but that's another sort of risk from this is like those people's ability to stay in the u.s and not get deported basically exactly yeah exactly and then then we talk about bringing in you know i know there's a lot of internal debate right now between the republican party on you know bringing, bringing in people to work, these jobs, and bringing in these minds, but this is a clear example of where the United States has excelled in the past. We've been able to bring in great minds from all over the world to help us work on research, and to help us come to work in these labs.
I mean, you go to, like, UCSF and Stanford, and you'll working these labs on important stuff. And that's another, like, that's something we're going to lose.
And I hope we don't lose it permanently. I hope it's not, you know, something that like you say will last generations worth of damage, but it's hard to see how it won't at this point.
Yeah, I was just looking up, I 100% agree. And to your point about how much of the science and even other amazing things that are done in this country are done by immigrants.
I think it's over just over a third of Nobel laureates from the United States have been immigrants to the United States. you know and it's sort of a nationalist thing right but like for 99 of the time for better

like the u.s has been very very good at absorbing other country scientists when you know this like

we we got to, you know, okay. So like, it's, it's hard to take too much credit for it because we also took a bunch of scientists from the knots, like from the actual Nazis, but we also expect a bunch of very famous U S scientists, like we're in the U S because they were fleeing the rise of the Nazis.
And you know, like we, we are looking at a situation where we are going to be the opposite of this. We're like, our scientists are going to be fleeing everywhere else because our government is being run by these people.
Yeah. And I wanted to highlight, I think that's one of our really great points about the effect of not getting the funding and who it trickles down to.
But I also wanted to highlight that there's two different kind of ways that the funding can be withheld. The one is just that review process and not actually reviewing grants, right? So like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall.
Who knows if when that will get discussed? There are people in that kind of position where they maybe were dependent on or really hoping to get like funding this round. And now they don't know if or when that proposal will get reviewed.
Of course, you never know if you're going to get funded, but to not even have a chance at review is an unanticipated barrier. Then on the other side, there's people who have been funded and are in the position that I'm in, which is not knowing whether I'm going to receive the next payment.
Because the NIH, so I have a five-year grant, and we are currently in year three. Every year you have to submit a status update on your project.
And then they determine, based on lots of different things, including what budget they are given from Congress, how much of the funds that they had originally projected they'll be able to give to you. And there are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who are doing work that's related to health disparities, health equity, women's health, LGBTQ health, et cetera, who now do not know if our work falls under quote unquote DEI or DEIA or gender ideology or all these vague terms that the administration is using.
And so we actually don't know whether, like for me, I don't know if I'm going to get my next set of funds in July. So I was in the process of interviewing to hire someone to join my lab.
And I genuinely don't know whether I should hire someone knowing that I may lose funds in five months or do I just try to make do without? And then that's a job that no one gets. And if you play that out over the 300,000 people who are funded in various ways by the NIH, you start to understand the scope of damage that's being done here.
Can you tell people what your current grant is? Because I think that is pertinent to this conversation. Yes, yes.
Yes, you're right. Okay.
So my grant is called Ending Sexual Harassment, Teaching of Principal Investigators as a cute acronym, E-STOP. So our goal is to try to help people intervene when there is sexual harassment with the ultimate goal of decreasing the amount of sexual harassment that's happening in biomedical research.
Oh, they don't want you to do that. Like, oh no.
Right, because one of the great terrible ironies of this whole thing is that their argument is that they're doing a lot of this to protect women, the sanctityity of women or whatever this is you know i i'm hopeful that i'm wrong for you i hope that that this is not the case but i could see them very easily saying that this somehow fits under woke ideology and even though it's something clearly that is designed to help not just women but a lot of women could benefit from this, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
And to your point, like everyone is at risk for experiencing sexual harassment. It's just that the majority of folks who experience it are women or sexual and gender minorities.
And so, yeah, I've really obviously, as you can imagine, been thinking a lot about how they are interpreting these words that they're using and whether sexual harassment, which, by the way, is a form of discrimination. Like, is that DEI? Is stopping discrimination DEI? Probably.
Like, who knows? Well, you know, quickly, if I may, I can go over this. there was this email that was dispersed from the CDC about terms that were no longer going to be

used, that were going to be scrubbed from the CDC's databases. And they included words like gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, non-binary.
They use both. Yeah, one with a hyphen and one without the hyphen.
Assigned male at birth, assigned biologically male or biologically female so anything that terms like that they're going to scrub wait let me can i just clarify that because actually it's even worse yeah i think than what you just described because what they actually said in that email as i understand it is that they there's all these researchers who work at the cdc so they said if you have submitted a manuscript for publication to any scientific or medical journal that has any of these words in it,

you must retract that manuscript. So it's even much, much broader than just what's on the CDC's

website. It's any work that anyone employed by the CDC has done, any research that they've done,

that they are in the process of publishing. They have been asked to rescind that work

Thank you. that anyone employed by the CDC has done, any research that they've done, that they are in the process of publishing.
They have been asked to rescind that work so that they can remove these god-awful words, right? That are actually words that are used routinely in science, but they can no longer have them in their manuscripts. And how nonsensical would their manuscripts be without these words? I mean, yeah, it's terrible.

The other thing that blows my mind about this is how incredibly inefficient,

maybe that's the point, is how ridiculous it's going to be.

Who's going to be doing this?

Who's going to be looking over this?

To my knowledge, there's only been one political appointee in regards to this,

and that's at the CDC.

It's Susan Moneris, the acting director there at the CDC. And it's all going to go through that one person? Every study is going to go through that one person? It makes no sense.
I don't even understand how it's going to be enforced. It's a ridiculous thing.
And I'm sure they're going to try to make some examples out of people, but how would they even enforce this? going to find out with your grant i guess yeah i think the bleak thing about specifically the fact that it's these study retractions and it's just you know this attempt to ban anyone from doing any research right is that like the the problem for them with medical research about trans people is that everyone who's doing this who isn't a like unbelievably rabid anti-trans person from the beginning you know looks at everything that they want to do to trans people and goes this is going to kill unbelievable numbers of us and I think like part of what they're doing here is they're trying to before any of this stuff come out they're trying to stop the scientific apparatus from revealing the fact that they are trying to wipe us out. And that's an unbelievably bleak thing to live through, I guess.
Yeah. I'm so sorry.
It sucks. Honestly, I wish I could say something more.
It's really terrible. I will say this like Jenny Winely because it never happens.

Obviously the best the best thing you can do for trans

people is like something

that involves the fall of the regime.

Like the second best thing is like hire us

because no one does it and we can't

no one can get jobs.

Right.

And but like the third minimum thing

after like money or like housing

is like like check in on the trans people in your life because nobody actually ever does it. And it means a lot.
And it's not going to stop the wrath of the state. But I don't know.
A lot of people feel less alone. This has been the Mia Trans Public Service announcement.
It's now over. I think that's great advice in another friend of the show, Margaret Killjoy.
And she also said, you know, when you hire people, you hire trans people, put them front of house, make it visible. And then when you go and you frequent these places, let them know that's part of why you do it.
Like, I like that you guys are doing this. I'm here to support that.
I mean, because we're talking about money, we're talking about people's livelihoods are at stake. And we have to show that these are people that are not only employable, but could benefit your business.
Yeah, honestly, I don't know what to say about it either, aside from everything that they're doing is atrocious. It is ascientific.
It is inhumane. It will harm people.
Yeah, people are going to die.

People probably have already died.

If you're trans and you're listening to this

fucking, don't die, think about how

good it's going to be to get a piss on these people's

graves in like eight years.

It's going to roll.

But...

It is. It is.
I agree.

It is. And to add to Argavan's point, it is dumb is i agree it is and dad to argavan's point it is dumb on every metric i can't think of a single metric and that these actions are not hurtful and going to harm us in the long run to close this out this is something that I think is very important because no one in the U.S.
apparently seems to understand this at all. How does the grant process actually work and what is it? Because, you know, this process is the difference between you like having clean water to drink and like that study that was going to determine if your water is clean or not not happening yeah yeah exactly so you know first thing i will say is that the word grant applies to lots and lots of different opportunities and there are grants as small as like 1 000 or 5 000 dollars and grants as large as multi-million dollars and the processes actually are i mean they're analogous but they can be pretty different you can imagine, for a smaller grant, the amount of work that you have to do to earn that grant generally is a little bit less.
But I can speak in the most detail to the NIH review process and specifically to these grants that they call R01. These are like kind of their fanciest grants that go to individual researchers with their team, but it's led by an individual researcher often.
And the way this works is, first of all, I want folks to understand it takes a year from the time that you apply until the time that you get money can take up to a full calendar year. And so you put in an immense amount of effort.
So I'll use myself as an example. I apply for a grant in October, huge amount of effort.
I don't know how many hours leading up to that grant submission. And then I just sit and wait for months, months and months before there's even a study section, if study section happens.
And then after that, it's still a couple more months before I might get information. It depends.
Of course, there's some variability there, but it's a long, long process is what I'm trying to say. And the way the process starts is often you will send what's called a letter of interest to the agency that you're applying to.
So as you said earlier, it's the National Institutes of Health. So every institute has its own notice of funding opportunities or NOFOs that are like, here's what we're actually asking people to submit for at this point in time.
And then people will send a letter of interest to the program officer. Each grant mechanism will have its own program officer, and you will send a letter of interest.
Maybe you get some feedback, and then you move forward to the actual grant itself. And I just want to say that it is more work than probably anything else I've ever done, except maybe my dissertation.
And so it's a huge amount of work. The R01 includes, for example, a one-page specific aims page, which is you have the entirety of the study somehow magically summarized in one page with your three aims.
And if that doesn't get the reviewer's attention, and if they don't think it's compelling and interesting and important, that may be the the end you may have done all the rest of the work and they may only read that yeah and then you have a 12 page these are single space pages single space pages half page margins 12 page research strategy i don't know how many thousand words thousands of words that is but i'm just telling you 12 single space pages is a lot of text about your research and and and it's like one of these puzzles where it like has to be exactly right and you have like these figures and you have to get them exactly the right size and the exact right place on the page with the legend and everything so that it all magically fits in these 12 pages because if you don't do it right they will literally reject your grant for formatting problem and so you you may

have spent months writing this grant and because you had the wrong font size or the wrong margin that that they can literally choose not to even read it and then you're you're then having to wait till either six months later if there's another opportunity or sometimes a full year later before you can try again also it's worth noting you also have to like do a bunch of science Like if it it was just you must do 12 you must write right 12 pages of stuff and format it it would probably be okay but like you also have to do science like both for it and also while you're doing it it's it's incredibly hard to get these when someone gets a grant we all celebrate it for them because we're all so excited because we know it's not easy. What's funny about that is the Republicans make it seem like all you have to do is put in a couple terms like, you know, non-binary and you automatically get a grant.
They have like no idea how like challenging it is. No, it's like the only thing that could even potentially work like that is to say whatever you're doing is cancer research.
Like that's the actual thing right like sometimes you could like defraud the dod by telling them like whatever research you're doing is camouflaged but like it's not it's even that is like it makes it like one percent more likely that your endless hours of work yeah i wish i could just write woke ideology on these people's full pages and then like get a to your point, you have to, part of what's in those 12 pages is what is the work that you've done that builds up to the work that you're proposing to do? And that's the whole section called preliminary studies. And what's in there varies depending on like what kind of research you're doing.
If you're doing animal research, it might be various animal models that you've tested different things on that demonstrate, for example, that you are able to work with the specific animal model that you're proposing to you in this study and that you have the specific methodological skills for whichever type of, say, cellular analysis or whatever it is that you're doing, that you have those skills, that you have the equipment that you're able to actually carry out that research. Because part of what they're evaluating is, can the person who's proposing to do this work actually do the work? The last thing they want to do is give you millions of dollars and have you fall flat on your face because you don't have the skills that are needed.
So you have these pages, part of those full pages, like often a page, two, three pages about what you have done to prepare for the work that you're proposing. And a lot of times, to your point, that work may or may not be funded.
You may have to, if you're like at an academic institution, you might be using your startup funds. You might be trying to get smaller foundation grants or something to be able to do that work so that you can prove to the funding agency that you're able to do it.
And then in addition to the full-tasting, there are a bunch of additional documents that are required. Like there's currently, this will probably change, but currently there's like a diversity plan.
There is a, how are you going to treat participants who are women and minorities? There's like an age document. There's a page about resources and facilities.
There's all these additional documents, which again, all have their own specific formatting requirements. There's a project narrative, which is shorter, and then a project summary, which is longer.

I think I could have those backwards.

But anyway, the point is all these additional pages,

it's not just the specific aims

and just the research strategy.

It's all of this plus the budget

and the budget justification.

And like, you could just go on.

But I think you start to understand

that there are many, many files

that go into a single grant application

and it represents often months of work

for an individual and their collaborators. And if you have, for example, another institution you're collaborating with, they all have to do a bunch of this paperwork as well.
And there's a contract between the two and all of this is done just to have a chance at getting funded. Yeah.
And you know, the disruptions to the funding system, the disruptions to the studies, the disruption to just the payout means that like all of this work that you're doing you know you have no idea whether whether like again all of this in some cases unpaid labor that you have been doing for months and months and months like could just not happen yeah and also like it's worth noting too like you also have to like when you're figuring out what what you're going to be doing next like working out whether or not your grant even has a chance of getting approved like that it like is something that is a that is it that is a long-term decision that determines like what like you know what colleges you go to like what institutions you end up at like all of that kind of stuff and like that thing being all the stuff being up in the air and for people who run labs yeah trying to figure out like can you so i don't personally work with graduate students, but a lot of people do. So can you afford to bring in and sponsor another support, another graduate student? Can you afford the support of another postdoc? These are all long-term decisions.
These aren't just like, okay, I'm going to hire someone for two months until I find out the next thing. It's like you, you, you want to commit to people, especially trainees.
So it makes it very difficult for people who run labs to make those decisions to bring people in because we don't want to let people down. And so I think the kind of intuitive and natural consequences that people will bring in fewer people because that's less risky than bringing in more people and then having to either cut their funding or let them go or whatever later on when you don't get the resources that you need.
And I want to just point out that institutions here have a major role to play and not all institutions, and by that I mean higher education institutions, and not all of them are equally resourced, obviously. But we all know that there are quite a few in this country that have massive endowments.
And so what is the plan there? And what is the support for the folks at their institutions? And I'm not trying to oversimplify what is, in fact, a very challenging issue, but it would be nice, it would be fantastic if some of these institutions came out and said, we understand that this is a very challenging time.

We remain committed to supporting the work of our faculty,

our graduate students,

our postdocs,

et cetera.

And we will,

and we will fund anyone whose funding is withdrawn or withheld.

Let's just say.

It'd be nice if some of these are very important,

prestigious academic institutions showed maybe at least the same backbone as Costco. Yeah, that's all I ask.
Okay. Two, I want to highlight two, it's very early yet in this game, but Brown did come out, I think it was yesterday or sometime over the weekend, stating clearly that they remain committed to their values of academic freedom, right? So that's a way to say it, right? Like we support our staff and employees and students, faculty, doing whatever work they think is important.
I think that that was their roundabout way of saying, we're not abandoning the principles of DEI. But who knows? But that's what they said.
But Princeton actually put out their annual report on DEI at Princeton. And I forget the exact wording, and I don't have it in front of me, but their president talked about how important it is to support people from different backgrounds, etc.
So those two that are trying to do something. Yeah, I remain hopeful.
I remain hopeful. Also, I got to put in my word of Costco hate here, which is they're currently screwing over their unions.
I thought they resolved it. I thought they actually gave them the pay increase.
Yeah, it's not resolved yet. I thought the hot dog was still $150, though, so that's important to me.
Read Jamie Loftus' book, Raw Dog. I'm a doctor.
I can't do that by law. Yeah, but even the NFL came out today and said that they're not going to end their DEI programs any time to.
NFL known for being strong supporters of DEI. That is a thing, though, if you want to understand why the NFL is doing that, look at who the current heads of the NFL Players Association are and who their past heads for the last decade have been and that will give you an indication of why it's like that.
Yeah, Mia follows football pretty closely, I can tell. Unfortunately, it becomes football.
Also, I kind of owe the NFL Players Association because they did put out a statement in support of our unionization drive. Yeah, it was very sweet.
That's nice. Well, I do want to say one more thing about the grant process, which is that often people are submitting the same grant over and over and over because the funding rates are so low.
And so often they will submit it the first time, get feedback, make changes, resubmit later. And again, as I pointed out, it's not like this is a rolling submission process where any day of the week you can submit.
I think for most mechanism, again, there's going to be some variability from institute to institute, but at most twice a year. So like if they reject it, hopefully they give you feedback.
By the way, sometimes you don't even get feedback because if you weren't one of the top grant applications, you don't even get discussed. So you may not get feedback, but let's say you get feedback, then you try again.
And then maybe you try again and then maybe you try again. So sometimes it can take many cycles of this entire terrible process before you get funded once.
And so to Kaveh's point about efficiency earlier, efficiency, I mean, if you think about it that way, it's an extremely inefficient system. But the point I just wanted to make is that people work really, really hard to get these grants.
And for some of the folks right now who are kind of in limbo waiting for study section to resume, this might be their third or fourth submission of something. And they were really hoping this was going to be the chance because at some point you can't keep pursuing unless you have some other independent income, like often at some point you cannot keep pursuing a specific line of research.
So you have to think about what breakthrough is being put on hold or will never be identified because of all of this, because someone might have been waiting and maybe they can't wait for however long it takes to resolve this freeze. And maybe they end up switching their career path into something completely different.
And I'll just say, like, even on a smaller scale, I had a grant that a colleague and I submitted several years back that got funded. That was a very competitive grant.
It was not a federal grant. It was a foundation.
Very competitive. And we were delighted.
We were, I mean, just thrilled to get funded. And then we could not, in the end, take the grant.
We did not do the work of the grant because he ended up not being able to find an appointment that was going to work for him in academia. So he went to industry.
And so that work never got done. To this day, that work has not been done.
Yeah. I would love for it to be done.
But those are the types of consequences that we're talking about when we're looking at

what's happening with these funds and the delay of distributing the funds and the chances that funds will be revoked from people. They really change the course of not just individual lives, but of science.
Yeah. And I mean, the most visual example I could think about this was I knew some people who wanted to work in a coronavirus lab in 2019 and couldn't do it because they didn't their PI didn't have funding for kind of coronavirus thing.
It's like, oh, it would have been useful if they'd got that grant. So I think this is a decent enough place to wrap up.
I do have one thing that I want to plug, which is something you were talking about earlier, which is these institutions coming out and backing their scientists, right? And that's a thing that you can do. You can put pressure on these institutions to do the right thing.
And so it might be over by now, but literally as we were recording this, there was a protest going on at NYU's hospital. Yeah, Langone.
Because they've cut off care to trans youth. They cut off gender affirming care.
Yeah, and so, you know, you can do this. The people who actually run these systems and, you know, the entire federal government, right? People running the federal government are relying on everyone just sort of sitting there being shocked not knowing what to do and doing nothing.
And, you know, you can go show up to the administrators, the offices of the administrators of these places, and you can confront them and you can be like, okay, you're, you were either right here, right now, you're going to be a coward and you're going to go along with this, or you're going to go back your own people. Yeah.
Yeah. And that, and that's something that you could do right now.
And I just want to add, we didn't talk about this earlier, but when we talked about the CDC and everything that's been removed, one thing that's relevant to that is that there's an office for research on women's health. It's the only resource dedicated to women's health in the entire National Institutes of Health.
We do have a National Institute of Children's Health. We do not have a National Institute of Women's Health.
We have an office for research on women's health. We love the US government.
It gets worse. Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it gets worse. So the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which is like, I would say one of the most prestigious kind of academic organizations that existed, a review of funding for women's health research at the NIH, and they put out a report in December.
It's pretty scathing if you read it. And they shared that from 2013 to 2023, Research for Women's Health was like 8.8% of the entire NIH budget.
As a reminder, women are out of the population. And just as a reminder, and they called for almost $16 billion of additional funding to go to Women's Health Research in the coming five years and the creation of an institute for women's health.
So what happened last week with almost everything on the website for the office of research for women's health was deleted. It's gone.
So their funding and opportunities page is gone. Their bios about their staff are gone.
Their updates on advances in medicine for women over the last 25 years gone. Their pages on maternal morbidity and mortality gone the importance of including women and minorities in clinical trials gone their page on health equity gone you get the picture so all of that except for just a very bare minimum landing page and a link to the um office of i forget the official in the office but that's an office that works on autoimmune diseases.
Everything else is gone. And so I did create a script.
If anybody wants to call their member of Congress, I have a script for that and the CDC pages that people can use in terms of actions. That's something I think that is about as real as it gets for us at this point.
And I think that the more we are emphatic in our messaging, that none of this is okay, that we demand to have these resources back online, that we demand to continue funding research on health disparities for all the different groups affected, I think the better the chance is that that actually happens. So that's out there if anybody wants that.
Yeah, we'll put links to that in the description. Also, I'm going to put it a personal plug to call your congressperson to yell at them about all of the anti-trans stuff because they're they are legitimately in a flux point right now where the party is flipping back and forward between just being like yeah whatever we'll pass a defense bill that like bans trans people from the military and we're gonna stop things from happening and so this is the thing that can go either way and getting yelled at by their constituents legitimately does help with this so yep absolutely yeah do that do that too when you're called while you're calling with the cdc multiple things different calls even yeah you might just want to put them on speed dial and make it you know on your drive if you go into work maybe every day on the drive you're just calling hi here's the issue of the day because there is no shortage of issues that we need to be communicating about yep yep yep so speaking of things in bios uh where can people find you to for stuff that you want to promote the way you you do etc etc i mean i'm on all the things even the terrible things uh which is most of them are terrible but i'm on tiktok if you just put my first name, usually I'll come up.
TikTok, Instagram,

Twitter. I know.
I know.

And Blue Sky.

And I'm not the only one I don't

really do is Facebook.

You're too cool for that.

Oh, I have a sub-sec.

That's where the script is. It's on my sub-sec.

Now, I'm not too cool for Facebook. I'm just too lazy

for Facebook. I mean,

listen, if you're on these things, you're not too cool for anything. That's the really cool kids are not on any of these things.
Yeah. You can find me at on blue sky at Kaveh, K-A-V-E-H-M-D.
And more importantly, you can listen to my podcast, the house of pod. It's a relatively fun, informal look at medicine.
We tried to make health care more relatable you know sometimes we'll take an aim at medical quackery or grifts and that sort of thing i think your listeners will like it yeah our guests range from doctors like peter hotez or argovan here to musicians like portugal the man or a lot of the cool zone family that you all know and love prop and Robert and, uh, hopefully Mia soon. So, um, find it anywhere you get your podcast, the house of pod.
Yeah. And you can find all of the, we've talked about like a staggering number of the other shows that we do in this one, but yeah, you can, our other shows where there are podcasts.
I'm so bad at plugging these things. You'd think it's my living, but no.
Can't do it. Zero out of ten.
Absolute failure. But yeah, thank you to both for coming on, and I hope you get your grant, because fuck like Jesus Christ thank you well if I don't get my funding renewed this summer I will let you know maybe we can talk about it yeah yeah I'm down yeah yeah this is what could happen.
Go harass your legislatures,

your local administrators for universities,

your local police department.

Make sure they do not bad stuff and do good things. Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here.
Today it's me, James, and I'm joined by Nevdon Jamgothian. We're here to talk about Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the increasingly genocidal rhetoric from Azerbaijan.
But I want to start off, Nevdon, we're talking about COP 2024, I guess. Can you explain, like, I think people will be sort of somewhat familiar with these series of climate conferences, but this one was held in Azerbaijan, right? And can you explain a little bit about, you've specialized in like these greenwashing, sports washing, various other sort of forms of laundering legitimacy, right? I'd love for you to start off there and explain how this particular conference was used as a means of laundering legitimacy for what is a genocidal project.
COP 29 was just concluded in azerbaijan is the deadly serious and vital conversation about climate in the united nations which we absolutely need to have but from the beginning it was a clown show and the way azer-dictatorship, was able to procure this for themselves was at COP28, which was held in Dubai, another questionable location for the climate conference, where they had a pavilion, as reported by Politico EU, where they had a giant advertisement that said, Karabakh is the first place to achieve net zero emissions in Azerbaijan. And that was one part of them getting the bid for COP29.
And the way Azerbaijan was able to achieve net zero emissions in this particular location was they committed a genocide against all the people. If there's no people, there's no climate emissions.
And that's probably not even true, that it's a net zero emissions because they've engaged in so much of the eradication of any trace of Armenians in this place that Armenians have been living for at least 2,500 years. Destruction of buildings, of course, is one of the huge source of pollution.
And they've raised something like four cemeteries, thousands of the monuments, four churches have been demolished, entire neighborhoods have been raised, historical neighborhoods. So it's probably not even net zero.
But that was their advertising claim to get the bid. COP29 was originally supposed to be in Europe, but Russia was vetoing every European bid.
And Armenia, who Azerbaijan is currently occupying 215 kilometers of Armenian territory, was blocking Azerbaijan until Azerbaijan offered to give up 32 Armenian hostages. So we've got a claim of genocide.
Then we've got a gangster hostage situation, which they did. They gave up 32 members of the Armenian military, and they made give up two Azerbaijanis that were re-held by Armenia because they had gone into Armenia and killed a local security guard trying to steal his car.
They probably were lost and they killed this guy and they were trying to escape. But then just one of them had been sent to life imprisonment.
But that's what Armenia gave up in exchange. To allow this climate conference to happen.
That's correct. So let's zoom back from this climate conference, right? I think it's a really interesting place to start.
This site of our genocide is a net zero area. And it's a very bleak vision of the sort of greenwashing future.
Let's explain a little bit of the history of the conflict between these two countries. And also, perhaps more broadly, I think people will probably be familiar with the Armenian genocide if they've listened to this show.
But of Armenian people as a subject of discrimination and hatred for centuries, right? Well, you know, I mean, Armenians are one of the ancient people of that area. Greeks, Jews, Persians, they're one of the people that have kind of stuck it out for a long time in that neighborhood.
The Turkic people are more recent visitors to the neighborhood, and there's nothing wrong with migration of people. But there's something about populations that have been there for a long time that really strikes a nerve, if we want to be very mild about it, with the Turkic people, Turkey and Azerbaijan, in the sense that they've been engaged in a policy of destroying any remnants of Armenians, including physical people.
For at least since the 1880s, they've been making them second-class citizens since they came in, in the Ottoman Empire. There's this myth of a multicultural society, which is interesting.
Azerbaijan is also trying to promote. But it really was a second-class situation where the minorities in the Ottoman Empire had a lot of extra taxes and duties and persecution than other people in the area.
Yeah. So let's talk about this area then, specifically this area, which would be called, depending on who you are, Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh, right? I think probably it's, I don't know if I haven't looked on Wikipedia, but like what were the more commonly used terms for people wanting to look it up, right, in American English.
But let's explain why there is a conflict in this area and then what has happened since, I guess we can go from like the fall of the Soviet Union would be a place to start. Sure.
I mean, we talked about it earlier. That's the tough thing about talking to Armenians.
Like where I would start would be the 6th century and the fall of the kingdom of Ratu. But I guess we don't have that much time.
So basically, and I do have to put this in there because there's this big Azerbaijani narrative that Armenians are a fictive people, they're a fictive presence, and I'll deal with that in a little bit.

Yeah.

But, you know, it's just been recorded by Greek.

I mean, I don't know why I should have to prove our existence, but we do.

Yeah.

So anyway, it's a recorded history that it's where the Armenian alphabet was invented.

These people have been indigenous to the region for thousands of years.

They've got a deep connection with the land.

But all the Soviet Union, fast forward, there it had been under the territory of the Azerbaijani SSR, as an autonomous oblast, as they called it. It had been given to the Azerbaijani SSR because of Stalin, who was the commissioner of minorities.
Stalin has this big project to divide the people, the minorities in the Soviet Union to fight each other, which is ramped up in the 1960s when the Soviets start inventing fake history to pit people against each other, which is wild. But Soviet Union is crumbling.
The people of Artsakh, which is the Armenian indigenous name, Nagorno-Karabakh is generally acceptable as well. That would be the

colonial name or the name that the Azeris call the region. They are fed up with not being able to learn their language because of Azerbaijan.
They're fed up with not being able to have any of the rights as Soviet citizens because the father of the current dictator of Azerbaijan was ruling Azerbaijan since 1969, And his policy was to try to get as many Armenians to move out of the region as possible. So they're fed up with this and they're like, okay, enough.
They legally secede from the Soviet Union. It's allowed in the constitution, which of course infuriates the Azerbaijani SSR.
You know, so there's a bunch of conflicts, there's some pogroms that happen against Armenians in cities of Baku and Sungit, and at which point they secede fully from the Soviet Union, one of the first areas to do so, in 1991. They actually left the Soviet Union before Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan, with the Soviet Union's troops, invade. There's this bloody mess.
It's called Operation Ring, where they're killing Armenians in the area. There's a war that erupts when everybody secedes.
Armenians in Artsakh get the upper hand due to they really cared about it. And also probably because of racism within the Soviet Union, where they trained Armenians a little bit better than they did Azeris.
It's a humiliating defeat for Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is pushed back.
Armenian sees about 9% of Azerbaijani territory beyond Artsakh. And that was a stasis until 2020.
Yeah. Really.
Yeah, sort of 30 years of... Right.
But it was always disputed, right? This area was... Did Azerbaijan continue to lay claim to the Atsuk region? Is that correct? For some reason, it was never recognized by the UN as being a real country, similar to some other places.
Why that is, is confusing to me because they did leave earlier than anybody else.

It is an ethnic minority that chose to leave the area, but they weren't considered legitimate

by the UN, by Azerbaijan. And secondarily, we have this brutal dictatorship that's held together

by ethnic hatred. Really, I cannot overstate how terrible the Aliyev regime is in Azerbaijan.
But, you know, Armenian forces committed at least one war crime that I'm aware of during that time in a place called Koljoli, where they killed 180 to 600 Azeri civilians. And they've used this event, and I think one other, to really hold their country together

in this pit of broth and broth of ethnic hatred.

So not till 2020 does that really coalesce.

Do they become strong as a petro-state to take back large portions of the country?

Yeah.

Talking of taking back, I'm going to have to take back 30 seconds of everyone's time for an advertising break here. So let's do that and we'll come right back.
All right, we're back. One thing I think that might be illustrative to hear is that in the first Artsakh War, Turkish, I guess, irregulars or mercenaries, or I don't know what you want to call them, people associated with the gray wolves fought on the side of Azerbaijan, right? And keen history understanders will know that there is some history of anti-Armenian sentiment among the gray wolves and indeed in Turkey as a country.
So perhaps this is a good point to talk about the international involvement here, because I think it's very misleading to do this, as we're seeing in Syria right now. People want to divide the world into blocks, right? With like this sort of Cold War narrative that we have of Russian interests and U.S.
interests.

And I think this is an excellent example of why that is not necessarily a great way to perceive the world.

So can you explain the international involvement in Artsakh and in this ongoing conflict, which we'll get to at the beginning again in 2020, I think, in a second?

In addition to Turkish forces being used in that 2020 war, which I guess we'll have to get into a little bit, their Syrian mercenaries were used as well. They were put on the front lines as kind of candid fodder.
They were given something like a $100 bonus that they beheaded a civilian, a $200 bonus that they beheaded an Armenian soldier there. But, of course, Israel is the primary supplier of Azeri weapons and weaponry going so far to test some of their drones on manned Armenian outposts early on before the war started.
It's fair to say that Azerbaijan could not have been so successful without the aid of their ally, Israel. Israel has been deeply involved in Azerbaijan for a long time.
They use Azerbaijan as a listening post against Iran. Israel stages raids from Azerbaijan on Iran, and that has to do with the ethnic minority on Iran.
There's a lot of Azeris down there. Israel gets something like 40% of its oil from Azerbaijan.
Right after the Palestinian genocide started, Israel awarded two contracts to the state oil company Sokar in Azerbaijan. That's right adjacent to the Palestinian gas field and the Lebanon oil field to Sokar to explore.
It cannot be overstated how complicit these two groups are with each other. They really, really need each other in the region.
And the United States also likes Azerbaijan as well. They see it as a friendly Muslim country.
Bullock against Iran as well. Yeah, and I think they also have some Turkish drones.
Is that right? The Bayekar drones, absolutely. So let's talk about that 2020 war because that that was a war that relied heavily on these drones right as a major means of uh destroying Armenian armor and pushing that offensive so what happened in 2020 along this disputed border well you know it's called mountainous Karabagh it's uh an area that's great defensively if you're fighting in a pre-drone world.
But, you know, as you've discovered with your Kurdish friends, the drones are amazingly destructive against people hiding in caves, which is what the Armenian response had been. Armenians had been a bit lazy.
They've been relying on Russian tanks and weaponry, whereas Azerbaijan's is buying from Israel.

They're buying from all, you know, many, many just different sources, which reflects the wealth of Azerbaijan, of course.

So in 2020, there's some indication that Aliyev, the dictator of Azerbaijan, had been planning this for a while.

He had this playbook called Operation Azeri Smile 2020. The troops move in.
They encounter more resistance than they thought. And they get most of the Armenian-held territory of Nagorno-Karabakh back.
They're stopped at the last minute, probably by Russian intervention at this time. Armenia was a member of the Russian alliance at that time, which they're leaving just because Russia has failed to live up to its treaty obligations in any way.
And it left a kind of a skeletal state of Artok left, which was only supplied by this one road called the Lachan Corridor. That was only one road from Armenia to supply the 120-some-thousand Armenians who lived in Artsakh left, which brings us to 2024.
Okay. 23.
24. Yeah.
So you have this situation where we now have this massive area that's, I guess, occupied. And a lot of people began leaving at that time, right? Through that Lachin corridor.
People didn't feel like they could safely remain there. I mean, the indigenous people of Artsakh have this profound relationship with the land and the people.
I am an icon painter. I was talking to my priest and he was comparing the people there to the elves and the Lord of the Ring.
They whistle to the birds. They've just been living with the land for a long time.
So there was a drain, but it's not as big as you would have thought just because there's this intense millennia-old connection with the places of Artsakh. So what Azerbaijan did, and this is, I think, unprecedented, is they had a fake ecological protest that stopped the Lachan Corridor from supplying food and medicine to the people of Artsakh.

So they starved those people.

They denied the medicine.

People had miscarriages.

Azeris were firing at farmers in the field.

They were trying to collect food. And that went on for nine months.

And what stopped it was Azerbaijan claimed it was a group of ecological protesters who were stopping trucks of food coming into Artsakh for any reason, which, you know, is enough of a smokescreen for the Western world to really throw up its hands. Yeah, fascinating.
So they literally had a blockade of these protesters? These protesters blocked it. The Russian troops that were the peacekeepers refused to disperse these protesters.

They were these old, appraxed-looking people wearing fur coats. They were identified on social media as actually being members of the Azeri military.
And they had these printed signs that said things like protect nature, stop pollution. Very generic.
Wildly generic things. Ostensibly, they were against the gold mining operations in Artsakh, which is nuts because a protest is not allowed in Azerbaijan, and B, there had been an actual protest against a real gold mine that was owned by the daughters of the dictator, and they were brutally shut down before.
So anybody who's paying any kind of attention to this knew that it was fictive.

But I think the EU in particular needing enough of a smokescreen not to support these people.

EU, of course, is getting its gas through Azerbaijan.

Yeah.

Because they've said they don't want it from Russia.

But Russia is just feeding its gas to Azerbaijan,

and then Azerbaijan is selling its Azerbaijani gas to the EU. So they were just trying to do that.
Yeah, they've just created a pass-through and, like, someone who can live off that rentier income. So let's go to 2023.
Okay. What do we see happening in 2023? So the eco-protesters, they kind of run their course, and then there's a lightning operation.
Artsakh's attacked. Position's overrun.
There's this massive exodus of people, people who have to leave their houses immediately. The road is blocked.
People are dying on this road on the way out, fighting each other just to leave their houses.

In 2020, Azerbaijan has said, sure, you know, Armenians can come back.

We're just taking back our territory.

You live here, you can do that.

But when Armenians did, there's this one case of a 69-year-old farmer who went back to get his possessions.

The dairy troops cut off his head.

Jesus.

They put it on a dead pig. And they put all those images on social media.
They raped and tortured anybody that they could find left behind, and they turned it into memes on telegrams, stickers that were, you know, something like down like 20,000 times in the five days they were being monitored for this. So there was absolutely no question that people could stay behind.
Yeah. Zero.
So there's no Armenians left. And so there's literally been daily ritual that's been going on for 1,700 years that doesn't go on anymore.
And there's a tragedy in that. Yeah.
it's been lost like and yeah it's hard to quantify the like you know the meaning of that loss i think especially for folks who aren't familiar with people in their culture and their connection to these things talking of quantifying things i need to uh look at the amount of time we got here and pivot again to advertisements. And we're back.
So what we see in Artsakh, especially in 2023, is a product of ethnic cleansing, right? Genocidal violence, however you wish to phrase it. I mean, ethnic cleansing is not a term that has really a definition in international law.
Genocide does. Often very much, like in this instance, I'm using them to mean one and the same thing.
It's the removal of people either through killing them or forcing them to leave or starving them. The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the Lumpkin Institute, Luis Moreno Campo was a founding prosecutor of the ICC, Juan Uresto-Mendez, a special advisor to the Secretary General on Genocide Prevention.
They all call it genocide. So we can call it that.
Yeah, we can call it genocide. It's fairly safe.
Yeah. There have been many genocidal projects in history.
what is as a bjans goal with this is it the removal of armenian people with the area such that as ari people can occupy it is it access to the resources that are there is it settling a historical score if you look at a map there's this idea of pan-terranism is that something that something that you're familiar with? Yeah. Can you explain that to listeners who are not? Pan-Turranism is this Turkish idea of an ancient Turkish state that stretches from the Bosporus all the way over to Mongolia.
And there's one little country in the way that is blocking this empire that should exist, according to the Pan-Tyrannus. And this is an old idea.
It's a 19th century idea. It's lumping in with every Nazi and race junk scientist idea that you have.
But that's the idea. And the secondary thing is, you know, again, Aliyev is raping his people.
He's imprisoning every journalist. He's any scientist.
It's really on a level with Turkmenistan or what was happening in Syria or North Korea. And he needs ethnic hate to keep his country together.
He's made an ethnic hate theme park. It's not called that, but that's what it is against armenians in this so yeah so really i see it as a consolidation of power he needs an enemy he needs to move forward which is why he's threatening to invade armenia proper next yeah and like i think one of the things that like happened with the um with the conflict in Arts Act, I'm just thinking about this Pan-Turkic stuff because I see it every single day in the replies to my posts on social media, right? In my case, it's with reference to my time in Kurdistan and in Rojava.
Disinformation played a massive role in the 2023 conflict, in the 2020 conflict too, right? And i think people who are hearing about this for the first time are at massive risk for finding that some of that different information right they hear about this driving to work today on our podcast and they go to google it there's a lot of crap out there right so like can we address that the role that it's played and continues to play the load of crap or the pan-terranism or both well the pan-terranism generates a lot of crap right like i'm convinced that some of the accounts in my replies are not real human beings oh yeah that's been a well uh established phenomenon the number of bots that uh azerbaijan to a lesser extent turkey because i think turkey's more secure in its genocidal aspect, whereas Azerbaijan is really, really going for it. You know, so not only the bots in the replies, which just come up no matter when you put in a keyword, there's going to be lots of mentions on your social media.
Not to mention there's a pretty vicious campaign out there to dox anybody who talks about this. That's happened to me before, and it's not pretty.
But also there's this thing called mirror propaganda. I don't know if you've heard of that, but the Azeris will take something that Armenians say, like, oh, Armenians should be able to have a right to return.
So they throw up this huge cloud of, they'll take actual documents that have been produced by, I don't know, Freedom House, right? Yeah. And then they'll copy the entire document and format things as right of Azeris to return to Western Azerbaijan, which is their new concept.
And Western Azerbaijan is the country of Armenia. So they have these maps where they renamed all the towns of Armenia with Azeri names.
They claim Armenians only came to the region in 1828 with the Russians, that they're a fake people. Another tragedy of Artsakh is they're taking these monasteries and places, not only destroying them, but chiseling off ancient inscriptions to prove that Armenians didn't exist there.
They've already done this in this other place called Nachavan, which is, they call it the largest cultural genocide of the 21st century, where they destroyed thousands of medieval monuments and stones with bulldozers and sledgehammers. So they're just wiping them out, any record of Armenian, anything.
And they're claiming Armenia is really is really should be called Western Azerbaijan and anytime Armenians talk about Artsat going back they're like well we they've made cookbooks they've got a television show about Western Azerbaijan and it's just it's what you're laughing and I laugh too but it's it's so ugly so scary but it's funny too yeah well these things are until it's your grandma or what have you been beheaded um like yes it does seem it does seem obscene and it's so obscene that it's funny right but like this is a a concerted state project right that like it's easy to get caught up in um and it's easy to get caught in this disinformation machine not just from like yeah like a bot in your replies, but from news, like you say, news outlets or doctored reports or things that look very convincing. Search results that go to the top.
I mean, you know, and this, of course, started with the Iranian genocide, which, of course, Turkey and Azerbaijan and Pakistan for some reason say it was fake. If you search for that, the top results are going to be Armenians are lying.

They committed genocide with us.

And then they'll throw these numbers like, oh, yeah, Armenians killed 3 million Turks.

Like, what are you talking about?

This is just like words have meaning, you know.

Increasingly less and less.

Less and less. You know, there's that great Hannah Art line about constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
And that's what they want. We're an obscure part of the world.
This will say a bunch of shit and people throw up their hands and walk away. Yeah.
Oh, it's too complicated. And so they sort of.
Too complicated. Right.
Yeah. Or, you know, they'll say, oh, it's ancient hatreds and like that's bullshit it's not

ancient hatreds it's a very modern thing these are real people who have real understandable issues you know like in gaza it's like it's very clear yeah what's going on yeah yeah and the difference there is that it has received a lot more coverage and a lot more attention so where does this leave us now right as of john has just hosted this conference and it's important to recognize that this conference is a project of kind of global liberalism, right?

to the COP conference, and it conveys legitimacy.

And in this case, it's a means of kind of laundering legitimacy for this Karabakh project, in their case,

through the lens of protecting the planet. Where do they go from there? Well, so what makes the dictatorship of Azerbaijan a little bit different from these other dictatorships I mentioned is I think they care about what people think a little bit.
They bring in F1 Racing, they have Eurovision.

They really do these projects because they want to be seen as a legitimate state.

Whereas I think those other, like North Korea, they don't do that.

No one's going to like us no matter what we do.

Yeah, they've given up.

They want to play on the international stage.

So that's one aspect. Another aspect, it legitimizes themselves to their internal critics.
People in Azerbaijan are smart. They know what's going on.
But they say, oh, the world is coming to us. The world accepts us.
They must accept the brutal dictatorship that's cracking down. Anybody's gay, lesbian, You know, torture is a feature of this regime.
So it legitimized themselves internally. Yeah.
And what they fear, I guess, is people would getting angry that they invade Armenia. So I think it's that sheen.
Now, we could argue whether that was effective because COP29 was an absolute train wreck for them but i'm not sure that matters to them right matters for the environment yeah i think probably these cop conferences are not going to be the way we solve our uh our issues with climate change but that's another another conversation going forward like what is the status of odds are what can those people those people who were able to leave, like what does the future hold for them? Are they sort of refugees in Armenia now? They're refugees in Armenia. Armenia is a poor state, doesn't have the oil reserves.
The Azerbaijan just announced that they increased their military budget by 20%. It was already incredibly high.
Last time I got statistics, the flights from Ovda, which is the Israeli military installation for flying equipment to Azerbaijan has ramped up. It's higher than it was in 2020 before their invasion.
It's on par for 2023. So that's a pretty clear sign that they're getting all their equipment from Israel.
They stopped before COP. And so I haven't been able to get data on that since then.
Azerbaijan just issued a declaration that parents cannot visit their children in the military. Oh, well.
And that's a bad, bad sign.

Yeah.

So the question is not if it's when.

It is winter.

Armenia has a lot of mountains.

Those are pretty good to defend.

People have figured out, I'm sure you've talked to your friends who were Java,

they figured out drones a little bit, how to deal with them better.

Armenia has reached out to France, who's been helping them a little bit. Azerbaijan says there's some conditions for peace that are insane.
You know, like change your constitution is one. Get rid of all EU observers is another.
Don't get any new weapons. And then give us what's called this Zanger Corridor, which is like this road that goes to their exclave, Narcjavan, to the west there.
And it's just like you can't stay. No country's going to do that.
Oh, and they've got another claim, which is they say allow the UNESCO to visit Armenia to check out erased Azerbaijani sites, which is just a mere propaganda insanity because UNESCO is already in Armenia. And Armenia asked that of UNESCO for Azerbaijan.
But, of course, they just copy that. Right.
And say, well, why don't you do it? Yeah. Right.
Which, you know, is not a real thing. But anyway, so those are the conditions.
So it seems probable that Azerbaijan will invade possibly in spring because the snow will melt it away, possibly now because Aliyev seems like he's very angry that the world kind of paid attention to COP-29, is figuring out that he's a dick. And he's ramped up in arrests in his own country.
He just arrested an entire television station of people that were, you know, again, it's one of the least press-free countries on earth, but I guess we're doing something before that. And they'll either take the southern half of Armenia, or they'll take all of it, because they say Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, is historically part of Azerbaijan.
So that's the state where we're at there. And I really think any other perspectives are wishful thinking.
And I'm sorry to be so grim about that, but it's, I think it's a very real possibility that this Armenian genocide, that it's killed literally, you know, countable millions of Armenians since the 1890s and ramped up through 1915 through 1923. And then subsided a little bit is ongoing and their project will be completed in the next year.
Yeah, that's pretty bleak. Yeah.
How can people, they want to be in solidarity, they want to support, like this is something that doesn't get reported on right in the US, even if they just want to learn more. How can they do that? Where can they go? There's a good site that says Learn for Artsakh.
That's a good site. There's a bunch of Armenian websites that people can go to.
May I post some links on the show notes? Would that be good? Yeah, we'll absolutely bet those in the show notes, yeah. Yeah, I would be very happy to do that if people want to donate things.
But it's similar to Gaza or other places. What does awareness do? I guess it could slow things down.
Yeah. But really, we just need state actors to respond to this.
Armenians get very cynically used in France and in the United States by right-wing politicians who claim that they're protecting Christians, but I don't think that's something that will actually happen. Yeah, I mean, people did the same thing for Assad, right? That he protected Christians in Syria while he murdered, gassed his own people.
Exactly. That's a best of cynical thing and a worst of justification.
I mean, what have you seen that's effective in terms of world action for these things with Kurds or other people? I mean, look, when we talk about how the Kurds have defended themselves from a state project to eliminate them, right? In they haven't been able to right and when they have it's through their own armed initiative for the most part right they were very fortunate to have the support of the united states but that was only ever in the battle against isis it wasn't when genocidal violence right this genocidal project in afrin we're seeing it right right now in in talrafat the u.s didn't stand beside them there and it's not in its nature too and i think this is a really difficult situation that we find ourselves in all around the world right now we see we've seen this in africa too right like it's not really in the nature of the united states done in this century to intervene simply for human rights reasons, simply because genocide is wrong. We had a person, Samantha Power, who wrote a book on how genocide is wrong and we should intervene.
And then what happens when she's in power with Obama and Biden? Does it intervene? We draw red lines and then let's sidewalk over them. It happens all over the world.
And I think, yeah yeah we're probably in a post-hegemonic era but that doesn't mean that people deserve to die because we're in a post-hegemonic era i don't know when look if i look at the other genocide which i've spent more time with than than most genocides which is a weird thing to say it's the genocide in myanmar of the rohingya people yeah they are still facing genocidal violence now even from anti-hunter groups but I also see Muslim people in the Karen National Liberation Army I see them fighting with the KNDF and and the way that those people liberated themselves was like from the bottom up and i think that like i find some hope in what's happening in kyrgyzstan and what's happening in myanmar and i don't see very much from the community of states so much of the thing that even fucking exists i don't really believe that states have a conscience and yes i don't think it's in their nature to care about people because people are inherently valuable but i I do think people do, and I do think it is in the nature of people to care. So I guess we have to continue to hope.
And there has been some positive statements by your Java regarding Armenians, and there's been a lot of solidarity there, which is great. You know, Kurds helped commit the first Armenian genocide, and they've apologized.
And so I'm seeing a little glimmers of hope in terms of the solidarity of people who see what's right and wrong, who aren't state actors. That's absolutely right.
Yeah. One of the things, there's another thing that will be deployed very often, the Kurds are responsible for the Armenian genocide.
Kurdish people were part of the Armenian genocide and they will acknowledge that and they've tried to make amends for it. Yes, exactly right's all yeah like we're here now we're not prisoners of our history but we have to acknowledge it so that we can move from it thank you for sharing all that yeah thank you is there anything else that we've failed to address you want to get in quickly before we i mean yes there's thousands of years of stuff but but you know visit visit Armenia.
It's still called one of the safest places on Earth. It's been rated safer than Japan.
Oh, wow. It's a beautiful place.
It's a struggling democracy, but it's the only democracy in the area. Try to pay attention to the news.
You know, as hacky as it seems, right, your senator, you know, like, I just feel wrong saying

that, but what else can we do, right? If you're in Britain, the UK is an incredibly egregious

supporter of Azerbaijan through British Petroleum. Really, you people probably can have the biggest

effect because the UK is the biggest enabler of those dirt bags. And thank you for the time.
I really appreciate it. And I don't feel like I've done justice to 2,500 years of history, but thank you so much.
No, I think that's great. Is there any way people can follow you online if they'd like to? Oh, absolutely not.
I'm tired of getting doxxed.

Excellent.

Yeah, that's probably for the best.

I have to.

You know, that's why I paint icons.

This is because it's anonymous, you know.

Yeah.

Very offline.

Yeah.

But thank you so much.

Great.

Thank you.

This is It Could Happen Here. this is it could happen here executive disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening the white house the crumbling of our world and what it means for you i'm garrison davis today i'm joined by mia wong james stout and robert evans this week we are covering the week of January 29th to February 5th, and oh boy, has this week felt like a month.
I am absolutely exhausted, and let's start, I guess, by talking about what Trump did Tuesday night. He had a press conference with both himself and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to announce that the United States would, quote-unquote, take over the Gaza Strip, resulting in, quote-unquote, long-term ownership.
Previously on that day, Trump also signed an order pulling out of the United Nations Human Rights Council and cutting off aid to UNRWA. Let's start with this topic.
Hopefully, we will have a later episode, maybe next week covering what's happening in palestine but you know this is as of right now the current most development this is one of the more like crazy things that he's like like you could see netanyahu even like in the room clearly finding out about this for the first time uh yeah that there was a real oh shit really vibe i i'm not sure how long trump and netanyahu have actually had this like entire thing planned that that is a distinct possibility that like this has been netanyahu's goal for a while and this was like impacted his negotiations with biden like knowing that he wanted this to be like the outcome where the u.s basically just takes and holds the territory of gaza as a u.s territory indefinitely. I think Bibi knew that Trump would give him a positive outcome in any number of ways, right? To include just saying, bomb it off the map.
I think it's reasonable to assume that. Well, I mean, something like this was, I think, the obvious outcome as soon as Trump, I mean, from before Trump won, right? Yeah.
Netanyahu never had any intention of letting things go back to the way they were before October 7th. And Trump has a vested interest in giving Netanyahu whatever he wants the most.
Like, it's, I don't know. I'm not surprised by it.
I guess I'm a little bit like, okay, at least now we know what they're going to do next. It's in line with the Manifest Destiny territorial expansion that Trump has been talking about the past few weeks.
I mean, Joe Biden laid the groundwork for this by giving Israel the actual bombs and materials to do the demolition side of this project. And now Trump continues to discuss relocating Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan while promising to turn Gaza into, quote unquote, the Riviera of the Middle East.
Level it out. Create an economic development, unquote.
He has also said that he's going to again said he's going to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, which would leave 2000 people in CENTCOM to deploy to Gaza, I guess, if that's what they want to do.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's no possible way this can go quote unquote well this is going to be a fucking catastrophe the basic plan here is to do a genocide and then i mean this is this is part of a genocidal operation yeah it's like this is like what we're doing we're doing a second larger genocide this is like the finishing touch yeah but but then but you know like on a sort of practical level it's like okay the u.s couldn't hold Afghanistan, right? Like, and, like, obviously, this is a sort of practical level, it's like, okay, the U.S. couldn't hold Afghanistan, right?

And obviously, this is a quote-unquote easier occupation, but it's like, this is going to be a fucking shit, like a nightmare.

And I don't know, my assumption is that this is going to be just like, if he actually does a deployment of U.S. troops, this is going to be hideously unpopular.

People are going to be coming back in body bags, and it's going to fucking to fucking i don't know it's going to be a nightmare for everyone involved and yeah it's a absolutely terrible idea i'm more scared that they're going to get away with it i think it's i i'm more scared that things will go fine for them and this just becomes like an actually stable u.s territory in the middle east East. There will be significant pushbacks, not the word, right? Like there will be guerrilla warfare, right? Like it's very hard to take and hold significantly larger urban areas, as the U.S.
has found out for 20 years. Whether or not people will accept that, I think they might.
Like I think Trump kind of needs an enemy, you know, and a war and like a quote unquote, you know, he can paint almost anything as a win. And I think people might be more willing than we'd like to think to accept people coming home in body bags from that.

I'm not really sure I think we're actually going to see the kind of troop deployment that people think based on what Trump has said as opposed to expanded support for what the Israelis have already been doing, which has done a significant job to depopulate the area as it stands. I think we have to be hesitant to draw too strong a line between the rhetoric and what Trump is actually going to do, which doesn't mean I don't think that it's not very likely that you're going to continue to see mass depopulation in Gaza.
I think it's just that I don't know that I think the only way that happens is something that looks like most of the occupations of the last century have looked like from a U.S. point of view.
Yeah, and the new model is this Syria model, right? Like, of the relatively small footprint, and then a local partner forced at the IDF pulling security for U.S. contracts and in U.S.
money. Right, the IDF and a lot of third-party corporate...
Yeah, PMCs. Yeah, PMCs, you know? Yeah, for sure.
We've got guys champing at the bit to do that, and that looks a lot likelier to me than the 10th mountain division you know occupying large chunks of gaza agreed yeah eric prince is ready to uh ready to get in there sadly all right let's uh let's transition to our new segment titled stinky musk which i came up with uh last night delirious and yes it's bad no I'm not going to fix it. South African gang does a hostile takeover of the United States.
Yeah, you're hitting today, Garrison. Elon Musk and a gang of overly online Gen Z interns are doing an oligarchic cyber coup of the federal government, starting with the Office of Management and Budget and moving on to USAID, General Services Administration, the Treasury.
and as of recording, NOAA, as well as many other agencies, smaller agencies, bigger agencies, that they are infiltrating both physically and digitally. Employees of these agencies have been locked out both physically and digitally, as the Doge team ransacks various departments and accesses sensitive data with no oversight.
And that's like government data about you, possibly in the hands of a literal Nick Fuentes-pilled Groiper intern. Security officials who tried to resist Musk's seizure of classified materials have been fired, and Doge personnel threatened to call the U.S.
Marshals to be let into buildings. I have some more info on this as we will go on, but I guess this is an okay time just to discuss.
Yeah, I think the response to this is one of the more hopeful things going on right now. And kind of what led me to think that is looking at 2020, looking at the fallout from 2020 and what worked and what didn't, largely what didn't work, and thinking like, okay, well, if we're going to actually get any kind of functional resistance to what's happening, what does that look like? And it doesn't look like the same crews of people doing the same thing that they did four or five years ago, which is why I've got some hope in the fact that you've got a different crowd of people who are radicalizing and taking to the streets and, you know, we...
Federal employees. Federal employees, right? And you've got a lot of...
Or former. Yeah, most of them are still current but, you know, it's a mix of former and current federal employees and these are the people who do a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff at the Office of Personnel Management, Office of Management Budget, like, these are who keep things functioning at a ground level.
And a lot of them are pissed off in a way that I don't think we have really seen before. And I think there's a potential, and who's to say? Right now, we just had a big protest in front of Treasury, about a full city block or so of people, many, if not the

vast majority of whom were federal employees, rallying alongside a lot of Democratic members of Congress. And, you know, that's not, that doesn't accomplish anything on its own, but it's a potential start to accomplishing something.
You know, if you get those people out in the street, It provides, among other things, a lot of cover for everyone else. And it also is the start of, you know, what you might call a reverse January 6th.
You know, if January 6th was a bunch of random people taking and occupying government buildings without any knowledge of, like, what they are or how things actually function inside of them, the kind of thing that we might be looking at in the near future is the opposite of that. We're a bunch of people who absolutely do know how those organizations and buildings function trying to take and occupy them.
And that's the feeling I got because I talked to some folks who are at the Treasury protest. One person that I talked to most extensively is a federal contractor who was present in 2017 at the travel ban protest.
One person that I talked to most extensively is a federal contractor who was present in 2017 at the travel ban protests, if you remember those, which is back when Trump announced his first Muslim ban and a bunch of people started occupying airports and stuff. I was at LAX for that.
This person was at some of those protests and he was out in front of Treasury. And the quote that I've got from there was, I was expecting it, it being this protest, the Treasury protest, to feel like the travel ban protests.
It didn't. It was a lot angrier than the travel ban protests.
The travel ban protests were kind of an in-defense-of-another-person sort of anger. And this was narrowly focused anger at a very specific group of people.
There were a lot of people yelling and screaming outside of their congressman's offices and the like, and there hasn't been that much disruption compared to what we're going to see, right? Social security payments haven't stopped going out in mass. So if we're seeing something like this at this early stage, I think there's a lot of potential there.
And the thing this person brought up repeatedly is like, when we start seeing congressmen kicking in doors is when things are going to get interesting. If that happens, like that's kind of the stage at which there's a lot of potential for this to turn into something that could actually like cause change.
Like if you actually start getting government employees who are willing to do more than stand outside of their offices, like who are willing to take direct action to occupy those buildings or stop other people from and you've seen little bits of that, right? One of the things we did see is as these doge kids came along, federal employees refusing them entry, keeping doors locked. Now that was not illegal because these were literally, as it's been described to me by multiple people, just kids showing up demanding entry without any kind of a badge or evidence of who they are, right? Right.
When you get people who are willing to escalate from that and refuse entry, that's when we might actually see some things start to seriously shift here. I mean, based on how much of what Musk is doing is just like bypassing Congress and doing like a very kind of like typical like oligarchic coup.
Like he's doing all those steps. And if you look at like what happened in South Korea a few months ago, we are not at the point where congressmen are literally like, you know, climbing over like fences, barricading doors.
We're not in South Korea territory yet. But yeah.
But like their lawmakers like were willing to do that. And there is, I think waiting from people to like wait and see if our lawmakers are going to be willing to do the same to like protect the actual like functional aspects of our government yeah and like things are already happening like we are in some ways kind of already at this point yeah the usaid website is now like completely removed leaving only a note that claims that all personnel have been put on administrative leave including overseas personnel but this essentially leaves a whole agency shut down but all done with like without an act of congress or even like an overstepping executive order from trump it was just it was just the unelected elon musk who decided to and carried out the closure of a government agency which like should be like like should actually is statutes that are designed to stop this from happening, just no one's enforcing them because they control almost every aspect of government.
Musk has also closed the IRS direct file tax system, which has now forced taxpayers to use third party paid services. He's doing this one by one.
I think the weakness that they have right now is that because they're causing so much chaos because they're like you're talking about the fbi purge they're trying to do like you know but the thing that they're relying on is everyone is just going to let them in and just let them get walked over but it's like okay the thing about acting this much outside the law is what guys with guns do you have who you can use to enforce this yeah that's the thing where it's it's legitimately like if there's serious resistance to them they might start to crumple because the the the reason you work inside of the legal order or you have your own paramilitaries is so that you can have like the guy with the gun to make you open the door yeah and the more people who are willing to just be like no fuck you like and like force

them to actually like find guys with guns who are willing to do this the odds are lower that you get a positive shift because people engage directly and aggressively with the cops then you have when some sort of like mid-level military functionary is asked to drive a tank over a school teacher right like historically historically if you look at when regimes fall that happens more often than the waving a flag on top of like a pile of corpses yeah right like demands are ordered illegal illegal orders are given to people with guns and they're like no i'm not going to shoot at a bunch of teachers today that's not the only way this kind of thing happens but at least like for my money that's the likeliest positive outcome right yeah and if you look at the last world historical empire run by incredibly unpopular genotocracy it was the soviets and look at how they fell apart that's that's more or less what happened yeah yeah and like it's interesting that if we use a varian definition of the state like that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence right that they've dismantled their apparatus for state violence as well and this could just be like the blunt instrument of apparently offering every federal employee uh i know i've heard that they've tried to un-retire wildland firefighters who accepted their offer of retirement which is extremely funny but like it's it's very like yeah if you're going to what you're going to retire a bunch of fbi agents or fire them because like me i said they are going to need hitters they're going to need to use coercive force at some point possibly very soon yeah to get what they want to do done and and i think when it comes to that the question is like which hitters yeah because the the fbi and the cia i mean are getting are getting gutted at the moment right now like so you're looking at like and the nsa you're looking at local police federal protective services uh department of homeland security you know yeah and the marshals right like like these are kind of like the shooters trump to play with, and the military will remain an open question until the critical moment, right? Yeah. I mean, FPS is infinitely expandable and is mostly contracted, like Robert and I have spoken about this before.
But, like, that's the one that has a lot of potential to grow. And I think within local, especially sheriff's departments, you've got some people who won't bat an eyelid in some of those.
Oh, no, no, no, absolutely not. And I do think that like sheriff's departments are kind of what haunt me the most.
But that's also, it's not purely a matter of like which agencies and organizations are going to back Trump in this. It's also a matter of like geographic location.
And DC, in DC at least least he can count on a lot less of those guys because like the capitol police aren't thrilled right now you know essentially what elon is doing right now is exactly what he did to twitter except to the entire united states of america yeah and like yeah by the end of this process it still might function on some level right like twitter kind of functions, but it's just worse in every way. It's worse.
It doesn't have the quote-unquote good features it used to. It's buggy.
It's full of Nazis. It's just – it sucks more.
Like the previous version was already bad and harmful, but the new one is just worse without the aspects that made it semi-worthwhile. And I'm going to do an episode next week about this specifically, and how Musk is Twitter-ifying the entire government, using all of the same tactics, like refusing to pay leases on buildings, installing beds in agency headquarters to make employees sleep there overnight, having teenagers review code of long-standing employees employees it's the exact same process and if you didn't like what happened to twitter uh that process is now happening to the government itself i can't wait for the irs to send me a letter saying my pussy in bio like that that will be uh hey now now now you've now you've gotten me back on the trump train uh you know what i'm i'm peacing out for the day I'm on board now before we close this segment and pivot to ads I do want to shout out the work that Wired is doing right now Wired magazine is doing some fantastic reporting on this the DC attorney is currently promising to go after individuals who post about Doge employees they might end up going after some of these wire journalists who identified this gen z doge team that is wreaking havoc throughout the government uh with no oversight wired provided what should be you know legally required the necessary identification of public workers yeah who musk is trying to keep secret the dc attorney and like trump's doj is very mad about that they

might they might end up like uh going after these people but uh uh fantastic work coming out of

wired right now yeah if you want to keep up to date on musk's takeover i strongly recommend

checking out their work i'll post some of those in the sources below let's go on a quick ad break

and then come back to talk about uh the continuing uh kind of fake trade wars and immigration sick all right we are back i'm gonna pivot towards uh james and mia to discuss tariffs and immigration Take it away yeah so on monday trump sort of averted the market collapse that he had set off with his declaration that there are going to be 25 tariffs on all goods from canada and mexico and also 10 tariff on china so let's let's go into like what actually happened so the tariffs tariffs on Mexico and Canada are on hold for a month.

However, the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods did go into effect.

And we'll get to more about what that's going to do in a second. But much more importantly, Trump eliminated the de minimis exception, which allowed like people and companies to ship goods from China that were worth under 800 and not have to go through the formal customs process and you know pay tariffs on it and also have to spend all of that time paperwork and shit and before we get into the sort of devastating effect this is going to have on businesses i want to make it clear that like regular people in china use this to send things to people in the u.S.
Like, that's a very normal thing that is now really, really difficult. And about a third of YouTube ads are supported by people who run companies that make use of this loophole.
Yeah. Okay, so on the business side, this is actually really interesting because I think it's one of the, I mean, not the first, but I think it's going to be be a very very early example of trump completely fucking a base that's been very very supportive of him because this is going to liquidate huge portions of the dropshipping economy right like all of all of the stupid youtube shirts like all of that stuff is just going to be annihilated can you explain dropshipping if people aren't familiar mere just like 10 second Yeah.
So dropshipping is a thing where you do an order and instead of having like an inventory, normally you'd have a warehouse that has shirts in it. Dropshipping, you don't do that.
You are now the intermediary and you have these manufacturers like print to consumption basically. and you can you can do this very cheaply and then you can run the entire markup but it works because of how cheap it is to get these small-scale Chinese firms to make stuff for you.
Those people are screwed. Companies like Temu and Shein are either going to have to just completely eat shit, or they're going to have to figure out a way to move their entire supply line through countries like Vietnam, which is going to be very difficult.
I mean, because Temu even getting stuff to the U.S. has been kind of hard for them because of how the logistics network works.
Yeah. And so obviously, like, I don't I don't think most people listen to this show are that sad about Shein and Temu eating shit.
But no, it is like a mixed bag because a whole lot of the the MLM industry is going to take a header as a result of this yep yeah there's some stuff to like fuck them but on the other hand there are a lot of people who are going to eat shit who are not those people and this is there is a a huge like range of industries that are run by very very small businesses like it was even just like an individual person who like makes crafts and sells it and those people are also screwed because they they rely on getting the resources in from china and there's a lot of sort of you know it things like like people who build like hand like retro handheld consoles oh yeah and like i don't know like custom airsoft rifles i know jd you talked about like there's a whole bunch of industries like that that are these like small scale production things that are just screwed that rely on this stuff. And so the ripples of this specific part of it are going to keep playing out basically no matter what else happens in this trade war.
Yeah. It's also worth noting that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada aren't gone.
They've just been postponed for a month. so there is a real chance that we end up in exactly the same place that we were going into the weekend where no one knows where these tariffs are going to take effect and basically blow a smoking crater in the world economy.
And we get another round of the negotiations that James is going to talk about. It's already setting off a really sort of staggering right wing.
I mean, not even necessarily right wing, but just like a nationalist backlash in Canada.'s kind of been tearing up this sort of international right-wing alliance and nationalists because suddenly Trump's coming after them and now they're really mad about it. Well, and because Trudeau announced that he would be targeting retaliatory tariffs specifically at red states, we now have people calling him Dark Woke or Dark Trudeau for very different reasons than they used to call they used to call him Dark Trudeau.
Garrison. Oh, that's magnificent, Garrison.
All right. All right.
You're going to get cancelled if you're not careful. Outstanding.
Speaking of getting cancelled, what hasn't gotten cancelled is the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods, which is just now in effect.

It's just happening. That's bad.
It's going to increase inflation. It's also, you know, it's sort of the opening round of this escalation to a trade war.
China has retaliated with tariffs that are not a very big deal on U.S. goods and some product control stuff on export control stuff on some rare earth minerals.
actually I don't know three-year-olds

but like minerals you need

for production stuff

that isn't a big deal yet but could be i mean and we were all expecting chinese tariffs having 25 percent tariffs to canada was not something i thought was like a looming no yeah yeah i mean i thought they'd do mexico i didn't know about i'm very worried about the offshoring of Chinese labor and the impact that we'll have in places like Myanmar, where China has these special economic zones. And it's something we will cover.
We obviously have a lot of sources. Yeah, we're on Monday.
On Monday, we're going to cover this more. So I think something that's important to understand about these tariffs is that these tariffs are not economic policy.
This is the mistake that all of the capitalists who back Trump made is that they assumed

that just like every other president

who's made promises like this,

like Obama's promised

to renegotiate NAFTA,

they all assumed

that because of economic policy,

they'd be able to just like

get Trump to be pro-business

and he wouldn't do it.

The miscalculation they made

is that these are not

economic tariffs.

These are directly foreign policy

geopolitical tariffs, right?

They're international relations

art of the deal bullshit.

And the goal of it, and he's been deploying this against like i mean columbia denmark uh he's threatening the eu now he's going to keep doing this with china the the goal of this is to directly use american but consumer power as as a weapon of imperialism to make these countries fall into line yeah and now now we'll pass it to james to talk about what he was specifically trying to get out of mexico and canada in this round yeah so like me i spoke about falling into line there i think it's probably a good place to start like this kind of trump brinksmanship is very typical of his style right nearly every media outlet i think fell for it this time just like it did in his first term like we got this like this is going to cause a crisis Trump was very nebulous in his goals for these tariffs and as almost always like he talked a lot about like America being treated unfairly right he talked about the border and he talked specifically about fentanyl so I want to begin by talking about fentanyl just to be clear it is true that some fentanyl comes into the USA from Mexico and to a lesser degree also from Canada. The vast majority of the fentanyl that enters the USA from Mexico, about 80% of the convictions made as a result of that fentanyl entering the USA are made on US citizens.
And 90% of the fentanyl that is seized is seized at ports of entry. so this idea that there are like Mexican nationals backpacking fentanyl through the desert, that exists, but it is not what is bringing the bulk of the fentanyl that is killing the people in this country into this country.
There are multiple cases of CBP agents taking bribes to allow the drug into the country. I will link to two of them in the show notes, but know that there are more of them.
And given the relatively high bar for CBP agent, anyone in DHS to be investigated, right, we can assume that this is something that happens on at least a semi-regular basis. So what did Trump do to stop this fentanyl coming into the country? What did he get? He got this promise that Mexico would deploy 10,000 troops to its border.
In reality, this isn't much of a concession at all. The Mexican National Guard has been deployed to the border for years.
Specifically, it's been deployed at gaps in the US border wall for more than a year. So people will remember our coverage of the open air detention sites in Hacumba in East County, San Diego.
All of those open air detention sites correspond to gaps in the border wall where migrants would enter, surrender to border patrol, and then be detained in open air. Each of those gaps now has a Mexican National Guard checkpoint in front of it.
They're there in conjunction with the INM, the National Institute of Migration in English. The INM has camps for the migrants who do come there.
This is something that Biden obtained in, I think, late 23, early 24. And that's why we aren't seeing open-air detention one of the reasons the other reason being biden's asylum ban we aren't seeing as many people crossing the border right mexican border towns also tend to be areas where the mexican military deploys its troops because often there are places where organized crime occurs due to their proximity to the border and the market for drugs and the fact that weapons from the u.s tend into Mexico and that that's where large numbers of weapons for organized crime come from.
For more than a year, I've received press releases from Tijuana constantly talking about new unit arrives, special forces arrives, army arrive, and then they'll have pictures of a parade. Now, they never tell us when those units are leaving.
They just keep telling us they're coming. So it's very hard to get a sense of actually how many troops are there sure but the idea that mexico is suddenly militarizing its border is kind of farcical yeah and i i want to there's been a lot of sort of cheerleading of shine bombs sort of like standing up to the u.s and i don't think people in the u.s really understand the securitization on the mexican border and so something that i'm realizing that i don't think i just just assume people knew about this, but I don't think ever made it into the Western press much is that, so like a few months ago in October, the Mexican army just like opened fire on a convoy of, like on a convoy of immigrants.
And this was, this was on the border of Guatemala and just like killed six of them, shot 12 other people. So like, and like there are massacresquently.
This is not a Mexico is pro-immigrant, the US is anti-immigrant thing. Part of the reason why Trump can declare victory without getting any concessions or whatever is because of how murderous the Mexican army's border policy is already.
Yeah yeah and the Mexican leaders have successfully been able to paint themselves as leftists exclusively being two inches to the left of a further and further right regime in Washington DC people can listen to the last episode of my daddy and gap series for an idea of how Mexico is constantly deporting migrants to its own southern states I want to talk a little bit about the Canadian concessions very briefly. Again, 10,000 agents and a border spending that really doesn't change much in terms of what was already becoming a more militarized border.
There has actually been a significant flow of migrants from the US to Canada in the last couple of years, specifically of Francophone African people who would take that route. I'm aware of several TikTok influencers.
There's's one guy i follow in shad who he's in canada now but he's from chad and he makes these videos explaining to chadian people how to like go from mexico into the u.s and then move up to canada obviously where they can speak french and that that's makes their lives much easier right makes it much easier for not to not have to learn a language trudeau did agree to list cartels as terrorist organizations. Yeah, that seems to be, from what I can tell, the big move that he made.
Yeah, so it does allow for some economic sanctions, right? If they attempt to use that Canadian border and sort of get around the United States. It's much less significant than a US listing, which we believe is coming.
Canada's not going to use it to do covert operations inside Mexico, I don't think. Canada's not going to be drone striking anyone.
When Trump listed the Kurzweil force, he then struck its leader with a drone. I don't think Trudeau's going to be, I don't think Canada's going to be doing that.
But nonetheless, that is a concession. And perhaps there is some plan for that.
It certainly allows for, and I've said this before, the economic sanctioning of people who provide material benefit to those organizations, or potentially the arrest of people who provide material benefit to those organizations, which is a large number of businesses in Mexico which end up being extorted or paying protection money, right? So we don't know what is going to happen with that, but it's one of the tools that Trump now has to use as another cudgel against Mexico. Yeah.
The last and perhaps most sinister of all development is this deal that Marco Rubio struck with Bukele in El Salvador, right? El Salvador has said it will host US citizen criminals and deportees from any nation in its jail system. So I'll just read Bukele's tweet.
It's very short. We are willing to take in only convicted criminals, parentheses, including convicted US citizens, into our mega prison, SECOT, in exchange for a fee.
The fee will be relatively low for the US, but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable. If you're not familiar, it means counter-terrorism confinement center in Spanish.
For people who haven't heard about this, it's the largest prison in the world that Bukele opened in 2023. And it's a terrible place.
There are cells of 100 people. In that cell, there are 80 bunks, two toilets, and two basins.
They are extremely confined. I think they get 6.5 feet of space per person.
They get 30 minutes outside a day. They're forced to shave their heads.
Their ankles and wrists are chained. People are arbitrarily detained there, sometimes for things like looking like they might be in a gang.
Multiple human rights organizations, including that, well, the State Department is not a human rights organization. Sometimes it's the opposite of that.
The State Department itself has raised concerns about human rights abuse due to the quote-unquote state of exception, which exists in El Salvador, which allows the government to do these things without really any human rights oversight. The US has already seemingly moved some migrants to Guantanamo bay to the guantanamo bay detention center and satellite imagery has shown tents going up there very few at the current time um and they seem to come from fort lewis mccord which i couldn't work out but there are tents i guess i think it was washington post had these satellite images of tents being constructed there i'm trying to keep an eye on that satellite imagery.
Of course, Biden opened the door to outdoor detention. It's not impossible that we will see that again.
But this Bukele plan, this plan to send people to El Salvador, especially U.S. citizens, evidently this is unconstitutional.
The courts get to decide how much that matters, right? We don't.

This is deeply concerning.

We're all waiting on the courts, and we're all deeply concerned.

Yeah.

Well, there you go.

One final break, and then we'll come back to end Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling. And part of its focus was to prevent teachers from calling trans students by their names and preferred pronouns, even promising to inflict legal punishment for doing so.
Basically, like mandating deadnaming, misgendering, and forcibly detransitioning students. This order specifically took aim at, quote-unquote, social transition.
This is like the non-medical social aspects of transitioning, like changing gender names, pronouns, what facilities you use, socialization. And like this stuff has historically been, you know, the most common form of transition for minors.
It's the easiest to do. You don't even like need your parents' help.
But this order blames schools for indoctrinating children in, quote, radical anti-American ideologies, unquote, which they include gender ideology as a part of. The order tries to mandate a national school bathroom ban, restrict participation in school sports, and states that within 90 days, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Attorney General shall provide Trump with a quote-unquote ending indoctrination strategy to protect parental rights and eliminate all federal funding that directly or indirectly supports gender ideology indoctrination in K-12 schools, including curriculums, teacher education, certification, licensing, employment, and training.
To quote from the order, quote, the attorney general shall coordinate with state attorneys general and local district attorneys in their efforts to enforce the law and file appropriate actions against K-12 teachers who violate the law by, one, sexually exploiting minors, two, unlawfully practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license, and three, otherwise unlawfully facilitating in the social transition of a minor, unquote. So basically, the goal is to try to make calling a student by their name and pronouns illegal and wrapping this in either with some form of sexual exploitation, practicing medicine without a license, and using those as justifications for making this practice illegal.
Now, in response, school districts in Columbus, Ohio, Harrisburg, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, announced that they would not comply with the order and continue to defend their trans students, according to journalist Aaron Reed. Seattle Public Schools published a statement reaffirming their commitment to protecting LGBTQ students and staff.
And later, the California Department of Education pushed back on the legality of Trump's order. Other blue cities and states have stayed quiet in the week since the order, with teachers and parents calling on places like the New York City public school system to take a stance on if they will stand up for their trans students.
So this is one side of the coin right now. The other side is healthcare, which we will close on.
Now, in relation to Trump's executive order from his first week, entitled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism

and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, some hospitals have begun complying

in advance by canceling patient appointments for gender-affirming care. Denver Health and

University of Colorado Health sacrificed the care of their patients for Trump's promise of

continued funding by announcing that they would no longer be offering care, including blockers and hormone replacement therapy for patients 18 and under. The Virginia Commonwealth University and Children's Hospital of Richmond have also ceased providing gender affirming care to those under 19.
This past Monday, thousands of people gathered outside at the NYU Langan Hospital in protest of the hospital's choice to proactively comply with Trump's order to restrict health care after the cancellation of two appointments for trans patients under the age of 19. Now, after these protests, which saw thousands of people protesting out in the streets, after this, the New York Attorney General sent a letter to the state health care systems saying that the state law requires that hospitals provide gender-affirming care and claimed that the federal funding would not be impacted by an executive order.
And this really hammers down the point that none of these executive orders are self-enforcing. These all require proactive implementation by local actors.
Dr. Jeremy Birnbaum was quoted in the New York Times.
He's a pediatrician at the state-run University Hospital of Brooklyn. And he was quoted as saying, quote, I am willing to go to jail to continue to provide your care, unquote.
And you really can't like protest hospitals that comply in advance. Same thing with schools.
These are targets that can provide actual pressure. And there's probably people on staff who are very sympathetic and they just might be too scared to take a stance right now.
And we have some breaking news as of this morning. State Attorney General from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Nevada, Vermont, and Wisconsin released a statement saying that Trump's executive order banning trans health care is unlawful and the hospitals have a duty to provide care.

So this is like the most optimistic thing that we've seen so far.

Now, obviously, these are blue states.

This is not going to impact red states who already have these types of bans either in process or are going to have them down the line.

Georgia just put out a trans healthcare ban this morning for a bill that'll reach our Senate in the next few weeks. But this is the current situation.
Protests seem to have plied a degree of pressure that has gotten states' attorney general to actually make a statement on this issue. Yeah, I will say, so I still teach, right? I teach at a community college and sometimes uh through that we also teach high school students if you are an educator or someone in health care now is the time to be talking to your union about like how you meet this because like the stronger we are the better we can confront this and the only way to confront this is we all need to do it together.
And like, these are conversations

that we need to be having right now.

Like we do not have time

and our unions are a very valuable tool

for preserving our rights.

Yeah, that's actually part of what I was going to say.

I've talked to a few union teachers

who are like,

yeah, we're going to go do this.

We're going to go fight.

So I expect in the next couple of weeks, we're going to more movement from the teachers' unions. And I think there's, you know, there's an under, I mean, on the one hand, there is the threat that, you know, these people do want to privatize the education system, right? So there is a chance that this is, you know, trying to draw a backlash out of this is something that they're going to try to use to just completely eliminate like national federal education but also you know this is something we've i want to close this episode on that we've been talking about this whole time right is that this this whole coup is being carried out by a bunch of people with laptops and pieces of paper walking up to bureaucrats and the bureaucrats doing what they're being told right this is this is not a coup that's working with, like, an army that is showing up on your street.
And you can go, like, find the local bureaucrats who are the people who are supposed to enforce this stuff, and you can protest them, and you can put some steel in their spine and make the administration actually try to do this. It's not that hard, and they'll fucking cave.
Yes, that's that's entirely what i was trying to get

at earlier and and you know it ties into what james was saying is like this is the time to be making connections across as wide a swath of the country as you can including like everyone you can get in touch with who uh is not someone you would normally organize with like this is a moment of potential and it's

during moments of potential that you should

be widening the

swath is not someone you would normally organize with. This is a moment of potential, and it's during moments of potential

that you should be widening the swath of people

that you connect to,

because otherwise there's just no getting through

this sort of shit.

We will be covering all these topics

more in depth in our regular daily episodes.

I have a mind-boggling, very frustrating episode

on Musk and the Trump campaign's promises of abolishing different departments of government, as well as a deep dive on affirmative action and DEI wokeness in the coming weeks. And I'm sure we will all be focusing on different parts of this in our continuing episodes.
But that does it for us today. See you on the other side.
We reported the news news 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.

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Thanks for listening.