It Could Happen Here Weekly 168

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Speaker 44 Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

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Speaker 45 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, in China specifically with the AIF.
Welcome to the show, Azad.

Speaker 45 Thanks for for being here.

Speaker 43 Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 46 Of course.

Speaker 45 Yeah, this has been a project that I've been following from afar for some time, maybe several months now, I think.

Speaker 45 But for listeners who have not been following, can you explain very briefly the role of the AIF in the struggle in Myanmar?

Speaker 21 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 21 Getting right into it. Yeah.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 In Burma, already for decades, there have been some kind of established precedent of,

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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 Free Bremer Rangers, but I wouldn't classify them as like, you know, foreign fighters or anything.

Speaker 44 They do very, very good work, but yeah, slightly different role.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 43 The people who did this kind of stuff were mostly coming as individuals, you know, kind of on their own prerogative.

Speaker 43 And secondly, they were overwhelmingly, we can say, non-political or, you know, ex-military guys from Western nations or, you know, from neighboring countries who were somehow drawn to the conflict and wanted to use their skills in that kind of light.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 It specifically came about after 2023, 2024, there were slowly more internationals in the country, internationalists we can say,

Speaker 43 who were here on a much more, yeah, albeit at the beginning, individual.

Speaker 43 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,

Speaker 43 which led over into the name.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And of course, after talking with like 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.

Speaker 43 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,

Speaker 43 consistent perspective for internationalism in Myanmar, that was kind of the goal.

Speaker 45 Yeah. And if people aren't familiar, it's the anti-fascist internationalist front, right? The AIF has a really cool logo with the

Speaker 45 peacock tail and the three arrows and the like the white star and a red background that I thought that was a, I really appreciate your logo. Yeah.
So yeah,

Speaker 45 I think people will like, when they talk about the conflict in Myanmar, they will be like, oh, why are they, why is there not more internationalism? Why is there not more international volunteers?

Speaker 45 Something that you and I have spoken about before is that like, this has always been an international conflict, right? And it's always been an anti-fascist conflict as well.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And I think you and I both agree that those are not the lens through which we should view it.

Speaker 43 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

Speaker 43 branches that you can go down.

Speaker 43 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 course the 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?

Speaker 43 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?

Speaker 43 And that was the fundamental calculation in that. So insofar as it's a fight against fascism, that makes it an internationalist struggle in itself.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 So yeah, in that regard, it's very much an internationalist struggle.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 I've spoken to tons of them even two years ago, especially young women there, right?

Speaker 45 Looking at the women's revolution in Rojava and seeing that this was a possibility, that this was something on the horizon that they could strive for. Do you want to explain

Speaker 45 your own perceptions of that and experience of it?

Speaker 43 Yeah, sure. Well, first, you know, not to overstate things, while 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 43 You know, you know, a little biased having spent time in in Rojava, as you also have. I think, how can we say? I'll give a bit of context.

Speaker 43 In 2023, I think this message went out from the KNDF to the forces in Rojava. And I was there at the time.

Speaker 45 So was I.

Speaker 43 Really? What? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 45 I was there to say we were there.

Speaker 43 We were both there.

Speaker 45 Yeah, at the same time. Everyone started hitting me up for book recommendations.
It's like October. I didn't know that.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 45 Right after October 7th, I think.

Speaker 21 Okay.

Speaker 43 Anyways, so yeah, when this came out, like some friends sent this to me and was like, hey, can you translate this?

Speaker 43 And I like not only me, when I saw it, but also all the friends in the leadership and, you know, all of the comrades there were like very

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 you know, recorded this video message and sent it back. It was very much like a very pleasant, happy surprise for everyone involved.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 Fundamentally, we're comrades on the same very, very long front line. Now, I think what that looks like locally, especially, I'm happy that you mentioned like specifically the women's situation.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And specifically here in Myanmar, we see a very difficult situation in the revolution in regards to like the position of women. Yeah.

Speaker 21 Where

Speaker 43 because of, I mean, it's a very new revolution. Lots of these people are, you know, a couple of years ago, they were just in, we can say, liberal society.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 It was a natural evolution from protest to resistance to revolution. No?

Speaker 43 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,

Speaker 43 you know, have prepared and have readied themselves to to fight against the dictatorship.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 So I think Rojava inso much as like, I think anybody can take Rojava as an inspiration.

Speaker 43 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 the entire paradigm of the Rojava revolution.

Speaker 43 So I won't say that 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.

Speaker 43 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, for us is eternal inspiration.

Speaker 45 Yeah, and it's a really beautiful thing to see, like you said, just to see people like.

Speaker 45 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?

Speaker 45 It's willing to allow the people of Rojava to die for it in the battle against ISIS or Daesh,

Speaker 45 but it's not willing to stand by them when they're being bombed by Turkey, right?

Speaker 21 Something

Speaker 45 you and I have both seen. But to see something that instead begins with genuine solidarity and admiration.

Speaker 45 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,

Speaker 45 it's so rare to see revolutionary movements submitting their faults, especially during the struggle, right? During the moment of revolution.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 It's the thing in Rojava too.

Speaker 45 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

Speaker 45 It's really a special thing. It's really a wonderful thing to see, especially with the world seemingly getting more and more isolated and more and more

Speaker 45 nationalist as opposed to internationalist. Like it's a really beautiful time for it to happen too.

Speaker 43 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 Like they really do see the conflicts that we're facing today against the capitalist system, against capitalist modernity.

Speaker 43 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

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 It's not just like pendering to some internationalist kind of sentiment.

Speaker 45 Yeah, no, it's very real, and it has, yeah, very genuine basis in sharing more than common interests, I will say.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 But can you explain like the groups and the struggle as it has been since 2021? In many ways, Chinland is where the revolution, the armed revolution began, right?

Speaker 45 So can you explain how we get to a place today where in recent weeks we've seen massive victories in Chinland?

Speaker 21 Yeah, so

Speaker 43 as you know, the political situation, at least between the groups, is somewhat complicated. So I'll try my best to like

Speaker 43 most fairly but also somehow accurately describe yeah i'll start from the history we can say as you described in and around mindat 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.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And with that kind of weaponry, they were going and attacking police stations and checkpoints.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 Even we have only sticks and stones. We will dismantle this dictatorship.

Speaker 43 So yeah, that was a very inspiring early period.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 It's a moniker that a lot of groups share. There were a lot of different PDFs and CDFs popping up just in the days following the coup in Chinland.
So, yeah, like from the very beginning, there was

Speaker 43 the precedent in the history of revolution there. Now, these towns that were the beginning of the revolution have now been seized.

Speaker 43 So, Mindat, as of last month, was taken by the Chin Brotherhood Alliance, as well as CDF Mindat and

Speaker 43 alliance partners.

Speaker 43 So the progress has definitely been made. The current landscape looks a little bit like this in Chin State.
There's two big blocks,

Speaker 43 we can say. One block is the Chin Brotherhood, and one block is the Chinland Council.
At first, there was only one block.

Speaker 43 called the ICNCC, which stands for Interim Chin National Coordinating Council or Committee. I always forget the last C.

Speaker 14 I remember at the same time as you were.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 Again, last C, always ambiguous.

Speaker 43 So, yeah, for a long time.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And everywhere there was resistance against the dictatorship and on some level cooperation both with Qing groups as well as with the NUG.

Speaker 43 In 2023, political events occurred and

Speaker 43 as we can say politely, a disagreement in the political future of Chinland separated into two groups with CNA, CNF withdrawing from the CJDC and forming their Chinlin Council.

Speaker 43 And the groups that kind of subscribed to that vision and subscribed to that path, they joined the new Qinlin Council.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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

Speaker 43 have had very incredible victories. You know, Qinlin Council has been able to, in the north of Chin State, liberate Chika and Tunzong town.

Speaker 43 And then, of course, in the south of Chin State, Shenblu has been able to take Matupi and Kantelet and Mindat. So definitely victories all around.

Speaker 43 But yeah, I'll stop myself before I comment too much more on that.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 45 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? Guy, yeah, 2025. God.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 45 Four years from the beginning of the revolution.

Speaker 45 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 taking on police checkpoints or attempting to organize an armed resistance and those little air guns with the made of the blue plumbing pipe.

Speaker 21 Like,

Speaker 45 they

Speaker 45 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,

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 But it's such a beautiful thing that it has. I wonder, like,

Speaker 45 it's a crucial time for the revolution now, right? Like,

Speaker 45 the revolution is as successful as it's ever been. We're reaching the fifth year.
Can you explain, like,

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And it's an alphabet secret.

Speaker 45 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 can you explain?

Speaker 45 These aren't groups sort of necessarily. Sometimes they are opposed to each other.
They have different visions for the future.

Speaker 45 But can you explain the role of the AIF within the broad anti-junta movement?

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And every single page has at least 10 different acronyms. And it's absolutely insane.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 Our perspective so far has been that, especially as foreigners, I mean, especially as like foreign foreigners, you know, like Western foreigners,

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And now it's time, now it's time for us to tell you what to do, or now it's time for us to train or something like like that.

Speaker 43 Yeah, I would say our perspective is much more closer to the perspective of the

Speaker 43 international structures in Rojava. Our goal is recognizing that this enemy, the SAC dictatorship, the SAC Junta, is fundamentally a fascist anti-human enemy.

Speaker 21 That makes it also our struggle.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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 have

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 Yeah, quite contrarily, everyone at all stages, even the NUG is saying, I'm not talking about us.

Speaker 43 I'm just talking about publicly, you know, everyone is saying, whatever help we can get, we appreciate it. Yeah.

Speaker 43 But, you know, we're not just 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 uh 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.

Speaker 43 We need to learn from the struggles of our comrades there. We need to learn from the developments happening in this revolution.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And in our own ways, to take the lessons of this revolution to take the uh the 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 i remember um when i was much much younger talking to a veteran of the international group an anarchist veteran no it's from the international brigade to correct myself and i asked him to explain anti-fascism to me and he said that for him like

Speaker 45 when someone devalues humanity, like the junta does in Burma, like the Francoists did in Spain, right? Like Assad did in Syria,

Speaker 45 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 all humanity to defend.

Speaker 45 humanity, to defend compassion and kindness.

Speaker 43 Absolutely.

Speaker 45 Yeah, I think what you're doing in Myanmar is part of that desire to defend humanity against inhumanity, against whatever we want want to call it. What are the struggles that the revolution faces?

Speaker 45 Like, I know you guys have recently been doing a fundraising campaign, for example, and the revolution is almost unique in its complete lack of solidarity from the states of the world, right?

Speaker 45 There is not

Speaker 45 a state that is backing this revolution. It is entirely the force of the people of Myanmar.
So can you explain some of the struggles within the revolution, perhaps because of that?

Speaker 43 Yeah, I mean, as much as some people,

Speaker 43 you know, like to say

Speaker 43 CIA or something like this is an awful lot of people.

Speaker 21 They can fuck off.

Speaker 43 Of course, the reality is that, you know, I've heard the term crowdfunded revolution. I think it's incredibly accurate.
Yeah.

Speaker 43 Because no, in the AIF, we recently did a fundraiser for vehicles and equipment and things like this. But that's on our scale.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And of course, even like 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.

Speaker 43 So we can say overwhelmingly it is a popular resistance.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 But these organizations enjoy the like 95% support of the people against the junta, you know?

Speaker 47 Yeah.

Speaker 43 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 yeah you know they have a lot of ammo us not so much uh so there's like lots of these practical problems i think the

Speaker 43 how can we say cynical kind of as you mentioned earlier western outlook has been to paint the 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?

Speaker 43 Now, I disagree with that assessment. Obviously, I think, you know, yourself, as you're familiar with the conflict, I think it's much deeper than that.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 But on the other hand, that is a, 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, as you're seeing, most of the country is no longer in the junta's control.

Speaker 43 Yeah. 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, contestion.

Speaker 43 So very soon, the onus will be on revolutionary forces to answer that question. Okay, how are we going to consolidate?

Speaker 43 How are we going to transfer these wins on the battlefield into something that is more permanent and more lasting?

Speaker 43 And I think, you know, already as you're seeing in Chin State, that I can speak speak of, and that people are seeing in elsewhere that I can't speak of because I don't know, there are definitely frictions.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 But fundamentally, I think the trajectory as it currently is

Speaker 43 positive for the resistance, we can say.

Speaker 45 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 45 I was talking to someone yesterday in another part of Myanmar.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 Talk to us about like liberated Chin Land, right? Mindat's just been liberated.

Speaker 45 Large areas have been under the control of semi-control of a dictatorial regime that has been extremely oppressive to the Chin people for decades. Like, how are people receiving their liberty?

Speaker 45 How are they?

Speaker 45 governing themselves or attempting to take care of one another in these liberated spaces.

Speaker 21 Sure.

Speaker 43 Well, I think the first thing I'll say is maybe to contrast to other parts of Myanmar, we've been relatively lucky in Chin State in 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.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 So because of the nature of Chin State, they never had the,

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 They were the ones kind of cowering in their corner.

Speaker 43 But I think, especially after these towns are being seized now, you know, take Ricodhar, which is the border town on India, or take Mindatam or Tupi, these towns that have just been recently seized.

Speaker 43 These are towns which people are wanting to live their lives. I mean, Shinstate has always been autonomous, even in British rule, in colonial rule.
It was just labeled as unadministered, you know?

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 And the removal of the junta from these areas is allowing those relationships to much more naturally flourish.

Speaker 43 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 a fighting and to continue their lives as normal, which I think finally now that not just in Chin State, but 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.

Speaker 45 Yeah. And

Speaker 21 I think

Speaker 45 that narrative that you pushed back on already, that like, and we've seen it from so many, like every think tank, every analyst, 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.

Speaker 45 They will stop.

Speaker 21 And that hasn't happened, right?

Speaker 45 It's not happened anywhere. But

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 The fact that there are parts of Myanmar that are free now and where people can live their lives as they wish will never change.

Speaker 45 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 Chinland, right?

Speaker 45 Like, like, not all of them will be, will have spent their whole lives there. They'll have come there from Burma majority cities, maybe.
Is that correct?

Speaker 43 Look, like,

Speaker 43 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 Shin State.
Yeah.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 Yo, even if it's just someone sending someone to say hi from somewhere, you know? Yeah. It's not like, oh, everyone's in their corners fighting.

Speaker 43 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?

Speaker 43 They're coming from opposite sides of the country. Yeah, absolutely.
It's fundamentally a fight against the dictatorship.

Speaker 43 It's not the fight to liberate Chinland or to liberate Kareni or something like this. Yeah.

Speaker 45 I remember speaking to Amandalay PDF a while ago, and they were saying to me, like, they were really scared when they first...

Speaker 45 left the cities because they'd been told that like wild people lived in the mountains.

Speaker 21 And that like,

Speaker 45 now we're wild people.

Speaker 21 We like the wild people.

Speaker 45 Like, but yeah, this narrative. I mean, James C.

Speaker 45 Scott talks about this, right, in The Art 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.

Speaker 45 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?

Speaker 21 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 45 People will be listening to this, I'm sure, and like

Speaker 21 thinking

Speaker 45 this is laudable, this is incredible. And A, they'll be shocked that they haven't heard about this.

Speaker 45 Maybe, especially the newer listeners, and I do want to say that, like, you can go back and listen to our other coverage on Myanmar.

Speaker 46 There is a lot.

Speaker 45 But

Speaker 45 in terms of conflicts, right, conflict is always messy, and war is never inherently a beautiful thing.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And why do you think that the, especially the Western media, has largely overlooked the conflict in Myanmar? That's a good question.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 43 I will say... just on a very base level, without getting into any kind of like, you know, pondering or something like that, I've spoken with a few journalists.

Speaker 43 And, you know, before anything, before we even talk about politics or something, there is just the material material calculation that these outlets are making.

Speaker 43 From what I understand, from what I have heard, people don't care.

Speaker 43 Now, that's really unfortunate, but like these like big networks, you know, CNN, whatever, 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.

Speaker 43 From what 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 me and Mark.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 You know, like whenever there's some massacre or whenever there's some, you know, inter-tribal 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 Lacio that we saw, you know?

Speaker 43 Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. For these big things, the Western media will be there.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 Yeah. It seems like this Western eye is only interested in the suffering, we can say, which is really unfortunate.

Speaker 43 But, you know, even if the media is not paying attention, we can say for better or worse, the governments are paying attention. Absolutely.

Speaker 43 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 being very involved in the process yeah so yeah while unfortunately the the kind of liberal media eye is not so much uh you know giving myanmar the coverage that it deserves as a popular revolution the powers at b 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, the revolution that, like,

Speaker 45 entirely, I mean, at points armed itself using guns it downloaded off the internet.

Speaker 46 You know,

Speaker 45 it offers sometimes I think when I'm 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.

Speaker 45 Like, and it's only in

Speaker 45 covering the small parts of the revolution that make it truly a revolution that we can see that.

Speaker 45 Like you have an Instagram and on there you are posting about training sometimes when you're doing the trainings and there are women who are coming to train, you know, with rifles to be, I was going to say marks people, I guess.

Speaker 45 Like I know people.

Speaker 43 Yeah, only U.S. military guys are weird about calling things snipers.
Yeah, they're snipers.

Speaker 21 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And it's only through like following those little revolutions that happen every day that make up a big revolution that we truly understand it.

Speaker 45 And I'm sure that's something that you're seeing on a daily or weekly basis, right? Like people's worlds opening up and their horizons changing because of the revolution.

Speaker 21 Well, listen, absolutely.

Speaker 43 Now, of course, you know, as leftists involved or interested in this revolution, studying it, whether you're socialist, whether you're anarchists, whether you're communist, whether you're apoist, 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.

Speaker 43 No, like I'll give an example.

Speaker 43 From 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, 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.

Speaker 43 It was not even that like, okay, 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.

Speaker 43 The calculation that was made was a moral calculation. It was saying we have the choice.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 I mean, now, like, everyone jokes on the Tamada because they're obviously garbage now, but like,

Speaker 43 at the time, that wasn't the

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 It was fundamentally, people didn't even envision the victory, but on the moral principle to resist, they've resisted.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 There's no books, there's no ideological books here that you can study and understand the underpinnings of the revolution.

Speaker 43 You know, there's no classes that you can go to that the PDF teaches you about what their revolutionary paradigm is.

Speaker 43 Fundamentally, it's a fight of the people against oppression and against dictatorship.

Speaker 43 And while, of course, there's some strengths and some weaknesses that we face in the revolution, ultimately, in the same way as Rojava and 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 a symbol that actually, yeah, you can win.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 45 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 in it.

Speaker 21 Incredibly good.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 45 Like 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?

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And no one bought it until eventually CoolZone did, and here I am. But like, even 2021, 22, talking to those guys, I was like, they might all die.
It's still been worth it for them.

Speaker 45 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 incredible.

Speaker 45 Obviously, war 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.

Speaker 45 It continues to amaze me every day, every time I see people dancing in front of a captured military headquarters.

Speaker 45 I don't know. It's just such a remarkable revolution.
Azad, 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?

Speaker 45 Are there places online or are there ways that they can support you aside from obviously being part of the struggle? How can they help you?

Speaker 43 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 news updates or something like that.

Speaker 43 And that's Azad underscore AFA on Instagram.

Speaker 45 Spell out Azad for the non-Kurdish speakers.

Speaker 43 Yeah, A-Z-A-D, A-Z-A-D, if you will.

Speaker 21 Yep. Thank you.

Speaker 43 Underscore AFA on Instagram. The AIF also has an Instagram for like official posts.
It's AIF Myanmar.

Speaker 43 In general, about the AIF, especially at this early stages, right now we're involved in some front lines in Western Myanmar.

Speaker 43 And so because of that, we don't really have a lot of information presence out right now.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 43 For listeners who don't know, maybe, yeah, maybe they're not aware.

Speaker 44 This only started in October of last year.

Speaker 43 So we're still

Speaker 43 in the stages of consolidating and getting our equipment. We set the goal for $10,000 and we exceeded it.
We raised over $13,000 for that.

Speaker 21 Nice.

Speaker 43 So yeah, we're very happy to say that. But in the future, of course, there will always be more opportunities.
As you know, Revolution is very expensive.

Speaker 43 So yeah, on all fundraising platforms, we have PayPal, Cash App, and Venmo. And all of those are AIF Myanmar.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 21 We can say, we hope to share soon.

Speaker 45 Yeah, that would be great to see.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And I'd love to give people a place to learn about them.

Speaker 21 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 45 Great. Thank you so much.

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Speaker 49 Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 It's available now in paperback. I have my paperback copy from Roche Press.

Speaker 49 So, Spencer, I guess let's get right into it. What is siege and why should we still be talking about it?

Speaker 50 Well, unfortunately, we should still be talking about it because it's still influential.

Speaker 50 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 is a lifelong neo-Nazi.

Speaker 50 He joined the American Nazi Party at age 14 in 1966. He is still an active ideological believer in national socialism.

Speaker 50 It's a book that in it, he makes the argument that any kind of normal legal political activity was 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 We can destabilize the government and society. And after this, neo-Nazis can come to to power.
This has become a very influential idea. More recently, he was rediscovered.

Speaker 50 It was a pretty obscure, the newsletters were very unpopular. He never made more than 100 copies.
The original book had a print run of 1,000. So it was a sort of obscure text.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 It was found by these younger aspiring terrorists, let's say at the time, around a message board called Iron March.

Speaker 50 It became the Bible of the Atomoffen division, this neo-Nazi group that its members and associates killed five people.

Speaker 50 And out of that, everyone in the Atomoffen division had to read Siege, which became the hashtag.

Speaker 50 And out of that grew this whole sort of network first of groups and now really of totally decentralized like propaganda channels on Telegram, Dubteragram, promoting these these same ideas.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 He makes a reference to people who are into siege in his writings.

Speaker 50 And more and more, I've documented before him at least 12 murders that were either by the Adam Waffen division, by people inspired by siege culture, or by people directly linked to Terragram.

Speaker 50 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 and Western Europe.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And if there's a single ideological text today that's influential on this scene, it is by easily James Mason Siege.

Speaker 49 And what I particularly am enjoying about the book, and I just told you before we started recording, I haven't finished it yet.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 It's the animating force behind Adam Waffen.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 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?

Speaker 49 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?

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 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?

Speaker 49 That you can't understand modern neo-nazi organizing if you don't know the history that goes back to the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And there's no differentiation made between them. And I would say that National Socialists are quite different from other white supremacists for a variety of different reasons.

Speaker 50 So there is no book about neo-Nazism in the 1970s in the U.S.

Speaker 21 at all.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 It's actually not bad. It's an eight-part series by Martin Kerr.
So the first half is really reconstructing what happened in the 1970s, because this is what siege is coming out of.

Speaker 50 This siege is an answer to the questions that face neo-nazis in the 1970s. And then the second half of the book is even, I would say, less about Mason.

Speaker 50 It's about these four countercultural figures who discovered Mason, helped publish him, and eventually created it, published, and disseminated Siege itself.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 I had many mutual friends with another, the publisher, Adam Parfrey of Ferrell House. So like I was like right around what these people were doing as part of the 90s counterculture.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And so I will say how this started.

Speaker 50 is right after Charlottesville, the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, always, you say these things and you just give the name of the thing and people are like, wait a minute, that's like where I live.

Speaker 21 You know,

Speaker 21 we're more than that.

Speaker 50 You know, I was in Seattle. I was like, oh, I was at Seattle referring to this 1999 demonstration.
And I'm like, people

Speaker 50 here weren't even necessarily born then and just saying at Seattle doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 The street fighting people might be familiar with, even that's fading from memory, was before it was supposed to start.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 49 Nobody ever gave a speech.

Speaker 50 Nobody gave a speech.

Speaker 50 As we know, the car attack happened like an hour or two later. I got to look at a timeline.
It's all like garbled now, right?

Speaker 43 1.30.

Speaker 21 Yeah, that sounds right.

Speaker 50 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?

Speaker 50 And so there was a spike in interest in it. And Adam Woffen had been doing more and more.

Speaker 21 Adam Woffin, people are committing murders.

Speaker 50 Strange murders.

Speaker 50 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 even in more structured political movements.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 Anyway, these are questions for terrorism studies. And so there was a spike of interest in it.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 Well, first I discovered it's not easy to get to Lawrence, Kansas. You have to fly into an airport.

Speaker 21 And then I think I took an Uber for like an hour.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 The government sees them and has them in a warehouse somewhere or whatever.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And I quickly found out what I had. And there were two things.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 Some people don't know this. Joseph Paul Franklin shooting and paralyzing publisher Larry Flint and some other things.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 the most radical wing of these splinter groups. So there was that story.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 It was just a joke, all these things that we hear today almost word for word.

Speaker 50 And so I found all their letters to James Mason and they're adorned with swastikas and eight eights and they're helping him. They had, they reveal the extent that they helped him.

Speaker 50 And the funny thing is a lot of this stuff was actually available on Out in the Open. It was in published books, but it was like little pieces of flakes of gold scattered around everything.

Speaker 50 And 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 turned to two articles.

Speaker 50 And I sat down to write it and turned 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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 not, this is great that you have me on the podcast.

Speaker 50 Not against, no diss against you. No shade, no shade.

Speaker 49 No, and I'm so, I'm so jealous of your trip to Kansas to see the archives. I, I only recently, a year or two, discovered that his papers existed in those archives.

Speaker 49 And so I wrote to the archivists 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.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And so it's, it's like, you know, trying to like randomly throw darts or something. If you get the right file, they have them.

Speaker 49 I know, I was like, I was begging and pleading. I was like, please just like any letters you have with Bob Height.
I just, I just want the Bob Height letters.

Speaker 50 But I can give you the Bob Heike letters.

Speaker 21 I would love those.

Speaker 50 I think they'll digitize stuff for a price, though.

Speaker 49 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?

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 But nobody takes those pieces and slots them together because they interlock.

Speaker 21 They all interlock.

Speaker 21 Right.

Speaker 49 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?

Speaker 50 Well, the lone wolf question is a long question. A lot of people know Metzger moved to the lone wolf strategy after war was sued by the SPLC and collapsed.

Speaker 50 But Mason was advocating this beforehand and was very tight with Metzger.

Speaker 50 So there is actually a book describing what you've said, putting the pieces together, and it's called Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Faction.

Speaker 49 Exactly. It's the, I think it's a majority of the.

Speaker 50 Which you can buy today.

Speaker 49 I mean, like I said, it's the only book that I know of that fits these pieces together.

Speaker 50 No, it is the only book. Actually, I've been in contact with James Mason, and he said one radio interview, it's not the first of its kind, but it's the best of its kind.

Speaker 49 High praise from the book's Nazi pedophile subject.

Speaker 49 Why did he donate his papers to the library? Because like you said, most people are not only not preserving these items, right?

Speaker 49 They're not preserving them at all because they know what they've done is illegal or embarrassing to everyone involved.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 Did you talk to him at all about why he did that?

Speaker 50 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. He'd go antiquing.

Speaker 50 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 it looks like the area nations booth at the tulsa gun show it looks like my apartment but like in the in the inverse and fewer plants um

Speaker 50 so he he he was a collector so he was already i my understanding is he was already selling george lincoln rockwell memory abilia or whatever papers and such to kansas they have this collection there called the uh wilcox collection of anti-extremist stuff this guy laird Wilcox, had been an 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.

Speaker 50 So they, 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.

Speaker 50 They were like, oh, these are just a bunch of kooks and wingnuts. They're not important.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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 who had made him the head of the party who was actually the second head uh harrington cliff harrington clifford 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 that have been printed that were wrong by scholars and others that were and it wasn't their fault they were taking it was hard to get these 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

Speaker 50 mason was one of the co-founders and not him he only became the uh the head in the 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.

Speaker 46 Like, really? Like, come.

Speaker 50 Oh, your flag is a swastika.

Speaker 46 Oh, I mean, this is absurd.

Speaker 50 But people will do that, right? It's like the dead parrot skit in Monty Python, if people know this. And so, but Mason stands out because he's always been very upfront about his views.

Speaker 50 He's very proud of them. He's not ashamed.
And if this embarrassed other people, they didn't belong. He's, as he told me, they didn't believe in the one true religion.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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, so yeah, he has nothing to hide.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 So yeah, I mean, he wants, he wants his, he's proud of his lineage and he wants it documented. And I knew I did him a favor by writing a book about his movement.

Speaker 50 I mean, they don't have the intellectuals and the resources to and the train people to write historical books. And I did it a pretty straight up book.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 49 Sending them their press releases. Yeah.

Speaker 46 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 50 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

Speaker 49 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

Speaker 49 but he resisted the characterization that he was inciting terrorism, even though he, like Mason, very much was.

Speaker 50 Oh, well, Pierce is just a liar. I mean, all these guys are.

Speaker 21 Exactly. That's what I mean.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 50 You know, there is a terrible book about Pierce by one of the sycophants, who's a professor, actually.

Speaker 49 Robert S. Griffin.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 49 And that, again, that is one of those dishonest histories.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 Griffin, he wrote, what is it? The fame of a dead man's deeds. Yes.
Is that what it's called?

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 I mean, he could take issue with that characterization if he wants, but

Speaker 49 yes, if I'm sure you've read the book, it's not neutral. It's a hagiography of Pierce.

Speaker 50 Yeah. There's There's actually a book by Pierce's son, too, which is interesting.

Speaker 49 I have read that. It's quite good.

Speaker 50 Well, unfortunately, a lot of it's copy-pasted, but.

Speaker 49 Well, I think his insight into his relationship with his father is very unique. It is called The Sins of My Father by Kelvin Pierce.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 50 Black's daughter or son?

Speaker 21 She has transitions.

Speaker 50 Oh, I did not know that. Well, Mazeltov.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And I felt like heartfelt apology for it.

Speaker 21 And yeah.

Speaker 50 Actually, this is a fun fact. You may know a member of the Aryan nationalist

Speaker 21 Action

Speaker 50 ANA, this terrorist, this bank robbing group from the 80s, I think, became the first person to transition gender from Donna Langen.

Speaker 49 Donna Langen was known as Pretty Boy Pedro when she was the head of the Arogen Republican Army. It was a bank robbery gang out of Alohim City.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 49 She was the first person to... win a battle with the federal government to transition in federal prison.

Speaker 50 To get surgery. Yeah.

Speaker 49 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 Langen, her dead name.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 50 Texas bans prisoners from changing their names.

Speaker 49 She is in FMC Carswell.

Speaker 50 That is in Dallas.

Speaker 21 In World Texas, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 43 Yeah, that's why.

Speaker 50 That's why.

Speaker 49 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? That

Speaker 49 the person who won that legal battle for us was a Nazi bank robber.

Speaker 50 Well, she has also long repudiated those politics. So I think she's been the only person to have surgery, trans person to have surgery who was in prison at the time.

Speaker 50 Because I think that was recently and then everything, you know, everything.

Speaker 50 They changed. I know that they slowed down their trans policies waiting to see the results of the election.

Speaker 50 For a strange reason, I know actually a bunch of the stuff about trans people in prison. So anyway.

Speaker 49 No, it's, I mean, it's a remarkable, a remarkable history. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 49 So you started writing this book after Unite the Right because there was this renewed interest in siege.

Speaker 49 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,

Speaker 49 realizing that it is only becoming more relevant and not less?

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And then like that's when people are interested and that's when it is more important.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 I mean, that's good for me, but I'll have to say what's good for me is bad for society.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah, it's it's

Speaker 50 I don't know. I don't really, you know, what do you say about that? I call these people empty people spreading emptiness.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 who can't deal with their problems engaged in like hurting other people who are often not so different than them.

Speaker 50 You know, I mean, there's a trans man who was in Adamoff, and you know, like they're, they're

Speaker 50 numerous stories of people being, you know, of not white descent.

Speaker 50 Either they're hiding that they're not, or they're a mixed race descent, and they're sort of passing as white of being Jewish, of being queer, all this stuff. The movement's filled with these people.

Speaker 50 Sometimes it's the people are even like, how many straight white men are there in the movement? Like, and it's just sad.

Speaker 50 You're like, I see, you're being attracted to this because you're so alienated or you're so,

Speaker 50 your identity is so shaky that you are attracted to this idea of a firm, strong identity.

Speaker 50 And I mean, sometimes people forget fascism in Italy and Germany arose in basically the last two countries that arose and solidified in Europe.

Speaker 50 Like those were countries that wasn't clear what Italy was going to be. There's such differences between the North and the South.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And it works the same, I think, with people's identities. And one of the, one of the things that attracts people to neo-Nazism, I think, is this strong affirmation of an identity.

Speaker 50 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 into these things.

Speaker 49 And they recruit so young.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 so he's 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 woffen members are very young i guess were adam woffen technically doesn't exist anymore but

Speaker 50 most of the most of the young men who spilled blood for adam woffen were 20 years old 19 years old and you know someone pointed out the founder of the feukrieg division when he founded it was 12.

Speaker 50 he was arrested when he was 13 or 14 but he founded it at 12.

Speaker 49 and which tragic obviously tragic heartbreaking disgusting but imagine being one of the adults who is in that group and finding out that your fur was 12.

Speaker 50 I, I, I grew up in the south in an extremely Protestant area

Speaker 50 at the height of that like 80s fundamentalist Christian, Christian right thing. And

Speaker 50 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...

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 50 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

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 I think there'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.

Speaker 50 I was a pretty smart 12-year-old. Maybe I would understand it better, but you just need somebody repeating it.

Speaker 50 The slogans and the narratives have already been formed by others. You're not necessarily innovating on it.
As long as you can repeat the dogma, it does, does it really matter who's saying it?

Speaker 50 Does it matter if

Speaker 50 the person is gay or Jewish?

Speaker 49 And I mean, the Estonian 12-year-old was not a one-off. You know, like in the Ethan Melzer case a year or two ago, Ethan Melzer was a U.S.

Speaker 49 Army private who was trying to set up his unit in Turkey to be attacked by Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

Speaker 49 And the person he was communicating with online, sort of goading him into these acts, was a child. It was a child.

Speaker 50 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 O9As who are not.

Speaker 49 He was at the bleed point of Adam Waffen splinter group and Ona. He was involved with Rape Waffen.

Speaker 50 Oh, was he?

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 49 But yeah, Melzer was at that sort of bleed point where Adam Waffen was becoming Ona.

Speaker 50 But I think what we're seeing now, and definitely in these last two school shootings in the last month, is

Speaker 50 a syncretic murder cult.

Speaker 50 The guy who just did the NASPA one 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.

Speaker 50 And they don't seem to have a real ideological necessarily connection to some of this, the political stuff. It's just become.
And O9A, they are... founded by a neo-Nazi and many of them are neo-Nazis.

Speaker 50 That's what I was going to say. They don't have to be and all the people aren't.
And even if you were supposed to be, they aren't all. And so we're just getting through

Speaker 50 these

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And when he was around Satanists, they were atheist Satanists around the Church of Satan.

Speaker 50 That when you start saying, hey, we need to commit random murders in this goal of destroying the like supposed Jewish controlled society so there could be a white Aryan revolution, like it doesn't matter if you have a really political reason or if you're thinking that these heretical acts will destroy somehow the consensus reality.

Speaker 50 You're just trying to goad people into these violent random acts of terrorism and more random murders.

Speaker 49 Right. And the end result is the same.

Speaker 50 Their thinking is the same and the end result is the same. So they start cross-pollinating.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 I mean, it's just pathetic stuff. Go, you know.
beat up homeless people and stab them.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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?

Speaker 50 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 that often the body count is very high.

Speaker 50 Like, what becomes the difference anymore? Does it really matter? Like the Alan, Texas guy who was a Latino neo-Nazi who killed a bunch of people in an outlet mall. Is this really a neo-Nazi action?

Speaker 50 Like he was, like clearly, if we look, you look at his stuff or an article called Nazis of Color about this dynamic.

Speaker 50 But was his action, how is his action necessarily any different than like a school shooting or whatever? Just like, you know, it's just like he's going somewhere and killing random people.

Speaker 50 Like, what is this about? So I think we're seeing this.

Speaker 50 syncretic murder cult 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.

Speaker 50 I think especially younger people who went through COVID, Zoomers, and I guess people younger than that would be Generation Alpha, spend more time online than any other generation.

Speaker 50 Obviously, they must. And this becomes, especially when they're much younger, the horizon of their world.

Speaker 50 Right. And if they're in cells and they're not really connected to other people and they're not connected to their family, like it just, it just drives these impulses more and more.

Speaker 50 And they don't have the maturity to look outside of it or to think about the repercussions of it or have the empathy to think about how it's going to affect other people and their families.

Speaker 49 And so when it comes to siege, what would you say its current role in this sort of evolving syncretic murder culture that we have is?

Speaker 50 Is Siege's legacy now just that its ideological lineage lives on in sort of the teragram milieu or is it still itself influential well i mean some of this is a question of ideas uh 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 tone they didn't read it they didn't all read it

Speaker 50 Yeah, I know, read Siege. It's like, how many of you have read Siege?

Speaker 50 And I found out doing the work that there's like an edited 100-page version, and then there's like a little pocket version, and then someone even made the 10 tenets of siege.

Speaker 21 There's this the spark notes murder cult.

Speaker 50 Well, Adam Wafflin Division apparently had a test on siege to get in. I'm like, I know these people didn't, right?

Speaker 50 They're like a lot of very, you know, disturbed or, you know, people who aren't going to like, it's a boring text.

Speaker 44 I mean, I read it twice.

Speaker 49 I've read portions, but I'm not going to sit here and say I read the whole book. It's 450 pages.

Speaker 50 Man, I read every newsletter and the book and it's, yes, no, no. So it acts as the symbol to be like, look, we have a serious intellectual thing.
How many Christians have read the Bible?

Speaker 50 Let's be really serious.

Speaker 49 I think that, yeah, 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.

Speaker 50 Yeah. I mean, how many communists have read Das Kapital?

Speaker 50 No, 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 Because somebody who flows into activism, who's young, who it doesn't matter if they're young, doesn't have a background in politics, is going to take the things seriously that you say.

Speaker 50 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, it was great.
It wasn't true.

Speaker 50 I mean, half of Americans are like it, 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.

Speaker 50 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?

Speaker 50 And people have inherited that from Siege or inherited it secondhand, you know, because Terragram is very well versed in what Siege is about. I mean, Adam often had to read it.

Speaker 50 So they were more, I think, into it as a text. And then as it's gone out, you know, Terragram people, the Terrogram collective certainly knew what was in it and stuff.

Speaker 50 And it's 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.

Speaker 21 Right.

Speaker 49 So Terrogram is directly downstream of Siege, right? So Siege was a newsletter that became a book. People read the book.
And then the people who read that book turned it back into a zine, right?

Speaker 49 So it's sort of. Oh, to some level.
Right. It's moving through its phases and now it's regressing back into sort of mimetic zine form.

Speaker 50 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?

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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, why did we have these ideas? And I think that's, it's normal.

Speaker 50 I mean, there are all kinds of weird intellectual groundings for white supremacists. A lot of it is theology, which is sort of curious.

Speaker 50 And I kind of concluded at some point that you just needed something complicated because they couldn't use race science anymore.

Speaker 50 And there weren't people who developed social science other than someone like Alain DeBenois, who's saying something much more complicated than most white supremacists are.

Speaker 50 And so like theology just allowed something intellectual for people to chew on. You know what I mean?

Speaker 50 Like people who are real smart, who are very analytical, want something to chew on with the ideas, whether it really changes their practice or not.

Speaker 50 And I think there has to be something that serves that need.

Speaker 49 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?

Speaker 49 I guess, especially in this political moment.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 It's part of other things. And I see it as a distinct strain.
And I want people to have just a better understanding of that political movement's origins, which is maybe a more scholarly thing.

Speaker 50 And I am, 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And it was this woman posted that she's like, essentially, and that's how I read it.

Speaker 50 In the 20th century, there was always this assumption that transgressive art, avant-garde art, was implicitly progressive.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 And it's very the 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.

Speaker 50 And that was never true.

Speaker 21 Never true.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 Sharps, sharps to some extent. Sharps were, a lot of them are right-wing nationalists.
They just weren't Nazis. This is a common.

Speaker 50 There were 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.

Speaker 50 This is still the case in neo-folk and heathen religious circles.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 I once was mentioned very early on in 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 and defending me?

Speaker 50 But like 4chan didn't have to end up the way it did. You know, the earlier internet culture wasn't like this.
It It was progressive or libertarian or a more decent libertarian

Speaker 50 reading of libertarianism than we have now. So that's the second part.

Speaker 50 I mean, other than these guys, if you ever were in the industrial or neophol scene and you heard the Bethers Nazis, I have all of the receipts in detail in the book.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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,

Speaker 50 you know, people are not familiar with them, but I think are familiar enough with this idea of like a super radical cultural movement about

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 I just did a podcast with some, you know, occult-style esoteric podcasts. And I was talking about Satanists who become Nazis.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 49 That's an important takeaway, too, that, you know, in any subculture, especially the 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.

Speaker 49 Push back. Don't let them bully you.
Push them out of your spaces.

Speaker 50 Absolutely. And Nazis ruin everything.
They intentionally go into all these spaces and sometimes don't intentionally.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 We're not infiltrating these movements.

Speaker 47 We're just vegans.

Speaker 50 We're just also Nazis. Like, but, but we're not vegans because we're Nazis.
We're not coming here from some other reason.

Speaker 49 Well, you can't let them stay with you either way.

Speaker 50 Well, this is a funny story.

Speaker 50 I don't know if you have time, but I heard the 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.

Speaker 50 It was people from the group, you you know, from the group doing it. People brought their partners.

Speaker 50 It wasn't an official group function, but this one member of the group brought her husband, who was Kevin McDonald.

Speaker 21 Oh.

Speaker 50 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, I'm a.

Speaker 50 vegetarian or whatever. I'm here with my wife.
She's going to a party.

Speaker 49 Like, 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.

Speaker 50 Yeah. But he's like, I'm not here to recruit anyone.

Speaker 21 I'm here.

Speaker 50 You know what I mean?

Speaker 49 The barbecue is over when the race scientist shows up.

Speaker 50 Well, this became a big discussion in the group about whether to push him out or not. But you have to do these things.

Speaker 21 And if you, even if you don't want to, they're my friend or everyone's welcome or whatever.

Speaker 50 What is going to end up happening if you don't push the Nazi out is that more Nazis show up. Well, if you do, if it's a single person, people are going to start leaving.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 So even just on your own, you know, enlightened self-interest, if you want to keep your group together, I've seen this again and again and again.

Speaker 50 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

Speaker 50 I try to appeal to the baser reasons sometimes with people, you know.

Speaker 49 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 a 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 Rootledge Press.

Speaker 49 It's available, I think, wherever books are sold. I bought my copy directly from the publisher, Rootledge Press.
I think it was only $27, you know, a bargain and a steal.

Speaker 49 So pick up a copy of that. And where else can people find your work, Spencer?

Speaker 50 Thank you for now that you mentioned that. I am on all of all of the socials, usually at Transform6789.

Speaker 50 I have a webpage if you want to, if you have an RSS feed, as someone said this recently, they're like, it's actually one of the better ways to keep track of people.

Speaker 50 It's like, there's your follow a zillion people. Anyway, it's spencersunshine.com.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 You can help me out with the rent and get some exclusive content. So, yep.

Speaker 49 Well, hell yeah, thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 50 Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's been great.

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Speaker 36 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 37 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 25 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 38 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 39 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 32 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 41 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 32 Let's move forward from there. NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 46 Welcome to Icadappa here, a podcast where the singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening all of the time. I'm your host, Mia Wong.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 21 federal government grant system.

Speaker 46 And I think to a lot of people, that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal, but that is unbelievably catastrophic for like,

Speaker 46 I would go so far to say it's like the survival of the human species for reasons that we'll get to in a second, but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone on earth.

Speaker 46 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, is.

Speaker 46 I have brought in two people who are intimately familiar with this: Argyvon Sales, who's a surgeon and professor of medicine, and friend of the show.

Speaker 21 Yeah, come on.

Speaker 46 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 46 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-living it.

Speaker 46 But yeah, friend of the show, Kamehoda, who is a gastroenterologist and the host of the podcast, House of Pods. And both of you two, welcome to the show.

Speaker 21 Oh, thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you.
I'm excited to be here for your most Persian episode ever.

Speaker 21 Pretty sure.

Speaker 46 We may have done episodes

Speaker 21 that were like about Iraq. Yeah.

Speaker 21 This is as Persian as it gets. 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 health.

Speaker 21 care infrastructure of the United States on a massive level. So you're not lying.

Speaker 46 It is a serious, serious issue, not just for us but for the whole world yeah and one of the i mean the place i want to start i think is with because it was happening i think in nsf nah 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, my description of it is anything that has to do with civil rights at all, like gone.

Speaker 46 His description description of it is like dei and woke so like anything that has to do with queer people anything that has to do with like racial inequality and they were supposed to like go through and review every single like government grant program for anything and but don't forget he also included the

Speaker 46 gender ideology which is a meaningless phrase and and the green new deal is all part of it too 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, again, Office personnel management's response was to just freeze literally every single grant program in the country.

Speaker 46 And this was everything from Pell Grants and like work study for college students to like food aid for single mothers to my personal favorite.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 But one of the things that he froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear weapons manufacturing sites.

Speaker 46 So like we almost like,

Speaker 21 why?

Speaker 46 Yeah.

Speaker 21 why is that included?

Speaker 46 It was because literally what happened was they found a list of every single grant that like anyone does or like and any like program that gives out grants and they froze all of them and 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 So like we

Speaker 46 dodged a like giant nuke-sized bullet when like most of these programs got their money back after a judge was like, well, you obviously can't do this.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah, but I would just want to clarify. for the people listening here that it wasn't just grants specifically.
It was like all federal assistance.

Speaker 21 So one of the things that was very confusing and chaotic was this question of, does this mean Snap is gone? Does this mean WIC is gone? What about Head Start? What about Meals on Wheels?

Speaker 21 I mean, there are tons of federal assistance programs out there. And they had only made an exception for Social Security and Medicare

Speaker 21 in the memo, but not Medicaid. And what happened the next day, but the Medicaid portal went down.
Right.

Speaker 46 Yeah.

Speaker 46 And it's chaotic too, because like all of the programs you just named were on the list of like programs that they were putting a freeze on, but then it wasn't clear what was going to happen with them.

Speaker 46 And

Speaker 21 it's still not.

Speaker 21 Right. Right.
Yeah. We just have a judge.
We have, we found one judge with a backbone in the entire country so far. And

Speaker 21 he said, no, you cannot. Yeah.
Yeah. I am surprised actually that Trump hasn't gone out on the attack.

Speaker 21 Maybe I just missed it, like attacking that judge, you know, but it is, I 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So it seems like it's a complete mess to me what's happening. And it's what's terrifying about it is not just that it's a mess, but it is happening.
I mean, they are doing it.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 46 And 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.

Speaker 46 And they have been been given control of an apparatus that they don't understand at all, right? Like that, that's how you get defunding a nuclear police.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 And that's no longer true what is actually happening here is in order to kill us they are they are willing to kill every they are willing to let all of you die in nuclear fire yeah in specifically in order to hurt us right that's the sort of line we're at where you know all of these 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.

Speaker 21 Right. Just out of spite or something.
For sure, out of spite and hate.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But they're literally executive orders. There are not laws in the books.
Congress has not passed anything. It's like this elderly man woke up and said, hey, let's get rid of DEI and DEIA.

Speaker 21 For example, those are the terms they use exactly without saying what DEI is. or what DEIA is.

Speaker 21 And then just, I feel that we need to pause for a moment on the A, D E I A, and they spell out, you know, A is for accessible.

Speaker 21 Wiping out everything related to accessibility is directly in violation of the ADA and makes no sense and is cruel 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.

Speaker 21 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 must be only male and female, thereby erasing intersex people completely.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So for them to go into like these CDC data sets, take them offline so that they can binarize whatever is there, eliminate, I'm assuming, I don't, I mean, I don't know that this is what's 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.

Speaker 21 So that's what when you're talking 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 in LGBT.

Speaker 46 Yeah, and the stuff that they're doing, like the destruction of this research data, the way that it's been just like taken down and destroyed, little parts of it

Speaker 46 have come back up up after the sort of backlash, but you know, 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 21 Yep. 100%.

Speaker 46 And

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah. That's the way you get those big bucks.
That's how you do it that's professional broadcasting

Speaker 46 and we are back so i want to move from that to kind of the 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 the national science foundation national institutes of health can you talk a bit about what's been going on with grants there before we move into like how this whole process works yeah so the first sign that something was materially going to change after these executive orders as i recall um i'm i'm living this along with everyone else and what is time, but the first thing that I recall is the study section being canceled.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And then they come together and discuss, they don't discuss all of them, by the way. They only discuss the ones that have, that seem to have the most merit.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 They're not able to continue the important work that they're doing. They may lose their job.
Like really, truly, people can lose their job because they were not able to secure enough funding.

Speaker 21 to support themselves and their lab. So these are really, really important meetings.

Speaker 21 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 uh dr megan rae said that her or not maybe not hers 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 is february 3rd and those study sections for today were canceled on the other hand nsf which is obviously a separate organization,

Speaker 21 has informally, I've heard, decided that they're going to resume some study sections, although they haven't resumed it yet.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 For 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.

Speaker 21 And it's because of a lot lot of what they did that we're able to do that.

Speaker 21 When we're looking for new breakthroughs or we're looking for something where a patient comes to us and they're like, isn't there anything? We've tried everything.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 These are the things that we're talking about, these really important healthcare infrastructure that we're discussing.

Speaker 46 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, stuff like that.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 But, you know, I mean, this is all the way down to the level of like undergrads and college chemistry labs. Like

Speaker 46 they are getting paid out of these grants from the National Science Foundation, from the National Institutes for Health, like all of these, all of these institutions pay out everything.

Speaker 46 And it's like, this is the basis

Speaker 46 of how all science, almost all science, like there's some private sector stuff, but the thing is, like the giant private, like Bell Labs, right?

Speaker 46 Like your old school giant private sector, here's our giant R D thing.

Speaker 21 Like that's all kind of gone.

Speaker 46 So, you know, like the only people who aren't getting funded by this are like weird startup guys. And it's like, okay, look, look, look, look what they've invented in the last like 15 years.

Speaker 46 It's like cryptocurrency, NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again.

Speaker 21 Theranos. Don't forget.

Speaker 46 Yeah, Theranos, the metaverse, Juicero. Like they're doing great.

Speaker 21 They're doing great.

Speaker 46 And people will be like, oh, they invented AI. It's like, no, national labs were using those AA algorithms like a decade and a half ago.

Speaker 21 It's like, yeah, the generative AI, blah, blah, blah. Okay.

Speaker 46 We're not here to get into me complaining about generative AI.

Speaker 46 Go listen to Ed Nitron's entire show offline.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And I will just say, as an academic, these are certainly the kind of premier funding opportunities that we have.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 job can be really dependent on whether we get this funding or not.

Speaker 46 And it's a generational thing, too, because the students also need this funding.

Speaker 46 And so people, people who are undergrads, particularly people who are like doctoral students, like their research, right?

Speaker 46 Like the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school, like getting PhD so they can become scientists, that's all also like funded by these grants.

Speaker 46 And if that stuff goes away, like it's not just that you're you're obliterating this generation of science, like you're kneecapping the next like three generations of scientists. Right.

Speaker 46 Because each one of them down the line suddenly doesn't have the research experience that they're supposed to have.

Speaker 21 Exactly. Yeah.
Right. And also, who would want to go into science if it's going to be like that? Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 21 If there's just going to be like some random person who goes into the White House and goes, never mind, we're not doing that anymore. Who wants to be exposed to those kinds of wins?

Speaker 21 A lot of the smartest doctors and scientists I know, they tend to be risk-averse people.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And they might even, I don't know, maybe they could win. I don't need to talk to a lawyer about that.
Seems unlikely because they're not private sector.

Speaker 21 But to them, they're not going to because they're living paycheck to paycheck to some of these.

Speaker 21 people that are in the lower levels, people that aren't making a ton of money and they have livelihoods that they're trying to maintain.

Speaker 21 They're not going to try and rock the boat when it comes to these things.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah. And I just want to highlight that postdocs, I think, are particularly vulnerable because they are often like this NSF freeze actually demonstrated this very well.

Speaker 21 They aren't, as Pop said, like they're definitely often loving paycheck to paycheck.

Speaker 21 And what the NSF freeze did was that it made it so folks could not get their next paycheck yeah 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 the grants that i have actually we work directly with postdoctoral and some pre-doctoral but many postdoctoral training programs that fund postdocs 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.

Speaker 46 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?

Speaker 46 They're who are either international students or international students who are just who are, you know, coming in from other countries.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 And this is the thing that's constantly leveraged in sort of labor organizing, right? Or like one of the threats that universities will make. Usually, they do it implicitly.

Speaker 46 Sometimes they'll just go out and say, it very legally will be like, okay, 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 21 Exactly. Yeah.
Exactly.

Speaker 21 And 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 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 I mean, you go to like UCSF and Stanford Stanford and you see these people working these labs on important stuff.

Speaker 21 And that's another like,

Speaker 21 that's something we're going to lose. And I hope we don't lose it permanently.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 I think it's over just over a third of Nobel laureates from the United States have been immigrants to the United States.

Speaker 46 You know, and it's sort of sort of a nationalist thing, right? But like for 99% of the time for better, like the U.S.

Speaker 46 has been very, very good at absorbing other country scientists when, you know, this, like, we, we got a, you know, I, 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 Nazi, like from the actual Nazis, but we also, like, a bunch of very famous U.S.

Speaker 46 scientists, like, were in the U.S. because they were fleeing the rise of the Nazis.

Speaker 46 And, you know, like we are looking at a situation where we are going to be the opposite of this, where like our scientists are going to be fleeing everywhere else because our government is being run by these people.

Speaker 21 Yeah. And I wanted to highlight, I think that those are all really great points about the effect of not getting the funding and who it trickles down to.

Speaker 21 But I also wanted to highlight that there's two different kind of ways that the funding can be withheld. So one is just that review process and not actually reviewing grants, right?

Speaker 21 So like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall. Who knows if when that will get discussed?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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,

Speaker 21 how much of the funds that they had originally projected, they'll be able to give to you.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And I genuinely don't know whether I should hire someone knowing that I may lose funds in, you know, five months, or do I just try to make do without? And then that's a job that no one gets.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Can you tell people what your current grant is?

Speaker 21 And because I think that is pertinent to this conversation. Yes, yes.
Yes, you're right. Okay.

Speaker 21 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 decreasing the amount of sexual harassment that's that's happening in biomedical research oh they they don't they don't want you to with that like oh no 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,

Speaker 21 the sanctity of women or whatever. This is, you know, I am hopeful that I'm wrong for you.

Speaker 21 I hope that this is not the case, but I could see them very easily saying that this somehow fits under woke ideology.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And so, yeah, it's, I've really obviously, as you can imagine, been thinking a lot about how 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?

Speaker 21 Is stopping discrimination? DEI, actually. Probably.
Like, I mean, who knows? Yeah.

Speaker 21 Well, you know, quickly, if I may, I can go over this.

Speaker 21 There was this email that was was dispersed from the CDC about terms that were no longer going to be used. They were going to be scrubbed from the CDC's databases.

Speaker 21 And they included words like gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, non-binary.

Speaker 21 They use both.

Speaker 21 Yeah, one with the hyphen and one without the hyphen. Assign male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male or biologically female.

Speaker 21 So anything that terms like that, they're going to scrub. Wait, let me, can I just clarify that?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It's any work that anyone employed by the CDC has done, any research, I should say, 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?

Speaker 21 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?

Speaker 21 I mean, it's, it's, it, yeah, it's terrible.

Speaker 21 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 monares is the acting director there at the the cdc and it's all going to go through that one person all 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 it's a ridiculous thing it i'm sure they're going to try to make some examples out of people but how would they even enforce this?

Speaker 21 We're going to find out with your grant, I guess.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 46 I think the bleak thing about specifically the fact that it's these study retractions and it's this, you know, this attempt to ban anyone from doing any research, right?

Speaker 46 Is that like 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.

Speaker 46 And I think like part of what they're doing here is they're trying to, before any of this stuff can come out, they're trying to stop the scientific apparatus from revealing the fact that they are trying to wipe us out.

Speaker 46 And

Speaker 45 that's

Speaker 21 an unbelievably bleak thing to live through, I guess.

Speaker 21 Yeah. I'm so

Speaker 21 sorry. It sucks.
I mean, I honestly, I wish I could say something more. It's really terrible.

Speaker 46 I will say this, like, genuinely, because it never happens. Obviously, the best thing you can do for trans people is like something that involves the fall of the regime.

Speaker 46 Like, the second best thing is, like, hire us because no one does it and no one can get jobs. Right.

Speaker 46 And, and, but, like, 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.

Speaker 46 And it's not going to, like, stop the wrath of the state. But, like, like i don't know it'll help people feel less alone this this has been the be a trans public service announcement it's now over

Speaker 21 i think that's great advice in in other 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And we have to show that these are people that are not only employable, but could benefit your business.

Speaker 21 Yeah, honestly, I don't know what to say about it either, aside from everything that they're doing is atrocious. It is ascientific.

Speaker 21 It is inhumane. It will.
It will harm people.

Speaker 46 Yeah, people are going to die. People probably have already died.

Speaker 46 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 gonna rule,

Speaker 21 but

Speaker 21 it is, it is, I agree. It is, and to add to Argobon's point, it is dumb on every metric.
I can't think of a single metric in that these actions are not hurtful and gonna harm us in the long run.

Speaker 46 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?

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, first thing I will say is that the word grant applies to lots and lots of different opportunities.

Speaker 21 And there are grants as small as like $1,000 or $5,000 and grants as large as multi-million dollars.

Speaker 21 And the processes actually are, I mean, they're analogous, but they can be pretty different.

Speaker 21 Because as 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.

Speaker 21 uh 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And so it's a huge amount of work.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 end.

Speaker 21 You may have done all the rest of the work and they may only read that.

Speaker 21 And then you have a 12 page, these are single space pages, single space pages, half inch margins, 12 page research strategy. I don't know how many thousand words, thousands of words that is.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And you have like these figures, and you have to get them exactly the right size in the exact right place on the page with the legend and everything so that all magically fits in these 12 pages.

Speaker 21 Because if you don't do it right, they will literally reject your grant for formatting problems. And so you may have spent months writing this grant.

Speaker 21 And because you had the wrong font size or the wrong margin, that they can literally choose not to even read it.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 46 Also, it's worth noting, you also have to like do a bunch of science. Like if it was just you must do 12, you must write 12 pages of stuff and format it, it would probably be okay.

Speaker 46 But like you also have to do science, like both for it and also while you're doing it.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 They have like no idea how challenging it is.

Speaker 46 No, it's like the only thing that could even potentially work like that is to say, say whatever you're doing is cancer research. But like that's the actual thing, right?

Speaker 46 Like sometimes you could like defraud the DOD by telling them like whatever research you're doing is camouflage. But like it's not.

Speaker 46 It's even that is like, it makes it like 1% more likely that you're endless hours of work.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I wish I could just write woke ideology on

Speaker 21 12 pages and they're like, get a grant amusing.

Speaker 21 But yes, to your point, you have to, it's 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.

Speaker 21 And that's a whole section called preliminary studies. And what's in there varies depending on like what kind of research you're doing.

Speaker 21 If you're doing animal research, it might be various animal models that you've 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 use in this study and that you have the specific uh 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 that research because part of what they're evaluating is can the person who's proposing to do this work actually do the work?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So you have these pages, part of those 12 pages, like often a page, two, three pages about what you have done to prepare for the work that you're proposing.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And then in addition to this 12-page thing, 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 I think record out those backgrounds. But anyway, the points, all these additional pages, it's not just the specific aims and just the research strategy.

Speaker 21 It's all of this plus the budget and the budget justification.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And all of this is done just to have a chance at getting funded.

Speaker 46 Yeah.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 And like that thing being, all this stuff being up in the air.

Speaker 21 And for people who run labs, trying to figure out like, can you, so I don't personally work with graduate students, but a lot of people do.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 you want to commit to people, especially trainees.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And so I think the kind of intuitive and natural consequence is that people will bring in fewer people

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And I want to just point out that institutions here have a major role to play.

Speaker 21 And not all institutions, and by that I mean higher education institutions, and not all of them are equally resourced, obviously.

Speaker 21 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?

Speaker 21 And I'm not trying to be. I'm not trying to oversimplify what is in fact a very challenging issue, but it would be nice.

Speaker 21 It would be fantastic if some of these institutions came out and said, we understand that this is a very challenging time.

Speaker 21 We remain committed to supporting the work of our faculty, our graduate students, our postdocs, et cetera. And we will fund anyone whose funding is withdrawn or withheld, let's just say.

Speaker 21 It would be nice if some of these very important, prestigious academic institutions showed maybe at least the same backbone as Costco.

Speaker 21 Yeah,

Speaker 21 that's all I ask.

Speaker 21 Okay, too, I want to highlight, too, 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?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But the Princeton, 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 etc so so that those two that are trying to do something yeah i remain hopeful i remain hopeful yeah also i got i got to put in my word a costco hate here which is they're currently screwing over their unions so i thought they resolved it i thought they actually gave them the no they didn't they didn't the pay increase

Speaker 46 Yeah, it's not resolved yet.

Speaker 21 I thought the hot dog was still 150, though. So that's important to me.

Speaker 46 Read Jamie Loftus' book, Raw Dog.

Speaker 21 I'm a doctor. I can't do that by law.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 But even the NFL came out today and said that they're not going to end their DEI programs any five food. Oh, nice.
NFL known for being

Speaker 21 a practice on DEI.

Speaker 46 Well, I mean, that is the thing, though, right?

Speaker 46 If you want to understand why the NFL is doing that, like look at who the current heads of the NFL Players Association are and like who their past heads for the last like decade have been.

Speaker 46 And that will give you an indication of why it's like that.

Speaker 21 So

Speaker 21 yeah, Mia follows football pretty closely, I can tell.

Speaker 46 Unfortunately, if we come to football.

Speaker 46 Also, I kind of owe the NFL Players Association because

Speaker 46 they did put out a statement in support of our unionization drive.

Speaker 21 Yeah, it was very sweet. That's fine.

Speaker 21 Well, I do want to say one more thing about the grant process, which is that often often people are submitting the same grant over and over and over because the funding rates are so low.

Speaker 21 And so often they will submit it the first time, get feedback, make changes, resubmit later.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 I think for most mechanism, again, there's going to be some variability from institute to institute, but it's at most twice a year.

Speaker 21 So like if they're, if they reject it, hopefully they give you feedback.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But let's say you get feedback, then you try again, and then maybe you try again, and then maybe you try again.

Speaker 21 So sometimes it can take many cycles of this entire terrible process before you get funded once.

Speaker 21 And so to Kavi's point about efficiency earlier, like, I mean, it's, if you think about it that way, it's an extremely inefficient system.

Speaker 21 But the point I just wanted to make is that people work really, really hard to get these grants.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Like often at some point, you cannot keep pursuing a specific line of research.

Speaker 21 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 i 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.

Speaker 21 And so he went to industry. And so that work never got done.
To this day, that work has not been done. Yeah.

Speaker 21 I would love for it to be done.

Speaker 21 But those are the types of consequences that we're talking about when we're looking at like what's happening with these funds and the delay of distributing the funds and the chances that funds will be revoked from people.

Speaker 21 They really change the course of not just individual lives, but of science. Yeah.

Speaker 46 And I mean, like the most visual example I could think about this was 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 work on a coronavirus thing.

Speaker 46 It's like, oh, it would have been useful if they'd, if they'd gotten that grant.

Speaker 46 So I think this is a decent enough place to wrap up.

Speaker 46 I do have one thing that I want to plug, which is something you were talking about earlier, which is putting, which is these institutions like coming out and backing their scientists, right?

Speaker 46 And that's, that's a thing that you can do. You can put pressure on these institutions to do the right thing.

Speaker 46 And so it might be over by the, by, by now, but like literally as we were recording this, uh, there, there was a protest going on at NYU's hospital

Speaker 46 because they've cut off care to trans youth.

Speaker 21 They cut off gender-affirming care.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 46 And so, you know, you can do this. The people who actually run these systems and, you know, and the entire federal government, right?

Speaker 21 Why is the federal government?

Speaker 46 The people running the federal government are relying on everyone just sort of sitting there being shocked, not knowing what to do and doing nothing.

Speaker 46 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 are 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 46 And that, and that's something that you can do right now.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It's the only resource dedicated to women's health in the entire National Institutes of Health. We do have the National Institute of Children's Health.

Speaker 21 We do not have a National Institute of Women's Health. We have an office for research on women's health.

Speaker 21 We love the U.S. government.
It gets worse. Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it gets worse.

Speaker 21 So the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which is like, I would say, one of the most prestigious kind of academic organizations that existed,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 half of the population.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But what happened last week with almost everything on the website for the Office of Research for Women's Health was deleted. Jesus Christ.
It's gone. So their funding and opportunities page is gone.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 The importance of including women and minorities in clinical trial, gone. Their page on health equity, gone.
You get the picture.

Speaker 21 So all of that, except for just a very bare minimum landing page and a link to the office of, I forget the official in the office, but that's an office office that works on autoimmune diseases.

Speaker 21 Like 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.

Speaker 21 That's something I think that is about as real as it gets for us at this point.

Speaker 21 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 health disparities for all the different groups affected.

Speaker 21 I think the better the chance is that that actually happens. So that's out there if anybody wants that.

Speaker 46 Yeah, well, 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

Speaker 46 they are legitimately in a flux point right now where the party is flipping back and forth between just being like, yeah, whatever, we'll pass a defense bill that like banned trans people from the military and we're going to stop things from happening.

Speaker 46 And so this is a 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 calling while you're calling with the cdc multiple things

Speaker 46 different calls even

Speaker 21 yeah you might just want to put them on feed 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 well yep yep yep so speaking of things in bios uh where can people find you to for stuff that you want to promote What you do, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 21 I mean, I'm on all the things, even the terrible thing,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And I'm not the only one I don't really do is Facebook.

Speaker 21 You're too cool for that. Oh, I have a sub stack.

Speaker 21 That's where the script is. It's on my sub stack.
Now, I'm not too cool for Facebook. I'm just too lazy for Facebook.

Speaker 21 I mean, listen, if you're on these things, you're not too cool for anything. That's the really cool kids aren't on any of these things.

Speaker 21 You can find me at on BlueSky at Kave K-A-V-E-H-M-D.

Speaker 21 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 healthcare more relatable.

Speaker 21 You know, sometimes we'll take an aim at medical quackery or griffs and that sort of thing. I think your listeners will like it.

Speaker 21 Our guests range from doctors like Peter Hotez or Argovon 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 hopefully Mia soon.

Speaker 21 So

Speaker 21 find it anywhere you get your podcast, The House of Pod.

Speaker 46 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 find our other shows where there are podcasts.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 yeah, think,

Speaker 46 God, I'm so bad at plugging these things. You think it's my living, but no, can't do it.

Speaker 45 Zero out of 10. Absolute failure.

Speaker 46 But yeah, thank you to both for coming on. And I hope you get your grant archived because fuck that.

Speaker 21 Like, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 21 Thank you. Well, if I, if I don't get my funding renewed this summer, I will, I will let let you know.
Maybe we can talk about it.

Speaker 46 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 21 I'm just going to start a podcast.

Speaker 46 Yeah, this is what could happen here. Go harass your legislatures, your local administrators for universities, your local police departments.

Speaker 46 Make sure they do not bad stuff and do good things.

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Speaker 36 I turned off news altogether.

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Speaker 25 It's the rage bait.

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Speaker 32 nbc news brings you clear reporting let's meet at the facts let's move forward from there nbc news reporting for america

Speaker 45 Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today it's me, James, and I'm joined by Nevdon Jamgochian.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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

Speaker 45 You've specialized in like these green washing, sports washing, various other sort of forms of laundering legitimacy, right?

Speaker 45 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 like a genocidal project.

Speaker 21 COP29,

Speaker 21 which 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.

Speaker 21 And the way Azerbaijan, a Petro dictatorship, was able to procure this for themselves was at COP28, which was held in Dubai, another questionable location for a climate conference, where they had a pavilion, as reported by Politico EU, where they had a giant advertisement that said, Karabakh is the first

Speaker 21 place to achieve net zero emissions in Azerbaijan. And that was one part of them getting the bid for COP29.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Destruction of buildings, of course, is one of the huge source of pollution.

Speaker 21 And they've raised something like four cemeteries, thousands of the monuments, four churches have been demolished, entire neighborhoods have been raised. historical neighborhoods.

Speaker 21 So it's probably not even net zero, but that was their advertising claim to get the bid.

Speaker 21 COP29 was originally supposed to be in Europe, but Russia was vetoing every European bid.

Speaker 21 And Armenia, who Azerbaijan is currently occupying 215 kilometers of Armenian territory, was blocking Azerbaijan till Azerbaijan offered to give up 32 Armenian hostages. So

Speaker 21 we've got a claim of Shen Simon and then we've got a gangster hostage situation, which they did.

Speaker 21 They gave up 32 members of the Armenian military and they made Armenia give up two Azerbaijanis that were reheld by Armenia because they had gone into Armenia and killed a local security guard trying to steal his car.

Speaker 21 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.
Okay. in exchange.

Speaker 45 To allow this climate conference to happen.

Speaker 21 That's correct.

Speaker 45 So let's zoom back from this climate conference, right? Like in this, I think it's a really interesting place to start. This, like, the site of our genocide is a net zero area.

Speaker 45 And it's a very bleak vision of the sort of greenwashing future.

Speaker 45 Let's expand 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?

Speaker 21 Well, you know, I mean,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 The Turkic people are more recent visitors to the neighborhood, and there's nothing wrong with migration of people,

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 they've been engaged in a policy of destroying any remnants of Armenians, including physical people,

Speaker 21 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 the

Speaker 21 of a multicultural society, which is interesting. Azerbaijan is also trying to promote.

Speaker 21 But it really was a second-class situation where the minorities in the Ottoman Empire had a lot of extra taxes and duties and

Speaker 21 persecution than other people in the area.

Speaker 45 Yeah. So let's talk about this area then, specifically this area, which would be called, depending on who you ask, Artzak or Nagona-Karabakh, right?

Speaker 45 I think probably it's it's uh I don't know if I haven't looked on Wikipedia, but like what the more commonly used term for people wanting to look it up, right, in American English.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 21 I mean, we talked about it earlier. That's the tough thing about talking to Armenians.
Like, where I would start would be the sixth century and the fall of the kingdom of Ratu. Okay.

Speaker 21 But I guess we don't have that much time.

Speaker 21 So basically, and I do have to put this in there because there's this big Azerbaijani narrative that Armenians are effective fictive people, they're a fictive presence, and I'll deal with that in a little bit.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah. So anyway, it's recorded history that it's where the Armenian alphabet was invented.
These people have been indigenous to the region for thousands of years.

Speaker 21 They've got a deep connection with the land. Fall the Soviet Union.
Fast forward. The area had been under the territory of the Azerbaijani SSR as an autonomous oblast, as they called it.

Speaker 21 It had been given to the Azerbaijani SSR because of Stalin, who was the commissioner of minorities.

Speaker 21 Katalin 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.

Speaker 21 Soviet Union is crumbling. The people of Artsakh, which is the Armenian indigenous name, Nagarno-Karaba is generally acceptable as well.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It's allowed in the constitution, which of course infuriates the Azerbaijani SSR. You know, so there's a bunch of conflicts.

Speaker 21 There's some pogroms that happen against Armenians in the cities of Baku and Sungate.

Speaker 21 And at which point they secede fully from the Soviet Union. They're one of the first areas to do so in 1991.
They actually left the Soviet Union before Azerbaijan.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It's a humiliating defeat for Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is pushed back.
Armenians seize about 9% of Azerbaijani territory beyond Artsakh.

Speaker 21 And that was a stasis until 2020. Yeah.
Really?

Speaker 45 Yeah, sort of 30 years of.

Speaker 21 Right.

Speaker 45 But it was always disputed, right? This area was, Azerbaijan continued to lay claim to the Artsakh region, is that correct?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It is an ethnic minority that chose to leave the area, but they weren't considered legitimate by the UN, by Azerbaijan.

Speaker 21 And secondarily, we have this brutal dictatorship that's held together by ethnic hatred.

Speaker 21 Really,

Speaker 21 I cannot overstate how terrible the Aliyah regime is in Azerbaijan.

Speaker 21 But, you know, Armenian forces committed at least one war crime that I'm aware of during that time in a place called Kholjoli, where they killed 180 to 600 Azeri civilians.

Speaker 21 And they've used this event and I think one other to really hold their country together in this pit of frothing broth of

Speaker 21 hatred.

Speaker 21 So not until 2020 does that really coalesce, do they become strong as a petro-state to take back large portions of the the country? Yeah.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 All right, we're back.

Speaker 45 One thing I think that it might be illustrative to hear is that like in the first Adzakh war, Turkish, I guess irregulars or mercenaries or I don't know what you want to call call them, but people associated with the grey wolves fought on the side of Azerbaijan, right?

Speaker 45 And keen history understanders will know that there is some history of anti-Armenian sentiment among the grey wolves, and then indeed in Turkey as a country.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 People want to divide the world into blocks, right? With like this sort of

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 So can you explain the international involvement in Atzak and in this ongoing conflict, which we'll get to it beginning again in 2020, I think, in a second?

Speaker 21 In addition to...

Speaker 21 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 accuted.

Speaker 21 They were put put on the front lines as kind of canned fodder. They were given something like a $100 bonus if they beheaded a civilian, a $200 bonus if they beheaded an Armenian soldier.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 They use Azerbaijan as a listening post against Iran. Israel stages raids from Azerbaijan on Iran.
It has to do with the ethnic minority in Iran. There's a lot of Azeris down there.

Speaker 21 Israel gets something like 40% of its oil from Azerbaijan.

Speaker 21 Right after the Palestinian genocide started, Israel awarded two contracts to the

Speaker 21 oil company Sokar in Azerbaijan that's right adjacent to the Palestinian gas field and the Lebanon oil field to Sokhar to explore.

Speaker 21 It cannot be overstated how complicit these two groups are with each other. They really, really

Speaker 21 need each other in the region. And the United States also likes Azerbaijan as well.
They see it as a friendly. Muslim country, bulwark against Iran as well.
Yeah.

Speaker 45 And I think they also have some Turkish drones. Is that right? The

Speaker 21 Bayakar. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 45 So let's talk about that 2020 war because that was a war that relied heavily on these drones, right, as a major means of destroying Armenian armor and pushing that offensive.

Speaker 45 So what happened in 2020 along this disputed border?

Speaker 21 Well, you know, it's called Mountainous Karaba. It's

Speaker 21 an area that's great defensively if you're fighting in a pre-drone world.

Speaker 21 But,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Armenians had been a bit lazy. They'd been relying on Russian tanks and weaponry, whereas Azerbaijan's is buying from Israel.

Speaker 21 They're buying from all, you know, many, many different sources, which reflects the wealth of Azerbaijan, of course. So in 2020,

Speaker 21 there's some indication that LAF, the dictator of Azerbaijan, had been planning this for a while. He had this playbook called Operation Azeri Smile 2020.

Speaker 21 The

Speaker 21 troops move in.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 probably by Russian intervention at this time. The Armenia was a member of the Russian alliance at that time, which they're leaving just because

Speaker 21 Russia has failed to live up to its treaty obligations anyway.

Speaker 21 And it left a kind of a skeletal state of Artsakh left, which was only supplied by this one road called the Lachin corridor.

Speaker 21 That was only one road from Armenia to supply the 120-some thousand Armenians who lived in Artsakh.

Speaker 21 left, which brings us to 2024. Okay.
23. 23.

Speaker 21 Yeah. So

Speaker 45 you have this situation where we now have this massive area that's,

Speaker 45 I guess, occupied. And a lot of people, people began leaving at that time, right? Through that Lachin corridor.
Like people didn't feel like they could safely remain there.

Speaker 21 I mean, the indigenous people of Artsakh have this profound relationship with the land and the people.

Speaker 21 I am an icon painter and I was talking to my priest and he was comparing the people there to the elves and the lord of the ring you know they they whistle to the birds you know 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 yeah of art sag

Speaker 21 so what azerbaijan did and and this is i think unprecedented is they had a fake ecological protest oh wow that stopped the Lachen corridor from supplying food and medicine to the people of Artsakh.

Speaker 21 So they starved those people. They denied the medicine.
People had missed carriages. The Azeris were firing at farmers in the field that were trying to collect food.
That went on for nine months.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 45 Yeah, fascinating. So they literally have a blockade of these protesters?

Speaker 21 These protesters blocked it.

Speaker 21 The Russian troops that were the peace coopers refused to disperse these protesters. They were these old apprachnic kind of looking people wearing fur coats.

Speaker 21 They were identified on social media as actually being members of the Azerian military. And they had these printed signs that said things like protect nature, stop pollution.

Speaker 46 Very generic.

Speaker 21 Wildly generic things.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 before. So

Speaker 21 anybody who was paying any kind of attention to this knew that it was fictive.

Speaker 21 But I think the EU in particular needed enough of a smokescreen not to support these people. EU, of course, is getting its gas through Azerbaijan.
Yeah.

Speaker 21 That 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.

Speaker 21 So they were just trying to do that.

Speaker 45 Yeah, we've just created a pass-through and like someone who can live off that rentier income. So let's go to 2023.

Speaker 45 What do we see happening in 2023?

Speaker 21 So the the eco-protesters, they kind of run their course, and then there's a lightning operation. Artsakh's attacked, positions overrun.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 just to leave their houses. In 2020, Azerbaijan has said, sure, Armenians can come come back.
We're just taking back our territory. You live here, you can do that.

Speaker 21 But when Armenians did, there's this one case of a 69-year-old farmer who went back to get his possessions. The Zeri troops cut off his head.

Speaker 45 Jesus.

Speaker 21 Or they put it on a dead pig. And they put all those images on social media.
They

Speaker 21 raped and tortured anybody that they could find left behind.

Speaker 21 And they turned it into memes on Telegrams, stickers that were, you know, something like down to like 20,000 times in the five days they were being monitored for this.

Speaker 21 So there was absolutely no question that people could stay behind. Yeah.
Zero

Speaker 21 you. So there's no Armenians left.
And so there's literally been

Speaker 21 daily ritual that's been going on for a thousand, seven hundred years that doesn't go on anymore. And there's a tragedy in that.
Yeah.

Speaker 45 Yeah, it's been lost.

Speaker 45 Like, and 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 and their culture and their connection to these things.

Speaker 45 Talking of quantifying things, I need to

Speaker 45 look at the amount of time we got here and pivot again to advertisements.

Speaker 21 And we're back.

Speaker 45 So

Speaker 45 what we see in Adzak, especially in 2023, is a project of ethnic cleansing, right? Genocidal violence,

Speaker 45 however you wish to phrase it. I mean, ethnic cleansing is not a term that has really like a definition in international law.
Genocide does.

Speaker 45 Often very much, like in this instance, I'm using them to mean one and the same thing.

Speaker 45 The removal of people, either through killing them or forcing them to leave or starving them.

Speaker 21 The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the Lumkin Institute, Luis Moreno Campo is the founding prosecutor of the ICC.

Speaker 21 joan arasto méndez is 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

Speaker 21 yeah

Speaker 45 there have been many genocidal projects in history like what is azerbajan's goal with this is it the

Speaker 45 removal of armenian people with the area such that azeri people can occupy it is it access to the resources that are there? Is it settling a historical score?

Speaker 21 If you look at a map,

Speaker 21 there's this idea of panturanism. Is that something that's you're familiar with?

Speaker 45 Yeah. Can you explain that to listeners who are not?

Speaker 21 Panturanism is this Turkish idea of a ancient Turkish state that stretches from the Bosphorus all the way over to Mongolia.

Speaker 21 And there's one little country in the way that is blocking this

Speaker 21 empire that should exist according to the Panturanis. 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It's not called that, but that's what it is against Armenians.

Speaker 21 So

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 45 Yeah. And like,

Speaker 45 I think one of the things that like happened with the...

Speaker 45 with the conflict in Artzag, I'm just, I'm thinking about this, this pan-Turkic stuff because I see it every single day in the replies replies to my post on social media, right?

Speaker 45 In my case, it's with reference to my time in Kurdistan and in Rojava. Disinformation played a massive role in the, in the 2023 contract, in the 2020 conflict, too, right?

Speaker 45 Like, and I think people who are hearing about this for the first time are at massive risk for finding out some of that disinformation, right?

Speaker 45 They hear about this driving to work today on our podcast and they go to Google it.

Speaker 21 There's a lot of crap out there, right?

Speaker 45 So, like, can we address that, the role that it's played and continues to play?

Speaker 21 The load of crap or the pan-tyrannism, or both?

Speaker 45 Well, the pan-tyranism generates a lot of crap, right? Like, I'm convinced that some of the accounts in my replies are not real human beings.

Speaker 21 Oh,

Speaker 21 yeah, that's been a well-uh-established phenomenon. The number of bots that Azerbaijan, and to a lesser extent, Turkey, because I think Turkey's more secure in its genocidal aspect,

Speaker 21 whereas Azerbaijan is really, really going for it you know so not only the bots in the replies which just come up no matter what 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 uh campaign out there to dox anybody who talks about this that's happened to me before and it's not pretty yeah 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, our Armenians should go be able to have a right to return.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 They've already done this in this other place called Nakhtavan, which is, they call it the largest cultural genocide of the 21st century, where they destroyed thousands of medieval monuments and stones with bull jozers and sledgehammers.

Speaker 21 So they're just wiping them out,

Speaker 21 any record of Armenia, anything. And they're claiming Armenia is really should be called Western Azerbaijan.

Speaker 21 And anytime Armenians talk about Artsakh going back, they're like, well, they made cookbooks. They've got a television show about Western Azerbaijan.

Speaker 21 And it's just, it's what you're laughing and I laugh too, but it's so ugly, so scary, but it's funny too.

Speaker 45 Yeah, well, these things are until it's your grandma or have you been beheaded.

Speaker 45 Like, yes, it does seem, it does seem obscene, obscene and it's so obscene that it's funny, right?

Speaker 45 But like, this is a concerted state project that like it's easy to get caught up in 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 like doctored reports or things that look very convincing.

Speaker 21 Search results that go to the top. I mean, you know, and this course started with the Myranian genocide, which

Speaker 21 Turkey and Azerbaijan and Pakistan for some reason say it was fake.

Speaker 21 If you search for that, the top results are going to be Arminians are lying. They committed genocide with us.
And then they'll throw these numbers like, oh yeah, Armenians killed 3 million Turks.

Speaker 21 Like, what are you talking about? This is just like, like, words have meaning, you know?

Speaker 21 But

Speaker 45 increasingly less and less.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And that's what they want. We're in an obscure part of the world.
This will say a bunch of shit, and

Speaker 21 people throw up their hands and walk away.

Speaker 45 Yeah, or it's too complicated.

Speaker 21 And so they sort of complicated, right? Yeah. Or, you know, they'll say, oh, it's ancient hatred.
It's like, that's bullshit. It's not ancient hatred.
It's a very modern thing.

Speaker 21 These are real people who have real understandable issues. You know, like in Gaza, it's like, it's very clear

Speaker 21 what's going on.

Speaker 45 Yeah. Yeah.
And the difference there is that it has received a lot more coverage, a lot more attention. So, where does this leave us now, right? Azerbaijan has just hosted this conference.

Speaker 45 And like, it's important to recognize that this conference is a project of kind of global liberalism, right? Like the

Speaker 45 COP conference, and like it conveys legitimacy. And in this case, it's a means of kind of laundering legitimacy

Speaker 18 for this.

Speaker 45 Karabakh project in their case, right?

Speaker 45 Through the lens of protecting the planet. Where do they go from there?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 They bring in F1 racing, they have Eurovision. They really do these projects because they want to be seen as a legitimate state.

Speaker 21 Whereas I think those other things like North Korea, they don't do that. Like no one's going to like us no matter what we do.

Speaker 45 Yeah, they've given up.

Speaker 21 But they want to play on the international stage. So that's one aspect.
Another aspect, it legitimizes themselves to their internal critics. People have their pajamas smart.

Speaker 21 They know what's going on, but they say, oh, the world is coming to us. The world accepts us.
They must, you know, accept the brutal dictatorship that's cracking down anybody's gay, lesbian, anything.

Speaker 21 You know, torture is a feature of this regime. So it legitimized themselves internally.

Speaker 21 And what they fear, I guess, is people would getting angry that they invade Armenia. So it's just, I think it's that sheen.

Speaker 21 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.
It matters to the environment.

Speaker 45 Yeah, I think probably these COP conferences are not going to be the way we solve our

Speaker 45 issues with climate change, but that's another conversation.

Speaker 45 Going forward, like, what is the status of Adza? What can those people, those people who were able to leave, like,

Speaker 45 what does the future hold for them? Are they sort of refugees in Armenia now?

Speaker 21 They're refugees in Armenia. Armenia is a poor state, doesn't have the oil reserves.

Speaker 21 The Azerbaijan just announced that they're increased their military budget by 20%.

Speaker 21 It was already incredibly high.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It's on par for 2023. So that's a pretty clear sign that they're getting all their equipment from Israel.

Speaker 21 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, wow.

Speaker 21 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 fend.
People are figured out.

Speaker 21 I'm sure you've talked to your friends who are Java. They figured out drones a little bit.
Yep. How to deal with them better.
Armenia has reached out to France, who's been helping them a little bit.

Speaker 21 Azerbaijan says there's some conditions for peace

Speaker 21 that are insane. You know, like change your constitution is one.
Wow. Get rid of all EU observers is another.
Don't get any new weapons.

Speaker 21 And then give us what's called this Zangor corridor, which is like this road that goes to their exclave, Nakhchivan, to the west.

Speaker 21 And it's just like, you can't.

Speaker 21 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 mirror propaganda insanity because UNESCO is already in Armenia.

Speaker 21 And Armenia asked that of UNESCO for Azerbaijan. But of course, they just copy that.

Speaker 45 Right. And say, well, why don't you do it?

Speaker 21 Yeah. Right.
Which, you know, it's not a real thing. But anyway, so those are the conditions of peace.
So it seems probable.

Speaker 21 that Azerbaijan will invade, possibly in spring because the snow will melt it away.

Speaker 21 Possibly now, because Alia seems like he's very angry that the world kind of paid paid attention to cop 29 is figuring out that he's a dick and uh he's ramped up in um arrests in his own country he just arrests an entire television station of people that were you know again it's it's one of the least press-free countries on earth but i guess people were doing something before that

Speaker 21 and uh they'll either take the southern half of armenia or they'll take

Speaker 21 all of it because they say yerevan, the capital of Armenia, is historically part of of Azerbaijan. So that's a state where we're at there.

Speaker 21 And I really think any other perspectives are wishful thinking. And I'm sorry to be so grim about that, but

Speaker 21 I think it's a very real possibility that this Armenian genocide that it's killed literally

Speaker 21 countable millions of Armenians since the 1890s. and ramped up through 1915 through 1923 and then subsided a little bit is is ongoing and their project will be completed in the next year.

Speaker 33 Yeah, that's pretty bleak.

Speaker 43 Yeah.

Speaker 45 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?

Speaker 45 Where can they go?

Speaker 21 There's a good site. This has learn for ArtSock.
That's a good site. There's a bunch of Armenian web sites that people can go to.
May I post some links on the show notes? Would that be good?

Speaker 45 Yeah, we'll absolutely put those in the show notes.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Yeah, I would be very happy to do that if you want to donate things.
But it's similar to Gaza or other places. Like

Speaker 21 what does awareness do? I guess it could slow things down.

Speaker 45 Yeah.

Speaker 21 But really, we just need state actors to respond. to this.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 45 Yeah, I mean, people did the same thing for Assad, right? That he protected Christians in Syria while he murdered, gassed his own people.

Speaker 21 Exactly.

Speaker 45 That's a best of cynical thing and a worse of justification.

Speaker 21 I mean, what have you seen that's effective in terms of world action? for these things with Kurds or other people.

Speaker 45 I mean, look, when we talk about how the Kurds have defended themselves from

Speaker 45 a state project to eliminate them, right?

Speaker 45 In some areas, they haven't been able to, right? And when they have, it's through their own armed initiative for the most part, right?

Speaker 45 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, right?

Speaker 45 We're seeing it right now

Speaker 45 in Tal Rafat. The U.S.
didn't stand beside them there, and it's not in its nature to.

Speaker 21 And I think

Speaker 45 this is a really difficult situation that we find ourselves in all around the world right now.

Speaker 45 We've seen this in Africa too, right? Like it's not really in the nature of the United States, not in this century, to intervene simply for human rights reasons, simply because

Speaker 45 genocide is wrong.

Speaker 21 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?

Speaker 21 Yeah,

Speaker 45 we draw draw red lines and then let's sad walk over them.

Speaker 21 Like, it happens all over the world.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 21 I don't know.

Speaker 45 Look, if I look at the other genocide, which I've spent

Speaker 45 more time with than most genocides, which is a weird thing to say, it's the genocide in Myanmar of the Rohingya people.

Speaker 45 They are still facing genocidal violence now, even from anti-junter groups. But I also see Muslim people in the Korean National Liberation Army.
I see them fighting with the KNDF.

Speaker 45 And the way that those people liberated themselves was like from the bottom up. And I think that, like,

Speaker 45 I find some hope in what's happening in Kurdistan and what's happening in Myanmar. And I don't see very much from the community of states and much of the thing that even fucking exists.

Speaker 45 I don't really believe that states have a conscience. And I don't think it's in their nature to care about people because people are inherently valuable.
But I do think people do.

Speaker 45 And I do think it is in the nature of people to care. So I guess we have to continue to hope.

Speaker 21 And there has been some positive statements by your Java regarding Armenians. And there's some been a lot of solidarity there, which is great.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 people who see what's right and wrong, who aren't state actors. That's absolutely right.
Yeah.

Speaker 45 One of the things, there's another thing that will be deployed very often, the Kurds are responsible for the Armenian genocide.

Speaker 45 Kurdish people were part of the Armenian genocide, and they will acknowledge that and they've tried to make amends for it.

Speaker 21 Yes, exactly right. And that's all anything.
Yeah. That's great.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 21 Thank you for sharing all that.

Speaker 45 Yeah, thank you. Is there anything else that we've failed to address you want to get in quickly before we...

Speaker 45 I mean, yes, there's thousands of years of stuff, but

Speaker 21 you know, visit Armenia. It's still called one of the safest places on earth.
It's been rated as safer than Japan. Oh, wow.
It's a beautiful place.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 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,

Speaker 21 you people probably can have the biggest effect because the UK is the biggest enabler of those dirtbags. And thank you for the time.
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 21 And I don't feel like I've done justice to 2,500 years of history, but thank you so much.

Speaker 45 No, I think that's great. Is there any way people can follow you online if they'd like to?

Speaker 21 Oh, absolutely not. I'm tired of getting doxxed.

Speaker 45 Excellent. Yeah, that's probably for the best.

Speaker 21 I think we should all be in the next video. You know, that's why I paint icons is because it's anonymous, you know.

Speaker 21 Yeah,

Speaker 21 very offline. But yeah, but thank you so much.
Great. Thank you.

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Speaker 36 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 37 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 25 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 38 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 39 If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 32 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 41 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 32 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 40 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 33 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 I am absolutely exhausted. And

Speaker 33 let's start, I guess, by talking about what Trump did Tuesday night.

Speaker 33 He had a press conference with both himself and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Yahoo to announce that the United States would quote unquote take over the Gaza Strip, resulting in quote-unquote long-term ownership.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 45 This is one of the more

Speaker 45 crazy things that he's like, like, you could see Netanyahu even in the room, clearly finding out about this for the first time.

Speaker 44 Yeah, there was a real, oh shit, really? Vibe.

Speaker 33 I'm not sure how long Trump and Netanyahu have actually had this entire thing planned.

Speaker 33 That is a distinct possibility that this has been Netanyahu's goal for a while, and this was impacted his negotiations with Biden, like knowing that he wanted this to be the outcome, where the U.S.

Speaker 33 basically just takes and holds the territory of Gaza as a U.S. territory, like indefinitely.

Speaker 45 I think BB knew that Trump would give him a positive outcome in any number of ways, right? Like, to include just saying, like, bomb it off the map. Like, I think it's reasonable to assume that.

Speaker 44 Well, I mean, something like this was, I think, the obvious outcome as soon as Trump, I mean, from before Trump won, right? Yeah.

Speaker 44 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,

Speaker 44 it's, I don't know, I'm not surprised by it. I guess I'm a little bit like,

Speaker 44 okay, at least now we know

Speaker 44 what they're going to do next.

Speaker 33 It's in line with the Manifest Destiny territorial expansion that Trump has been talking about the past few weeks.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Create an economic development, unquote.

Speaker 45 He has also said that he's going to, again, said he's going to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, which would leave 2,000 people in CENTCOM to deploy to Gaza, I guess, if that's what they want to do.

Speaker 46 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 is to do a genocide and then...

Speaker 33 Well, I mean, this is part of a genocidal operation.

Speaker 46 Yeah, it's like, this is like, well, we're doing a second larger genocide.

Speaker 33 This is like the finishing touch.

Speaker 46 Yeah, but, but, but, you know, like on a sort of practical level, it's like, okay, the U.S. couldn't hold Afghanistan, right?

Speaker 46 Like, and like, obviously, like, this is, this is an, like a quote-unquote easier occupation, but it's like, this is going to be a fucking shit, like a nightmare. Like, and I don't know.

Speaker 46 I mean, my, my assumption is that this is going to be just like, if he, if he actually, like, you know, 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 i don't know it's it's going to be a nightmare for everyone involved and yeah it's 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 there will be significant

Speaker 45 pushbacks not the word right like

Speaker 45 there will be guerrilla warfare, right? Like it's very hard to take and hold significantly large urban areas as the U.S. has found out for 20 years.

Speaker 45 Whether or not people will accept that, I think they might.

Speaker 45 Like I think Trump kind of needs an enemy, you know, and like and a war and like a quote-unquote, you know, he can paint almost anything as a win.

Speaker 45 And I think people might be more willing than we'd like to think to accept people coming home in body bags from that.

Speaker 44 I'm not really sure.

Speaker 44 I think we're actually going to see the kind of troop deployment that people think think based on what Trump has said, as opposed to expanded support for what the Israelis have already been doing,

Speaker 44 which has, which has like done a significant job to depopulate the area as it stands.

Speaker 21 Like,

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 I think it's just that like, 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.

Speaker 45 Yeah. And the new model is this Syria model, right? Like with a relatively small footprint and then local partner force, like the IDF, pulling security for U.S.
contracts and U.S.

Speaker 21 money, like that.

Speaker 44 Right. The IDF and a lot of third-party corporate PMCs.
Yeah, PMCs, you know, like that's

Speaker 44 we've, we've got guys champing at the bit to do that. And

Speaker 44 that looks a lot likelier to me than the 10th Mountain Division, you know, occupying large chunks of Gaza.

Speaker 45 Agreed. Yeah.
Eric Prince is ready to

Speaker 45 get in there, sadly.

Speaker 33 All right, let's

Speaker 33 transition to our new segment titled Stinky Musk, which I came up with last night, delirious. And yes, it's bad.
No, I'm not going to fix it.

Speaker 33 South African gang does a hostile takeover of the United States.

Speaker 21 Yeah, you're hidden.

Speaker 45 You're hidden today, Garrison.

Speaker 33 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, then 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And that's like government data about you possibly in the hands of a literal Nick Fuentes-pilled Groiper intern.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 I have some more info on this as we will go on, but I guess this is an okay time just to discuss.

Speaker 44 Yeah, I think the response to this 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.

Speaker 44 And, you know, we federal employees.

Speaker 45 Federal employees, right?

Speaker 44 And you've got a lot of like or former. Yeah, most of them are still current, but you know, it's a mix of former and current federal employees.

Speaker 44 And these are, 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 the people who like

Speaker 44 make sure, keep things functioning at like 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?

Speaker 44 Like 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.

Speaker 44 And, you know, that's not, that doesn't accomplish anything on its own, but it's a potential start to accomplishing something.

Speaker 44 You know, if you get those people out in the street, it provides, among other things, a lot of cover for everyone else.

Speaker 44 And it also is the start of,

Speaker 44 you know, what you might call a reverse January 6th.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 We're a bunch of people who absolutely do know how those organizations and buildings function trying to take and occupy them.

Speaker 44 And that's the feeling I got because I talked to some folks who were at the Treasury protest.

Speaker 44 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 like airports and stuff.

Speaker 44 Like I was at the LAX for that. This person was at some of those protests and it was out in front of Treasury.

Speaker 44 And the quote that I've got from them there was, I was expecting it, it being this protest, the treasury protest, to feel like the travel ban protests. It didn't.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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 congressmen's offices and the like.

Speaker 44 And like, 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 moss.

Speaker 44 So if we're seeing something like this at this early stage, I think there's a lot of potential there.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 at which there's a lot of potential for this to turn into something that could actually like cause change.

Speaker 44 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 occupying.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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?

Speaker 21 Right.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 44 We're not in South Korea territory yet.

Speaker 33 But their lawmakers were willing to do that.

Speaker 33 And there is like, 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.

Speaker 33 And like

Speaker 33 things are already happening. Like we are in some ways kind of already at this point.
Yeah.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 It was just the unelected Elon Musk who decided to and carried out the closure of a government agency, which

Speaker 33 should actually be like criminal. There is like statutes that are designed to stop this from happening, just no one's enforcing them because they control almost every aspect of government.

Speaker 33 Musk has also closed the IRS direct file tax system,

Speaker 33 which has now forced taxpayers to use third-party paid services.

Speaker 33 He's doing this like one by one.

Speaker 46 I think the weakness that they have right now is that because they're causing so much chaos, because you're going to talk about the FBI purge, they're trying to do, like, you know, the thing that they're relying on is everyone is just going to let them in and just let them get walked over.

Speaker 46 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?

Speaker 46 That's the thing where it's legitimately like, if there's serious resistance to them, they might start to crumple because the, 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 44 The odds are lower that you get a positive shift because people engage directly and aggressively with the cops than you have when some sort of like mid-level military functionary is asked to drive a tank over a school teacher, right?

Speaker 44 Like historic, 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.

Speaker 43 Right.

Speaker 44 Like demands are ordered,

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 45 And if you look at the last world historical empire run by an 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 weberian definition of the state like that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence right that they've dismantled the apparatus for state violence as well and this could just be like the blunt instrument of apparently offering every federal employee uh time i know i've heard that they've tried to unretire wildland firefighters who accepted their offer of retirement

Speaker 45 which is extremely funny.

Speaker 46 But like, it's, it's very,

Speaker 45 yeah, you're going to what? You're going to retire a bunch of FBI agents or fire them because, like, Mia said, they are going to need hitters.

Speaker 45 They're going to need to use coercive force at some point, possibly very soon. Yeah.
To get what they want to do done.

Speaker 44 And I think when it comes to that, the question is like, which hitters?

Speaker 46 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Because the FBI and the CIA, I mean, are getting are getting gutted at the moment right now. Like, so you're looking at like

Speaker 44 you're looking at local police, federal protective services, uh, Department of Homeland Security, you know, and the marshals, right?

Speaker 44 Like, like, these are kind of like the shooters Trump has to play with, and the military will remain an open question until the critical moment, right?

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 45 I mean, FPS is infinitely expandable and is mostly contracted. Like Robert and I have spoken about it before, but like, that's the one that has a lot of potential to grow.

Speaker 45 And I think within local, especially sheriff's departments,

Speaker 45 you got some people who won't bat an eyelid in some of those.

Speaker 44 Oh, no, no, no, absolutely not. And I do think that like sheriff's departments are kind of what haunt me the most.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 DC, in DC at least, he can count on a lot less of those guys because like the Capitol police aren't thrilled right now, you know?

Speaker 33 Essentially, what Elon is doing right now is exactly what he did to Twitter, except to the entire United States of America.

Speaker 33 Yeah, and like, yeah, by the end of this process, it still might function on some level, right? Like, Twitter still kind of functions, but it's just worse in every way.

Speaker 33 It's worse. It doesn't have the quote-unquote good features it used to.

Speaker 33 It's buggy. It's full of Nazis.
It's just, it's more, it sucks more.

Speaker 33 Like, the previous version was already bad and harmful, but the new one is just worse without the aspects that made it semi-worthwhile.

Speaker 33 And like, I'm going to do an episode like next week, like kind of about this, like specifically, and how Musk is Twitterifying 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,

Speaker 33 having teenagers review code of like long-standing employees. It's the exact same process.
And if you didn't like what happened to Twitter, that process is now happening to the government itself.

Speaker 45 I can't wait for the IRS to send me a letter saying my pussy in bio. Like that, that will be

Speaker 21 hey.

Speaker 44 Now you've gotten me back on the Trump train.

Speaker 21 You know what?

Speaker 44 I'm peacing out for the day. I'm on board now.

Speaker 33 Before we close this segment and pivot to ads, I do want to shout out the work that Wired is doing right now.

Speaker 21 Oh, man. Yeah.

Speaker 33 Wired magazine is doing some fantastic reporting on this.

Speaker 33 The DC attorney is currently promising to go after individuals who post about Doge employees.

Speaker 33 They might end up going after some of these Wired journalists who identified this Gen Z Doge team that is wreaking havoc throughout the government with no oversight.

Speaker 33 Wired provided what should be legally required, necessary identification of public workers who Musk is trying to keep secret. The DC attorney and like Trump's DOJ is very mad about that.

Speaker 33 They might end up going after these people. But

Speaker 33 fantastic work coming out of Wired right now.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 Let's go on a quick ad break and then come back to talk about the continuing kind of fake trade wars and immigration.

Speaker 45 Sick.

Speaker 21 All right, we are back.

Speaker 33 I'm going to pivot towards James and Mia to discuss tariffs and immigration.

Speaker 46 Take it away.

Speaker 46 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 a 10% tariff on China.

Speaker 46 So let's go into like what actually happened. So the tariffs on Mexico and Canada are on hold for a month.
However, the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods did go into effect.

Speaker 46 And we'll get to more about what that's going to do in a second.

Speaker 46 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 pay tariffs on it and also have to spend all of that time paperwork and shit.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 Like that's a, that's a very normal thing

Speaker 46 that is now really, really difficult.

Speaker 44 And about a third of YouTube ads are supported by people who run companies that make use of this loophole.

Speaker 46 Yeah. Okay.
So on the business side, this is actually really interesting because I think it's one of the...

Speaker 46 I mean, not the first, but I think it's going to be a very, very early example of Trump completely fucking a base that's been very, very supportive of him because this is going going to liquidate huge portions of the dropshipping economy, right?

Speaker 21 Like all of the stupid YouTube shirts, like all of that stuff is just going to be annihilated.

Speaker 45 Can you explain drop shipping if people aren't familiar, Mia?

Speaker 46 Just like 10 second version. Yeah.
So drop shipping 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.

Speaker 46 Drop shipping, you don't do that. You are now the intermediary and you have these manufacturers like print to consumption, basically.

Speaker 46 And 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 like sort of small scale chinese firms to like make stuff for you those people are screwed companies like temu and xien are either going to have to just completely eat

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 I mean, because like Temu, even getting stuff to the U.S. has been kind of hard for them because of how the logistics network works.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 46 And so obviously, like, I don't, I don't think most people who 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

Speaker 44 MLM industry is going to take a header as a result of this. Yep.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 And this is, there is 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.

Speaker 46 And those people are also screwed because they rely on getting the resources in from China.

Speaker 46 And there's a lot of sort of, you know, things like people who build like hand, like retro handheld consoles. Oh, yeah.
And like, I don't know, like custom aerosoft rifles. I know JD talked about.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 46 It's also worth noting that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada aren't gone. They've just been postponed for a month.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 And we get another round of the negotiations that James is going to talk about.

Speaker 46 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 that's kind of been like tearing up this sort of international right-wing alliance of nationalists because suddenly Trump's coming after them.

Speaker 46 And now they're really mad about it.

Speaker 33 Well, and because Trudeau announced that he would be targeting, you know, like retaliatory tariffs, specifically at red states, we now have people calling him Dark Woke or Dark Trudeau, you know, for very different reasons than they used to call him Jack Trudeau.

Speaker 21 Yes, yes,

Speaker 21 Jarrickson. Oh, that's magnificent.

Speaker 21 All right. All right.
Shop up. My heart.
All right.

Speaker 44 All right. You're going to get canceled if you're not careful.

Speaker 45 Outstanding.

Speaker 46 Speaking of getting canceled, what hasn't gotten canceled 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.

Speaker 46 It's also,

Speaker 46 it's sort of the opening round of this escalation to a trade war. China has retaliated with

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 Well, actually, I don't know if the rare earth minerals, but like minerals you need for production stuff that isn't a big deal yet, but could be.

Speaker 33 I mean, and we were all expecting Chinese tariffs. Having 25% tariffs to Canada was not something I thought was like a looming no.

Speaker 21 Yeah. I mean, I thought they'd do Mexico.

Speaker 45 I didn't know about it. 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.

Speaker 21 I mean, something something we will cover.

Speaker 45 We obviously have a lot of sources.

Speaker 46 Monday. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 21 On Monday, we're going to cover this more.

Speaker 46 So I think something that's important to understand about these tariffs is that these tariffs are not economic policy.

Speaker 46 This is the mistake that all of the capitalists who backed Trump made is that they assumed that just like every other president who's made promises like this, like Obama's promise to renegotiate NAFTA, they all assumed that because it was economic policy, they'd be able to just like get Trump to be pro-business and he wouldn't do it.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 And the goal of it, and he's been deploying this against like, I mean, Colombia, Denmark, he's threatening the EU now. He's going to keep doing this with China.

Speaker 46 The goal of this is to directly use American consumer power

Speaker 46 as a weapon of imperialism to make these countries fall into line. Yeah, and now I'll pass it to James to talk about what he was specifically trying to get out of Mexico and Canada in this round.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 45 So like Mia 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?

Speaker 45 Nearly every media outlet, I think, fell for it this time, just like they did in his first term. Like we got this, like this is going to cause a crisis.

Speaker 45 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?

Speaker 45 He talked about the border and he talked specifically about fentanyl. So I want to begin by talking about fentanyl.

Speaker 45 Just to be clear, it is true that some fentanyl comes into the USA from Mexico and to a lesser degree also from Canada.

Speaker 45 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, right?

Speaker 45 And 90% of the fentanyl that is seized is seized at ports of entry.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And given the relatively high bar for a 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.

Speaker 45 What did Trump do to stop this fentanyl coming into the country? What did he get? He got this promise that Mexico will deploy 10,000 troops to its border.

Speaker 45 In reality, this isn't much of a concession at all. The Mexican National Guard has been deployed to the border for years.

Speaker 45 Specifically, it's been deployed at gaps in the U.S. border wall for more than a year.
So, people will remember our coverage of the open-air detention sites in Hacumbo and East County, San Diego.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 Each of those gaps now has a Mexican National Guard checkpoint in front of it. And they're there in conjunction with the INM, the National Institute of Migration in English.

Speaker 45 The INM has camps for the migrants who do come there, right? This is something that Biden obtained in, I think, late 23, early 24. And that's why we aren't seeing open air detention.

Speaker 45 One of the reasons, the other reason being Biden's asylum ban, we aren't seeing as many people crossing the border, right?

Speaker 45 Mexican border towns also tend to be areas where the Mexican military deploys its troops because often they're places where organized crime occurs due to their proximity to to the border and the market for drugs and the fact that weapons from the U.S.

Speaker 45 tend to flow into Mexico and that that's where large numbers of weapons for organized crime come from right for more than a year I've received press releases from Tijuana constantly talking about new unit arrive special forces arrives army arrive and then they'll have pictures of a parade right now they never tell us when those units are leaving They just keep telling us they're coming.

Speaker 45 So it's very hard to get a sense of actually how many troops are there.

Speaker 45 But the idea that Mexico is suddenly militarizing its border is kind of farcical.

Speaker 46 Yeah. And I want to, there's been a lot of sort of cheerleading of Scheinbaum sort of like standing up to the U.S.
And I don't think people in the U.S.

Speaker 46 really understand the securitization on the Mexican border.

Speaker 46 And so something that I'm realizing that I don't think, I just assume people knew about this, but I don't think I 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.

Speaker 46 And this was, this was on the border of Guatemala and just like killed six six of them, shot 12 other people. So like, and like there are massacres like that, like not infrequently, right?

Speaker 46 Like this is not a, this is not a Mexico is pro-immigrant, like the U.S. is anti-immigrant thing.

Speaker 46 Like part of the, part of the reason why Trump can like, you know, sort of declare victory without getting any concessions or whatever is because of how murderous the Mexican army's like border policy is already.

Speaker 45 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, D.C.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 I want to talk a little bit about the Canadian concessions very briefly.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 There has actually been a significant flow of migrants from the U.S. to Canada in the last couple of years, specifically of Francophone African people who would take that route.

Speaker 45 I'm aware of several TikTok influencers.

Speaker 45 There's one guy I follow in Chad, who, well, he's in Canada now, but he's from Chad, and he makes these videos explaining to Chadian people how to go from Mexico into the US and then move up to Canada, obviously, where they can speak French.

Speaker 45 And that makes their lives much easier, right? It makes it much easier to not have to learn a language. Trudeau did agree to list cartels as terrorist organizations.
Yeah.

Speaker 44 That seems to be, from what I can tell, the big move that he made. Yeah.

Speaker 45 Yeah. So it does allow for some economic sanctions, right?

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 Like, 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.
But like when Trump listed the

Speaker 45 Kurtz force, he then struck its leader, right, with a drone. I don't think Trudeau's is going to be, I don't think Canada's going to be doing that.

Speaker 45 But it nonetheless, that is a concession, and perhaps there is some plan for that, right?

Speaker 45 It certainly allows for, and I've said this before, right, 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,

Speaker 45 which is a large number of businesses in Mexico which end up being extorted or paying protection money, right?

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 The last and perhaps most sinister of all, development is this deal that Marco Rubio struck with Bukele and El Salvador, right? El Salvador has said it will host U.S.

Speaker 45 citizen criminals and deportees from any nation in its jail system. So I'll just read Bukele's tweet.
It's very short.

Speaker 45 We are willing to take in only convicted criminals, parentheses, including convicted U.S. citizens, into a mega prison, SECOD, in exchange for a fee.

Speaker 45 The fee would be relatively low for the U.S., but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable. If you're not familiar, it means Counterterrorism Confinement Center in Spanish.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 Multiple human rights organizations, including the well, the State Department is not a human rights organization, sometimes it's the opposite of that.

Speaker 45 But 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.

Speaker 45 The U.S. 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.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 But this Caleb plan, this plan to send people to El Salvador, especially U.S. citizens, evidently, this is unconstitutional.

Speaker 45 The courts get to decide how much that matters, right? We don't. But this is deeply concerning.

Speaker 33 We're all waiting on the courts and we're all deeply concerned.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 50 Well, there you go.

Speaker 33 One final break, and then we'll come back to end and discuss Trump's targeting of teachers in relation to gender ideology.

Speaker 50 Welcome back.

Speaker 33 So, last week, Trump signed an executive order titled Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.

Speaker 33 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 dead naming, misgendering, and forcibly detransitioning students.

Speaker 33 This order specifically took aim at quote-unquote social transition, right?

Speaker 33 This is like the non-medical social aspects of transitioning, like changing gender names, pronouns, you know, what facilities you use, socialization.

Speaker 33 And like this stuff has historically been, you know, the most common form of transition for minors.

Speaker 33 It's the easiest to do. You don't even need your parents' help.

Speaker 33 But this order blames schools for indoctrinating children in quote, radical anti-American ideologies, unquote, which they include gender ideology as a part of.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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 like sexual exploitation, practicing medicine without a license, and using those as justifications for making this practice illegal.

Speaker 33 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 Reid.

Speaker 33 Seattle Public Schools published a statement reaffirming their commitment to protecting LGBTQ students and staff.

Speaker 33 And later, the California Department of Education pushed back on the legality of Trump's order.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 So this is one side

Speaker 33 of the coin right now. The other side is healthcare, which we will close on.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 The Virginia Commonwealth University and Children's Hospital of Richmond have also ceased providing gender-affirming care to those under 19.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 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 healthcare 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.

Speaker 33 And like, this really hammers down the point that like none of these executive orders are self-enforcing. These all require proactive implementation by local actors.
Dr.

Speaker 33 Jeremy Birnbaum was quoted in the New York Times. He's a pediatrician at the state-run University Hospital of Brooklyn.

Speaker 33 And he was quoted as saying, quote, quote, I am willing to go to jail to continue to provide your care, unquote.

Speaker 33 And you really can, like, protest hospitals that comply in advance. Same thing with schools.
Yeah.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 33 And we have some breaking news as of this morning.

Speaker 33 State Attorneys 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 that the hospitals have a duty to provide care.

Speaker 33 So this is like the most optimistic thing that we've seen so far. Now, obviously,

Speaker 33 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

Speaker 33 down the line.

Speaker 33 Georgia just put out a trans healthcare ban this morning for a bill bill that'll reach our Senate in the next few weeks but this is this is the current situation protests seem to have applied a degree of pressure that has gotten state's attorney general to actually make a statement on this issue yeah I will say like so I still teach right I teach at a community college and sometimes through that we also teach high school students if you are an educator or someone in healthcare

Speaker 45 now is the time to be talking to your union about like how you meet this because like the stronger we are the the better we can confront this and the only way to confront this is we all need to do it together and like

Speaker 46 you these are conversations we need to be having right now like we do not have time and and our unions are a very valuable tool for preserving our rights yeah that's actually part of what i was going to say um i've talked to a few union teachers who are like yeah we're gonna we're gonna go do this we're gonna go fight so i i

Speaker 46 i expect in the next couple of weeks we're going to see more movement from the teachers unions and and i think there's you know there's an under I mean, there's, on the one hand, there is the threat that, you know, these people do want to privatize the education system, right?

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 46 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?

Speaker 46 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 bureaucrats doing what they're being told, right?

Speaker 46 This is not a coup that's working with like an army that is showing up on your street.

Speaker 46 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 them and make the administration actually try to do this.

Speaker 46 It's not that hard and they'll fucking cave.

Speaker 44 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 44 That's entirely what I was trying to get at earlier. And

Speaker 44 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

Speaker 44 is not someone you would normally organize with. Like, this is a moment of potential.
And

Speaker 44 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. Yeah.

Speaker 33 We will be covering all these topics more in depth in our regular like daily episodes.

Speaker 33 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 like affirmative action and DEI awokeness in the coming weeks.

Speaker 33 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.

Speaker 21 We reported the news.

Speaker 44 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 1 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 1 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 1 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 51 Hey guys, this is Ashley Connetti from the Ben and Ashley Eye Almost Famous podcast. And I have a new favorite place to shop online.
It's called Bohm.

Speaker 51 They have high-quality pieces that are affordable and ethically sourced.

Speaker 49 Also, they have a ton of cozies.

Speaker 51 If you haven't shopped there yet, you're missing out. Their fall collection.

Speaker 33 It's giving cozy.

Speaker 35 Cool, girl, energy.

Speaker 51 Like denim, dresses, sweaters, all the stuff that you actually want to wear. So go to bohem.com.
That is B-O-H-M-E.com. Trust me, you're going to have a pretty full cart.

Speaker 2 This is an iHeart podcast.